I’ve been at the Open Repositories 2008 conference in Southampton this week, where I gave a presentation on the first day on the SWORD project. The day before the conference, SWORD had already been discussed very positively at a Microsoft-sponsored meeting – Stuart Lewis, one the developers on the project was at that meeting a gave a presentation on SWORD. Throughout the conference, there seems to have been something of a buzz around SWORD and many people are interested in implementing it in their own repositories to support a wide range of use cases. This is very positive, especially as SWORD is about to receive a small amount of additional funding which might allow us to do some of the things people are pressing about.
What seems to have captured people is the lightweight, simplicity and web-focus of SWORD. This is pleasing, since this was our aim from the start – not to create a walled-garden standard for repositories, but something that could be used anywhere and by any system – this is a powerful thing. Sandy Payette described this as “low-barrier deposit” which I think sums this up very well.
Among ideas for what SWORD should usefully do now, are:
- improvements to the SWORD profile and code
- extend SWORD profile to full APP support, in particular to support update/delete
- additional code libraries
- extend, develop deposit tools
- testing with ORE Resource Maps
- … ideas?
At the very least the SWORD development team, led by UKOLN, has an opportunity to get some talented innovators together and to come up with some recommendations for the future of SWORD and deposit interoperability more generally, and of how this might be supported by JISC and the repositories community.
