The SWORDv2 project is now underway. The next few blog posts will outline the project plan that is being followed. The first of these blog posts introduces the core team members. There are three people leading the project, each with a different area of responsibility. If you ever have any questions about the project, please feel free to contact these people directly:
Technical Lead: Richard Jones
The technical lead is responsible for leading the development of the SWORDv2 standard. This involves analysing the current standard and its shortfalls, looking at how the standard should evolve, and surveying the technical landscape to ensure that the proposed solution fits with other systems.
Richard has been involved with the technical specification of all the past SWORD versions, and was joint creator of the current DSpace implementation of the SWORD standard. He has worked extensively with the SWORD and AtomPub standards, and in the area of repository interoperability, particularly between research information systems such as Symplectic Elements and Frida (the Norwegian national research system). Richard is also a member of the Scholarly Output Notification and Exchange (SONEX) working group, which works in collecting and analysing use-cases surrounding repository deposit. He is also chair of the DevCSI Developer Focus group, and a founder member of the DSpace Committer group.
Community Manager: Stuart Lewis
The role of the community manager is to foster a community around the SWORD v2 standard to help it evolve, meet the user requirements, encourage implementations and uptake, perform advocacy and training, and create a cohesive community that will take ownership of the standard allowing it to develop in a sustainable fashion.
Stuart Lewis works for The University of Auckland Library in New Zealand as their Digital Development Manager. He has played a major part of all the past SWORD projects, initially by being the joint creator of the DSpace and Fedora implementations, but also by writing clients such as the Java web client, the PHP API, and the Facebook client. More recently he has contributed by creating the EasyDeposit SWORD client creation tookit, and for writing ‘The SWORD Course’ that was first delivered at the Open Repositories 2010 conference to an audience of 55 international participants.
Stuart blogs regularly about SWORD developments (http://blog.stuartlewis.com/tag/sword/) and has co-authored two papers concerning SWORD:
– Allinson, J., François, S., Lewis, S. SWORD: Simple Web-service Offering Repository Deposit, Ariadne, Issue 54, January 2008. Online at http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue54/allinson-et-al/
– Lewis, S., Hayes, L., Newton-Wade, V., Corfield, A., Davis, R., Donohue, T., Wilson, S., (2009) If SWORD is the answer, what is the question?: Use of the Simple Web-service Offering Repository Deposit protocol, Program: electronic library and information systems, Vol. 43 Issue 4, pp.407 – 418. Online at http://hdl.handle.net/2292/5315
Project Director: Paul Walk
The project director is responsible for directing the overall direction of the project, and acting as a contact point between the project funder and the project itself.
Paul Walk has worked predominately in Higher Education in the UK since the early nineties. Starting in the academic library service at the University of North London, he went on to develop Web and intranet systems and take the technical lead in establishing the University’s VLE service in 1997. Paul has been involved in many community and standards activities, notably with JA-SIG, the International DOI Foundation and IMS Enterprise, and was one of the founders of the XCRI specification for course descriptions which has been adopted widely across Europe. Paul joined UKOLN at the University of Bath in 2006 and became Deputy Director in 2010, in which role he has oversight of research and development. He has guided the development of UKOLN as a JISC Innovation Support Centre and the founding of a sustainable community of developers in HE through the JISC-funded DevCSI project.
As well as the three core project staff, there is a small team of technical experts who will perform implementations of the SWORDv2 standard, and a Technical Advisory Panel who will help guide the development of the standard. More introductions will take place in future blog posts…