Adrian Stevenson from UKOLN talking about, and demonstrating, SWORD. Uses Atom Publication Protocol (APP) profile (with some custom extentions) to provide a standard way of interacting with digital repositories such as DSpace, Fedora, E-Prints, Intralibrary etc.

The SWORD work has developed the APP profile, and paid for work to enable SWORD deposit to repository software in common use in HE. It has also enabled the development of some demonstration clients:

• http://client.swordapp.org is a simple web client
• Netvibes SWORD widget (available along with other JISC demonstrator widgets from http://rwidgets.co.uk) – example of importing image into Intralibrary – some issues that still need tidying up – e.g. resource name once loaded into Intralibrary is currently just a string of alphanumberic characters
• Facebook App – (called SWORDAPP)
• FeedForward – this is a tool being developed by staff at CETIS – allowing you to pull together lots of resources from various sources (focussing on RSS but also allowing you to add local files and other resources) – it will package up a set of resources in an appropriate packaged format for the target repository (e.g. METS for DSpace, IMS for Intralibrary)

There are some issues – but I’m not clear from a quick demonstration whether these are things that need further development in SWORD or just to do with the way the apps are currently coded. One of the issues is choosing appropriate metadata and deposit types, and a question of how the App might retrieve these from the target repository so it can prompt the user for the correct values.