Following is a brief report of the INDEST-NCSI Workshop on Institutional
Repositories, held at Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, India
during 27-29 July 2004.
INDEST-NCSI Workshop on Institutional Repositories: Workshop Report
A training workshop on Institutional Repositories was successfully
conducted during 27-29 July 2004 at Indian Institute of Science,
Bangalore, India.
Participants from twenty-one leading academic research institutions
in India were imparted training in setting up institutional e-print
archives using the EPrints
http://www.eprints.org/ open source
software. Participating institutions included Indian Institutes of
Technology, Indian Institutes of Management and National Institutes of
Technology. The workshop was organized and conducted by the National
Centre for Science Information (NCSI), Indian Institute of Science,
Bangalore, in association with the Digital Library Research Group,
Computer Science Department, Old Dominion University, USA. The workshop
was sponsored by the INDEST Consortium, a programme of the Ministry of
Human Resources Development (MHRD), Government of India.
The main objective of the workshop was to fulfill a recommendation
of the INDEST consortium to the member institutions to set up
OAI-compliant digital research archives of their research publications,
following the model already set up at Indian Institute of Science
(
http://eprints.iisc.ernet.in/), and to work towards establishment of a
virtual research archive using the OAI inter-operability framework. It
was strongly felt that this would facilitate improved visibility and
impact of research output of these organizations and supplement the
existing scholarly publishing system. This initiative is an extension
of the INDEST consortium's initial goal of provision of shared access
to licensed e-resources like bibliographic databases and e-journals
(
http://paniit.iitd.ac.in/indest/).
Workshop programme and content:
The workshop was conducted in a training laboratory equipped with 20
workstations with Linux Red Hat 9.0 operating system. Each participant was
provided with a CD-ROM prepared by NCSI especially for the workshop. The
CD-ROM consisted of EPrints (version 2.3.4) and other related software
(Apache, MySQL, dependent Perl modules, etc.); presentations made in
the workshop; sample documents to be used in lab sessions; and resources
related to institutional repositories, metadata, and OAI. Participants
used a shell scripts developed by NCSI for automating the process of
installing EPrints and other required software.
The workshop sessions covered the following topics:
- Overview of OAI framework and introduction to OAI-PMH
- Institutional repository software - features and functionality
- Overview of EPrints software and EPrints-based archives
- EPrints software installation and test archive set up
- Document submission, moderation, search and browse
- Archive configuration and customization (home page, subjects, metadata)
- Automatic metadata extraction
- OAI in action - harvesting demonstration using local DSPace and EPrints
archives and ARC service provider set up
- Repository policies, content enrichment and advocacy
Workshop inauguration and valedictory:
On first day morning, Prof. R.S. Sirohi, Director, Indian Institute
of Technology, Delhi and Chairman, National Steering Committee, INDEST
Consortium, inaugurated the workshop. Prof. Goverdhan Mehta, Director,
Indian Institute of Science, was the Chief Guest. On third day evening,
Prof. P. Balaram, Chairman, Division of Biological Science, Indian
Institute of Science, and Editor of "Current Science" journal published
by the Indian Academy of Sciences, chaired the valedictory session.
Workshop evaluation:
All the participants were successful in installing the required software
and set up test e-print archives on their workstations. They also
went through the document submission and approval processes. They also
experimented with simple customization changes to the test archives. In
a formal feedback gathered, most participants felt confident of setting
up e-print archives in their institutions. Many expressed the need for
further help and suggested more hands-on time in future workshops.
On
a scale of 1-5 (1-very poor, 5- very good), workshop content got
average rating of 4.7, logistics arrangement got 4.4, and overall
assessment got 4.5. A major suggestion was to make available faster
machines in the training lab, compared to the slow PII machines that
we made available to the participants!
Workshop Website:
More details about the workshop including workshop programme,
presentations,
resources and other related content is available at the workshop
website -
http://www.ncsi.iisc.ernet.in/indest-ncsi-ir/
Dr. T.B. Rajashekar
Associate Chairman
National Centre for Science Information (NCSI)
Indian Institute of Science
Bangalore 560 012 (India)
(Workshop Coordinator)
E-Mail: raja_at_ncsi.iisc.ernet.in
Received on Wed Aug 11 2004 - 16:25:00 BST