Repositories
As digital repositories in the UK higher education community continue to develop beyond the pilot and project phase into mature mainstream service delivery, the focus for development work is moving towards enabling tools and frameworks for the successful linking of repositories. There is a need for guidelines and standards to be developed which feed into the policies of both data providers (for example institutional repositories) and service providers (for example cross-repository search services and subject repositories). Version identification is one area which requires such a framework.
Previous Work
VERSIONS Project
Led by LSE and carried out under the JISC Digital Repositories Programme (JISC Circular 03/05), has looked in depth at version identification issues and user requirements for a specific subject discipline, economics, and for a specific type of research output, academic papers or eprints. Further work is required to extend knowledge of requirements in other disciplines and communities of practice and to identify requirements for version identification of other object types.
River Study (pdf, 213kb)
The RIVER Scoping Study on Repository Version Identification commissioned by the JISC Scholarly Working Group and let by Rightscom Ltd., with project partners LSE Library and Oxford University Computing Services, took a broad view of the landscape and clearly mapped the problem space. The RIVER Project Team recommended to JISC that further investigation of user requirements in this area take place and then a framework for identifying versions be developed. RIVER also recommended to institutional repositories that develop policies and consider the use of workflow-based version management at the creation stage.
Other initiatives which inform the work of the proposed project team include:
NISO/ALPSP
- The NISO/ALPSP Working Group on Versions of Journal Articles, which has produced a set of detailed use cases to describe the time-based workflow of versions of journal articles from the point at which authors submit their manuscript to the publication in a refereed journal (and beyond, with web-based updating and comment) and has published a draft set of terms to describe each of the major revision stages of relevance to the publishing community. This work is still underway and the project team would expect to keep in close contact with this ongoing international standards work.
Eprints Application Profile Working Group
- The JISC-funded Eprints Application Profile Working Group, led by June Allinson (JISC and UKOLN) and Andy Powell (Eduserve Foundation), which has produced an application profile which has relevance for version identification, based as it is on the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) and the DCMI Abstract Model. This work is being taken up through a DC Task Group.