Thoughts from OR 2008

Day Two of the International Open Repositories conference in Southampton, UK. Content has been excellent so far; and a quick report on what's topical this year either in sessions or reception/coffee discussions:

• At last year's conference, a lot of emphasis on workflow. This year the themes are preservation and sustainability, and the integration of social networking with repositories as well as presentations on working scientific repositories.
• Emphasis on the critical need to make the repository useful to scientists by easy ingest and integration from the initial authoring or data generation point. The repository has to be at researchers' desktop. The respository needs to be in the laboratory. Have to support all phases of research lifecycle.
• Repositories to date have focused at the last stages of the research lifecyle.
• Repository back-ends for blogging and other collaborative tools.
• Tension between scientists/scholars not seeing the IR or data repository as useful, but at the same time a critical concern is the amount of data being lost.
• A lot of tools refined now for ingest with a focus on easy ingest.
• A couple of very interesting presentations on text/data mining; one demonstrated the value of getting knowledge that's currently locked in e-theses into the published domain  - obvious value of the Semantic Web standards.
• The Australians rule the world! Helps that their federal government has invested very substantially in this and other HE infrastructure areas. Their national library has produced a service framework composed of 39 services with standards and guidelines for each area. As a result, 80% of Australian universities have a production repository.
• Institutional data preservation policy required.
• The University of Southampton has been an excellent host despite the challenge of the attendance being nearly double that of last year (about 485 people here). Fortunately the students are on vacation.