It’s great to read such lively responses to this thread; it’s obviously sparked a lot of interest. My contribution to it is to provide just a bit of background information on one of the projects originally identified in the repository wow-factor discussions.
http://dspace-dev.anu.edu.au/dspace-xmlui/handle/1030.58/19507/browse-title?browseBy=places
(note that the google maps icons may take some time to appear in your browser window)
This link points to an 'beta' version of the Bidwern Project, which is an ‘eResearch’ project funded by the Australian Research Council, with the software development undertaken at the Australian National University. The Web presentation end of the project uses the Manakin framework developed by Scott Phillips and team at Texas A&M <http://wiki.dspace.org/index.php/Manakin>. The ANU software team who worked on Bidwern Project (Peter Raftos, Scott Yeadon and Leo Monus) agree that Manakin is an excellent foundation on which to build sophisticated ‘dissemination’ services for DSpace.
However, an equally big wow-factor for the ANU team, unfortunately invisible for users of the site, is the fact that the site is dynamically rendered from information stored in DSpace that is ‘ingested’ from a Filemaker database application developed for field-based researchers as part of the Bidwern project. The information from the Filemaker database is uploaded into the repository via a METS encoded submission information package (SIP) using an automated ‘one-click’ submission process.
As part of the ‘live’ demonstrations of Bidwern site, my ANU colleagues wow audiences by opening up the Filemaker database, importing a digital media file or three, adding some descriptive metadata, and then hitting the one-click ingest button to package up the data and send it all of to DSpace. They then return to the Web browser pointing to the Bidwern URL, refresh the screen, and presto, the new images are visible in both the Google Map and Google Earth interfaces. Just to prove this is not some sort of presentation voodoo, they then click through the Manakin generated site to the new items in the generic DSpace user interface.
It takes a while for the penny to drop, but what the audience is seeing is a seamless scholarly communications workflow starting with a common desktop application through to sophisticated outputs, however, with the repository at the heart of the process.
For those interested, and who can make it, I will be demonstrating the Bidwern project at an upcoming 2006 CNI Task Force Meeting <www.cni.org/tfms/2006b.fall/project.html>. And for those lucky enough to be going to Open Repositories 2007 <http://openrepositories.org> in San Antonio, Scott Yeadon of the ANU will be demonstrating it. Scott Phillips will also be attending this conference to discuss the opportunities Manakin offers repository developers. Peter Raftos will be doing a demo at the Sustainable Data from Digital Fieldwork event at the University of Sydney, December 4-6. < http://conferences.arts.usyd.edu.au/index.php?cf=11> .
On a final note, and by way of a shameless plug, the Australian Partnership for Sustainable Repositories (APSR), my employer, is taking the lessons learned from the Bidwern project, with the generous support of the ANU as an APSR partner, and applying them to a range of other scholarly communications ‘workflows’ that will be developed over 2007 as part of our funding from the Australian Government. Details of these workflow projects will be available on the APSR web site over the next few weeks.
Chris Blackall
Development Portfolio Coordinator
Australian Partnership for Sustainable Repositories (APSR)
TEL: 61 - 2 - 6125 7797
MOB: 0404 700 105
FAX: 6125 5526
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http://www.apsr.edu.au
WK Hancock Building - East Wing
The Australian National University
Canberra ACT 0200
Australia
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