Client Profile

The K.U.Leuven, established in 1425, is the oldest university in the Low Countries (Netherlands, Belgium, Luxemburg). The university teaches 34,940 students and an additional 4,402 international students.

Research at the university is carried out by 4,831 full-time researchers, and annually 530 doctorates are awarded. The K.U.Leuven employs 8,017 people and the university hospitals employs another 8,172 people. K.U.Leuven is also member of the League of European Research Universities (LERU).

Introduction

Lirias, K.U. Leuven’s DSpace based repository, has been developed by @mire in collaboration with the research coordination office, the library and the institute’s IT department. Aside from the installed @mire products, specific customizations were necessary in order to make the repository fully fit the institute’s workflow and IT infrastructure. Examples of such modifications are the integration with the institution’s SAP ERP system and Shibboleth infrastructure. @mire also imported data from legacy systems (Access Databases, Reference Manager, Endnote, spreadsheet) and provided a web interface, allowing faculty to easily validate these data.

In this project, the human factor played an important role. In order to facilitate adoption of the repository by all departments, more than 60 introduction meetings were organized to clearly communicate the functionality and benefits of the repository. @mire developed specific training materials, such as manuals, presentations and tool tips within the repository. LIRIAS, now in it’s second year of operation, is the second largest DSpace installation worldwide, according to OpenDOAR.

Customizations

Listed below is a selection of 8 of the 20+ customizations.

• Integrate DSpace with the staff database
  The university of Leuven required that authorizations on submitting items into collections were maintained at the staff database level (software2: SAP Campus Management and mySAP ERP Human Capital Management). The client requested that the communities & collections in DSpace correspond to the organizational units within the University. The user (researcher) would log into their SAP portal and from within that portal could immediately go to DSpace without having to log in again. And when attempting to submit items to DSpace were only allowed to submit to collections in DSpace, corresponding to the organizational units for which the user was working. Direct Single Sign On (SSO) Authentication, not through the SAP portal, was achieved by setting up DSpace to communicate with the university’s central Shibboleth Identity Provider.
• Import records from ISI databases (SCIE, SSCI, A&HCI) and PubMed
  The DSpace submission interface has been extended to include live importing of metadata from ISI WoK and PubMed databases. The submitter can search the databases from within the DSpace user interface and can retrieve a list of records from ISI or PubMed matching their search query. The user will be able to link through to ISI or PubMed to see all information regarding the record, and select a record from the list and continue the submission with all form fields pre-populated with the metadata of the selected record, retrieved from the external resource.
• Dynamic linking with ISI WoK citation index
  When a logged in user accesses an item page in DSpace that has an ISI WoK identifier in the item metadata, ISI WoK will be queried through webservices to get the latest citation information for that publication. For every citation a link to the full article in ISI WoK is provided.
• Access to DSpace metadata from EndNote, RefMan & ProCite
  For this customization the following functionality was implemented: a crosswalk from DSpace dublin core to MARC metadata, setting up a Z39.50 server in front of DSpace, creating configuration files for connecting the Z39.50 server to EndNote, RefMan & ProCite. Researchers can search and harvest the DSpace repository from within EndNote, allowing the retrieved results to be used later-on e.g. to add citations in new research.
• Submission Templates
  The University of Leuven required the submission forms in DSpace to be configurable per collection as well as based on research publication types, defined as templates. For each different research publication type (paper in international journal, conference proceeding, ... ) it is possible to configure a different set of metadata fields to be filled out in the submission forms. A user has to select the template (type of research publication) to be submitted before starting the submission and will then be presented with only those metadata fields that are applicable for the selected template in the collection the user will be submitting the item in. Configuring the templates and applicable fields for the templates can be done in the regular input-forms.xml file.
• Journals Database design, implementation & integration
  To simplify and speed up the submission process and to avoid errors in journal names, a database was implemented to hold journal metadata (including name, ISSN nb, impactfactors, university journal classification, ...). A webapplication had been implemented to edit the journal metadata and upload spreadsheets with new data. The database was connected through webservices to a DSpace instance. At the time of submitting an item to DSpace the researcher is now able to search the journal database from within the submission form in DSpace and simply select a journal. For articles, it is forbidden to manually add a journal that is not contained in the Journal Database, for other document types, both selection from the database and manually entering of journal information was allowed.
• Webservices to use DSpace data in Research evaluation tools
  Researchers at the University of Leuven are evaluated regularly (eg. when applying for a promotion) and an important aspect of that evaluation is the amount of work a researcher has published. The data needed to do the evaluation is captured in DSpace so @mire implemented several webservices to allow the Research Management System to query DSpace for all kinds of statistics about a researcher’s publishing performance. Some of the statistics include: H-Index for the researcher’s entire career (a scientist has index h if h of his N papers have at least h citations each), total number of publications in ISI WoK top 10%, number of publications in international journals, number of international conference proceedings, average impactfactor, ...
• Restrict access to items using embargo
  Files within the KULeuven DSpace repository required different access settings depending on the preferred requirements of the submitter. For some items, an embargo was required. In the context of the KULeuven, these embargoed files needed to be accessible for intranet users, but not for the public. After the embargo date, these files were automatically available for the public. Other files needed to be configured to be either public, private, or accessible in the intranet only. The submission forms have been extended to offer submitters the option to configure the required permissions on each individually uploaded file.

Support

...

Training

Customizing and expanding the DSpace contextual help function content in order to reflect the customizations was one of @mire's responsibilities. Another was to produce and provide the university with training material for end-users (university researchers), metadata editors, and content validators. @mire has also provided training the Library IT dept. to provide the actual training to the users. The K.U.Leuven had also requested @mire to provide detailed documentation on long-term DSpace maintenance.

@mire Modules

• Infocon: Users are able to export information in a variety of formats.
• Reporting Suite: Lirias has an elaborated statistics module and the ability to generate publication lists for groups, individuals or organisational units.
• Metadata Quality