Articles by centaur

CentAUR is now publicly accessible at http://centaur.reading.ac.uk, and following a very informative testing period with three ‘early adopter’ academic Schools has been introduced to the rest of the University via: 

• Talks to academic schools and relevant staff in directorates
• A regularly run practical training course in the University’s Centre for Staff Development & Training programme
• Email notification, to School Directors of Research for cascading to academic and research staff. This was sent today, and we have been busy answering queries and handling people’s first deposits. If the repository fills up over the weekend, we’ll know it’s worked. I’m hoping…

Schools are responsible for adding their own content, either via a central administrator or directly by their authors. Both models have been tested successfully and we are now waiting for Schools to tell us their preferred route.

Current content includes publications from the School of Mathematics, Meteorology and Physics (2007-9), the School of Human and Environmental Sciences (2009), the School of Pharmacy (2009) and the School of Systems Engineering. Repository staff will upload references to older publications (2003-9) for the whole University during 2010.

We now have read-only access (on campus) to the first version of CentAUR at http://centaur.reading.ac.uk. Currently CentAUR has 530 deposits, which have been transferred from our pilot EPrints repository.

• User accounts will be set up for Reading staff during the autumn term.
• Public access will follow after the next round of testing and updates, which will include improvements to the home page and the inclusion of cover sheets for full text documents.

Last week we ran our first internal training session for ‘repository supporters’ (library, copyright and REF related staff), as a dry run for staff training sessions. This was very successful in enabling us to test the depositing and editing workflow, training materials and the integral on-screen help. We also received a number of offers of help to assist with the verification and editing of new deposits, once the repository is in use across the University!

Whilst the build of our new EPrints repository is nearing completion of its first ‘iteration’, we’ve made significant progress in preparations for a 2010 roll out:

• Our request for some science schools to be early adopters of the repository has been enthusiastically received. Meetings with School Directors of Research for: Maths, Meteorology and Physics; Human and Environmental Sciences; and Pharmacy have taken place and introductory talks about the repository booked for academic and research staff within those schools.
• The dissemination of our project plans began externally with a talk at the REF event on 15th June  and internally with a presentation to our liaison librarians on 2nd July. Talks to other University stakeholders have been arranged for the autumn.
• Our newly appointed repository support officer is now in post and has begun working on the legacy data, starting with that of the early adopters.
• Awareness of the project is increased by a news item about the repository on the University’s research web pages.