Thanks, Ian, for the pointer to the DepositMO project. Dave Tarrant got some spontaneous applause at the Edinburgh Repository Fringe this year when he demonstrated two deposit clients from the project, both of which extract a degree of metadata, one directly from Word, the other via a Dropbox-like file drag-and-drop deposit. See the edited versions of these demos:

MS Kinect & SWORD v2 deposit with MS Word http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=glYeDvlWriQ 
MS Kinect & SWORD v2 deposit (Flip) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f0r0P_Rkg2o

Of course, it could be the use of Kinect that causes the excitement.

Some things to add about this. These deposit clients connect with repository software through SWORD v2; not just EPrints, but now with DSpace as well (subject to some bug fixing with the Word client). Both have SWORD v2 versions available http://swordapp.org/2011/11/sword-v2-ready-to-use/

The emphasis here is not just on one-click deposit with automatic metadata, but on deposit of in-progress work, the idea being that a repository becomes part of an author's workflow, thus making it more likely that by the time the work is complete you will already have a copy in the repository. Working within a popular authoring application like Word is a good example to start with, while the drag-and-drop client captures other types of files. It's this in-progress capture that SWORD v2 makes possible. Currently repository deposit, whether through native interfaces or via SWORD, is a fire-and-forget process that provides the depositor with little feedback or control.

We've done some extensive testing of the clients, which we are about to begin presenting on the project blog, probably in quite a long series of posts. Dave managed to find the wow factor with his demos, although it's fair to say that testing revealed user issues that need to be worked on further, especially as collection size grows and version control becomes harder.

Steve Hitchcock
DepositMO Project Manager
IAM Group, Building 32
School of Electronics and Computer Science
University of Southampton, SO17 1BJ, UK
Email: [log in to unmask]
Tel: +44 (0)23 8059 9379    Fax: +44 (0)23 8059 2865
http://blogs.ecs.soton.ac.uk/depositmo/
Twitter: http://twitter.com/depositMO

On 16 Dec 2011, at 08:46, Ian Stuart wrote:

> On 15/12/11 21:42, Arthur Sale wrote:
>> My attention was taken by the good deposit interface provided by
>> Mendeley: the researcher simply deposits (drag and drop) a pdf file, and
>> hidden behind the scenes an artificial intelligence program deduces the
>> metadata (author, title, abstract, references, page numbers, journal,
>> etc) and presents these in bulk to the researcher to confirm or edit.
>> 
>> What I’d like to ask this list: is: has anyone developed a similar
>> interface for institutional repositories, especially EPrints and DSpace?
>> If so, what experience have you had with it?
> 
> I know that a couple of Southampton people have done it with EPrints related projects (DepositMO being a brilliant example!)
> 
> I've spoken to them about this (as it would be very useful functionality to have in the OA-RJ broker service), however there is no stable code available as yet.
> 
> .... but yes - there is definitely prototype code out there to do metadata extraction, and deposit into repositories.
> 
> (also see http://code.google.com/p/pdfssa4met/)
> 
> -- 
> 
> Ian Stuart.
> Developer: Open Access Repository Junction and OpenDepot.org
> Bibliographics and Multimedia Service Delivery team,
> EDINA,
> The University of Edinburgh.
> 
> http://edina.ac.uk/
> 
> This email was sent via the University of Edinburgh.
> 
> The University of Edinburgh is a charitable body, registered in
> Scotland, with registration number SC005336.