I went to the APSR Market day on Friday to spruke Fez generally but also in relation to RQF . As well as giving my talk, it was good to see the other repository projects are offering and what they had to say about RQF.

The morning started with a talk from Sandra Fox from DEST: Not much different to the information given in February though I wasn't there for the infamous DEST-bashing in Feb and also arrived late due to my flight so didn't get all of Sandra's talk (so this whole paragraph is a bit second hand - sorry about that). The general comments throughout the day were that Sandra is making the best of a tough job and bearing the brunt of the stress caused by RQF on some fronts.

The Dspace guys vented a bit of frustration at Dspace over a few things they'd really like to see change but then came back after morning tea and assured us that Dspace is their repository of choice. I guess their point was that no repository can be the "do everything" software, especially when it comes to the RQF requirements. Andrew (i.e. my boss here at UQL) also mentioned that Fez will only be part of the RQF solution at UQ for the same reasons - that a repository isn't a content managment and business workflows system (though Fez can do a little bit of those things).

Some of the limitations of repositories in general when it coems to RQF is that we'd want to be able to select articles for the RQF without everyone knowing publically or even without authors knowing. The requirement for freezing objects in time throughout the assessment and the general workflows of selecting the four best papers and generating the output packages for DEST are also challenges for repositories.

I didn't get a look at the new ePrints 3 but heard that one innovation is that when a user uploads a document, they are not confronted with a big metadata entry form but rather just enter a title and upload the document. Once the document is uploaded, the user can come back and enter the complete metadata in chunks. Apparently, once the document is in the system, the owner is a bit more committed to entering it's metadata. In Fez, a user might get to that big metadata entry screen and bail out because it looks too hard - especially with all the required fields. The Fez workflows could be improved so that they chunk up the metadata entry screens and allow incomplete records to be saved in the unpublished state at least.

We were given a quick look at the new Vital. I noticed that they indicate if the fulltext is stored in the record when they do a listing. Fez currently shows thumbnails in the listings for image records - it would be nice to see maybe some icons for PDFs and things for our records with fulltext or even indicate the database for records that link to external fulltext (like the icon or name of the database perhaps).

There was a lot of interest in the ProQuest Digital Commons software probably because they have been the unknown quantity for the group at the market day. ProQuest had the most questions from the floor where as I got the impression that most people there already knew all about Fez, DSpace and ePrints. Most of the questions were about pricing and the relationship between a repository host and it's customers rather than the technicalities of RQF requirements though.

Something that was also noted early on was that a disadvantage of open source is that you need a fairly strong IT capability to modify the software. The advantage, of course, is that if you can get your hands on some programmers, you can modify the software to do exactly what you need (within reason I guess) and have a lot of control over that. On the other hand, the turn-key solutions from ProQuest, VTLS and even ePrints hosting means that you can set things up without the hassel of trying to communicate with software geeks (you get to talk to sales people instead). While the hosted solutions are happy to have input from their customers, the level of responsiveness will vary according to how much money you have and/or whether what you want has a business case.

With all the interest in hosting and turn-key repositories, it would have been good to have the Fez hosting up and running to show off. Stay tuned for more updates in that area.

UPDATE: Presentation slideshows