Scratching That Itch: Process Improvement and Problem Solving in the University of Bath Research Data Archive
Citation
(2019), ‘Scratching That Itch: Process Improvement and Problem Solving in the University of Bath Research Data Archive’, in Open Repositories 2019: "All the User Needs", Universität Hamburg, Germany, 10–13 June 2019.
BibTeX format: natbib or biblatex
Abstract
The University of Bath has operated an EPrints-based Research Data Archive since 2015, and in that time it has been heavily customized to suit local needs. In order to manage these customizations, an Enterprise GitHub repository was used first to record and subsequently to deploy changes to live and test servers. The Git-based workflow has enabled new features and fixes to be implemented and deployed much more rapidly and safely than before. For example, we introduced functionality to apply individual licences to all files in a dataset in one go; and a new responsive landing page design was introduced, including an updated JSON-LD header block for improved visibility through Google Dataset Search. One of the larger developments was to simplify the user journey for depositing a dataset, which previously required users to begin in the University's Pure CRIS before continuing in the Archive: work was done to improve the alignment of the data models in Pure and the Archive, and an XML feed was introduced to allow newly published datasets to be synchronized into Pure. These changes have improved the user experience of both end users and repository staff.