Towards a repository-enabled scholar's workbench: RepoMMan, REMAP and Hydra

Between April 2005 and March 2009, the e-Services Integration Group at the University of Hull undertook two Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC)-funded projects, RepoMMan and REMAP. The RepoMMan tool developed a browser-based interface through which a user could interact with a private digital repository space to support the development of their works-in-progress. It went on to look at the processes involved in publishing such works to a public-facing repository and to investigate the possibility of generating metadata for the published object automatically. The follow-on REMAP Project implemented the publishing process and also investigated how triggers might be embedded in the objects that were created that would help with management and possible preservation of the object over time. The work of RepoMMan and REMAP has now been taken up in an international collaboration, the Hydra Project, which seeks to develop a repository-enabled "Scholars' Workbench". This will be a highly flexible system that will provide a search and discovery interface for a Fedora repository and that can be configured to provide interactive workflows around it for pre-publication development of materials and their post-publication management. © 2009 Richard Green and Chris Awre