Do library catalogues and repositories talk to each other?
The Centre for Digital Library Research at the University of Strathclyde is currently investigating the links between university library catalogues and digital repositories as part of a JISC funded study.
Can library users find resources in their university’s digital repository through the library catalogue? Do library catalogues and repositories share records for the same items?
If catalogues and repositories generally aren’t linked in these sorts of ways at the moment, could they be?
These are some of the issues being explored by the study. The team are surveying repository managers and others about now - so, if you receive a request to respond to their online survey, your response would be much appreciated.
For further information about the study, please visit the project’s Web site and the project’s Web page on the JISC site.
How do people use electronic information resources?
Research funded by the JISC, RIN and others over recent years has helped to increase understanding of how students and researchers use electronic information resources. Analysis of Web logs - such as the work done for the e-Books Observatory Study by CIBER at UCL - has proved a fruitful line of inquiry.
A new study - which has now been underway for a few months (so apologies for this late post) - seeks to add to this evidence through detailed observation of how individual students and researchers in Business and Economics use a number of information resources in their area (such as Business Source Premier).
The aim is to observe how individuals react to and use particular interfaces and then to explore those behaviours through structured interviews.
The work is being conducted by Middlesex University and is being complemented by an analysis of Web logs for a selection of Business and Economics e-books and e-journals by CIBER.
A report of the findings is expected during the autumn.
For further information, please visit the project Web page on the JISC Web site.
Sharing citations?
An international workshop in Amsterdam in March, funded by JISC, SURF and DRIVER, discussed work needed to improve interoperability between repositories. Four areas of work were focused upon:
- citation services
- interoperable identification systems
- repository handshaking (interoperable deposit systems), and
- repository organisation (supporting repositories around the world)
There’s more information and an update here:
http://repinf.pbworks.com/
There is also an option to sign up to this wiki / community.
Specifically now, there is a proposal for internationally coordinated work to enable repositories of OA research papers to share the citations therein. This is currently out for public review, and your comments would be most welcome. Please see the proposal here:
http://repinf.pbworks.com/Citation-Services-draft-project-proposal
There are some 15-20 funders of repositories infrastructure around the world (like JISC in the UK) also looking at this proposal, with a view to funding the work it describes.
Thanks
Neil
Towards the academic library of the future - expressions of interest by 8 July 09
We’re working in partnership with SCONUL, RIN, RLUK and the British Library on an initiative:
• to gather and analyse evidence about current and future trends that are likely to have an impact on the future of academic and research libraries in the UK; and
• to formulate strategic responses to help libraries respond creatively to key changes in the wider environment, so that they continue to develop and sustain effective levels and types of information services to support students and researchers in the HE and related sectors.
We’re currently seeking expressions of interest to lead and manage the activity which will use a variety of futures tools and techniques, such as horizon-scanning; trend and driver analysis; scenario analysis; attractiveness grids; and/or value chain analysis. Prospective consultants may wish to suggest other approaches. Whatever approaches are adopted, a key feature of the programme should be that seeks the active participation of as wide a range as possible of people in the library and information sectors, along with users and other stakeholders from across the higher education and research sectors, and their engagement in helping to
• identify, review and assess key trends and underlying drivers likely to affect scholarly libraries, and their use by students and researchers in the years ahead;
• formulate and test scenarios to assess current policies, processes and services, the likely impact of future developments, and the issues and choices facing decision-makers; and
• draft a series of authoritative papers setting out possible futures for library and information services in supporting institutional teaching, learning and research strategies, and the steps required if those futures are to be realised.
The success of the initiative will depend on securing contributions from people with a wide range of views and perspectives who are prepared to experiment with ideas, to challenge existing assumptions, to ask awkward questions, and to test possible impacts.
The contract let will be funded up to a level of £120,000 (exlcuding VAT) and will run from September 2009 to April 2011.
Expressing interest:
Expressions of interest should simply take the form of an email indicating a name and full contact details. Following the outcome of this call, the RIN will issue an ITT to those who have expressed an interest. A full project specification and tendering requirements will then be issued.
The deadline for expressions of interest is 8 July 2009.
Expressions of interest should be directed to Aaron Griffiths (aaron.griffiths@rin.ac.uk). Please also contact Aaron is you have any questions relating to this work.
JISC has recently taken forward a campaign to help raise some of the related issues.
A new climate for meteorological publishing?
***This is a guest post from Fiona Hewer on behalf of the JISC OJIMS project***
Scientific information about weather and climate change is being scrutinised more than ever to meet the need for advice to policy-makers on greenhouse gas emissions and their consequences. The Royal Meteorological Society (RMetS), a world-leading publisher, and the British Atmospheric Data Centre, a NERC repository, have been working on new ways to provide scientific quality assurance and access to meteorological data, to meet this need, and the wider requirements of the meteorological sciences.
The internet provides many ways to give access to data and information on-line, from online journals and institutional repositories to project and personal websites. ”Overlay Journals” are websites that can sit above all these sources, collating information on a particular topic and providing quality control information, such as through a peer-review process. So, for users with an interest in a particular topic, an overlay journal gives wide, quality-controlled access from a single web site.
The OJIMS project (Overlay Journal Infrastructure for Meteorological Sciences) aimed to investigate overlay journal mechanics, create an open-access repository and evaluate business models for potential overlay journals. It has been funded mainly by the JISC Repositories and Preservation Programme (Repository Start-up and Enhancement Strand) and also supported by NERC. The project has raised awareness of the potential benefits and obstacles to digital publishing in the meteorological community, including scientists and organisations in the public and private sectors.
The project activities included; surveys of scientists and stakeholder organisations; review of outputs from other JISC projects such as RIOJA and other work on open-access; identification of the benefits, risks and costs of two overlay journal scenarios; development of a document editor for overlay journals; and creation of a new document repository.
Fiona Hewer of Fiona’s Red Kite was engaged by RMetS to evaluate the business models. It evaluated the technologies and business cases associated with new overlay journals. It is hoped that this will lead to the publication of a data journal in the near future.
The OJIMS project outputs have been used to inform NERC’s information strategy.
The full reports can be downloaded here. More information is available on the project website including a link to the CEDA-docs demonstration repository.
Participate in JISC Landscape Study
Apologies, firstly, to Ann Chapman and Rosemary Russell over at UKOLN that I haven’t done this post a bit earlier. They are both currently working on a landscape study to understand how people use Web 2.0 tools and services as part of the shared infrastructure services (SIS) programme to both set the current work in context and also to understand what we need to do into the future.
There is more information on the UKOLN blog for the project at http://blogs.ukoln.ac.uk/jisc-sis-landscape/ so if you are working with Web 2.0 tools and services please visit and fill in the survey.
jiscri - The results
We have been notifying and sending out grant letters to bidders to the JISC Rapid Innovation call, also known as jiscri, this week and are now able to release some information about the call.
We got 94 bids for the call and have ended up funding 33 projects at a cost of £1.1m. Originally we had allocated less funding to this call but in response to the number and quality of bids we received it was agreed we were able to increase the level of funding available for these projects. So thank you to those that submitted proposals and showed interest in this programme activity.
The 33 projects still need to sign and return their grant letters before the projects are confirmed so we can’t give a full run down of them yet but will list them on this blog and the JISC website as soon as we can. We were able to fund projects in each of the priority areas specified in the call:
- Mashups
- Aggregating tags
- Semantic web and linked data
- Data search
- Visualisation
- Personalisation
- Mobile technologies
- Lightweight shared infrastructure services
- User interfaces
The projects will start in June and run for 6 months. We will be having a meeting for these projects and people interested in them in early September. An announcement about this should come from the IE demonstrator soon. The IE demonstrator will be showcasing the work of these projects so it is a good RSS feed to grab if you are interested in jiscri.
Web Services and repositories
I attended a workshop on June 2 on the use of Web Services to enable interoperability between repositories, repository services and other systems. The workshop was organised by the Ethos project (Electronic Theses Online). Most attendees were from a repository manager or developer background.
[Update: the presentations (including audio recording) at this event are now available]
As a number of speakers noted, the term ‘Web Services’ is a very broad one. The main focus of the day was on the use of a number of specific protocols and approaches to provide ’services’:
SWORD for depositing items in repositories
SRU to search for and retrieve items
And REST for passing data between servers.
Using such ’services’ enables repository services to be used from within environments other than the repository itself (so, if you wanted to deposit an item in a repository from within a research management application of some kind, for example). It also enables repositories to use other systems’ services. One example given of this was look up of file format information from the National Archives’ PRONOM database of file formats.
From discussion, the general view appeared to be that Web Services do have a role to play in aiding integration of repositories with other systems and avoiding ’silos’. However, achieving such integration raises issues such as:
- having sufficient access to technical expertise
- ensuring good communication between repository managers and developers
- focussing on real user needs.
None of these are easy issues to address. Two of the speakers came from institutions which are members of the Scottish Digital Library Consortium and they noted the value of libraries ‘clubbing together’ to share available technical expertise and resources.
The ‘library management system’: a round up of some (fairly) recent initiatives
This is rather a long post - but it is on a big subject!
Last year saw the publication by the JISC and SCONUL of a major report on library management systems used in UK higher education. A lot has happened since. So, I thought it might be useful to post an update - even a long one - on some related recent JISC activities.
The LMS report highlighted a number of issues to be addressed in order to make library resources as visible and accessible as possible in the digital environment, including:
• integrating library systems and other university systems so that relevant data can be shared between them and users can access services in different ways (within university portals, virtual learning environments, etc.)
• making library metadata (catalogue records) available to other services (such as web search engines and collaborative web tools) so that information about library resources can be easily found, used and personalised by users where and how they choose
• using library usage data (information about how many times an item has been borrowed and by what kind of user, for example) to indicate how individual library resources are being used, thereby providing a basis for user ‘rating’ for library resources – and doing this at a ‘network level’ (so not limited to one library) in order to have access to enough meaningful data
• improving the quality of search interfaces and reducing the number of different systems which users need to search to access the full range of resources available to them.
JISC is just one partner in seeking to address these issues with vendors of library systems developing new discovery tools, OCLC’s recent announcement about using WorldCat as the basis for effectively a shared library management system and SCONUL investigating the potential for shared library management systems, for example.
So, what has been happening on the JISC front?
The TILE (Towards Implementation of Library 2.0 and the e-Framework) project has investigated the use of Web 2.0 tools by library services, outlined a possible new model (a ‘library domain model’) for how library services might fit in the wider information environment (to help inform further development of library systems) and proposed testing the extraction and combination of usage data from a number of university systems to provide the bases of user ratings for library resources.
As you may know from some earlier posts, reports from the TILE project are now available on the JISC web site and there is a workshop on the domain model planned for June 19. Further work is planned to test extracting and combining usage data as noted above.
Meanwhile, EDINA and MIMAS are developing the search interfaces for SUNCAT (the national serials catalogue) and COPAC (the national research libraries’ catalogue) as part of the D2D (Discovery to Delivery) project. The work includes providing Web 2.0 and other tools to enable users to share metadata and to link from bibliographic records to ‘the thing itself’ (or a means of obtaining it). The project partly builds on the recommendations and findings of the DPIE (Development of Personalisation for the Information Environment) investigations of 2008.
Continuing the theme of ‘joining up’, the JISC Scholarly Communications Working Group recently commissioned a study into the existing and potential links between library management systems and digital repositories.
And the winning entry at the recent Dev8D Web Developers event was a prototype reading list system which aimed to make it easier to extract information for reading lists from catalogues, Amazon and elsewhere and then make the reading lists available in different applications.
Following the major ‘Google generation’ report of early 2008, efforts also continue to understand what information services people actually need with the launch of a new British Library/JISC study of young researchers’ use of online and physical information environments. JISC’s Publishers’ Action Group has also commissioned an observational study of how individual students and academic staff in Business and Economics use electronic information resources.
So, there is a lot going on - and that is just within a JISC context. If nothing else, the activity in this area illustrates that the ‘library management system’ is even more the subject of debate than it was when the JISC/SCONUL study was commissioned not so very long ago …
A technical challenge for a Friday afternoon
We have had an interesting technical challenge posed by Chris Rusbridge, Director of the DCC relating to marking JISC bids and wondered if any of you clever people out there could come up with a solution.
For the jiscri call we received 94 bids each of these has to be marked by 3 markers, the marking process has approximately 5 sections with comments. That is a lot of data to process so an online submission system is essential. We use a web form for this. However, lots of our markers are mobile and entering marks directly into the web form is not convenient so the markers prepare their marks and comments offline and then add them to the web form at a later date. JISC provides a standard spreadsheet to help people make notes.
Copying comments and marks from the cells in the spreadsheet into the individual boxes on the web form is a time consuming and dull task and Chris is keen to find an automated way to do this.
I had a look at this myself last night and got halfway to a quick and dirty solution. Since the webform doesn’t have an API, I figured the easiest way to speed things up will be to make the pasting process easier. This can be done with enhanced clipboard systems such as ditto or clipdiary. However, getting the individual cells from the spreadsheet as unique entries on the clipboard in the correct order is a problem I couldn’t solve.
So over to you. Is there a way to use the clipboard solution to make Chris’ task easier or is there an altogether more elegant solution? Chris’ deadline is 10am Monday 11th May so answers before then would make Chris happy.
Here is a dummy example of the webform (it is from a completed marking process): http://survey.jisc.ac.uk/einfevaluation
I have put an example spreadsheet on google docs the text in the yellow boxes is what needs to be copied.
The way in which JISC bids are managed and marked is under review in the JISC policy department and they are looking for a manageable yet user friendly approach. This challenge is not part of that process so we are not looking for suggestions for different marking systems here, it is purely a technical challenge that happens to be related to marking.
We may be able to send a small gift to the most elegant solution but surely making Chris happy is the main prize here.