Digital Repositories What are they and what can they do? Dr Stephen Charles MIDESS Project Manager University of Leeds MIDESS Management of Images in a Distributed Environment using Shared Services. (Multimedia really not just images) Presentation will be available at

Why bother with Digital Repositories? To maintain important digital information which needs to be preserved in the medium to long term (text, images, video, sound etc). Currently little attention paid to where digital information is stored (mostly websites/CD’s etc) This digital information also need to be located quickly via effective searches (particularly important for multimedia) Suitable metadata need to be included for preservation. Standardisation of formats (for example jpg, gif, tiff, mpeg etc) Ordinary web pages are not designed with preservation in mind. Material on websites usually have little or no metadata. To ensure that digital information is readable. For example who can read Venture Publisher files or files saved on Amstrad computers?

MIDESS Project Looking at how Institutions can share multimedia material in digital repositories. MIDESS partners are: University of Leeds London School of Economics (LSE) University of Birmingham University College London UCL (no repository installed– examining copyright issues only)

How did we obtain funding for MIDESS/Digital Repositories? JISC (mostly) - grant ends May 07 HEFCE - for long term support of digital repository at University of Leeds. ALPS project – Project wishes to access Repository at Leeds University from other institutions (Bradford, York etc) via VLE’s (WebCT/Blackboard etc). Other potential Institutions (Bradford? Sheffield?) interested in storing material in the digital repository at Leeds. Leeds becoming regional digital repository. Small amount of funding centrally from universities.

Key activities for MIDESS (each has a workpackage) User needs analysis Functional and technical evaluation of digital repository software packages Implementation of digital repository. Metadata requirements analysis Digital preservation requirements analysis Enterprise integration Copyright and IPR review Resource discovery and shared services review Metadata Harvesting Evaluation and dissemination

User Requirements Specification Questionnaires and interviews with academic and support staff at the Universities of Leeds, Birmingham, UCL and LSE. (link to questionnaire on MIDESS website)link to questionnaire on MIDESS website Aim to identify extent of digital collections held at MIDESS partner institutions (on servers, local computer, DVD’s, CD-ROM etc) which could be stored in the digital repository. (link to workpackage on MIDESS website)link to workpackage on MIDESS website Identify requirements and key drivers for institutional repositories (what do users want?)

Enterprise Integration Assess institutional requirements, eg: –Storage capacity required (digital images and video material require a lot of storage space) –Storage location of digital material (possibilities include: Server were software is kept/SAN/streaming servers for video/linking to files instead of storing them) –Interoperability with other systems (VLE’s, Library Systems etc) –Authentication – Shibboleth etc. Consider use of automated storage and archiving solutions. Possible integration with enterprise content management systems.

Resource Discovery Establish a pilot of content-sharing or re-use by academic staff, preferably across institutions. Expose repository content to resource discovery services Assess impact of this and resulting use of collections

Digital Repositories requirements/wish list Flexible metadata standards (not just Dublin Core/qualified Dublin Core). May include: VRA Core/LOM/user specified metadata schemas. Ability of repository to support multiple format (images, video, sounds, text etc ) Support for OAI-PMH so that other institutions have the ability to ‘harvest data from our repositories (providing we allow them). Flexibility in authentication using techniques such as restricting to IP address, LDAP (Windows active directory), passwords etc. Highly customisable systems which can be tailored for individual MIDESS partners.

–Ability to handle content packaging standards for e-learning (eg IMS, Scorm etc) –Ability to interact with other third party systems eg: portal, Virtual Learning Environment (VLE). –Support for federated searching tools –Digital preservation support Digital Repositories wish list

Digital Repository Software evaluated in depth (six 1 hour long presentations on same day) Dspace (open source) Fedora (open source) Greenstone (open source) Encompass/Curator (commercial) DigiTool (commercial) Symposia (commercial) Detailed evaluation of all products on MIDESS website at: (Link to workpackage)Link to workpackage

University of Leeds test Digital Repository (Encompass/Curator)

University of Birmingham Digital Repository (Dspace)

London School of Economics Digital Repository (Fedora)

Integration with Virtual Learning Environments (VLE’s) As part of the ALPS project cetl.ac.uk/ a number of universities (Bradford, Huddersfield,, Leeds Met, York) are interested in linking their VLE’s to the digital repository at Leeds. cetl.ac.uk/ There is currently integration software available between VLE’s software products such as Blackboard/WebCT and Leeds digital repository (Encompass/Curator) which allows material in the digital repository to be accessed seamlessly from the VLE.

How might we actually share material across Institutions? Z39.50? Web Services? METS? Web links in repository to other repositories? Work done at Los Alamos/Mellon foundation on interoperability between digital repositories. ction_ pdf

Proposed Digital Collections These include: Medical School/Healthcare (Leeds/Birmingham) Department of English Fine Arts Library special collections (Leeds/Birmingham/LSE) Leeds Textile Museum Department of Physics (Bragg) Media Services (Leeds/LSE/Birmingham) School of Music (various compositions) Training/E-learning material/video of lectures etc (Leeds/LSE/Birmingham)

Manuscripts (Leeds, Birmingham) Coins (Leeds, Birmingham) Medical images (Leeds, Birmingham) Media Services Images (Leeds, LSE, Birmingham)

Common questions from potential depositors of digital material at MIDESS partners. How much is this going to cost me? What are copyright Issues if I want to make my material available in the repository? What is the time commitment do I have to make? Who has access to the material I put on the repository? How can we stop people stealing the material we put in the repository (images/video etc)? Who adds the digital material to the repository? Owner of the material? Library Staff? MIDESS staff? (depends on complexity at the moment) Who adds the required metadata? Owner of material? Library Staff? MIDESS staff? – difficult for MIDESS for complex images eg medical images! Costs – 3 primary factors – cost of digitisation (professionally adding digital material), cost of storage (disk space), cost of adding metadata (time to do this)

Problems we have encountered Difficult to contact everybody within universities who are potentially interested in digital repositories. Complexity of setting up digital repository software (these are not out of the box solutions). Agreements on formats (Tiff, jpeg, gif etc) and metadata standards/controlled vocabularies between different MIDESS partners. Copyright issues can be very difficult to resolve. Many potential depositors expect us to give us the material and we do the rest!

Summary Setting up digital repositories requires a lot of work! No such thing (yet) as the ideal Digital Repository software, all have advantages and disadvantages. Important to understand user requirements before you start. Its early days for digital repositories – numerous improvements on the way.

End of Presentation Questions? Dr Stephen Charles MIDESS Project Manager Edward Boyle Library University of Leeds Phone