After 8 months of work by a fantastic bunch of developers, I am able to announce the launch of the main technical outputs from the SWORD project, which I will do after a bit of introductory preamble … skip to the end if you’ve heard it all before.
SWORD is a six-month JISC-funded project to define and develop a standard mechanism for depositing into repositories and other systems. Why? because currently there is no standard way of doing this. A standard deposit interface to repositories will allow more services to be built which can offer functionality such as deposit from multiple locations, e.g. disparate repositories, desktop drag&drop tools or from within standard office applications. SWORD can also facilitate deposit to multiple repositories, increasingly important for depositors who wish to deposit to funder, institutional or subject repositories. Other possibilities include migration of content between repositories, transfer to preservation services and many more.
Rather than develop a new standard from scratch, SWORD choose to leverage the existing Atom Publishing Protocol (APP), “an application-level protocol for publishing and editing Web resources”. APP is based on the HTTP transfer of Atom-formatted representations yet SWORD has focussed on two key aspects of the protocol – the deposit of files, rather than Atom documents, and the extension mechanism for specifying additional deposit parameters. Also worth noting is that SWORD does not specify the implementation of all of the functionality of APP, rather it supports deposit only, but that shouldn’t constrain implementers who want to support the fullness of APP.
So, to the outputs:
1) a profile of APP which implementers can use to create SWORD deposit clients or SWORD interfaces into repositories, where the client will ‘do’ the deposit and the interface will accept it: SWORD Profile.
2) test implementations of the SWORD interface in DSpace, EPrints, IntraLibrary and Fedora to demonstrate the efficacy of the SWORD approach: SWORD Implementations
3) two demonstration clients which can be used to deposit into the implementations at 2) or into any other SWORD-compliant implementations: SWORD clients
4) code for use with DSpace, Fedora, EPrints and the demonstration client: SWORD downloads
There are still some things to follow from SWORD – case studies from repositories and clients intending to implement SWORD will be produced over the next few months, as well as a final report, but for now, I think that’s quite enough to be getting on with.
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