Fedora UK and Ireland User group meeting

I’ve just come back from Oxford where I’ve been presenting some early findings from the project to a group of Fedora users from across the EU (plus a few from the States and Australia). I was invited to come and speak to the meeting by organiser Chris Awre as part of the Duraspace initaive called the Scholars Workbench community which has been established to;

‘undertake its own scholarship in this area. It will gather existing information on how scholars use and generate information, and how they manage it, capturing experience that can be shared.’

I felt that the presentation I gave was a bit of a curve ball for the attendees, as there was no techncial content, but I felt it was a good opportunity to find out how much knowledge there was outside of the Scottish HE sector about the research pooling initatives in Scotland, and how successful they have been. I have been suprised in the past about how scant this knowledge is, and given the questions I answered during the lunch break after the presentation, it seems that this is the case.

The general thrust of the presentation, which can be found here on Slideshare, was to describe the context of the project, position reserach pools and then to speak a little about the intial observations that we’ve made.

These observations centered around drivers that they have for recording details of the reserach produced from within the pool for purposes of reporting, administration and measurement.  I also commented on the very strong sense of community that the pools have developed, and how this could be a very valuable asset from the point of view of gaining buy in from the members into depositing their published (and potentially unpublished) outputs to support collaboration and knowledge transfer.

So, overall, a good opportunity to provide some good background to a lot of well known folks in the repository world.