MePrints

MePrints has been around for a while now. Long enough in fact to talk about who’s using it and how. MePrints has been deployed on LORO, a learning materials repository at the Open University (loro.open.ac.uk) , the HumBox repository (humbox.eprints.org) which is a learning materials repository compiling materials for a UKOER project and EdShare at the learning materials repository University of Southampton.

On all these repositories MePrints has been very warmly received. I recently did a short workshop with Kate Borthwick from the HumBox to evaluate how users were using the site. It turns out that MePrints has quite radically changed users perception of the repository. By putting information from all areas of the repository in one place users are discovering features they never new the repository had because they did not bother to explore it. Futhermore the users now use the quick deposit widget as the primary way of starting the deposit process. This is very good news although it does render quite a lot of work we did with the deposit manager useless 😐 . All these signs point very positively at MePrints and really believe this might be a step in the right direction.

Finally we have had some outside interest about MePrints from our first research repository. The University of Glasgow have been speaking to us about installing it. They have a particularly interesting use case because all of the deposits in their repository have been done by  few administrators on behalf of a large number of academics. MePrints (by default) only shows information on your profile about items you have deposited yourself. Tim Miles-Board came up with a nifty but very simple modification to eprints which changes the definiton of  ownership in eprints to authorship. An eprint can have many authors but only 1 owner. This will allow all authors to see details about the eprints they are an author of without have to have deposited it (the code is at the bottom of this post). I’m hoping this will be the tipping point which makes MePrints usable for Glasgow and other Research repositories with similar concerns.

A picture of Matt Phillpott’s Humbox Hompage:

The code goes in a file in your eprints archive cfg.d and looks a little something like this:

$c->{get_users_owned_eprints} = sub
{
         my( $session, $user, $ds ) = @_;

         my $searchexp = new EPrints::Search(
                 session=>$session,
                 custom_order=>"eprintid",
                 dataset=>$ds,
                 satisfy_all=>0 );

         $searchexp->add_field(
                 $ds->get_field( "userid" ),
                 $user->get_value( "userid" ) );

         $searchexp->add_field(
                 $ds->get_field( "creators_id" ),
                 $user->get_value( "email" ), "EQ" );

         return $searchexp->perform_search;
};

$c->{does_user_own_eprint} = sub
{
         my( $session, $user, $eprint ) = @_;

         return 1 if $user->get_value( "userid" ) == $eprint->get_value(
"userid" );

         my $ids = $eprint->get_value( "creators_id" );
         for( @$ids )
         {
                 return 1 if $user->get_value( "email" ) eq $_;
         }

         return 0;
};