RepoMMan Digital repositories and personal resource management strategies (PRMS) Warwick, 27 March 2006 Richard Green

Agenda (Very) brief outline of RepoMMan Researcher survey  overview  interviews  on-line Results

RepoMMan – an outline To build a workflow enabled DR  Based on Fedora and BPEL, standards compliant Automated metadata as part of workflow Surface in portal/VLE/VRE (Sakai) Informed by user requirements analysis  researchers  teachers and learners (to come)  administrators (to come)

The DR grand plan

Researcher survey - overview How do researchers “do research”?  the macro level (idea  published paper)  the micro level (interaction with IT) Established a set of guidelines for interviews and specific questions for on-line version

Researcher survey: interviews Loose set of guidelines Let them ramble Refine answers in line with on-line questions Fill in gaps Discuss possibilities for using a repository etc... Full verbatim transcript

Researcher survey: on-line Carefully thought-out questions Carrot: iPod giveaway Designed to be quick to complete ‘Card sort’ for complex question(s) Free text where appropriate Write to Access database, analysed in Excel Summary report

Results The on-line survey (229 responses) essentially confirmed the interview outcomes Analysed by Hull/Other/All Interesting insight into personal resource management

Results: interviews Responses varied:  carefully thought out, structured, PRMS; DR only required for deposit  chaotic PRMS; DR would be useful for organisation from the start  and everything in between

Results: survey Fleshed out the interview findings with numbers  majority share their works in progress with departmental colleagues (92.1%) contacts in other UK HE (53.3%) HE overseas (30.3%)  mainly by ; majority use ‘track changes’  91.8% have version control of some sort

Results: survey Work is kept on:  Overlap between first four; implies access from multiple places (DR could help); backup (again DR could help)  2 / 3 keep on more than one machine of which 50%+ on 3 or 4!

Results: survey Wide range of file types in use (analysis by card sort)  documents (98.3%)  presentations (96.1%)  images (85.6%)  spreadsheet (85.2%)  HTML (79%)  text/xml (76.4%)  statistics (65.9%)  archives (62.4%)  database (57.6%)  audio (39.7%)  diagrams/CAD (38.9%)  video (38%)

Survey: results 90%+ actively take backups – and normally in more than one place 68.5% claim to structure their files 71.9% keep material in perpetuity work-in-progress is to be found ‘all-over’; researched material tends to stay in the office

Summary The idea of a DR is generally welcome For some it would contribute to PRMS Very wide range of file types to cope with DR is potentially a flexible, accessible and safe store for unpublished as well as published material

Project website