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Shared Research Repository - 22/23 funding

Lead Research Organisation: British Library
Department Name: Research Services

Abstract

The British Library's Shared Repository Service was developed to support cultural heritage organisations in sharing their data and opening up their research. Piloted through 2018-2021, and supported with initial AHRC iDAH funding in 2021, it has continued to bring iDAH further towards inclusion of heritage and IRO research. Developments in the previous 12 months have improved functionality for users, branding options for partners, and metadata. During that period, conversations with other IROs about future use of the shared repository and bringing their research into the platform have brought them closer towards on boarding, and our interviews to understand how to meet needs beyond the IRO Consortium have identified the next steps to further strengthen open data and scholarship across UK heritage research. Now IROs understand the future of iDAH, more organisations are keen to move towards set up.

Further effort is now required over the next 12 months to continue improving the repository service, ramp up the inclusion of partner organisations and deliver vital skills development to IRO colleagues in support of increased use of repository services, and key competencies for open scholarship.

The Shared Repository Service will allow for adherence to Open Access and data sharing mandates, while providing institution-specific front-end repositories to heritage organisations with nationally- and internationally-recognised brands, allowing partners to showcase the research produced by their expert staff. This research is produced through business-as-usual activity, as well as from collaborative research projects, and other activity such as artist in residence programmes. The British Library's Shared Repository Service aggregates that research content across partners to make participation a collective activity that increases the visibility of heritage research from across the UK. This creates a scaling of benefits while allowing a maintenance of organisational branding and impact.
 
Description The award allowed the British Library to continue to invest in repository technology and resource for onboarding new partners, providing stability for cultural heritage organisations seeking a cost-effective way of sharing their UKRI-funded research outputs. This has allowed the Service to expand beyond the initial pilot partner cultural heritage organisations and plan for four new partners in the next tranche of funding.

A hybrid training programme on scholarly publishing, communications, open access and research data management was established and was delivered in three in-person locations to UK-specific audiences and twice to a global audience. As a result of this, practitioners were able to further their knowledge about meeting open access compliance and helping researchers at their organisations to share their outputs in a sustainable way, for the long term.
Exploitation Route We have already taken forward the outcomes of this work by building upon the technical developments and onboarding resource through additional investment under iDAH. Our training programme materials are available for everyone to download and re-use according to the specific licences via the British Library institutional repository. All technical developments for Samvera Hyku platform were fed back to the core repository, so are available for everyone to use.
Sectors Digital/Communication/Information Technologies (including Software)

Culture

Heritage

Museums and Collections
 
Description This grant has focused on developing an existing service and targeting gaps in knowledge and awareness of repositories and open access/scholarly publishing. The work confirmed that permanent, or at least long term, support from national bodies such as the AHRC and British Library, is crucial in encouraging other organisations to select the Shared Repository Service as the most suitable repository offering. We will continue to explore this finding in the third grant where we anticipate onboarding another four organisations in 2023-2025. The training material from the Repository Training for Cultural Heritage Professionals were very well attended and we continue to see downloads of these outputs. We have been approached to run these sessions again in future years and have seen from our new partners in the Shared Service that education and awareness raising about the importance of repository infrastructure is critical to delivering their research mission. The technical developments arising from this grant have been fed into the core code base of the Samvera technology, meaning they are available to all users of the platform. Many cultural heritage/'GLAM' (galleries, libraries, archives and museums) across the world use Samvera Hyku and therefore are able to make use of the functionalities developed under the grant.
First Year Of Impact 2022
Sector Digital/Communication/Information Technologies (including Software),Culture, Heritage, Museums and Collections
Impact Types Cultural

Economic
 
Description British Library Shared Repository Service 2023-2025
Amount £385,110 (GBP)
Funding ID AH/Z000106/1 
Organisation Arts & Humanities Research Council (AHRC) 
Sector Public
Country United Kingdom
Start 09/2023 
End 03/2025
 
Title Samvera Hyku 
Description Samvera Hyku is an open source, next-generation repository product. It is a multi-tenant application, which allows a consortium to host multiple tenants (or repositories) on the same instance. Each repository is silo'd from each other, so each organisation in the Shared Repository Service has a repository that they alone can upload/share content from. All repositories share the same infrastructure, code and metadata schema, the latter providing a consistency that allows the unique 'shared search' functionality to work, and enables outputs on a specific topic or theme from all participating organisations to be discoverable. 
Type Of Technology New/Improved Technique/Technology 
Year Produced 2022 
Open Source License? Yes  
Impact The Shared Repository Service has used Samvera Hyku since 2018 following competitive procurements in 2018 and 2020-21 and during this time, we have made a significant number of developments to the software. As a result of the 2022-23 funding, we built upon much of this work by commissioning the following developments: - an XML parser for bulk import of content (using UK ETD_DC - for theses - as a test case, but can now be applied to any XML schema) - full technical Plan S compliance for repositories - implementation of the Universal Viewer for all relevant file types - IRUS analytics to complement G4A use statistics - foundations laid for securely integrating institutional SharePoint files to repository to ease uploads of very large files (using BrowseEverything) - configuration of the OAI-PMH feed to enable other services to harvest the metadata - enhanced the security and robustness of the infrastructure, e.g. move to AWS S3; upgrade Bulkrax to most recent version As a result of these new functions (and enhancing the robustness of existing functions), we onboarded a new partner to the Service - the National Trust - and secured the commitment to join in subsequent years from the Science Museum Group, the National Library of Scotland, the Alan Turing Institute and the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. All developments were collaboratively achieved by Cosector and Software Services by Scientist.com and are embedded in the open source code repository for Hyku, meaning that they are available to everybody at no further cost. 
URL https://iro.bl.uk
 
Description Repository Training for Cultural Heritage Professionals 
Form Of Engagement Activity Participation in an activity, workshop or similar
Part Of Official Scheme? No
Geographic Reach International
Primary Audience Professional Practitioners
Results and Impact Three in-person workshops (York, Edinburgh, Cardiff) plus two webinars open to all interested practitioners from cultural heritage/IROs with a responsibility for research infrastructure within their organisations. This included, but was not restricted to: opening up access to GLAM research outputs, research data management, scholarly communications and publishing, the role of repositories in research grant applications/management, procuring a repository platform and digital preservation.

The sessions aimed to make participants understand:
- the benefits of making GLAM collections openly available;
- the value of research repositories;
- policy and legal considerations in managing repositories;
- key communities to engage with to establish an institutional repository.

As a result of the sessions, we saw an increase in subscriber numbers for the BL's monthly Scholarly Communications newsletter and were approached by some UK cultural heritage organisations with questions about joining the Shared Repository Service. Participants reported an increased confidence in understanding many of the legal issues around the subject of repositories/copyright and OA, and that they felt more able to raise gaps in their organisations' coverage of these areas as a result.
Year(s) Of Engagement Activity 2023
URL https://bl.iro.bl.uk/collections/209c4f8b-df4f-4b63-bf56-ccb57a8ca385