ICE-RS: Taking repositories from Web 0.5 to Web 2.0
The problem with PDF-only documents
At Open Repositories 2006 in Sydney there was lively discussion about bringing repositories onto “Web 2.0”, a theme of Open Repositories 2007.
The default document format for repositories is Adobe's Portable Document Format. Many web-based repositories are not really part of the fabric of the Web.
While PDF does have the advantage that it can faithfully render documents for print it has a number of disadvantages, on Web 2.0.
PDF should certainly be offered as a document format but so too should HTML, allowing more seamless online scanning, browsing and reading and better integration with the rest of the web via mechanisms such as browser extensions.
ICE for Research and Scholarship
ICE-RS extends on ICE, a system that allows faculty to work in a word processor using styles to capture the structure of their courseware, while providing a parallel HTML view generated automatically.
Behind the scenes, documents are stored in the standard, XML based OpenDocument Format, which promises to aid in preservation.
Building on ICE
ICE-RS will provide a toolkit for researchers to capture and manage content throughout its life cycle and create flexible, re-mixable HTML and preservation-quality XML as well as PDF.
An example of re-mixing: ICE software can extract labeled parts from a long document to make a HTML-formatted slide presentation from key diagrams and specially marked-up text in the document. No PowerPoint required.
ICE includes a 'working repository', a version-controlled, distributed database that can aggregate work from multiple researchers, capturing research reporting from the very beginning of its lifecycle, rather than just at the end, as is the case with most Institutional Repositories (IR).
This ICE working repository will allow a 'dashboard' view of research in progress, aggregating information about the writing process across research teams and institutions. ICE software will collect metadata from the very start of the writing process, and enable automated 'zero-click' ingest into an IR at the appropriate time, for example upon acceptance of a paper into a conference.
The ICE-RS project has established partnerships with other projects in Australia for integration with DSpace and Fedora, and Fedora client software including VTLS Vital and the University of Queensland's Fez.
ICE-RS is supported by the Systemic Infrastructure Initiative as part of the Commonwealth Government's Backing Australia's Ability - An Innovative Action Plan for the Future.