A look back at PubMan Days 2010

Berlin, 19thand 20th May 2010

As has been expected, time went by quickly – the PubMan Days 2010 are over. We took many new impressions back with us to Munich and we hope that all of the attendants at least had an interesting and informative time at Harnack-Haus.

Especially, we would like to thank all speakers for their inspiring contributions. Beyond that, we were happy about the lively interest shown by the audience throughout the diverse discussions. Much to our delight, many of the attendants took the opportunity to share their opinions, requirements and ideas with us.

Thursday was all about the growing PubMan community and its members within the MPG. After some introductory words from Malte Dreyer we heard two quite interesting reports by Gisela Lausberg, Kirstin Baumgarten and Irina Arndt about the concepts of and the experiences with the PubMan projects Language Description Heritage and Jus CMS. Projects like these are important for the global PubMan development for they proved to generate beneficial side effects for the community as a whole. Once integrated into PubMan, new features and functionalities that were originally developed in connection with certain projects for single Institutes become available for the entire community.

During the following session, members of five different MPIs told us about their specific requirements and ideas concerning the usage of PubMan at their institutes. Some of those institutes already are productive users of PubMan. Others are in the midst of migration process or at least seriously planning for the future adoption of PubMan.

Next, Juliane Müller gave a global overview of the various facets of the PubMan release planning and process by the MPDL. One focus was to raise the community’s awareness of its own role within the release planning of PubMan. For the composition of possible features for a new release, it is essential to have as many as possible information about the ideas, needs and wishes of the users. Because of that, the MPDL to a certain extend is depending on proposals and requirements from the institutes. Knowing and understanding the user’s perspective immensely helps us with our goal to make PubMan a more valuable tool for our customers.

After that, there was a lively discussion about the most important future developments. Improvements, new features or conceptual changes that would affect the usage of PubMan for all of its users, should be discussed within the community for there might be a compromise to be found. Besides the pure “collection” of issues, we were eager to learn about their prioritization within the community. Some of the suggestions and issues mentioned throughout the discussion were:

* Implementation of a service for duplicate checking

*Owner management for items

*Institute specific view for CoNE autosuggest lists (CoNE Persons)

*Skinning: Individual (institute specific) look and feel for PubMan interface.

*Question of citation style: One correct APA or 80 different citation styles?

*Deletion vs. withdrawal of items

*Search for “submitted” items

*Collaboration scenario: e.g. access rights for co-authors

On Wednesday we were happy to also welcome numerous speakers and participants from outside the MPG.

In the opening session we heard two inspiring keynotes by Urs Schoepflin from the MPI for the History of Science and Frank Scholze from KIT. Both speakers told the audience about their experiences and ideas in connection with digital publication and repositories in general and reflected on possible future developments in this sector.

Afterwards, Anita Eppelin from ZB MED and Roland Bertelmann from GFZ Potsdam reported on their experiences with PubMan. Through these examples we received an important impression of the implementation and usage of PubMan outside the MPG.

Throughout the last session of the day it was up to us – the MPDL – to provide an insight into the current status of PubMan development. First, we tried to give an overview of various MPG-projects in the environment of PubMan, such as PEER or Jus CMS. After that there was a live demonstration of the basic PubMan functionalities being implemented in the upcoming version 6.1. In addition, we presented a brief report about the modifications that were included in the least two PubMan releases.

In a final step the participants were informed about the migration of publication data at the MPG using the example of the PubMan migration by the MPDL. Besides explanations about the single steps of this process, we tried to give the audience an idea of the decisions and preparations that have to be made by the institutes before and during each migration. Furthermore we put a focus on central migration issues like questions concerning the OU-Structure, preparing the usage of CoNE service or the crucial phase of test migration.

Following the last speech there was a final discussion about several questions concerning the productive service of a repository.

Some topics were e.g.:

* Metadata quality: How complex? Who is responsible?

*Validation rules

*Repository structure: Simple solutions or complex structure? Own development or commercial product?

*Workflows: How should they be designed? Who is allowed to “release” data?

We hope all participants enjoyed this event and we are expectantly waiting for PubMan Days 2011!