Request for replacing the reference to the "LRT Standards" PDF with a more informative reference

[bansp]

Current instances of CLARIN DSpace point users at the "LRT Standards" PDF in places where a centre is expected to provide the user (= the depositor) with information about the given centre's preferences regarding deposition data formats. The two places that I was able to identify are:

1. the FAQ, in answer to the question "What submissions do we accept?"
2. the pop-up where a user selects data for upload.

(This ticket was originally meant to be a PR, but I felt a bit overwhelmed when trying to search for "LRT-v6.pdf" in the source and staring at all the results -- apologies for chickening out... :-) )

I can very well understand why the "LRT Standards" document was chosen:

• it is a single PDF available from clarin.edu,
• it talks about standards (and some of those standards either define data formats or correspond to known formats, so the connection was easy to make)
• it used to be (at the time when the CLARIN DSpace customisation was prepared) described as a CLARIN recommendation,
• there was no obvious alternative at that time.

The essential bits of the above have all changed, by now. Basically, all that remains is that the document is still available from clarin.eu -- but only as an item of historical interest (it was compiled 15 years ago). Many of the standards it mentions have either evolved or been retired, and, crucially, what the centre should provide here (by CTS requirements and by the definition of the relevant CLARIN KPI) is its own, specific recommendations concerning which formats it is ready to accept nearly with no effort ("recommended"), which may require some hassle and delay ("acceptable"), and which should rather get up-translated before submission ("discouraged").

There are no general top-down guidelines in CLARIN for what each centre should accept -- that is always dependent on the specific research profile that each centre has and on its long-term-archiving workflows. An example can be seen e.g. in what the IDS publishes in the Standards Information System -- that is rather drastically different from the content of the "LRT Standards" PDF, with space for general description of the centre and for comments on some of the individual suggestions. That is the format which CLARIN centres are encouraged to follow (getting more/all centres on board of the SIS is actually a running subproject of the Technical Centres Committee).

I would like to ask, in my role as representative of the CLARIN Standards and Interoperability Committee, for the reference to that PDF to be removed from the source. There are two non-mutually-exclusive ways in which this could be performed:

1. a quick substitution for the page https://www.clarin.eu/content/standard-recommendations -- which is also a kind of roundabout page, because it encourages the user (and, indirectly, the centres) to start using the Standards Information System. So it's effectively a kludge, but at least it avoids providing obsolete or simply false information (and provides some hopefully useful information on top of that). And it's "ready to use", independent of the particular centre's profile.
2. comment in the file (I'll be happy to assist in formulating it) that encourages the person who is customising their instance of CLARIN DSpace to reference either their existing page listing format recommendations (some centres have such pages) or the format recommendations that the centre maintains in the Standards Information System, where the link is of the form https://standards.clarin.eu/sis/views/view-centre.xq?id= + [centre-ID].

Thanks for considering this! :-)

[stranak]

I agree with Piotr's recommendation. Would it be sensible to set the custimisation / confuguration of a new instance to use 2), and if it doesn't exist, use 1) as fallback?

a quick substitution for the page https://www.clarin.eu/content/standard-recommendations -- which is also a kind of roundabout page, because it encourages the user (and, indirectly, the centres) to start using the Standards Information System. So it's effectively a kludge, but at least it avoids providing obsolete or simply false information (and provides some hopefully useful information on top of that). And it's "ready to use", independent of the particular centre's profile. comment in the file (I'll be happy to assist in formulating it) that encourages the person who is customising their instance of CLARIN DSpace to reference either their existing page listing format recommendations (some centres have such pages) or the format recommendations that the centre maintains in the Standards Information System, where the link is of the form https://standards.clarin.eu/sis/views/view-centre.xq?id= + [centre-ID].