An initial period will be devoted to setting up the network, and in particular to organising the start-up workshop and the creation of a central website. This website will describe the initial terms of the network, and will provide interactive facilities, such as a forum, blog and wiki, allowing participants to contribute to the further development of the questions to be addressed by the network, and subsequently to the other aspects of the network's activities. The website will also serve as a means of attracting new members to the Network.
Building on existing experience within the core group, we will integrate into this website a Fedora repository (www.fedora-commons.org), which will over time develop into a digital library of material associated with digital repositories in e-Science. We will use Fedora for this because the central teaching and learning library for UK e-Science, hosted by the e-Science Institute in Edinburgh, is based on Fedora. This will allow an easy integration of our materials into this library at the end of the network grant.
In addition to advertising the project online and by mailing lists, we will make direct contact with individuals that we know to be working in or interested in the field. Participants in the electronic forum will be asked to nominate up to three people for the first workshop, with an emphasis on non-academics. As we regard the potential community of interest to go beyond the academic world, we will make particular efforts to involve non-academics. In preference, these would be staff who, while having technical knowledge, are sufficiently senior to provide significant inputs as to the near-future application of digital repositories systems in their environments. We will also provide expert management of the on-line discussions, summarising threads and identifying outstanding issues and topics for new threads. The web site will host collaborative tools for future joint proposals by participants in the Network. The web site and electronic forum will continue to be used throughout the project and beyond.
Workshops
We plan to organise five Network workshops to take place during the three-year period of the project at accessible locations in the UK. These workshops will act as a forum for interested academics and partners in academic and non-academic institutions. All workshops will be open and widely advertised, to maximise effectiveness, and it is anticipated that there will be participation from outside the UK. To ensure that the workshops between them cover a wide range of issues, the Network managers will devise a themed agenda and organise speakers for each, and the timetable will allow significant time for debate about the issues raised. We do not intend to charge a registration fee for the Network workshops, and travel and subsistence costs will be paid to academic participants (although not to industrial participants).
Additionally, we plan to submit at least three proposals for workshops at major conferences addressing the domains of digital repositories and e-Science, e.g. Open Repositories, UK All Hands Meeting, IEEE Conference on e-Science and Grid Computing, Open Grid Forum, European Conference on Digital Libraries. We will invite a range of international speakers who are experts in their respective fields, and who will be paid travel and subsistence from the project grant. However, we will endeavour to attract sponsorship from relevant bodies, including commercial companies and developers of digital repository and other related software.
Working Groups
We envisage that the initial Network activities will result in the establishment of several working groups addressing specific issues that arise from the general discussions. To ensure that these discussions do not diverge too much from the aim of the Network as a whole, each working group will be required to report its discussions and conclusions regularly to the main Network. The issues to be discussed cannot of course be finally determined here, but they are likely to cover the specific topics described in the Overview and Motivations section above, such as digital repositories in scholarly communications and digital repositories and grid technologies.
Each working group will be given six months to carry out a scoping study of its selected area, and will be expected to produce a plan including both recommended activities for the remainder of the three year network period, and follow-on work such as recommendations for further areas of work that required additional external funding. The scoping studies will be incorporated into a summary report and published on the network website