Dear Miika,
Great, that you have installed DSpace-Cris!
I attempt some answers for you:
Workflows: Yes, this is possible. As every university is different, it is
difficult to build a generic system for this. I suppose that these university
specific processes are a big reason why commercial products for CRIS are
expensive. At HKU there were existing databases used for other purposes, from
which we could harvest. The biggest part of the DSpace-Cris project on our
side (HKU), was negotiating permission from the several data owners, and then
setting up customized scripts to harvest, clean/verify, augment, and load in
XML to DSpace-Cris. At your site, you could add-on to DSpace-CRIS for
collection of, and processing of this data, then pre-load to DSpace-CRIS, or
build other databases to do the same.
DSpace Default Publication Form: We (HKU) mostly do not use this. Early
experiments asking faculty to deposit themselves were not successful. It is
better for faculty to input into the HKU database for staff evaluation, from
which we regularly extract and load into DSpace by XML. We augment this with
data from Scopus, PubMed, WoS, and others. On the other hand, I have seen
other sites customize the DSpace form, and have different ones for different
functions/types/staff, per your query.
Affiliations: HKU affiliations are of course controlled by the DSpace-Cris
ResearcherPages (author profiles). However, we also show non-HKU affiliations
in the DSpace publication items for non-HKU people, when we know them. This is
possible because we have a relational table for authors, that is separate from
the DSpace publication items, and from the ResearcherPages. Example,
http://hub.hku.hk/handle/10722/129470
Controlled Affiliations: You have made a controlled pick-list of possible
affiliations? We do not have this. We just just accept non-HKU affiliations,
as we receive them. I have heard that ORCID will soon show affiliation, and
that this will be based upon a controlled list from some vendor.
Bibliographic Import: This of course depends upon the source. Scopus, PubMed
& WoS have documentation for their APIs and Web Services. After getting this
data, we use Perl and other tools to manipulate into XML, and then load into
DSpace.
I believe that Andrea will write with further details to you.
Wish you well,
David T Palmer
Associate University Librarian & Digital Strategist
The University of Hong Kong Libraries
10/F Kennedy Town Centre
23 Belcher's Street
Kennedy Town
Hong Kong SAR
Tel. +852 3921 2921
http://hub.hku.hk/rp/rp00001
http://orcid.org/0000-0001-5616-4635
------------------------------
Message: 4
Date: Fri, 11 Oct 2013 12:46:56 +0300
From: Miika Nurminen <[email protected]>
Subject: [Dspace-tech] Dspace-CRIS, customizing validation and
workflows
To: [email protected]
Message-ID:
<CAKoVu=og3du28mzgn9fjtprjrtegpjpwuywwb1+4bhyyz71...@mail.gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
Hello,
I'm investigating options for a new research information system in our
organization. Dspace-CRIS has been considered as one candidate. The prospect of
merging research data with existing Dspace installation seems promising from
the maintenance point of view, and especially the functionality implemented at
the HKU Scholars Hub feels most impressive.
We have some quite specific CRIS requirements both related to validation of
publication data (partially posed by the Ministry of Education so the same
requirements apply to other institutions in Finland as well), and support for
various workflows - especially related to tracking projects and grants. I
managed to get test installation of Dspace-CRIS running, but I have some
questions about the capabilities (or possibilities of customization with
"reasonable"
effort - our old system has been developed completely in-house so we are
prepared to do some develepment and certainly collaborate with other
organizations with similar needs as well) of the system.
- The most pressing concern (since this seems to be currently handled better in
commercial alternatives): is it feasible to implement customizable workflow
processes related to CRIS entities that is separated from the normal Dspace
submission process?
This involves "validation" all all first-level CRIS entities in general (for
example, librarian should check additions to journal items), and in its most
involved form, project/grant management (=Pre- and Post-Award Process). The
basic process should be like:
1. Researcher fills in some basic metadata about the project application
(name, funders, partners, budget information, etc.) 2. For "large" projects,
financial secretary checks the budget 3. For all projects, dept. head approves
or rejects the application 4. If the application is approved, data about the
funding decision and possibly spending would be imported from financial system.
In most cases, financial secretary (or administrator) would link the financial
data with project application (using the project code or other identifier).
After the link has been made, new records (=e.g. funding decisions for
different years) related to the project should be combined to earlier data
automatically (based on the linked the project code).
I assume that the data import or the actual data structure needed to represent
this information is not a problem, and dept. heads or secretaries can probably
be represented using the Dspace authorization groups, but what about the
workflow (notifications, acceptance) functionality related to the process?
There may be also documents (e.g. funding applications or decisions) related to
the process, but since the actual entity we are interested in this case is the
project
- not the documents related to the project (in most cases, they contain
confidential information anyway).
- Another concern is related to the presentation and validation of publication
information. While Dspace-CRIS allows using CRIS entities as authority (which
is a great feature itself), the default submission form provided in Dspace
seems somewhat restricted.
For example, we would need
- Custom submission forms depending on the type of the publication (e.g.
journal articles, books, or conference papers need partially different visible
fields and validation rules for)
- Validation depending on values entered on multiple metadata fields.
For example - if the publication is marked as "international collaborative
publication" (a field required for national publication information in
Finland), the author affiliations should be checked such that at least one
author is from another, foreign organization.
- Presentation of the list/tree values based on custom queries during data
entry. For example, we would like to store all internal (=our
departments) and external (=funders, collaborators) organizations in same,
hierarchical structure, but depending on the context, only parts or this list
should be visible/searchable.
- A related concern with organizations involves presenting their time span -
over time, departments are splitted or merged and in genral, have a start or
end date. This should be reflected in validation as well (e.g. compare the
publication year to organization's lifespan) Can (or should?) features like
these be implemented on top of default Dspace submission process, or would it
make sense to define a new kind for workflow functionality on top of
Dspace-CRIS (perhaps related to project workflow mentioned in above point)
since JDynA framework seems already support some of the required validation
functionality?
- The aspect of combining affiliation data to authors is still somewhat unclear
to me. At the HKU Scholars Hub, affiliation data seems to be "wired" to author
profiles (?), but we would need to differentiate the affiliation information in
each publication (most importantly - has the author written a specific paper
_as_ member of our organization or as "outsider" (preferably with some
affiliation as
well) - there are also cases with multiple affiliations (our university +
other) and this should be tracked as well). In addition, the organizations used
in affiliation data should be picked/matched from a larger organization list or
tree (=so you could search for a given organization and get all persons,
publications, grants and other information related to that organizations). Can
this be done with Dspace-CRIS? From earlier conversations I noticed that the
concept of "nested objects" might help - is there any documentation or
additional data about the way they are defined/applied?
- The feature list mentions that _second level_ cris entities can be added
using the web ui. How about the expected amount of work for adding new first
level entities (e.g. different kinds of achievements)? Is this mostly on
configuration (hibernate files, form
definitions?) issue or does this involve changes in the Dspace-CRIS code itself?
- Are there plans to release the code (or documentation/guidelines) for
"enhanced" submission process as described in OR2013 presentation (Integrate
external bibliographic services in DSpace submission process)? The ability to
import bibliographic metadata from external services (and preferably merge the
data from various sources) is one of the central requirements for a new CRIS
and the functionality described in the presentation seems to fare (or even
surpass) the features offered by commercial competitors.
best regards (and sorry for the lengthy post),
--
Miika Nurminen
University of Jyv?skyl?
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