Introducing Dspace @ ILRI

Peter Ballantyne1 December 2010

ARE THEY TRULY ACCESSIBLE?

CGIAR RESEARCH OUTPUTS

Not really …• They are not captured• They are locked up behind passwords• They are kept inside intranets• They are not on the Internet, or digital• Their addresses are not permanent• They are not easy to find• Licenses do not encourage re-use• They can’t ‘travel’ as far as they should• ..

Who cares? Why be accessible?

• Our data information or knowledge assets should have benefits that can travel across boundaries

• They need to be:– Described and stored for posterity– Easily found and accessed– Easily shared and re-used – Available, accessible and applicable without

restrictions

AAA

• Availability - able to identify a ‘publication’ (metadata at least)

• Accessibility – able to ‘get hold of’ the ‘whole thing’

• Applicability – able to adapt and re-use or re-purpose the ‘publication’

AAA Pathways

• Promising technical and institutional routes to more or better accessibility– Creative commons– Google– Social media– REPOSITORIES – . . .

• Repository of outputs of people and projects (hosted at ILRI)

• Publishing and alerting platform

• Repository for projects, institution, CRP?

• Gateway to Google and beyond

• Uses Dspace

Choices we made• Organize contributions by content type

(publications, multi-media, articles datasets, etc)

• ‘Map’ items across to projects, themes, teams (organization structure – link to web sites)

• Dublin core the basic metadata• FAO/AGROVOC metadata• Some extra ‘ILRI’ indexing (regions,

subject areas – link to web sites)• Get many people comntributing content

Workflows• Dspace ‘the’ ILRI way to publish on the ILRI web …• Projects need ‘archives’ and visibility’; Dspace offers

both• We aim to ‘index’ everything• We aim to ‘publish’ as much as we can, with permission• We decentralise content management: Program teams

contribute content; info teams do quality control• RSS gets content across the web and into mailboxes and

desktops• Mainstream, open source solution, with open (OAI)

standards• The ‘repository’ is NOT the value proposition for the

scientists ; we sell it as ‘publishing’

Future ?• Index/make available limited access items (to the

CGIAR with Active Directory?)– Full text articles / Internal documents

• Index data and other resources, that are in full elsewhere?

• Sign up for joint specialized support (upgrades, advanced admin and apps, look and feel, training) – http://atmire.com ?

• A single ‘CGspace’ server (linux) for multi-users? – eg ILRI/ICRAF/CPWF … others

• http://mahider.ilri.org / http://mahider.cgiar.org / http://dspace.waterandfood.org ??