Free Workshop: Digital Repositories, e-Research and Portals

Wednesday 6th and Thursday 7th Sept, Lancaster University Centre for e-Science (LUCeS) and Lancaster House Hotel

12:00-16:00 hrs on the 6th Sept and 09:30-16:00 on the 7th Sept

The main aim of this workshop is to explore the relationship between digital repositories, e-Research and Portals in the UK with a view to articulating e-infrastructure gaps and short term requirements. The hosts will report on the JISC ITT: JISC Information Environment Portal activity - supporting the needs of e-Research, see http://www.jisc.ac.uk/index.cfm?name=funding_portaleresearch, a study they are undertaking for JISC. The aims and objectives of the study are:

• To scope the requirements of e-research within the area of resource discovery withreference to portal type services and tools.
• To identify gaps and duplication within the current provision (with reference to JISC portal and other relevant activity) therefore to identify potential areas for network and possibly synergies that could offer a more holistic approach than currentlyavailable.
• To highlight issues and challenges that will need addressed in terms of serving e-Research requirements and in terms of enhancing portal activity for the IE more generally.
• To make recommendations for portal related activity that could be taken forward by JISC.

See the bottom of this wiki page for an interesting questionnaire outlining areas on which you can help us meet these aims.

If you would like to attend, please email r.j.allan@dl.ac.uk ASAP, if you would like to make a presentation please include a title and short (200 words) abstract by 25th August. We anticipate that there will be time for up to 10 (40 minute) presentations over the duration of the Workshop.

For the purpose of the workshop, we define a Digital Repository to be either alocal institutional or a central (e.g. subject- or discipline-based) archive for depositing and providing access to digital contents. Repositories usually have a registry and search facilities via a catalogue or union catalogue with recognised meta-data such as Dublin Core. Several interfaces to such catalogues have been made and are available for research or teaching.

We define a portal to be A network service that provides a personalised, single point of access to a range of heterogeneous network services, local and remote, structured and unstructured. Portal functionality often includes resource discovery, email access and online discussion. Portals are intended for (human) end-users using common Web 'standards' such as HTTP, HTML, Java and JavaScript. In the context of the JISC IE, portals interact with brokers, aggregators, indexes, catalogues and content providers using Z39.50, SRW, the OAI-PMH and RSS/ HTTP. (JISC Information Environment Architecture glossary)

We take e-Research to be the invention and exploitation of advanced IT:

1. to generate, curate and analyse research data from experiments, observations and simulations,
2. to develop and explore models and simulations, computation and data at extreme scales;
3. to enable dynamic distributed virtual organisations, facilitating collaboration with information and resource sharing;

The workshop will be videoed and made available as a resource on the Web for future reference - see http://redress.lancs.ac.uk/Presentations.html for previous workshop recordings.

Accommodation and all meals for speakers and attendees are free and will be in a 4* hotel next to campus, http://www.elh.co.uk/conferences/lancaster.php, we will also pay reasonable travelling expenses. The workshop meeting will take place in Lancaster University, Faraday A41. For travel to Lancaster University see http://www.lancs.ac.uk/travel/travel.htm.

Workshop Programme

Day 1, 6th September 2006

11:30-12:00 - Registration and Introduction to the Workshop will take place at the hotel

12:00-13:00 - Lunch Lancaster House Hotel

13:00-13.40 - Simon Coles (Chemistry, Southampton) Digital Repositories as a Mechanism for the Capture, Management and Dissemination of Chemical Data

13:40-14:20 - Chris Awre (Information Services, Hull) Institutional management of portal(s): facilitating portal use across boundaries.

14:20-15:00 - Fred Friend (UCL) Are Institutional or Subject Repositories best for Researchers' Needs?

15:00-15:20 - Tea

15:20-16:00 - Catherine Jones (CCLRC, Rutherford Appleton Laboratory) CCLRC's Institutional Repository: past, present and future

16:00-16:40 - Derek Sergeant (EVIE, Leeds) What Real Researchers Want (from their Institutional Environment)

16:40-17:20 - Matthew Mascord (IBVRE, Oxford) The Integrative Biology VRE Project: how portals and digital repositories can benefit computational biology.

17:20-18:00 - David Giaretta (CCLRC, Rutherford Appleton Laboratory) Using unfamiliar data - the link between e-Research, Portals and Preservation

Hotel Check-in

19:00 onwards - Dinner Lancaster House Hotel

Day 2, 7th September 2006

9:00 - Walk from Hotel to A41

9:20-10:00 - Rob Allan (CCLRC, Daresbury Laboratory) JISC ITT Report

10:00-10:40 - Ann Apps (MIMAS, Manchester) IESR: A Registry of Collections and Services

10:40-11:00 - Coffee

11:00-11:40 - Ken Miller (ESDS, Essex) What's in STORe - The Info Grid?

11:40-12:20 - Peter Millington (SHERPA, Nottingham) The New Improved OpenDOAR Directory of OA Repositories

12:20-13:00 - David Shotton (Zoology, Oxford) Data Webs: New Visions for Research Data on the Web

13:00-14:00 - Lunch

14:00-14:40 - James Reid (poster)

14:40-15:20 - Discussion

15:20-15:40 - Tea

15:40-16:00 - Conclusions and Recommendations

16:00 - workshop close and Taxis to station

e-Research Questionnaire

Before attending the workshop, please could you consider the questions posed in the attached questionnaire.

Please could you also share the questionnaire around your research group, or the people you support in their research. We would like to collect as many respoenses as possible to add to the evidence we report back to the JISC regarding the needs of e-researchers.

As we haven't had time to set this up in any other way - please open the document (from clicking the link below), save, complete, and then email your response to Caroline Ingram - email address in the document introduction. Thanks!

• researchsurveyshort1.doc: e-Research survey