I attended the following demonstration:

‘ … an opportunity to view the potential ‘research information system’ for [Bristol] University…. The Danish company Atira will be demonstrating their product ‘Pure’.’

Because of flaky wi-fi at the venue, we weren’t able to have the full demo, and in particular the Research Excellence Framework couldn’t be demonstrated.  This system is intended to replace IRIS as a place for collecting details of research outputs; it can also handle personal profiles, details of projects and funding, and include a repository of full-text articles.

It seemed to work nicely, and the interface for merging duplicate records from standard databases (allowing you to choose the most detailed version of each field) was impressive.  But I couldn’t help wondering how well our current practices would transfer to this system.  For example, how can salary details within projects be kept confidential? Who can see personal details in your profile?

The most interesting aspect to me was the potential replacement of the University’s ROSE repository (based on DSpace) though the demo only touched on this in passing.  This looked rather like an add-on to the bibliographic storage system and it wasn’t clear how much control there is over metadata, or whether a licence can be stored alongside the repository items, as with DSpace.  On the other hand, there is some advantage in integrating a repository with the database of information about research outputs, as it is rather opaque who is behind ROSE.  (Someone at another institution recently thought it might be me, on the grounds that I’d posted to a DSpace forum!)