New arrivals on the JISC IE Team
The JISC IE team is delighted to welcome some new faces to its ranks. Ben Wynne has come to JISC after most recently being the Deputy Librarian at the University of the West of England and brings considerable experience to his new role as Programme Manager focusing on the Digital Libraries area. His first task at JISC will be to investigate how libraries should be responding to a Web 2.0 world and he will be following up the recommendations of the JISC and SCONUL commissioned study of the Library Management Systems and Electronic Resource Management System landscape (April 2008) http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/resourcediscovery/libraryMS
In addition to this, Ben will also begin by looking at issues relating to Trust and Provenance of digital information.
The other new arrival on the team is David Flanders, well known to many in the JISC community as the driving force behind the much talked-about and highly-praised recent event, Developer Happiness Days. http://www.jisc.ac.uk/events/2009/02/devohappyday.aspx
David was the recipient of JISC funding in his previous role at Birkbeck College, working on the SOURCE project and also playing a principal role in the ‘Wisdom of CRIG’ initiative which provided expert support on technical and other matters to the emerging base of UK respositories. http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/digitalrepositories2007/wocrig.aspx
David will be able to bring very practical knowledge and expertise to his role as Programme Manager (Digital Libraries), not only with hands-on experience of technical development, but also using his experience of working within the constraints of the JISC funding framework to help us examine our processes and procedures and ensure they continue to offer the wider community maximum benefit and value for money.
Not only is the IE team expanding but other new faces are arriving at JISC as well. Whilst formally belonging to the e-Research team, it seems very likely that the work that Simon Hodson will be doing will have a great deal of overlap with the Repositories and Preservation area as he has been given responsibility for a new programme that JISC will formally announce in the near future around the whole area of ‘research data’. Simon joins us from the University of Hull and has also been on the receiving end of JISC funding, working as part of the VRE programme.
We are delighted to welcome all of them and anticipate taking great advantage of their respective expertise in a number of areas to scope and progress new and exciting areas of work.
Happy developers
As mentioned before on this blog, last week we ran a large event aimed at software developers in HE. Slightly tempting fate, the event was called developer happiness days, but judging by the mood of the event, the feedback and by the happiness meter that one of the delegates cooked up, it lived up to its name.
The event was organised and driven forward with immense enthusiasm by David Flanders, one of two new recruits to the JISC Information Environment team (look out for a future blog post for further news on that). I was fortunate enough to be able to help David with the event and also attended for 4 of the 5 days. The event was a hive of activity, much of which was captured on either Twitter or the event blog. I wanted to highlight some of the really interesting things that have emerged from the event so far:
There were a number of interesting talks given at the event, perhaps most relevant to this blog were:
- An introduction to agile development methodology by Graham Klyne
- A talk on the problems with PDF by Peter Sefton (video)
- A discussion on collective intelligence led by Tony Hirst
The industrious delegates also knocked up some interesting tools during the event:
- The happiness meter mentioned above was developed by Sam Easterby-Smith to use Twitter to measure the happiness of those at the event. It will be able to be reused for other events. Ben O’Steen (who had a large role in designing the event) has a really useful summary of the use of Twitter at the event on his blog.
- Chris Gutteridge was particularly industrious, producing:
- A url shortening service for people giving demonstrations and presentations
- A JSON output for EPrints
- A new way to deal with Microsoft Office documents for EPrints, as described on Les Carr’s blog
These are just some highlights of a great event and the most interesting outputs may be yet to come. The main focus of the event was a competition called the developer decathlon where delegates were asked to show us the future of academic software. There was a strong focus on the user in the competition as 10 users were brought in to come and talk to the delegates about their software issues. We ran a dragon’s den to give feedback on the delegate’s ideas and the dragons were all very impressed with the ideas of the 11 teams who ventured into their den.
The winner of this competition will be announced in a month’s time and this will coincide with a more thorough report on what was a very rich event. In the meantime, the event blog has lots of useful content and is worth exploring.
Repository Software Event
The JISC Repository Support Project is putting on a Repository Software Day on 19th March 2009 in Manchester. The event looks really interesting. There are open source and commercial repository software providers attending and the programme is a good mix of case studies, surgeries and discussion sessions. More details can be found on the events page of the RSP site.
From the event announcement:
The aim of the day is through exhibition and demonstration, to introduce Repository Managers and Technical Support Officers to a range of existing and developing Repository software and technology; and to allow the chance for discussion and solution discovery between delegates and software providers through exhibition, case studies, surgeries and user groups.Programme highlights include:
- Repository Software Exhibition
- Repository Software Case Studies
- Repository Software User Groups
- Repository Software Surgeries