{"id":2564,"date":"2009-06-29T11:06:09","date_gmt":"2009-06-29T10:06:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/keepit\/?p=245"},"modified":"2009-06-29T11:06:09","modified_gmt":"2009-06-29T10:06:09","slug":"eating-our-own-dogfood-yes-we-can","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/test-media\/2009\/06\/29\/eating-our-own-dogfood-yes-we-can\/","title":{"rendered":"Eating our own dogfood? Yes we can!"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"Having been questioned<\/a> about whether or how we might preserve our project outputs in the form of blogs, slideshows, videos, some colleagues in the EPrints developer team have revealed how they are rising to the challenge and creating tools to support inclusion of new online content forms in repositories.<\/p>\n

Chris Gutteridge, who first raised the question, offers his initial thoughts and suggestions:<\/p>\n

“Twitter and WordPress are not very compatible with the repository model. I’m not sure what the solution is there, beyond keeping a local record of the data even if the primary source is on 3rd party servers. It creates the interesting idea of “growing” eprint records, where a record could be “every blog post from XXX” or the twitter user “Y”<\/p>\n

“Youtube and slideshare, on the other hand present a different challenge. They provide a damn useful service, which is easy streaming slides\/video and easy to embed in your own site. I think that we can address this from two directions:<\/p>\n

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  1. Improve the functionality of repositories to lure the data back.\u00a0Streaming FLV (Adobe Flash) video for EPrints (not too hard to do if you limit\u00a0the formats accepted), and HTML slideshowy goodness from PPT files\u00a0(cue Les (Carr) and his scary OSX scripts<\/a>, perhaps?) These would be cool\u00a0features anyway.<\/li>\n
  2. Encourage the use of something the equal-opposite of the\u00a0official_url field (option on related URL?) to indicate the social\u00a0media\/web 2.0 (?) URL for the item. That way it can be included\u00a0in the metadata for all time and if youtube goes away, people\u00a0referencing the youtube URL could still be resolved to another\u00a0location.”<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    On video and slide functionality, two repositories are making progress: EdShare<\/a> and Language Box (“where students and teachers of languages can publish and share their learning materials, resources and links on the web”).<\/p>\n

    EPrints project developer Patrick McSweeney explains: “edshare and language box have been pitching for\u00a0some time that the reason people use these services is because they offer\u00a0something the repository doesnt. We’ve had a go at adding these things (to\u00a0language box):<\/p>\n