IR+ 2.0 now available for download

The University of Rochester is pleased to announce the open source release of its institutional repository IR+. Following a successful production launch on Tuesday October 12th, IR+ 2.0 is now available to the entire community.

IR+ was born from user research. With portfolios, personal workspaces, and publication listings, it offers useful tools for researchers and extends the role of the repository into the authoring process. It is a fully featured digital repository management solution that is easy for users to understand and manage. Its goals are to meet the needs of any organization that needs to author, publish and preserve digital information.

The download and documentation can be found at http://www.irplus.org

The new version has many new features and updates. These include:

- OAI-PMH harvestable
- Dublin Core mapping features for Identifiers and contributors
- Improved batch metadata manipulation - automated re-indexing enhancements (changing control lists forces re-indexing of all items that use changed data)
- Sponsor browsing / statistics
- Paging and Sorting for contributor pages
- Improved Search Engine Optimization(SEO) for better indexing of researcher pages and content within the repository
- Researcher page interface enhancements
- Content type listing and filtering at the repository and collection levels
- Content type counts at the repository and collection levels
- Increased download information and removal options for more accurate download counts
- Updated Help, Installation and User manuals
- RSS feeds for Collections/Contributor Pages
- Upgraded pdf/word/excel/power point text extraction libraries
- Updated user account management features
- Submission performance enhancements
- Improved home page module placement
- Improved change tracking
We are pleased with the current faculty and student interest in our IR+ installation, UR Research, having over two thousand registered users, over one million downloads and thirty six public researcher pages. Please feel free to contact me if you have any questions.

IR+ Innovation Fair Abstract Proposal - Sneak Peak

Institutional repositories were created as a way for organizations to provide users with a method for self-service preservation and dissemination of digital information. However, many organizations have reported difficulty convincing users to voluntarily deposit material into their repositories. The University of Rochester experienced similar difficulties, and carried out studies of its faculty and graduate students to determine the reasons for their lack of interest in using the repository. Our findings indicated a need for additional features to assist in the scholarly communication process, offering an opportunity to extend the repository and gain participation earlier in the authoring process. Driven by these user needs, the University of Rochester created IR+. While providing core repository functionality, IR+ offers tools for authoring, collaboration, portfolios, and analytics - providing value throughout the authoring and academic lifecycles. These new features form the foundations for Rochester's approach to attracting users into the repository, an effort that is already showing positive results. The University of Rochester sees these features as only the beginning of what could be many ways for the repository to be expanded and leveraged, not only to support the needs of its users but also to help further scholarly communication.

UR Research reaches 10,000 publications

UR Research, the University of Rochester's IR+ implementation now has 10,000 publications in its repository.

IR+ highlighted in Higher ED

An article about IR+ was recently published in Higher Ed. You can see the article here: Encouraging Open Access

Announcement to the University

We recently re-announced our institutional repository and its new features to our community here at the University of Rochester. I think it was a good way to describe our new repository - anyone interested can read it here: Virtual Work Space for Academics Promises Greater Access to Research

What type of contribution did you make – Easiest way of showing the value of the repository to faculty

I have to say that our contributor pages are wonderful. I love looking at these pages to see all the downloads the contributors have. Plus we can send a link to the faculty member and this is one way to show faculty how the repository provides value to them withour having to change their work practices. This is very important because our research faculty just like the rest of us don’t want to be any busier!

Here is the contributor page for one of our faculty members:

Contributor Example

The contributor page also serves another very useful purpose: it lists all works for a particular author. Since we have name authority control we can relate all publications to a given author even when they have published under different names!

Check it out here:

Name Authority Control Example


Another one of the major problems we had in our old DSpace system was we could not qualify the type of contribution a person made – everyone was an Author. There were no composers, photographers, thesis advisors. What a pain! In the new system, we made sure this was fixed and boy was the Music Library happy. We now have composers!

I hope Bach would be pleased!

I hope our thesis advisors are happy too:


Advisor Example


From the sound of things, our faculty are starting to talk about how they can see all the downloads for their publications.

IR+

Well, we did it. We released our new open source repository which was about 3 years in the making and I’ll have to say I’m very happy with the results – we’ve been running the system for about four months now without any major problems! We have had over 290,000 downloads since our August soft launch and that’s not including web crawler downloads. I’ll talk more about statistics in later posts.

We exported all of our 6,500 records from our old DSpace repository and imported them into our new IR+ repository which we call UR Research – you can see the new site here:

UR Research


We did some spot checking and made sure that we maintained all of our data. We now have features we always wanted as part of the system including: Authority Name Control, Researcher Pages, Multiple File Uploads, Statistics, Simpler Collection Model, Collaborative Authoring Workspace, Contributor Pages, Embargos and an easier to use interface.

We are testing the software on ourselves and hope to create an open source downloadable version in the next few days. It’s always good to run a system in production to make sure everything is running well.

The best news is that our existing users (Administrators, Faculty and Staff) have consistently told us it is much easier and more fun to use. For the first time we are getting asked by our faculty and graduate students about our repository and how it works.

This was a huge team effort, and it could not have been accomplished without the hard work and dedication of everyone involved.