With winter making one last ditch attempt to keep us all in our thermals, it’s time to take a look back at what we’ve achieved this February. The unseasonally high temperatures have obviously helped as we seem to have made good progress in this slightly shorter of months.

We’ve moved to new, improved web servers, significantly improved the speed and efficiency of the browse and search features, added date restrictions to the advanced search feature, added links to various social bookmarking sites (Digg, Stumble upon, Facebook, Connotea, Del.icio.us, Citeulike) and deployed the ability to download to EndNote and Reference Manager. Phew!

Our final projects for the month are currently in various stages of testing and will hopefully be deployed at the end of this week. These will be: item embargos, EThOS standardized submission forms, and a tool to define content types within the repository.

Item embargos allow a user to enter an embargo date when uploading a file during submission. The bitstream in the item view will be labelled as under embargo and inaccessible until the date set. The embargos will need to be set up by us, but it’s a simple change to a config file. Embargos set up across the repository, to all collections within a specific community, or to specified collections. All admins will be able to see embargoed content, and special groups can be set up to view embargoed content. Embargo dates can be changed within the item edit page, and we’re working on allowing embargos to be added to bitstreams added after submission.

Further to this we’re also creating a thesis-specific submission form that can be applied to a collection or collections of your choice, that also conforms to the UK’s EThOS project requirements. This will be released in hand with the item embargo tool.

The content type tool will show you how many items in your repository contain which file types, and how many do not. For example, you can look at how many items contain PDFs, and then at all those that don’t. For those that don’t, you’ll be able to see a breakdown of which file types they do contain, and link to the specific items in each case. There will also be a list of all items that are metadata only.

We’ve also been working on various small customisation requests for individual repositories, and we’re looking forward to seeing HeRA ready for public launch at the end of the month. Our March task list has been set, and I’ll add a further update on that later this week. In the meantime we’ve sent Graham off to Baltimore, not to catch up on season 4 of The Wire, but to attend the OAI-ORE launch. There will certainly be MUCH more of this to come, as ORE looks to become a central tool in repository usage moving forward.