Sumer Is Icumen In

All the exam boards have passed and the summer dawns on me and my academic colleagues. I am now old enough and wise enough to know that the apparently enormous stretch of free space in my diary will only allow me to accomplish two or three things before the evenings start drawing in and freshers' week arrives. I'd really like to get some things done on our repository, and I'm trying to make a list.

1. Migrate the repository (now seven years old) into EPrints v3.


2. Set up some QA procedures for the repository. Since the staff don't want to have any editorial oversight, we need to do this post hoc. It can all be done manually, but I'd like to have some help for (a) identifying potential duplicates (b) checking for missing full texts (c) checking for items that have been 'submitted' or 'in press' for more than a year (d) looking for missing metadata (e.g. page ranges).


3. Set up an automatic alert / deposit startup from sources like the ACM and IEEE digital libraries, so that I can regularly find out what new things have been published in recent journal issues and conference proceedings that haven't been deposited into our repository.


4. Set up a new student repository as an e-portfolio for undergraduate and masters coursework and related activities.


5. Pre-deposit the best third and fourth year project reports and presentations into the students' individual work areas on the repository


6. Have a big publicity push at Graduation, and get the students to sign permission forms for us to make the above work public

I've already got a lot of the work for #1 done thanks to Chris Gutteridge's effort over the last couple of months, but hopefully we can finish this off soon. I've also done a lot of work on #4 myself, so that we had something to show the students when their results were published. (See portfolio.ecs.soton.ac.uk for the new repository and also the poster we put up next to their degree results.)