Workshop on Institutional Repositories INDEST-NCSI

["Dr. T.B. Rajashekar" <raja@ncsi.iisc.ernet.in>]

Following is a brief report of the INDEST-NCSI Workshop on Institutional
Repositories, held at Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, India during
27-29 July 2004.

INDEST-NCSI Workshop on Institutional Repositories: Workshop Report

A training workshop on Institutional Repositories was successfully
conducted during 27-29 July 2004 at Indian Institute of Science,
Bangalore, India.

Participants from twenty-one leading academic research institutions in
India were imparted training in setting up institutional e-print archives
using the EPrints http://www.eprints.org/ open source software.
Participating institutions included Indian Institutes of Technology,
Indian Institutes of Management and National Institutes of Technology. The
workshop was organized and conducted by the National Centre for Science
Information (NCSI), Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, in association
with the Digital Library Research Group, Computer Science Department, Old
Dominion University, USA. The workshop was sponsored by the INDEST
Consortium, a programme of the Ministry of Human Resources Development
(MHRD), Government of India.

The main objective of the workshop was to fulfill a recommendation of the
INDEST consortium to the member institutions to set up OAI-compliant
digital research archives of their research publications, following the
model already set up at Indian Institute of Science
(http://eprints.iisc.ernet.in/), and to work towards establishment of a
virtual research archive using the OAI inter-operability framework. It was
strongly felt that this would facilitate improved visibility and impact of
research output of these organizations and supplement the existing
scholarly publishing system. This initiative is an extension of the INDEST
consortium's initial goal of provision of shared access to licensed
e-resources like bibliographic databases and e-journals
(http://paniit.iitd.ac.in/indest/).

Workshop programme and content:

The workshop was conducted in a training laboratory equipped with 20
workstations with Linux Red Hat 9.0 operating system. Each participant was
provided with a CD-ROM prepared by NCSI especially for the workshop. The
CD-ROM consisted of EPrints (version 2.3.4) and other related software
(Apache, MySQL, dependent Perl modules, etc.); presentations made in the
workshop; sample documents to be used in lab sessions; and resources
related to institutional repositories, metadata, and OAI. Participants
used a shell scripts developed by NCSI for automating the process of
installing EPrints and other required software.

The workshop sessions covered the following topics:

- Overview of OAI framework and introduction to OAI-PMH
- Institutional repository software - features and functionality
- Overview of EPrints software and EPrints-based archives
- EPrints software installation and test archive set up
- Document submission, moderation, search and browse
- Archive configuration and customization (home page, subjects, metadata)
- Automatic metadata extraction
- OAI in action - harvesting demonstration using local DSPace and EPrints
archives and ARC service provider set up
- Repository policies, content enrichment and advocacy

Workshop inauguration and valedictory:

On first day morning, Prof. R.S. Sirohi, Director, Indian Institute of
Technology, Delhi and Chairman, National Steering Committee, INDEST
Consortium, inaugurated the workshop. Prof. Goverdhan Mehta, Director,
Indian Institute of Science, was the Chief Guest. On third day evening,
Prof. P. Balaram, Chairman, Division of Biological Science, Indian
Institute of Science, and Editor of "Current Science" journal published by
the Indian Academy of Sciences, chaired the valedictory session.

Workshop evaluation:

All the participants were successful in installing the required software
and set up test e-print archives on their workstations. They also went
through the document submission and approval processes. They also
experimented with simple customization changes to the test archives. In a
formal feedback gathered, most participants felt confident of setting up
e-print archives in their institutions. Many expressed the need for
further help and suggested more hands-on time in future workshops.

On a scale of 1-5 (1-very poor, 5- very good), workshop content got
average rating of 4.7, logistics arrangement got 4.4, and overall
assessment got 4.5. A major suggestion was to make available faster
machines in the training lab, compared to the slow PII machines that we
made available to the participants!

Workshop Website:

More details about the workshop including workshop programme,
presentations, resources and other related content is available at the
workshop website -

http://www.ncsi.iisc.ernet.in/indest-ncsi-ir/

Dr. T.B. Rajashekar
Associate Chairman
National Centre for Science Information (NCSI)
Indian Institute of Science
Bangalore 560 012 (India)

(Workshop Coordinator)
E-Mail: raja@ncsi.iisc.ernet.in