EPrints: Repositories for Grassroots Preservation
Les Carr, www.eprints.org
Grass roots: preface and précis
•	The aim of this presentation is to tell a story. In the context of a meeting which has mainly dealt with the issues of national libraries and enormous digital collections, this is a presentation that addresses a different scale. It is a scale that is both smaller and larger at the same time. It is about collecting individual items from individual researchers - the so-called grass roots - through institutional repositories. Although this seems small and insignificant in comparison to tales of humongous digital collections, the day-by-day aggregated collection of individual items from a community of knowledge producers adds up to the entire scholarly and scientific literature - as well as its supporting data, experimental analyses, discussions and commentaries. 
•	This story about EPrints focuses on the challenges of acquiring data and documents in order to build up a global collection. The challenges listed are those relating to changing the working practices and use patterns of individuals and their host institutions in order to support long term preservation.
•	The story necessarily enlarges on the need to make things easier and more useful for the author/depositor/knowledge producer in order to encourage the first stage of preservation: acquisition.
Problem Space (1)
•	Universities and researchers are knowledge producers and knowledge consumers
•	Scholarly communications have been outsourced
•	Literally nothing to
show as evidence
of research activities

Problem Space (2)
•	Researchers have have hard disks which are just organised enough to support daily activity
–	Disk crashes
–	Stolen laptops
–	Software upgrades that go wrong
–	Backups that never quite get restored
–	Draws and folders full of old stuff that eventually fall off the radar
•	“Lost in some research assistant’s computer, the data are often irretrievable or an undecipherable string of digits”
Lost in a Sea of Science Data. S.Carlson,
The Chronicle of Higher Education  (23/06/2006)

UK Experience
•	UK Council of Research Repositories
–	platform agnostic
–	group of repository managers
–	speaks for repository managers

•	Most repositories
–	have a part time manager
–	receive little or no technical support
EPrints History
•	Open Archiving Initiative - October 1999
–	Originally called UPS
•	Among the Participants
–	Paul Ginsparg (Los Alamos, arXiv)
–	Carl Lagoze (Cornell, NCSTRL)
–	Stevan Harnad
(Southampton, Cogprints)

•	EPrints
–	proposed as a ‘build your own repository’ solution 
–	enable institutions and groups to participate in OAI metadata sharing initiative
EPrints History
•	First released April 2000
–	to co-incide with OAI-PMH
•	Version 3.0 released in Jan 2007
–	at Open Repositories 2007
•	Strongly backs Open Access
•	Used by over 240
registered repositories
EPrints Management
•	Open source (GNU license)
•	EPrints development model is more centralised than DSpace / Fedora
–	c.f. the original problem statement
–	pros and cons e.g. faster turnaround on development cycles, more focused, easier quality management
–	All of these platforms are hybrid open source - they were initially bankrolled!
•	EPrints Commercial Services
–	repository hosting, bespoke development & training
–	sustain the development team
EPrints Core Objectives
•	Lower the barrier for depositors while improving metadata quality and ultimate collection value
–	Time saving deposits
–	Import data from other repositories and services
–	Autocomplete-as-you-type for fast data entry
–	Name authorities

•	Enter once, reuse often
–	Works with bibliography managers,  desktop applications and new Web 2.0 mashups
–	RSS feeds and email alerts keep you up to date
–	Easily integrate reports, bibliographic listings, author CVs and RSS feeds into your corporate web presence
–	Used for corporate reporting and national Research Assessment

•	Simple platform for open source contributions
–	Tightly-managed, quality-controlled code framework
–	Flexible plugin architecture for developing extensions
EPrints Flexibility
•	EPrints backend
–	object store
–	API
•	EPrints frontend
–	Screen plugins
–	User interface +
methods + REST interface

EPrints + Honeycomb
•	Jam today - large self-managing storage extends repository bang for library buck
–	New chemistry & artistic objects to be collected
•	Jam tomorrow - potentially take over part of repository responsibility
EPrints Challenges
•	Small science > big science
–	Data from Big Science is easier to handle, understand and archive. Small Science is horribly heterogeneous and far more vast. In time Small Science will generate 2-3 times more data than Big Science.

•	Lots of inexperienced users
–	Give individuals the tools to become responsible curators of their own intellectual output
–	Give institutions the tools to manage, assist and leverage
–	Give users the tools to access the global literature data - to use and reuse for many, many purposes in many, many contexts by many stakeholders
It’s the Data, Stupid
EPrints - beyond the repository
•	OAI PMH services
–	Citebase - citation analysis for the
Open Access literature.
•	Unfunded PhD work (outshoot of OpCit)
•	4 million sessions per month
•	Destroy 1 RAID disk every 6 months

–	Celestial - OAI-PMH harvesting proxy
•	Supports Citebase and other services

–	ROAR - registry of Open Access
repositories
•	Tracks size and daily
deposit profiles over time
EPrints - Preservation Services
•	Format profiling using PRONOM-DROID
–	JISC PRESERV project
–	Initially to be applied to two pilot repositories
–	Ultimately applied to over 200 repositories
•	DSpace & EPrints
•	Applied via OAI
•	Delivered through ROAR

•	Add Honeycomb to the mix
–	We can ‘preserve’ repository
contents too
–	JISC PRESERV II project
The challenges of human scale institutional repositories versus the challenges of industrial-scale processing of humongous collections.

Lawnmowers vs Combine Harvesters?

How do you manage an entire nation’s grass clippings?