A Successful Demo

Yesterday we gave a demo of the ORCA Lite portlet to the Director of Information Services and the University Librarian and we are pleased to report that it was very succesful. They were extremely impressed with the work that has been done to date, and with the look and feel of the portlet. As with previous 'show and tell' sessions, the DOI deposit tab went down particularly well!

Key points raised were:

• Acknowledgement that the portlet design has been driven by user engagement, so is geared towards giving researchers and users the functionality they require.
• ORCA Lite has a nice, simple look and feel for the end user.
• The simplification of a complex set of functions is testament to the amount of work and creativity that has gone into ORCA Lite.
• The importance of getting the right senior stakeholders on board was stressed, in order to take advantage of ORCA Lite's simplicity to drive home the message of what has been achieved, and how it can benefit the research community, both inside Cardiff University and potentially the wider academic community.
• it is also important to disseminate the project outcomes and outputs to maximise the investment across the HE sector hopefully with the assistance of JISC.

In all, both were delighted with the work done and believe ORCA Lite will add great value to the university.

We on the project team are thrilled with this great feedback, but now have to buckle down and get on with getting the portlet ready for the first phase of end user testing, and also in engaging with the relevant stakeholders in order to increase impact and take-up of ORCA Lite.

Cited!

The Cardiff University Librarian has drawn our attention to a reference to the I-WIRE Project in an article by Rosemary Russell and Michael Day (of the University of Bath), entitled ' Institutional Repository Interaction with Research Users: A Review of Current Practice' in the journal New Review of Academic Librarianship (Vol 16, supp. 1, pp. 116-131). This is a special issue on dissemination models in scholarly communication, and this article focuses on the importance of institutional repository projects consulting all potential users and stakeholders, particularly researchers. Our comprehensive user requirements exercise that we blogged about previously (see entries on I-WIRE requirements from 10th, 16th and 22nd March 2010) has been referenced as good practice.

The University Librarian states that this is great recognition for the project and is an excellent endorsement of the approach adopted at Cardiff. Needless to say, this has made our week! We will be showing the ORCA Lite portlet to both the University Librarian and the Director of Information Services this week, so hope for more postive feedback to share.

End User Testing

Last week, we began to demo our proposed portlet version of ORCA to some of our stakeholders, and the feedback has been very positive, confirming that we are aligned with our stakeholders' requirements. Outlined below are the key messages that we took from the interviews:

• All participants have said that the portlet looks very quick and easy to use, and that it would not take up excessive amounts of their time to enter minimum data.
• Researchers understand the importance of open access, and the part it can play in increasing the impact of Cardiff research
• Ease of access to publication data is key
• Being able to extract research data from the portlet to use in various reports would be a big time saver for them.
• The portlet version of ORCA would be particularly useful for reports, conference proceedings and working papers which are usually hidden away on web pages.
• A feed to web pages would be a good incentive to authors and beneficial to the academic school.
• Keywords are important to ensuring an article is targeted at the right audience, and to getting the article to the top of the search result list
• An indicator that the item has been refereed would be valuable

We are very pleased to receive such good responses! We also received good feedback from our colleagues in the INSRVeducation team yesterday. We have four more 'show and tell' sessions planned for August with more colleagues from Information Services and with some of our other academic and research administrator stakeholders in the academic schools, and are also giving a demonstration to fellow library staff on 1st September. So look out for more feedback when we get it!

OR2010 Madrid

The 5^th International Conference on Open Repositories was recently held in Madrid this year, and as part of our dissemination programme, the I-WIRE team (Scott, myself, Repository Manager Tracey and Technical Lead Jim) attended. We contributed a poster on ‘Integrating the Institutional Repository with a Portal Environment’, and Scott and Jim gave a presentation on the technical challenge of building a portlet version of the institutional repository ORCA. We were pleased with the reception of both, and the team made valuable contacts with other developers and projects. We all very much enjoyed Madrid – a beautiful city which we wished we could have explored more of (although we did make it to the Prado and to the Bernabeu stadium on the night of the World Cup semi-final!)

MWE Integration

One crucial issue that has reared its head is how the interface between EPrints and the MWE will work. Part of the I-WIRE concept and brief is to establish a direct, real-time link between the MWE research portal and EPrints, but when Jim recently went to a developer's meeting at Southampton University, he discovered that EPrints does not at present have the functionality to interface with the planned research portal. This is obviously a concern as integration with the MWE is an essential feature of this project! Jim is currently evaluating our options, and he aims to present a recommended solution at the next Project Management Group meeting on 11th November.

Project Team in Place

Finally the I-WIRE Project Team is in place! Scott Hill is Project Manager, Louise Harrington the Project Support Officer, Tracey Andrews is Repository Manager and Jim Colhoun Technical Developer.

Scott and Louise both started on Monday 12th October and spent the first week getting to grips with the project requirements and oustanding issues. Updating this blog regularly will be a major ongoing feature of the project.

Our next step is to start work on the requirements capture.

Welcome to the I-WIRE Project Blog

Welcome to the blog for the JISC funded I-WIRE (Integrated Workflow for Institutional Repository Enhancement) Project.

The I-WIRE project will develop a workflow and toolset, integrated into a portal environment, for the submission, indexing, and re-purposing of research outputs in Cardiff University’s Institutional Repository (ORCA). This will be based on requirements gathered from academic Schools and administrative Directorates in the University.

The project starts this month April 2009 and runs for 2 years.