NORA and the development of institutional repositories in Norway

Arne JakobssonUniversity of Oslo Library

Library of Medicine and Health Sciences

Letter to the UHR’s member institutions 25.01.05 on Open access

to scientific articles”… the Norwegian Association of Higher Education

Institutions (UHR) recommends that their member institutions:

• Set up and develop institutional repositories which will give an accurate illustration of the research carried out at each institution and which will make access to this research available to all via the Internet

• Cooperate with other institutions with regard to a collective publishing archive

Letter to UHR’s member institutions 25.01.05

• Adopt guidelines recommending that authors publish their scientific articles in parallel, i.e. publish their scientific articles both in scientific journals and in the institutional repository

• Contribute to solutions which ensure that the repositories are closely connected with the existing cooperative systems for research documentation (FRIDA/ForskDok)

Student assignments are not included in the letter from the UHR!

• Universities and university colleges should make compulsory the deposit of student assignments connected with vocational studies and at major/master level in the institutional repository

Not enough with declarations!• When the UHR letter was sent out in January 2005 to the

various universities and university colleges there were only 3 active repositories in Norway– Oslo

– Trondheim

– Bergen

• The recipients did not really know how to proceed• Repositories require competence and continuity

– The library is the natural host

• Libraries have a role in developing and supporting mechanisms which make the transition to open access publishing by– establishing and managing institutional repositories

– promoting open access journals

Not enough with declarations!

• Repositories are no longer a technological issue

– Online storage costs have dropped significantly; repositories are now affordable

– Standards like the Open Archives Initiative - Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) are now in place

– Open source and commercial software platforms are available for an institution wishing to develop an institutional repository. (DSpace, GNU E-Prints, Fedora, OpenRepository and many others)

• The challenge consists of managerial, organizational and cultural issues

Rapid development in Norway

10 local repositories with almost 9000 fulltext documents:• Agder University College (35) • Geological Survey of Norway (NGU) (764) • Hedmark University College (200) • Norwegian Defence Research Establishment (506) • Norwegian School of Economics and Business

Administration (BORA) (1343) • Norwegian University of Science and Technology (DIVA)

(570) • Norwegian University of Life Sciences (62)  • University of Bergen (BORA) (1227) • University of Oslo (DUO) (3724) • University of Tromsø (MUNIN) (267)

Rapid development in Norway

• 5 out of the 6 universities in Norway have now established repositories

• 3 university colleges have established repositories• 2 research institutions have established repositories • The university colleges and BIBSYS have taken the

initiative in developing a common solution for establishing repositories for institutions connected with BIBSYS (BIBSYS Brage)

• Hopefully, the Norwegian Electronic Health Library (Helsebibliotek.no) will develop an institutional repository for the entire health sector

Different technical solutions

• DSpace– Bergen, Tromsø and BIBSYS Brage

• DIVA– Trondheim

• Local development – Oslo

• OpenRepository – Norwegian Electronic Health Library

• Non OAI-PMH compliant systems– 2 research institutions

Different focuses/priorities

• Student theses– Oslo

• Dissertations– Trondheim

• Journal articles– Bergen

• Institutional research reports– Geological Survey of Norway– Norwegian Defence Research Establishment

You have to prioritize what your institution wants you to prioritize!

NORA – Norwegian Open Research Archives

• The NORA project is a collaborative project between universities and university colleges in Norway, aiming to facilitate national search services for self-archived research material

• The project is also concerned with advocacy issues regarding open access and the establishment of institutional repositories in Norway

• Financed by the Norwegian Digital Library at the Norwegian Archive, Library and Museum Authority

• First project meeting 6th April 2005

NORA project team

• University of Oslo Library – project manager– NORA developed and operated by University of Oslo, IT-department (USIT)

• University Libraries– Bergen– Oslo– Tromsø– Trondheim

• University College Libraries– Agder– Hedmark– Bodø– Telemark– Norwegian School of Economics and Business Administration

• BIBSYS (from 2007)• The National Library of Norway (from 2007)

Common metadata model forinstitutional repositories in Norway

• The base of the model is the Dublin Core metadata model– The Nora project has selected eleven out of the fifteen original elements in

the Dublin Core Element Set as part of the Norwegian metadata model– These have been chosen as vital in any bibliographical description of

scientific documents and therefore are many of the elements mandatory to register.

– So far the project group has standardized the following elements in the metadata model:

• Language (ISO 639-2) • Date formats (MMDDYYYY) • Personal names• Publishers’ names• Subject category system • Document type • Resource type

Common subject category system

• The Norwegian Nomenclature for Scientific Programmes was chosen as the common indexing system

– Covers all subject areas and consists of three levels– Used by the Norwegian Current Research Information System FRIDA

• A large proportion of the documents in NORA are indexed by using the Norwegian Nomenclature for Scientific Programmes

– If you choose a word at Level 1 or Level 2, your search will automatically check all the subdivisions.

– You can choose more than one search term

• Searching/Browsing using the common index terms opened December 2006

– Possible to search for documents within a specific subject, across all participating institutions

OAI-PMH harvester

• NORA has developed an OAI-PMH harvester– Harvests and validates metadata to ascertain quality of metadata

in local repositories

– Data that differs from the metadata standard are either normalized, or the data suppliers are notified and allowed to correct their metadata

• even if the data come from many different sources they will look consistent to the user

• NORA assists local repositories to facilitate for metadata harvesting

• If NORA can harvest the local repository, other search services can also harvest the repository

NORA national search service for repositories in Norway

• Development of the NORA search system– Oslo University IT-department (USIT)

• User interface design– Norwegian University of Science and Technology

• Simple search opened 20th June 2005– 2,5 months after the start of the project

• Advanced search opened September 2005– traditional bibliographical search or an approach similar to Google

• the Google approach was chosen

NORA is searchable through other portals

• NORA is searchable through other portals – Http-search

– SRU/SRW will be developed

• BIBSYS Mime – http://mime.bibsys.no

Local responsibility

• All Norwegian repositories are invited to participate, but they must finance their own local development

• As soon as a new repository is launched it will be harvested by NORA

The local institutional repository:– Must be OAI-PMH compliant (Open Archives Initiative -

Protocol for Metadata Harvesting) – Must follow the collaborative metadata model – Must have objects in fulltext or other formats

FRIDA integrated with the local repositories at the universities

• FRIDA is the Norwegian research documentation system and it is compulsory for scientific staff members to register their production (articles) in FRIDA

• It is a great challenge to persuade scientific staff members to deposit documents in the institutional repository

– The local repositories should capture journal articles through the local CRIS (FRIDA/ForskDok)

• Researchers should only have to deal with one system• Self-archiving of scientific journal articles though FRIDA with

automatic transfer of the metadata and full text to the local repository at the university in Bergen, Oslo, Trondheim and Tromsø opened 1st of December 2006

Voluntary or mandatory self-archiving

• As yet only the University of Oslo has decided to make deposition compulsory– From 2007 it will be mandatory for all postgraduate students at the

University of Oslo to submit their theses electronically

Advocate open access in Norway

• The NORA Open Access Window is to be the central web site for scholarly communication in Norway, for students, researchers, librarians and decision-makers– www.openaccess.no

• The NORA Open Access Window is complementary to the international Sherpa-list

Capture documents from small institutions

• Small institutions do not have the resources to establish a local repository– NORA will develop an OAI-PMH editor that generates XML-files to

NORA

• The fulltext version can be published on an institutional web page

In conclusion

A rapid development within Norway!

NORA has made an important contribution!