EasyDeposit – SWORD deposit tool creator

The development of the SWORD (Simple Web-service Offering Repository Deposit) protocol has enabled repositories to start accepting deposits from remote systems and interfaces. If you’re unsure of the basics of SWORD, read one of the following:

However, to date there has not been a great deal of use of SWORD. One of the reasons is a lack of SWORD clients that can deposit items into repositories. Demonstration clients were created by the SWORD project, and a PHP SWORD library was created by the SWORD2 project, but no client that can easily be set up by web developers or repository administrators to be used by depositors has been created.

A bit of background:

Last year as part of my job at the University of Auckland Library, I had to create a SWORD deposit client to allow PhD candidates to submit an electronic copy of their thesis. We wanted to use SWORD to do this as it means the PhD students do not have to create a repository account, and learn how to submit in the repository. The SWORD client was written in PHP and made use of the SWORD PHP library. The client was made up of a very small number of pages: login, enter title of thesis, upload file, select embargo and licencing options, verify, submit.

I then had to create a second similar deposit interface to allow a department to archive a technical report series. This deposit interface was similar, but didn’t have the embargo option, asked for more metadata, and returned the URL of the deposited item in a format that could be inserted into their own web publishing system.

Developing and maintaining two similar but not identical systems seemed to be wasteful, therefore I decided to create a generic SWORD deposit interface toolkit that allowed new deposit systems to be easily created. EasyDeposit was born!

What is EasyDeposit?

EasyDeposit is a toolkit for easily creating SWORD deposit web interfaces using PHP. To start using EasyDeposit, follow the installation instructions.

How does EasyDeposit work?

EasyDeposit allows you to create customised SWORD deposit interfaces by configuring a set of ’steps’. A typical flow of steps may be: login, select a repository, enter some metadata, upload a file, verify the information is correct, perform the deposit, send a confirmation email. Alternatively a deposit flow may just require a file to be uploaded and a title entered. A configuration file is used to list the steps you require.

EasyDeposit makes use of the CodeIgniter MVC PHP framework. This means each ’step’ is made up of two files: a ‘controller’ which looks after the validation and processing of any data entered, and a ‘view’ which controls the web page that a user sees. This separation of concerns makes it easy for web programmers to edit the controllers, and web designers to tinker with the look and feel of the interface in the views.

What ’steps’ come with EasyDeposit?

EasyDeposit comes with 14 different steps, including:

Extra steps can be easily added just by adding a controller and a view for each new step.

Is EasyDeposit open source?

Yes! It is published with a modified BSD licence.

How do I use EasyDeposit?

Follow the installation instructions! If you have any questions, please leave comments on this blog entry, to get in touch with me directly.

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Posted on February 3, 2010 at 7:14 am by Stuart · Permalink
In: Uncategorized · Tagged with: , , , ,

3 Responses

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  1. Written by Nick Sheppard
    on February 5, 2010 at 11:51 pm
    Permalink

    Hi Stuart

    This sounds like a brilliant idea and I would really like to have a go at installing it myself – I’ve had a look at your installation instructions and found them a little beyond me which is a reflection of my limited technical knowledge rather than any lack of clarity on your part. I can just about manage FTP and use Dreamweaver to access an institutionally managed test-server but from what I can glean from your instructions you are referring to installation on a local machine using the command line (as a child of Microsoft I’m a little afraid of the command line!)

    As I mentioned on Twitter, I do have a colleague who can probably help me out but he’s very busy (mostly doing web-dev stuff for me!) and I do enjoy tinkering myself and wondered if there might be a way of installing EasyDeposit on my institutionally managed server using FTP?

    Apologies for my installation-naivety; as you identify, one of the reasons that SWORD has not been more widely adopted is due to technical barriers for repository administrators.

    Any help or advice greatly appreciated!

    Cheers

    Nick

  2. Written by Stuart
    on March 3, 2010 at 3:05 pm
    Permalink

    Hi Nick,

    Thanks for your feedback. Yes – installation is slightly tricky at the moment, but hopefully not too bad if the instructions are followed. I’ve taken on board your comments about being able to install it via FTP – I’ll have a think about that and see what can be done about it.

    I’m hoping to make an administrative interface to it also, so that once it is installed you can edit the settings via a control panel rather than having to have access to the server directly (or via FTP etc).

    Thanks for the feedback,

    Stuart

  3. [...] few weeks ago I wrote about the EasyDeposit system we’ve created at The University of Auckland Library. In a nutshell, it [...]

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