Open Repository is pleased to announce all customers have been upgraded to DSpace, version 1.8.

Benefits of the upgrade include:

     •    the ability to export communities and collections
     •    RSS feeds now support richer features, such as iTunes podcast and publishing to iTunesU
       •    supervisors and supervision orders
       •    open search functionality
       •    the ability for administrators to carry out more complex metadata editing in batches

Automatic upgrades are part of the service offered by Open Repository, enabling customers to concentrate on the management of content within their repositories, while quickly gaining the benefits of all the latest features.

When speaking about the upgrade, Bryan Vickery, Chief Operating Officer of BioMed Central said …

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Open Repository, the enhanced DSpace hosted service from
BioMed Central has always worked with institutes to provide LDAP (Lightweight Directory Access Protocol) to enable
access and maintain a distributed directory service for accessing individual
repositories.  Directory services provide
an organized set of records, often with a hierarchical structure, enabling the
need for a ‘Single Sign-On’ for all solutions held within an organization,
without the need for individual solution log-in details.

I am pleased to announce that this service has been
extended for OpenAthens
SP (Service Provider). OpenAthens SP
is a standard compliant platform which enables users to securely manage access
to all the solutions held within their organization via a Single Sign-On portal. …

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Open Repository can now display citation counts directly from Scopus, the largest abstract and citation database of research literature and quality web research.

For any items with a DOI that are recognized by Scopus, citation counts can now appear dynamically on the metadata page for that item within the repository. Enhanced Open Repository customers can take advantage of this exciting new feature simply by obtaining an access key for the service from Scopus.

For more information about how this latest feature from Open Repository works in practice, please do get in touch.

Yesterday, another new feature was added to the Open Repository service. The file-type analyzer is linked to from the admin menu, and allows administrators to see a breakdown of the content types within their repository of the numbers of items and the file types they contain.

The main page lists the various file types within the repository, the number of items containing each file type, and how many of each file type in total (e.g. 10 items with Adobe PDF and 12 PDF files in total)

The details can be drilled down in to. Therefore, you can view each of the 10 items, and see exactly how many of each file type an item contains.

The display also shows the reverse: i.e. which …

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It’s been a little quiet on the blog this month, if not in the office. We’re proud to announce that Medecins Sans Frontieres,  Northumbria University and Helsebibliotekets are all moving towards their full production releases, and also to welcome the Museum of London as our newest customer.

As always we’ve been fixing and tweaking where we can, improving speed and efficiency as we go, especially in relation to the browse pages. Meanwhile  DSpace 1.5, the majority of which we implemented last year, has gone into Beta testing for release in March.

We’ve also just released a new tool, a late addition to DSpace 1.5, that will help administrators with requests to move …

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With the arctic winds blowing the threat of snow down to London, it’s time to catch up with what’s happened to OR during January before we’re all potentially stranded by a few flakes bringing the capital’s transport system to a shivering halt.

It’s been a busy month; we hit the ground running and haven’t stopped, with improvements to both the front and back end of the service.

Hopefully, you’ll have noticed a marked improvement in speed when using your repositories. We’ve focused on further improving many of the processes that drive the service, cutting down on memory usage and estimated that this work boosted performance by about 25%. Yesterday, we moved to new web servers with increased memory and processing power, which …

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Halfway through January, a good time to cast a more general eye over what we’re doing at the moment and perhaps shed some light on what it is we get up to in the daylight hours.

Each month we create a task list, broken down into roughly 4 areas: new repositories, major projects, small projects, and individual customer change requests. Not every area will be represented each month, and occasionally we’ll create a new category for something that doesn’t quite fit the bill.

New repositories will be a combination of new trial or production repositories. This month we’ve added the HSE pilot, and the Royal College of Nursing pilot should be ready in a couple of days.

Major and small projects cover anything …

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As of only a few minutes ago, it is now possible to sort your search results on Open Repository in the same manner as you can with the browse options. That is to say, by Relevance, Title, by Submission Date and by Issue Date. Results can be ordered in an ascending or descending list, with options for the numbers of results per page and number of authors displayed against each result. The default setting for the initial results list will always be by Descending Relevance, in other words, with the most relevant results at the top.

Where community or collection names are found in response to a search query, they will still be displayed on the first page of search …

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We’ve almost completed the conversion of the old site interfaces to the new version and everything is looking good. There hasn’t been much feedback yet so I’m hoping that means everyone is happy with the new look and feel. It shouldn’t be long now before we’re able to get test instances of each of our repositories up for people to look at individually before we move to live.

Our next step is to set up the custom options for each of our current live customers. Apologies but these customisations are not available to pilot customers. The main choices that need to be made are for which fields appear on the submission form, which fields are used for the advanced search indexes …

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Something I’ve yet to mention is that we’re adding Google Analytics to all the live Open Repository sites with the 1.4.1 release. GA has recently relaunched with a new interface and we have to say that we’re really impressed with what it does and what it can do.

You can (just) see from the screenshot of the main Visitors overview below that GA offers a host of welcome reporting tools.

GA offers three main sections:

Visitors – where your visitors are coming from, what they’re doing and what they’re using.
Traffic Sources -  where your traffic is coming from and which search engines are referring them.
Content -  which pages are getting the most hits, how people move through the site …

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