Optimising Deposit and Import Capabilities of EPrints
The current version of EPrints has "clone" and "new version" options which save having to re-enter metadata for similar/different versions of an existing deposit. However, this doesn't help much if you are starting a new deposit. The approach we've been favouring of late is auto-completion (like Google Suggest http://labs.google.com/suggest), whereby the depositor begins typing the first few characters of the name of a co-author and is presented with a pop-up list of suggestions. The behind-the-scenes logic that determines what to suggest can be customised to an individual repository's requirements e.g. suggest from the list of registered users, suggest by looking up in the institutions user account (e.g. LDAP) server, suggest according to an internal database list of institutional and non-institutional users. The previous deposits that you have made can also inform the list of suggestions e.g. frequent/recent co-authors can be promoted to the top of the list of suggestions. This is not just about minimising keystrokes - the suggestion mechanism we implemented is also able to carry additional data about the authors being suggested. You mention the potential for cross-linking an author's work between archives. In order to do this you need to be able to uniquely identify them. Author disambiguation is potentially important for the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) in the UK. When an author's name is autocompleted, the ID of that author is also attached. We have also successfully applied the auto-completion technique to keywords and journal names (with the ISSN number of the journal being passed with the suggestion and used to auto-fill the ISSN field upon selection of the intended journal by the user). Although for the moment we've decided not to include it in the next version of EPrints (3.0), it will be in a future version. In the meantime, I'd be happy to describe our technique in more technical detail on the eprints.org wiki if that would be useful (creating an autocompleting field in the EPrints deposit form using an open source AJAX library is straightforward- the complicated bit comes in designing the (independent) program that makes appropriate and useful suggestions in reponse to the user's keystrokes). It is also worth noting that EPrints 3.0 will have a number of new options for importing data e.g. users can create new deposits by cutting and pasting BibTeX/EndNote/etc entries from a bibliography file into a textbox and hitting a button. Tim -- Timothy Miles-Board EPrints Services Southampton, UK [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.eprints.org/services/ Consultancy - Training - Hosting _______________________________________________ Bib_virtual mailing list [email protected] https://listas.ibict.br/mailman/listinfo/bib_virtual
