What better way to celebrate the last day of April than with another release of new features? (Yes, I can think of a few too, but you’ve got to be careful what you say on these blogs – you never know who might be reading).

Today brings to new enhancements to Open Repository. The first of which, you can see an example of in the screenshot below – tabbed browse panels for communities and collections.

Now, when you go to the homepage of a community or collection, the ‘browse by’ box will be presented with two tabs ‘Community’ (or ‘Collection’) and ‘All’. The browse links when displaying the ‘Community’ or ‘Collection’ tab take you to browse list of content that is within the community or collection that you are viewing. Clicking on ‘All’ will update the box with links for browsing the content of the entire repository – including the ‘communities and collections’ link.

The really nice part about this enhancement is that these navigation options stay with you when you are browsing within a community or collection – so if you go to the ‘Title’ list for a specific community, the browse box will still be presented with the tabs, and you can still choose to go to the ‘Author’ or ‘Date issued’ browse for that community.

The second feature is only available to repository administrators. One of the most popular features of Open Repository has been the document conversion facility, that allows submitters to create PDFs of their Word files (amongst other options). However, this was restricted to being part of the submission process – once an item was accepted into the repository, although you could add and remove bitstreams, you no longer had access to the document conversion facilities.

Today’s update changes this – as an administrator, if you edit an item, an additional button appears for the ‘Document Convertor’ (it’s near the top of the page, just under ‘Delete (expunge)’ and ‘Move Item’. On entering the document convertor, you will be presented with the existing bitstreams for that item, and any conversions that are available. It works in the same way as the conversion facility in the submission process, and also allows you to remove any bitstreams (just in case you create any by accident!). For editing any other metadata associated with the bitstream (name, description), or to add any files, you can use the form on the ‘edit item’ page as normal.