SWAP

The Scholarly Works Application Profile (SWAP) is an application profile to describe scholarly works or eprints using Dublin Core.

Our reasons for interest in SWAP

Some of the metadata we enter about an item describes the item itself; other metadata describes a different, published version of the item. It would be useful to be able to assign appropriate metadata to describe a work and show its relationship with other version(s) of the work. The SWAP approach of defining "entities" and "relationships" fits well with our requirement.
It is possible to append more than one file to a single record within Eprints: for example, the metadata describes a published work, a version of that work is attached but also one or more supplementary files may be attached. It would be useful to have a way to describe each of these attached files and the relationship between them. Again the SWAP model provides a solution.
We want to associate items in the repository with funder and grant data. These are additional fields suggested by SWAP.
Under pressure to grow our repository but struggling to populate it with full text, we are likely to want to incorporate metadata only records but need to be able to differentiate records where we offer full-text from those where we don't; plus it will be useful to differentiate those records where we offer full text and open access and those where we offer restricted full text. For example, embargoed works. Again, this requirement would be addressed through SWAP implementation.

Conclusions

We think there is a good fit between SWAP and requirements we have within WRRO. We considered how to progress implementation. Though we felt that we had developed our understanding of SWAP to a modest level within the project team, we could see difficulties with applying this abstract model to our repository. In particular, implementing SWAP at a local level would mean customisation of our Eprints software - which could make future upgrades to new versions of Eprints more difficult. We understand that many of the SWAP relationships are already captured within Eprints. Information about the next version of Eprints (3.1 at the time of writing) suggests that it is more SWAP-like. We therefore decided that to make any further changes locally to implement SWAP might be counterproductive. We will review to what extent Eprints has addressed our requirements after our upgrade to Eprints 3.1 and, if necessary, at that point revisit any local work required to implement SWAP.

Further information about SWAP

Allinson, J., Johnston, P. and Powell, A. (2007) 'A Dublin Core Application Profile for scholarly works'. Ariadne, vol. 50 (http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue50/allinson-et-al/).

SWAP Wiki

http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/repositories/digirep/index/Eprints_Application_Profile