Summer is here, and at bepress, things are heating up! We have a number of new features on our roadmap, including two very exciting pilot projects that we anticipate will have a substantial impact on our community.
Harvesting Pilot
We’ve been keeping this one under wraps, but it hasn’t been easy. We are thrilled to announce that we have begun our first foray into the world of harvesting content. We have access to more than 160 million objects from sources including PubMed, Elsevier’s ScienceDirect, Springer, IEEE, ArXiv, SSRN, RePEc, JSTOR, and many others. This week we embarked on a pilot harvesting metadata for new faculty profiles within the Expert Gallery Suite, but have plans to expand the scope. Once we’ve gathered feedback from our pilot partners we will have more to share about our release schedule for harvesting. We are grateful to all of the folks who have offered to work with us to make our harvesting tool a success.
Streaming Pilot
Next month, we’ll be working with another group of schools to pilot streaming media directly from Digital Commons. This feature will allow campuses to better manage the exploding need for media support. By using the repository as media server and preservation unit, users will upload content only one time to one system, benefit from usage statistics, and take advantage of flexible choices for access and display.
Reporting Tools
The Profiles Report from the Expert Gallery Suite, coming this month, provides reports on faculty activity such as positions, courses taught, honors and awards. Later this fall, we’ll also add Grants and Professional Affiliations. The Profiles Report works in conjunction with other bepress reporting tools like the Content Inventory to provide flexible solutions for institutional reporting needs like annual reports, accreditation, tenure and review, as well as faculty bibliographies.
New Search Features: Snippets and Thumbnails
Digital Commons is moving from Solr to Elasticsearch, which will improve the stability of our platform, increase the accuracy of search results, and allow us to build more search-based features faster. Our first feature allows users to see snippets matching search terms as well as thumbnails pulled from actual records.
ORCID for DC
SelectedWorks profiles began supporting ORCID identifiers in late 2016. This year, ORCID for Digital Commons will allow users to capture ORCID iDs and affiliate them with author information and publications.
We’ll be sharing more results of our pilot work on harvesting and streaming in the coming months. If you’d like more information about our pilots or are interested in participating, please contact Anne Stringer (harvesting), at astringer@bepress.com or Nicole Johnson (streaming), at njohnson@bepress.com. For other questions or other information, contact outreach@bepress.com.
