The big story lately from development at bepress has been the newly upgraded SelectedWorks, but that’s not the only thing happening. We’re very excited about three other big projects in the works that we hope you’ll be excited about, too.
Administrative Dashboard
We keep hearing how important it is for repository programs to demonstrate their value to their institution and community. In the same way that the newly enhanced author dashboard provides authors with the ability to explore the impact of their works, the new Admin Dashboard will let you explore the impact of your repository. The dashboard allows you to use your existing physical and virtual organization scheme to investigate usage of any publication or collection. Use it to highlight trends, usage from influential stakeholders, or other information about who is accessing your content and from where.
bepress Archive Service
We know that libraries are extremely concerned about safeguarding the digital content of their repositories. In light of that, we’re improving our archive service to provide you with better access to your content. Rather than delivering quarterly archives, we’ll push all your content and its metadata into a mirror archive on Amazon’s S3 in real time, using an S3 account managed by your institution. Having your content in S3 means you’ll have 24/7 access to your files. It also means you can take advantage of all the other services offered by Amazon, such as Glacier, for additional backups of the archived files. We’ll also verify the files’ copies by comparing checksums against the original files.
And great news for those subscribers who also use SelectedWorks: we will archive your SelectedWorks files and metadata alongside your Digital Commons content.
APIs
Library systems are increasingly interconnected. To help support the networking of systems, we will begin to introduce APIs that allow you to programmatically retrieve—and act on—the data in your repository. Use the APIs to connect Digital Commons with your other systems, on-campus or off. We’re currently reviewing requests from the community to help us prioritize which APIs will be provided when.
This is just the tip of the iceberg of all the work happening on the Digital Commons platform; be sure to follow the DC Telegraph blog for more details about these and other developments from bepress.
