The Winter 2015 EPrints UK User Group Meeting was hosted by ULCC and was my first EPrints User Group Meeting with my EPrints Community Lead hat on.  The programme, organised by David McElroy, was published on the EPrints UK User Group Google group.

This was my first public outing wearing my new hats:

• EPrints Services Business Relationship Manager
• EPrints Community Lead

What struck me most about the event was the evident health of the EPrints community.  The free tickets to the event were snapped up in a matter of days; on the day, the room was happily bustling with delegates from all over the UK; the presentations were varied and interesting; and a good crowd met for drinks after the event.

As well as a short presentation introducing myself and the Community Lead role, I had also been tasked with presenting the EPrints Development Roadmap to the community. The presentations are available on youtube (roadmap presentation at 2:34:07).

To end the event, I chaired a feedback session where we talked about what the community would like to see, and I invited people to email me directly after the session with further feedback.  Here’s what was received:

• EPrints Development
  • Drag & Drop file upload
  • Click-editable metadata fields
  • Thread-awareness in EPrints v4
  • Metadata extraction and workflow auto-population (perhaps from DOIs)
  • Improvements for Visual Arts items (further development of Kultur work)
  • Better infrastructure for dealing with duplicate records
  • Generic metadata schemas for Research Data Repositories
• Other Request
  • Technical Training Sessions (currently, EPrints Services routinely offers administrator training)
  • Technical Webinars
  • Regular updates from EPrints