Mashing thingISBN and library lookup using yahoo pipes courtesy of Mashed libraries 2008
I attended the Mashed libraries event organised by Owen Stephens and UKOLN on Thursday 27th. See Owen’s blog for an overview of the day. I am not a techie but I do love to mess around with software so I was expecting to be an interested observer rather than do any mashing myself. However the event was so good that even a tinkerer like me was able to put something useful together as a result.Tony Hirst demonstrated how to use Yahoo Pipes to do a number of useful things. One of the things Tony showed was how to use LibraryThing’s ThingISBN api to look up alternative editions of a book using the ISBN. Tony goes into detail about this pipe on his blog.I am a regular user of my local public library but the opac search experience is truly horrible; clunky, slow and restrictive. The fastest and most reliable way to search is by ISBN. However the problem with ISBN searching is that the opac covers 9 boroughs so there are bound to be alternative versions of most books and the opac is not clever enough to be able to detect this so I have to augment ISBN searches with painful title or author searches. ThereforeTony’s pipe offered a possible solution to my problem.Tony’s pipe was designed to link the results for all the alternative ISBNs to Amazon so it was simple to tweak it to display links to my local library instead. My version of Tony’s pipe can be seen on my yahoo pipes page.However it would be a bit of a pain to have to go to yahoo pipes every time I wanted to look up alternative ISBNs for a book so I tried to think of ways to make it more convenient. My first instinct was to try and make a netvibes widget that I could use to search for alternative ISBNs. However making a widget that accepted variable input in the ISBN field proved beyond me. Just as I was about to give up I thought of a different way.I already use Jon Udell’s library lookup bookmarklet to scrape ISBNs from Amazon pages and search for them in my local library catalogue. Perhaps it was possible to use this with the pipe?It was not only possible but incredibly simple. You can select the pipe to output alternative ISBNs in an RSS feed. When you do this, you get the following url: http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=6c6dc73754946fa278bbc1f76cddc469&_render=rss&isbn=0099469693All I had to do was plug this url (minus the isbn number at the end) into the library lookup bookmarklet generator, choose Innovative from the vendor list, click the build button and drag the result to your browser toolbar. Now I have a bookmarklet that can scrape an ISBN from an Amazon record and look up all alternative versions of the book on my local library opac.It is not perfect, it is ugly and it does not distinguish between ISBNs for books that the library holds and those that it does not. However, it is something that I will use on an almost daily basis and I am unreasonably pleased with myself. Thanks Tony, Owen and Mashed Libraries.I find events like Mashed libraries incredibly useful and I always come away buzzing with ideas. JISC will be putting on an event for developers early next year. Look out for more news on this on the event blog at http://dev8d.jiscinvolve.org***Update***Thanks to Owen’s prompting on Twitter, I have now modified the pipe so that it only displays links to editions of the book that the library holds. This uses the content of the h1 tags on the opac pages to judge whether a book is held or a null result is returned and then filters out the null results. It is a rather inelegant solution and is very specific to the opac of my local public library but I imagine could be generalised if you were willing to mess about with it.
OER: Metadata Now
At the JISCCETIS08 conference session on Open Educational Content/Resources (OEC/OER), we had a really useful discussion about what “minimal tagging” might mean in terms of OEC today. It was part of my presentation on technical infrastructure for the JISC/HEA OEC Programme. By infrastructure, I think I mean Paul Walk’s soft definition of infrastructure
The discussion made me reflect on all the assumptions that surrounds the term “metadata”, and the history that got us to where we are now, primarily around digital learning materials.
For the purposes of description, let’s abstract workflows down to two: creation to curation (authors), and discovery to delivery (finders). Metadata standardisation has always been about supporting the flow of content between people and systems, both for C2C and D2D. We’ve always known that if information about content is useful (and used) we should expect to find it somewhere in the workflow already. The vision has never been for users to have to fill in forms: that is just a step on the way to embedded interoperability, “metadata under the bonnet”.
One of the use cases which drove the adoption of schemas such as UK LOM was the assumption of complex objects in expert systems (VLEs) being transferred to other expert systems, with even search/browse services offering complex presentation options, displaying information on “semantic density” for the finders delectation. I think I would argue that now that is only a niche use case as far as open educational resources are concerned.
So when we’re talking about a “discovery to delivery infrastructure” for OEC, from granular assets such as word documents, slide presentations, through to packaged learning objects (with capital Ls and Os!), to online courseware, perhaps the place to start is: what information is already used in creation to curation tools/systems/platforms that could usefully flow through to help find and use content. This has always been the aim of standardised metadata for interoperability: embedding it into the system and making it invisible to the user.
Now there are so many C2C tools to consider, and even more D2D options, that its not effective to concentrate on any particular suite of tools. Thats why so many developers are interested in APIs, widgets and “eduglue” to stitch together what people are using, in an almost infinite combination.
And yet there’s also a renewed interest in community metadata particular for describing the contents of the content: tagging , folksonomies, linking resources together in the web2.0 world. Metadata may not be cool, but “tags” can be, and the network effect of community tagging is enabling navigation between content. As many people have commented, bottom-up or top-down, its still metadata. We don’t have to call it that, but we do count it as part of the infrastructure.
And thats where we always hoped to get to, isn’t it? We need to keep reviewing our primary use cases so that development effort is directed at the most useful interactions between tools/systems/platforms.
It goes without saying that there are huge parallels with thinking in other areas: resource discovery, open access repositories … but whilst we should aim for a common language, we still need to champion the use cases that are central to each endeavour. For OEC, I recommend joining the CETIS Educational Content SIG.
Institutional and Subject Repositories
This question comes up reasonably often: what is / should be the relation between institutional and subject OA repositories? There are some surprisingly strong views on this question. A JISC report just completed takes a very pragmatic line, simply asking where are the areas of common interest and where can the two types of repository help each other? The SIRIS report identifies a range of ‘drivers’ and ‘enablers’ that could form a shared agenda for collaborative work between institutional and subject repositories. Being a JISC report, the focus is on the UK, but it’s unlikely the issues are very different elsewhere.
“… to engage or not engage…” the choice for libraries.
A couple of weeks ago I attended the RLUK conference, their first conference and one that everyone there seemed to enjoy. Unfortunately I only made it for the last day for a slot where a panel of funders, policy bodies and service providers, including JISC, said a few words about priorities and partnership with others.
I did get to hear Lynne Brindley speak. She covered a lot of ground and most of what she said chimed with JISC priorities; albeit coming from a different set of organisational boundaries. Anyway I thought I’d just jot down what Lynne said as I think the issues she raised are well worth recounting here. I might’ve misinterpreted some things, especially since it was a while ago now but on the whole I think I’ve captured the main points.
In general she was referring to the fact that in the complex digital environment offering services that remain relevant and take advantage of what Lynne called “mass creativity” can be difficult. But she said the choice for libraries is “ to engage or not engage”. Unsurprisingly the message was to engage.
A summary of issues she raised:
• Developing digital information services does incur a cost. A lot of innovative projects have been developed but we have not yet fully tackled sustainability.
• Libraries should support innovative scholarship. We’re now in a complex world where the web is a platform of “mass creativity” but offers real opportunities for innovative scholarship. She referred to some examples where digitisation and making digital resources available have led to new knowledge.
• Libraries need to move well beyond the critical role they play in licensing and recognise that things like document supply are not as relevant as they once were.
• “life beyond the document” how should libraries respond to this?
• The research data question and the skills gap – we have data librarians but not enough of them; traditionally libraries are more orientated towards humanities.
• Masses of information of different types – blogs, email etc are all important to scholarship they are the ephemeral information of today; what are we doing about versions of works or notes and annotations? Think of authorship and how notes are kept of authors that enhance research.
• Many people use information in different ways, skim reading etc, therefore should delivery be different, does it matter that people use information differently? Information literacy does that matter? Should libraries be helping to equip people with the skills to make the right judgments?
• The researchers of the future (and quite a few researching now) come from the born digital age and will use information differently, so what is information literacy?
• Web archiving: the web is a huge resource that must be accessible into the future for research; the legal issues are a problem but hopefully legal deposit will make a difference.
• The value of the library can sometimes be summarised as: authenticity, authority and long-term use – what about authority v amateur?
• Digital preservation is very important – this has been seen as important at policy and government levels but now it is getting into the public conscience - this is when libraries start to have real success with these issues. Just tell someone that all those photos will not be accessible and they can relate to it.
• She ended on intellectual property (IP) and referred to the EU Green Paper on Copyright and how IP deserved attention and organisations, such as academic libraries, needed to take action so any risk of locking information down further was mitigated. She emphasised that without reasonable copyright exceptions there is a risk to democratic society.
A lot of these issues are being addressed by libraries and organisations like the British Library and JISC, for example we’re responding to the EU Green Paper on Copyright in the Knowledge Economy. But despite that all of the issues require further debate and change.
JISC is about to launch a collaborative initiative with SCONUL, RLUK, The British Library and RIN that builds on our Libraries of the Future campaign and that will seek to further understand and shape the position of libraries into the future. Watch this space…it should be announced shortly.
Is consistent metadata worthwhile?
At one end of the spectrum there are standards such as SWAP (Scholarly Works -DC- Application Profile) and CERIF. At the other end of the spectrum we have unstructured tags and full-text indexing. A new JISC report looks at this question from the point of view of resource discovery (there are many others, of course). The executive summary notes that, in order to express consistent collection policies, repositories need to have those policies clear, and that human-crafted, structured metadata is only worthwhile in specific, fairly well-defined circumstances (eg, non-text items). The case for automatic metadata creation is strong. In many cases, a minimum set of metadata might be enough to start with: title, creator, link to object and rights statement. As I say, there are other demands on metadata than simple resource discovery, but for that, the business case for human-crafted metadata is often weak. This headline is perhaps not news, but the more detailed recommendations on a way forward give us a practical agenda to work with.
Grant Funding Opportunities
An update on funding opportunities …
This month, November 2008, we will be releasing a Call for projects for grant funding. Outline details are on the Grant Funding Roadmap. UK FE/HE institutions are eligible to bid, with some types of projects restricted to HEFCE- and HEFCW- funded institutions, due to funding streams.
We’re finalising the Call at the moment, but you won’t go far wrong if you start thinking about what you want to do in:
- implementing automated metadata and textmining
- starting up repositories for research data, research papers, learning materials
- networking and enhancing repositories
- preservation in relation to repositories
- short technical projects to improve repository services
- connections between services to support particular disciplines
Bidders will have until January to prepare proposals, and succesful projects will be expected to start by 1st April 2009.
For those of you most interested in supporting research, please note there will also be a Call for projects related to Virtual Research Environments.
If learning and teaching resources are of particular interest, in December there will also be a Call for the forthcoming HEA/JISC Open Educational Content programme.
Date for your diary: Monday 15th December will be a Briefing Day for anyone who would like to come and hear about the funding opportunities related to the Information Environment and Virtual Research Environment Calls. It will be in Central London, probably 10-4. Details will be released soon.
If you’re not based in UK FE/HE, you may be interested in the Funding Roadmap for Invitations to Tender. These are open to anyone, so if you think you have expertise relevant to the sort of issues reported on this blog, then tenders are very welcome.
We will announce the Call on this blog as soon as it is released.
Sharing images
How can we share images more effectively for use in teaching and learning? The CLiC report (”Community-Led Image Collections) looked at this question a couple of years ago and, more recently JISC and the Higher Education Academy co-funded some case studies building on that report. The results are perhaps unsurprising, but worth bearing in mind for future work. In short, we need to work both with the gravitational centres on the web (eg Flickr) and institutional facilities, and ask how these best support individuals and academic communities, we need to find ways of alleviating copyright worries without ignoring the issue; we need to come up with solutions that will work for small-scale community collections with little technical support; and we need to do all this bearing in mind that open sharing of images may not always have a business case. Put like this, the findings are perhaps a little anodyne, but the fuller summary and full reports show how these questions are worked through in visual arts, engineering, archaeology and geosciences.
Web tools for programme management
We recently had an internal JISC meeting where we discussed what web tools we use to help us with programme management. Lawrie Phipps and I prepared a list of the tools that we use or plan to use to help manage ourselves and our programmes. I thought it might be worth posting the list here. I’d be interested to hear of any tools that people are using that are not on this list. Apologies for the length:
Community building
Twitter http://twitter.com/ – won’t suit everyone but is very good for little snippets, observations and off the cuff chats that the web has not really replicated until now. Could be used to build communities and for lightweight communication between projects. A useful feature is the use of hash (#) tags, placing the # at the beginning of an event or project tag to aggregate comments.
Blogs – persuading projects to blog regularly is great for the programme manager, for a community of projects and for anyone interested in the project. Blogging is not natural to everyone so perhaps in some cases, blogging can be used to replace project reporting?
A Project Manager’s reflection on the issue of keeping a blog:
So is it worth it? Speaking personally and (for once) completely frankly, I’ve been quite enjoying writing, for several reasons. First, it has allowed me to do a bit of self-indulgent vanity publishing, something for which I criticise other bloggers but, hey, I’m a hypocrite! Second, the requirement to be reflective has made me think about various aspects of the project, which is no bad thing. Third, as it has turned out, I haven’t had to trouble my conscience by using buckets of whitewash to tell a positive story; the project really has been going pretty well.
Ning https://www.ning.com/ – easily build your own social network, a good place for people to get to know each other online, communities can be closed or open and communication can be public or private. Ning is also a useful tool to run before a workshop for participants to start thinking, and during the workshop for getting delegates to write up discussions/findings, this is especially useful in, for example, plenary sessions where sometimes some delegates may have a tendency to dominate.
Facebook http://www.facebook.com/ – I am not your friend, I don’t want to be poked, I can not be brought and sold as a pet, I am neither a werewolf hunter nor a vampire slayer, I don’t want a virtual pizza, if I hadn’t contacted you just after I left school what makes I think to talk to you 20 years later? FaceBook? Just say no!
That being said, some project staff are using facebook to some effect, but we need to be aware of issues such as IPR.
Jiscmail http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/ – tried and trusted method of community building. Even with the plethora of web 2.0 tools available to projects, the most reliable way of reaching most of our academic community is through e-mail, the JISC Mail lists are simple and effective.
Current awareness
Delicious http://delicious.com/ – the most popular social bookmarking tool. A little limited in some ways and with an unattractive interface but lots of people use it and persuading projects to share bookmarks is a very useful thing to do as it highlights overlaps of interest and promotes serendipitous discovery of information. An important element when using it to share is to encourage the use of ‘notes’ when bookmarking.
Diigo http://www.diigo.com/ – a newer social bookmarking tool, allows you to be more specific about which part of a webpage is bookmarked, it also allows annotation of webpages. It supports creation of groups and preparation of web slideshows. However, not as many people use it already so barrier to participation may be higher.
Twine http://www.twine.com/ – a new social bookmarking tool, which permits bookmarking of any document and analyses bookmarks for common people, places and organizations. Also allows for creation of private groups.
RSS readers (google reader, netvibes etc) http://lifehacker.com/390619/best-rss-newsreaders – like twitter, won’t suit everyone’s habits but if you can find a reader that suits you and can get into the habit of building rss feeds into daily routine then it is a fantastic way to keep up to date with a potentially massive amount of information
Dipity http://www.dipity.com/ - a simple timeline builder. Could be useful in giving projects or a more general community an idea of the steps that led to now and a rough outline of programme timescales.
Crowdsourcing
Ideascale http://www.ideascale.com/ - a tool to source ideas from the community and to have ideas voted for and commented on. Worked very well for the IE team to solicit discussion and ideas from the repository community (http://jiscrepository.ideascale.com/) but plenty to be aware of here, including waning of user interest and expectations attached to voting. Also Dialogr http://www.dialogr.com/
Mechanical turk https://www.mturk.com/mturk/welcome- take advantage of a community that are willing to work for you on small tasks for micropayments. Here is a great description of a project that used mechanical turk http://waxy.org/2008/09/girl_turk/
Topcoder http://www.topcoder.com/ - tap into a large community of developers. The IE team are talking to topcoder about using their services for the developer community strand of the new programme.
mysociety.org http://www.mysociety.org/ - not really crowdsourcing but they build websites that utilise or support democracy and have worked for the government, bbc and google. Perhaps they could offer JISC something?
Collaborating
Google docs https://docs.google.com – can be used for collaboration on documents in a team or in the community.
Confluence https://wiki.jisc.ac.uk/dashboard.action - wiki for collaboration and communication
Communicating
Skype http://www.skype.com/intl/en-gb/ - instant messaging, internet phone and conferencing tool
Jing http://www.jingproject.com/ - a screencasting tool. Could be used for projects to communicate developments to the community.
Flickr http://www.flickr.com/ - picture sharing
Youtube http://www.youtube.com/ - video sharing
BlipTV http://blip.tv/ – video sharing
Flowgram http://www.flowgram.com/ - a way to create tours through various websites and content (an alternative to powerpoint or an introduction to a certain area)
Jiscmail – essential for large and active communities
Annotate http://a.nnotate.com/ - provide annotated documents e.g. templates
Slideshare http://www.slideshare.net/ - great for sharing slideshows, provides nice widgets and embeddable flash players, not so great at being searched by google.
Bringing it all together
There is little point giving projects 6 different tools without some way of bringing them all together. Here are some suggestions for amalgamating content.
Netvibes http://www.netvibes.com, iGoogle http://www.google.com/ig, Pageflakes http://www.pageflakes.com/ – can amalgamate content with flexible widget based approach. If it has an rss feed it can be displayed on these pages. However it is much more flexible than just rss (see repository widget work http://www.netvibes.com/rwidgets#General, or the exemplary widgets produced by tfl http://www.tfl.gov.uk/widgets/). I have put together an example page to show some of the things it can do. http://www.netvibes.com/amcgregor#Prog_management, obviously this page is shareable so can be used by projects as well as programme managers.
Ning https://www.ning.com/ – widgets using content from other tools can be embedded in ning. This is likely to be more difficult but more flexible than the netvibes style approach.
Getting things done
Tools for managing personal information or workflow:
Zotero http://www.zotero.org/ - a free bibliographic management tool. Only suitable for personal use at the moment but social features coming soon.
Google calendar https://www.google.com/calendar/ - a calendar application which is extremely easy to use and displays calendars of other users very nicely.
Remember the milk http://www.rememberthemilk.com/ – a to do list application that can be shared and can be used in a number of different applications (twitter, google calendar, blackberries and mobile phones).
Evernote http://evernote.com/ - a note taking application, includes ability to clip content from any application. Fully searchable. Can be easily used across computers and on mobile devices.
Outlook - task list, calendar all in one place and lots of people use it. Some useful plugins such as xobni http://www.xobni.com/ which takes advantage of the hidden social network in your inbox.
RSS readers - a way to manage information overload (see above)
Location and travel
Dopplr - http://www.dopplr.com/ - a social network for regular business travelers.
Have fire eagle http://fireeagle.yahoo.net/ and related geo data tools and social networks got anything useful to offer us?
More complicated stuff
Yahoo pipes http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/ – loads of cool tools including a way to set up persistent searches across a range of resources http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=1b71cfefcc9933e084970aef476518ab (a nice explanation of how to set up a persistent google search taking advantage of the new rss feature: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/readwriteweb/~3/8HqjuPpekeY/how_to_use_the_new_google_web_feeds.php ) and to amalgamate whole lists of blogs into one rss feed http://infteam.jiscinvolve.org/2008/10/17/rsp-blog-directory-and-yahoo-pipes/.
Roll your own newsroom http://radar.oreilly.com/2008/10/rolling-your-own-newsroom.html – a description of how an rss reader can be used to create a webpage of information relevant to colleagues. Could be used within JISC or within project community.
Notes
Tagging. It is important to think about tags at the start of programmes and projects so that searching across a range of applications is simple and effective.
It is very unlikely that simply advising projects to use a tool will work, the programme manager will need to devote some energy to promotion and provision of quality content to ensure that the resources are useful to projects. The best way to promote the use of a tool is to effectively use the tool.