Interesting repository user interfaces
There are a number of interesting repository user interfaces being developed by the repositories in the start up and enhancement strand of the JISC repositories and preservation programme.
The Faroes project is developing a repository for language teachers called language box. The repository is designed to be very lightweight and is collecting basic learning resources (web pages, power points, images, videos, etc) rather than complex learning objects.
Their beta repository can be seen at: http://languagebox.eprints.org/ The bull fighting resource is a particularly good example of how the repostitory interface handles different types of resources. I think the interface pulls off the trick of being instantly familiar, you can start to use the repository without stopping to think or scanning around the interface for the option you want.
The Kultur project is developing a repository for the creative arts departments at 3 institutions. As most of their deposits contain images of artworks then they needed to develop their eprints interface to suit these objects. The demo that they have so far is very attractive: http://kultur-demo2.eprints.org/. The slideshow on the home page makes it clear that we are dealing with a visual repository and they have taken the interesting option of hiding all metadata for an item until you click on the further information box.
The Lirolem project produced a repository that has a simple but very effective way of displaying items which consist of multiple formats. Here is an example of an item that is text and images: http://eprints.lincoln.ac.uk/1606/ Notice how responsive the interface is, clicking between the document and images tabs is instant as is clicking between different images. They have also chosen to include a “bookmark this” link on every repository item.
I am also hearing good things about the new, improved interface for Primo: http://dablog.ulcc.ac.uk/2008/10/21/primo-new-version-coming-soon/
All of these interfaces have taken the approach of displaying the item in the most prominent and appropriate way while relegating the metadata to the bottom of the screen or hiding it in a clickable box.
I know all these examples are eprints and that most of the work developing these examples has been done by Southampton, but these are the ones that have come to my attention so far. Apologies if I have missed any others. I would love to hear about interesting interfaces on other software platforms.
Repository widgets
JISC funded a small piece of work to produce some repository related widgets that could be used on platforms such as Netvibes and iGoogle. ICO3 carried out the work for us and I am pleased to say that there are now a number of widgets available.
You can read about the widgets and add them to your netvibes and iGoogle page at: http://www.rwidgets.co.uk/wiki/doku.php
Or to see them in action, go to the netvibes universe: http://www.netvibes.com/rwidgets#General
My favourite of these is the SherpaRoMEO widget, which works really well.
ICO3 will be doing some work to get community feedback on these widgets so if you are interested in helping ICO3 to review the widgets or if you just want to express an opinion, post a comment below or contact me directly http://www.jisc.ac.uk/contactus/staff/andrewmcgregor.aspx. I’d be really interested to hear your opinions and ideas.
The purpose of this work was to explore the possiblities of repository related widgets in this area, not to produce polished tools so I think that there is plenty of room for further development both of these widgets (I’d really like the sword one to have a drag and drop interface) and of other widgets related to repositories and the information environment.
RSP blog directory and yahoo pipes
Last week while playing around with yahoo pipes, I found this useful tool: http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=ypEo0_zd2xGgEDTaJhOy0Q
If you enter a link to an opml file it will aggregate all the rss feeds from that file into one tidy rss feed with each item labelled with which blog it came from.
The RSP published a series of opml files for a whole load of repository related blogs. These are categorised by blog type, one example is the personal blogs: http://www.rsp.ac.uk/blogs/opml.php?type=personal. Pop this link into the yahoo pipe (the box that says ‘the opml file is located at’), enter the number of items you want to appear in your rss feed and you get a handy little rss feed showing all the latest blog postings from that section of the directory.
This has saved me an awful lot of real estate on my netvibes page.
There is an opml file for all the blogs in the directory but this didn’t work too well for me when I put it through the pipe.
Records Management 2.0
It’s a sorry thing to admit, but I have to say that reading a whole book has become something of a distant memory for me these days! So … nice to be able to put that right by racing through Steve Bailey’s new book from cover to cover. It’s called ‘Managing the Crowd: Rethinking records management for the Web 2.0 world’.
Records management … a rip-roaring read? Well, I grant you it might not be everyone’s idea of great night in, but for anyone whose waking hours involves thinking about this stuff - I’d recommend you take a look at it.
Steve’s main contention in the book is that if records managers are not prepared to think outside of their comfort zone, they may be in danger of finding themselves no longer in a profession. Processes and procedures will have moved on and those hanging on to the electronic corollary of earlier paper-based working practices will begin to wonder why no-one in their institution is taking any notice of them anymore.
It ties in quite nicely with the soon-to-be-released JISC PoWR (Preservation of Web Resources) Handbook, a section of which addresses the need for a closer working relationship between Records Managers and those with responsibility for institutional websites, and is a timely alert to those institutions to discover what sort of resources they are in danger of losing if they don’t pay attention to web preservation issues.
JISC PoWR blog: http://jiscpowr.jiscinvolve.org/
What makes a ‘good’ API?
There are more and more opportunities for universities to take advantage of services offered by third parties on the web. It isn’t hard to see where exploiting Facebook or Twitter, or more ‘academic’ services such as SherpaRoMEO, can add value to a university’s ICT offer to its staff and students. Obviously there are issues, some legal (see Web2Rights toolkit) and some technical. UKOLN are just kicking off a small piece of work to see what’s going on in the sector in the UK, and identify good practice both in terms of using third party APIs, and in the APIs themselves.
Changing library services…and some views on digital repositories.
I have just read the Ithaka report on Key Stakeholders in the Digital Transformation in Higher Education 2006, Housewright & Schonfeld, published August 25, 2008. I hadn’t intended to spend Sunday morning reading this but a colleague, Dicky Maidment-Otlet, sent me an email about it and it seemed well worth a read.
It sets out an analysis of the most significant findings from some surveys of academic librarians and academics (faculty) mainly focused on scholarly communication and library services. The US based surveys were carried out in 2000, 2003 and 2006 and the changes are reported. Although I would say there are not many surprises in the report, it does help reveal some trends and issues that libraries and those interested in serving learning and research need to get to grips with. The library functions are categorised as 1) purchaser 2) archive 3) gateway and the perceptions of librarians and academics toward these are set out, it tends to focus a little more on the academics views. Some of the main findings and conclusions are:
* The library is generally becoming less visible and the perceived dependency on the library reduced (humanities academics having more dependency than scientists). The report summarises this as ” although librarians may still be providing significant value to their constituency, the value of the brand is decreasing”;
* Academics see the role of the library as a gateway as less important but librarians still think this is a core function; although this is coloured by users accessing resources from other places (e.g. search engines/remotely) so they may not always realise they are accessing a library resource.
* The report says ” Libraries are providing these high growth fields [information provision to scientists] value in the acquisition of resources - for example licensing costly journal collections - but otherwise have been relatively absent from the workflow…”;
* Increased importance on electronic materials for academics and librarians and readiness to cancel print subscriptions or depose of print materials (although again there is a disciplinary difference between humanities, social scientists and scientists, with the scientists being furthest towards the electronic trend and using resources remotely);
* Librarians seeing value in e-books but academics being far less enthusiastic;
* Visibility of research being more important to scholars than open access publishing;
* The case for shared preservation initiatives for journals being made;
* In order to support cross disciplinary and cross institutional research and learning there is a need for “system-wide approaches” and shared standards and protocols.
Overall the report makes the case for the need to better understand user requirements so that relevant services can be provided, and for the ability to change where appropriate to be taken seriously. It also makes the point that: “Deep consideration of how the library community can best serve scientists and preserve scholarly values in the face of a rapidly changing and increasingly commercial ecosystem is needed, both on a local and the system level.” These all appear to be sensible and helpful conclusions that libraries (and organisations like JISC) need to respond to.
I think the changes implied by the report require work at various levels for example these changes might include any of the following: marketing, a different strategic approach to service delivery for different disciplines, tackling changes by working across a range of stakeholders not just libraries and academics, but management and funders too, providing change at a local level but also being prepared to provide what the report calls “system wide” services.
The issues raised in the report are all relevant to the UK academic library sector (the data being from the US will mean some differences) and the Information Environment programmes and other JISC activity. I think the findings mainly support work we’re doing, examples being the LOCKSS pilot, the e-journal archiving registry, work that will follow on from the JISC/SCONUL Library Management Systems study, further user requirements analysis etc. But defining how best to deliver information services is a real challenge and one we need to put a lot of effort into if we are to provide a relevant infrastructure for research and learning. Sometimes aspects of this are about significant longterm change and not about immediate benefits. We need to take a long view with regards to change and impact, whilst also dealing with the here and now and quick wins. Perhaps the report could’ve dealt with these different aspects a little more (although that probably wasn’t the purpose of the report), and it does cover them, in particular it points out that some disciplinary groups are early adopters.
Since a lot of our programme activity has centred on digital repositories over the past five years I thought I’d end on the digital repository section (pages 24-26 in the report). The following statements from the report do in some respects challenge some of ways in which digital repositories are sometimes viewed. Whilst I think none of this is cut and dried and digital repositories can both support the stewardship of resources and more effective scholarly communication (indeed I think repositories are definitely helping improve access to research) I think these points are worth raising and I’d be interested in people’s reactions to them.
“Although a popular topic of discussion is the possibility of repositories to transform scholarly communications, this objective is not widely held by librarians.”
“Faculty interest in objectives for repositories basically matches those of librarians, being interested principally in using them to organise and preserve local material.”
“…we do not foresee institutional repositories yielding a transformative influence on the business side of journal publishing. Other types of digital repositories, especially those for storing images and special collections, are much more likely to continue to grow in importance at all types of institutions.”
iPres 2008
The 5th International Conference on Preservation of Digital Objects took place at the British Library at the start of this week, as anyone who looked at the Guardian on Tuesday might have noticed.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/sep/30/internet.digitalmusic
It was a confident and very well organised conference and seemed to reflect the fact that the field of Digital Preservation is really beginning to articulate where and how it should position itself in the information management landscape. Even in comparison with December last year (at the Digital Curation conference in Washington D.C.), there seems to have been a shift in tone. Back then, it seemed as if a lot of the speakers were voicing concern that Digital Preservation was not only perceived as difficult by the wider community - but actually was difficult (even for preservation experts) - and there was no guarantee that solutions would be forthcoming! (I acknowledge that others may not have got the same impression from that conference but that’s how it seems to me now as I cast my mind back to it). 10 months later on however, there is much less talk about the general difficulty of it all … and much more focus on how to do it, how to collaborate, and how to sell the benefits more widely.
Admittedly, we were treated to a candid assessment at the end of the conference by a good-humoured but down-to-earth Steve Knight from the National Library of New Zealand, who felt he had to take issue with the determinedly upbeat theme of the conference “Joined Up and Working: Tools and Methods for Digital Preservation”, but nonetheless, an oversubscribed conference including delegates from 33 countries, featuring 66 speakers, in parallel sessions, attracting 6 different sponsors … would seem to indicate that even if things aren’t as ‘joined up and working’ as they might be - then it’s a pretty safe bet that with that level of enthusiasm from so many bright and inquisitive people, it soon will be!
One of the highlights for me was hearing Jose Carlos Ramalho (University of Minho, Portugal) describe the preservation solution that he and his colleagues had developed as part of the RODA and CRiB projects: a service oriented preservation approach to dealing with repository information using the concept of significant properties … ahhh, music to the ears! All up and running and being used by the Portuguese National Archives.
That’s not to say that others haven’t got ingenious functioning preservation solutions, but I was particularly impressed with Jose’s matter of factness and the briskness of his delivery. He made it all sound pretty straightforward - which makes a nice change and confers great credit on him, not only for making difficult things sound do-able … but also for sounding like he enjoys doing it.
Headline message from the conference - Don’t mention the ‘Preservation’ word! (it’s confusing and people worry about it) … it’s all about enabling future ACCESS to spectacular resources.