Repository66.org Map Blog

This morning the Repository Mashup Map hit the magic number of 1,000 repositories represented on the map! Between them, they now hold over 8.7 million items.

There has also been a bit of work going on behind the scenes trying to make the maps perform better in your browser. They now close more cleanly, ensuring that they do not use up resources on your computer once you move on to view another page. Over the next few weeks it is hoped that we can reduce the loading time of the maps by almost a half, but at the same time introduce some growth graphs for each repository. Stay tuned!

To celebrate the first ever ‘Open Access Week‘ running from the 7th to the 11th April 2008, the maps have been upgraded with lots of the latest open access repositories that have sprung up over the last few months.

There are now over 920 repositories shown on the map, containing a whopping 8 million items between them!

The dots keep growing in number, and a new colour has arrived on the the scene - red!

There are now over 740 repositories represented on the map, and this number is growing each week. Remember, if your repository is missing, but is listed in ROAR, then use the locator interface to place it on the map. If your repository is not listed in ROAR, then list it!

The new red dots on the map represent BEPress‘ Digital Commons repositories. Since this is the next largest software system below DSpace and EPrints, we thought it deserved a category all to itself.

Several things have happensed with the repository map mashup recently: the maps now shows more than 600 repositories of the 898 listed in ROAR (at 2nd June 2007), and a new ‘repository size icons’ option has been introduced.

There are now 67.14 percent of the known repositories marked on the map. If your repository is not yet shown on the map, please register it with ROAR and OpenDOAR if it has not been already, and please use the locator facility to place it correctly on the maps. We’d love 100 percent coverage!

The ‘repository size icons’  option allows you to see the relative size of different repositories. Plotted using logarithmic scales, you can now find not just the geographical spread of repositories, but also the distribution of repository sizes across different locations.

The repository map mashup now has over 400 repositories shown, which between them hold over 4 million items! Because of the number of repositories, the icons used to display them have had to be shrunk to fit them all on!

The traffic to the site continues to grow, as do the number of links to the site:

1. The University of ‘Lyon 2′ has written an article about the maps entitled ‘Lyon 2 est sur la carte‘ (Lyon 2 is on the map). An English translation is available.
2. OpenDOAR have now officially launched their API, and use the repository map mashup as an example of the API in use.
3. In a Japanese-language ‘Current Awareness Portal‘ there is a blog entry about the maps.
4. Peter Suber’s ‘Open Access News‘ blog once again mentions the maps, and the interface available for users to position, or re-position their repositories.
5. http://openaccess.uib.no/ mentions the maps as ‘Ny oversikt over publiseringsarkiv’ (New overview of publications archive).
6. http://www.librariansworld.com/ includes a page about the maps.

The repository map mashup site has now taken another step towards providing a comprehensive global view of repository locations.

The problem to date has been the collection of the geographical location of each repository. So far nearly a hundred have been located by hand, whilst the remaining have been located using an IP address –> location tool (http://hostip.info). Those located using their IP address may be in the wrong location either due to being placed generically (e.g. in the middle of their city) or because they are hosted in a different place to their institution. However there are several hundred other repositories indexed by ROAR and OpenDOAR which need locating on the map.

The solution? There is now an interface to allow repository administrators to either place a missing repository, or update an existing repository location using a Google map. The same interface also prompts administrators of repositories not listed in ROAR or OpenDOAR to register with those directories.

The new interface can be found at http://maps.repository66.org/where/

Since the maps have ‘gone global‘ the loading and display time of the page has increased dramatically. This is because there is more data to download, and more repository markers for your browser to display. This can cause a 5 to 10 second delay from when the page has loaded, to when the markers are displayed. To help overcome modern-man’s low boredom threshold, there is a now a little loading sign with animated graphic. It shows when the data is being loaded, and then when the map points are being drawn.

Another natural side effect of having more repository markers on the screen is that it is harder to find the repository that you want when zoomed out. The answer to this has been the addition of ‘tool tips’. When you put your mouse over a repository marker it now gives the name of the repository so that you can ensure you have the correct repository before clicking on it.

It appears that the repository map mashup site is attracting plenty of blogging activity (always a good sign!).

1. First up - the well-known Open Access News Blog by Peter Suber. The entry talks about the new OpenDOAR API and how this could be used to create mashups and goes on to say “The most exciting example to date is the mash-up of OpenDOAR and Google Maps from Repository66“. See the full blog post: http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2007_03_18…
2. Next up is Richard Jones’ blog post Repository 66 and the Google Map Adventure
3. Another post comes from the EPrints team at Southampton University: http://trac.eprints.org/projects/iar/wiki/Export
4. Charles W. Bailey, Jr. in his much-read DigitalKoans blog writes about the maps: Repository 66: OA Digital Repository Map Mashup
5. David Prosser from SPARC Europe has written about the maps in the site’s “What’s New” section.
6. The pintini blog has a French entry about the maps entitled Sur la routes des DI.
7. A Japanese language blog points to the maps: http://b.hatena.ne.jp/entry/http://maps.repository66.org/
8. Finally, plenty of traffic is coming via del.icio.us where it was first tagged by JISC’s Amber Thomas (thanks Amber!) and now by others. See: http://del.icio.us/url/a09… for details.

Just in case you wondered, the data was collected by Google’s Web Analytics system - another great service from Google!

Today the repository map mashup site went global!

So far all data has been restricted to the UK. The repository data has come from two sources - ROAR and OpenDOAR. However neither of these data providers (until recently) provided any geographical data. OpenDOAR stores postal addresses, however these need to be converted into good old fashioned longitudes and latitudes. So the data for the UK is mostly hand-crafted.

In an attempt to improve on the amount of geographical data, Tim Brody from Southampton used http://www.hostip.info/ to generate location information for the IP addresses of many of the repositories. The maps have now harvested this data from ROAR allowing it to show more than 300 repositories.

(Tim Brody has also now used this data to create Google Earth files (see his blog for details) as originally blogged by Richard Jones ‘Repository 66 and the Google Map Adventure ‘).

Stage 2…? An interface to allow users to upload either corrected or new geographical data for their repository.

Stage 3…? Use some geocoding software to convert postal addresses from OpenDOAR into geographical location data.

Caveat - there are a few wrinkles in the system. For example if one institution hosts several servers, due to the programmatic fashion by which the locations are generated, the coordinates of the repositories will be identical. The code powering the maps just needs to offset each of them slightly. As it happens, the Google Earth version of the data is identical, but Google Earth shows one item, but with multiple lines coming out of it each ending in an icon for the repository - neat!