DELOS 9th Thematic Workshop:
Digital Repositories
Crete, May 2005

Rachel Heery provides an overview of the 9th Thematic Workshop on Digital Repositories entitled Interoperability and Common Services.

Introduction

The 9th DELOS Network of Excellence thematic workshop on Digital Repositories: Interoperability and Common Services took place over 11-13 May, 2005 hosted by FORTH near Heraklion on the Greek island of Crete. This workshop was organised jointly by the Semantic Interoperability (KESI) and Preservation (PRESERV) clusters of the DELOS Project and sought to provide different communities with the opportunity to learn about the latest research developments in this field. The workshop website with links to papers and presentations from the programme is available at: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/events/delos-rep-workshop/

Panorama of Heraklion, Crete.
(Photo courtesy of Martin Doerr, FORTH)

Workshop Themes

The workshop included eleven submitted papers focusing in particular on the role of repositories within e-learning and e-research and related digital library services. The papers examined the role of such repositories as providers of both preservation and access services.

In an opening keynote presentation, Sandy Payette, Co-director of the Fedora Project spoke on Beyond Storage: Rethinking the role of repositories in scholarly communication that suggesting we stand away from our traditional perspective of digital repositories as document-centric storage mechanisms and consider their role within a broader service-oriented architecture that enables integration of data, content, and services. Sandy's vision is that the current evolutionary development of the scholarly communication process might be revolutionised by a more process-oriented approach. Implementing repositories as flexible compositions of services based on a rich resource object model, would facilitate tasks such as content repurposing, and information reuse.

In a second invited presentation, Leona Carpenter, acting JISC Programme Manager, gave an overview of repositories which are being investigated and implemented as part of an of an integrated infrastructure for education within the JISC Information Environment. Two funding programmes within the UK are particularly focusing on repositories: one is supporting digital preservation and asset management in institutions and the second is a new Digital Repositories Programme aiming to embed repositories within the everyday information landscape of Higher Education.

There were presentations across a number of themes including: Repository Workflow and Design where both the optimisation of metadata workflows in a distributed environment and information design for cultural documentation were examined. In the theme Institutional Repositories experiences of building an open access institutional repository in a UK scientific research organisation were shared. Delegates also learnt of DEPTAL as a framework for institutional repositories as well as the significance of SHERPA DP as a means of establishing a persistent preservation environment for institutional repositories. In another paper on the theme of preservation, delegates also heard of the role reliability modelling had to play in the field of long-term digital preservation.

Finally the theme of Providing Services also offered presentations on the use of RDF aggregation and querying to extend the Open Journal System software to provide additional information about authors, searching heterogenoeous e-learning resources and two shorter presentations on the OAI service provider, METALIS, and the digital object lifecycle in the context of the dLibra Digital Library Framework.

In the course of the three days the conference not only covered specific work undertaken by a wide variety of research groups but also included breakout groups that looked at a range of issues and challenges confronting the community with respect to digital libraries. The issues included for example how repository research fits within the wider digital library research agenda and with the development of institutional management systems. There was also discussion on the potential for research collaboration within the context of digital repositories and in particular whether national funding of repository research and development limited the scope for sharing experience and best practice.

There was some consideration, as one might expect, of what exactly was understood by the term repositories and how they fit in relation to other services. Were they typically components of other services? Discussion moved to identifying common services for a repository reference model.

The workshop concluded with a review from Liz Lyon, Director of UKOLN, of the challenges facing research, in particular considering how repositories fit into the knowledge cycle of scholarly communication from research to learning. Discussion initiated at the workshop is being continued by means of an online forum mailing list.

Author Details

Rachel Heery
Assistant Director, Research and Development
UKOLN
University of Bath
Bath
BA2 7AY
UK
E-mail:
url: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/
Telephone: +44 (0) 1225 386724
Fax: +44 (0) 1225 386838