For #or2017 I attended 16 sessions (including satellite events), most of which include 3 presentations or 8 lightning talks, so there’s a lot of information that’s gone into my head over the last week. (As a result I now have 26 new items on my To Do list, which range from “Check X is on Y’s radar” to “Found a new national conference”.)

Below is a summary with key points and highlighting of things I particularly want to remember for some reason [plus thoughts of my own].

Monday – CAUL Research Repository Community Day

• Session 1: APCs not a solution so need to strengthen repositories. [This doesn’t entirely follow because there’s an excluded and oft-forgotten middle: gold OA journals that don’t charge APCs but are funded through other streams. But as it happens I do believe in repositories too or I probably wouldn’t be here.] Discussion about forming an Australasian (and/or New Zealand) formal consortium to make it easier to feed into COAR etc. NISO “Free_to_read” and “License_ref” tags [which I need to find out more about and how they work in the OAI context].
• Session 2: ORCID developments; repository self-assessment and repository metadata output health-check with some suggested standards from the point of view of one aggregator (Trove); two views on dealing withnon-traditional and creative works.
• When the Australians started talking about REF, the Kiwis bailed. My suggestion to talk about PBRF was overwhelmingly voted down. We had a robust discussion about metadata instead.
• I also squeezed in a visit to the State Library. I liked their coffee tables as advertisement: they were printed with a nice design listing the services they had on offer. And of course their Digital Futures space: the kinetic sand with a sensor/projector above that sensed the height of the sand and projected colours and contour lines accordingly; the tin can connected to wire flowers where you touch a flower and hear a random comment about the future from a previous visitor; and VR and touchscreens and stickers to put on a paper timeline mounted along the wall.

Tuesday

• Getting started with Angular 2 and DSpace workshop: 2 parts: background on what Angular is [I understand it so much better now! This was a far better explanation than any of the ones I’d tried while struggling with Primo’s new UI] followed by a hands-on working through the exercises. [This was a little quick for me but I managed to catch up using the github code as reference, and only failed on step 2 because the presenters missed a step too. 🙂 So I came out feeling very accomplished… though I still hate dependencies.]
• FOLIO presentation hosted by EBSCO – “a community collaboration to develop an open source Library Services Platform (LSP) designed for innovation”. Still very early stages but the “APIs all the way down” and responsiveness of the architecture is nice; worth keeping an eye on as it develops more modules.
• Electronic poster presentation: researcher metrics dashboards; CORE Repository Dashboard; IIIF image framework; OA retrospective theses; increasing OA content in your repository; improving the DSpace workflow

Wednesday

• Perverse incentives: how the reward structures of academia are getting in the way of scholarly communication and good science: basic introduction to scholarly communication and the need for OA from a mathematician’s perspective
• Research and non-publications repositories, Open Science: 8 lightning presentations: an intro to IIIF but most of the rest were about research data, including RDM training; data paper publication best practices from a journal’s perspective; data management plan record
• Scholarly workflows:
  • “Scholarly Tools…” looked beyond RDM and [where I usually think of managing/publishing code, methods] talked about research tools of which there are a bazillion – it more raised the scope of the issue than provided a firm path forward but that’s fair at this point!
  • “Research Offices As Vital Factors…” was an inspiring view from a research office that Gets RDM – might be a useful primer for other research offices.
• Demonstrating impact: “A New Approach for Measuring Value…” mentioned the idea of value as beyond a simple dollar figure to basic/expected/desired/unanticipated value. By contrast “How to Speak Business Case” talked about how to get down to the kind of value that speaks to project managers.

Thursday

• Repository admin and integration: 8 more lightning presentations.
  • “Mind the Gap!…” proposed ResourceSync as a replacement to OAI-PMH (retaining the latter for legacy purposes as appropriate) due to various advantages.
  • “Leading the Charge…” mentions the imminent “UK Scholarly Communications License” on the Harvard model which would be a great extension of precedent.
  • “Towards an Understanding…” talks of driver behind The Conversation to improve govt/public awareness/understanding of new research.
  • “Batch processes…” described a workflow for semi-automating identifying of low-hanging fruit to gather/import into IR. [I want to check with our workflows to see if this might help or if our workflows with Elements are about as efficient already.]
• Extending DSpace:
  • “Archiving Sensitive Data” was awe-inspiring [albeit irrelevant to me].
  • “Full integration of Piwik analytics” was relevant to me [due especially to us I think stuffing up what analytics DSpace does give us – but probably a bit too technically challenging].
  • “The Request a Copy Button” suggested it’s possible to get it working sensibly if we ever decide it’s worth it for us.
• Evaluation and assessment:
  • “Cambridge’s journey towards Open Access” is not that different from ours [which is heartening]. “Open Access policy 3 years in” at UniSA has a stronger mandate than us and still low deposit rate [ditto]; pre-population with CrossRef lookup on DOI is nice. [Probably replicates the functionality in Elements.]
  • “Self-Auditing as a Trusted Digital Repository” sounds like a pain in the proverbial though useful if you can bear to.
• Integrating DSpace: “Harvesting a Rich Crop” on multi-tenancy DSpace. “DSpace in the centre” on Elements/DSpace integration. “DSpace for Cultural Heritage” introduces DSpace-GLAM with IIIF-compliant image viewer, audio-visual streaming, dataset visualisation.

Friday:

• Institutional Publications Repositories and beyond:
  • “Curating, But Still Not Mediating” on appreciative demanding of README files asap under the principle of “The best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago; the second best time is now”.
  • “Uniform metadata for Finnish repositories” was determined by a national working group. [This has now inspired discussions about doing the same in New Zealand. I approve the idea but mourn the cleanup I’ll have to do in our repository… or maybe just in our OAI crosswalk…]
  • “Isomorphic Pressures…” looks at difference in IR ecosystem in Japan cf the USA and specifically factors influencing this: regulatory/coercive pressures; cognitive/mimetic pressures; normative pressures. [I like big words for new ways to think of things.]
  • “The role of the repository…” spins the citation advantage concept to do an analysis of the altmetric advantage of depositing in a repository. They find one.
  • “Scholarly Identity and Author Rights…” on popularity of workshops on creating your researcher profile.
  • And I got a chocolate koala for finishing my own lightning presentation on time. 😀
• Ideas Challenge:
  • “Data Pickle” modelled on ThisToThat.com should definitely be a thing.
  • “Global Connections” – I don’t know how well this would work in practice but having seen what machine learning does with Resene paint colours and Doctor Who titles I’d actually really like to see it generating metadata (and/or, per my question/suggestion, simply skipping a step and generating new research…)
  • “Brisbane Declaration ON the Elimination Of Keywords (B-DONEOK)” – if there is a mass global wave of cataloguers murdering institutional repository folk in the next week, you know why.
• Beyond Repositories: From Resource-oriented towards Problem-solving-oriented: I didn’t blog this well, it was very dense and full of ideas that are simultaneously catching up with things I see and well ahead in others – especially well ahead in determination to grab hold of it all and go for it.

And finally, a photo from the gala at the museum: