The latest beta release of EPrints targets the crucial issues of  
Quality Assurance and Repository Management. Having made data entry  
and reuse much easier for researchers and users in EPrints 3.0, many  
of the new features in EPrints 3.1 are focused on repository managers,  
giving them tools to produce a more valuable repository with more  
valuable contents.

- Quality Assurance
EPrints 3.1 adds new facilities for identifying and tracking metadata  
quality issues. Quality issues include stale, missing or anomalous  
metadata as well as potentially duplicate records. Issues are defined  
using the XML-based EPScript language or by bespoke plugins and are  
reported in regular quality audits.

- Batch Editing
To allow common errors to be corrected and systematic metadata  
enhancements to be easily made, EPrints 3.1 now provides a batch  
editing service. A target group of eprint records can be identified by  
an advanced search, with selected metadata values from the chosen  
records being added, removed or replaced.

- Repository Management
Repository administration tasks, configuration management and metadata  
schema updates can be run from the Web interface instead of requiring  
a login to the server's command-line interface. To control this  
feature, specific administration privileges can be assigned to  
individuals or groups of users.

- Research Impact Evidence Gathering
New facilities for citation tracking using services like Google  
Scholar make the repository more effective for gathering evidence of  
impact for research evaluation purposes. A new class of 'volatile'  
metadata means that citations, download counts, votes, ranks, Diggs,  
tags and comments can be regularly updated in the repository without  
the overhead of creating new metadata change events in the repository  
history or triggering new OAI-PMH updates.

- New API for REST-based programming
The EPrints Toolbox is a new API for the EPrints data model that makes  
it easier to create AJAX, Web-based and command-line tools. Together  
with support for SWORD, this makes EPrints even more capable at  
fitting in with your web environment.

Also in EPrints 3.1 is better support for SWAP, complex objects,  
versioning, individual and collection bibliography pages, document  
upload from Web or archive files, contributors metadata and a new  
database layer with Oracle support.

* EPrints 3.1 is currently available as a beta release, with the final  
version anticipated in June 2008.

* For a more complete list of the improvements in version 3.1, see http://wiki.eprints.org/w/New_Features_in_EPrints_3.1

* The slides of the Beta Launch presentation at OR08 are available  
from the Open Repositories 2008 repository at http://pubs.or08.ecs.soton.ac.uk/view/subjects/eprints.html

* The EPrints 3.1 beta installation disk can be downloaded from http://files.eprints.org/338/

* A LiveCD of EPrints 3.1 that gives you the option of running the new  
version WITHOUT installing it on your hard disk can be downloaded from http://www.eprints.org/files/eprints3/livecd_v3.1-beta-2.iso
--
Les Carr
EPrints Technical Director

PS All feedback gratefully received. What new repository features  
would you rate as a priority for EPrints 3.2?