Guide to using some web 2.0 services in JISC projects - part 2 of 3
This post is part 2 of a series of 3 posts about making use of web 2.0 services to help manage JISC projects.
Part 1 discusses using tags for projects, twitter and blogs.
This part of the series covers: social bookmarking, aggregation and note-taking.
Social bookmarking – Delicious
Delicious or a similar social bookmarking site is an online store of URL bookmarks that can be shared by many people. It can be used to aggregate content that is of interest to project staff. Delicious allows you to keep URLs, to group them together, and to add a description. When you add a new link to Delicious, tag it with your project’s tag so that other people in your project can find the link. They can also add bookmarks themselves, and hence a collective store of bookmarks is built up by using the tag.
We will be bookmarking things that we think are useful to projects in the Information Environment programme 2009-11 using the tag inf11. There is a page for inf11 bookmarksand there is also an RSS feed for this page that can be used in aggregation pages and feed readers.
Delicious FAQs
Q: How do we see what tags are available to follow within Delicious?
A: This isn’t necessarily the best way to do things as there is an enormous amount of content on delicious, but you can browse by tags. You could also see the tags people you know on delicious are using. Mine can be seen on my delicious tags page.
Other sites
Some other sites that can be useful for projects once you have a project tag to aggregate the content are:
- Flickr for photos that may be taken of the project (this could be of whiteboards or brainstorming sessions or presentations as well as records of events etc)
- Youtube or Vimeo videos are a great way to explain the project and its aims and objectives or to show off something you have developed.
Aggregation – RSS feeds & readers
There are many information sources on the web. How can you easily keep updated with them all; do you have to studiously visit each one on a regular basis? Well yes, that would work; but an alternative is to use an aggregator tool which pulls the latest content from each source that you’re interested in, and organises it in one place for you to peruse.
The most commonly used aggregator technology is called RSS (the acronym means Really Simple Syndication). Many websites now publish their updates as “RSS feeds”. The easiest way to use these updates is to use an RSS aggregator website or tool that collects the content from the various feeds, collates it, and presents it to you as a webpage that you access using your web browser or as a piece of software on your desktop.
Netvibes is an example of an aggregation webpage. Netvibes also offers an option to make the a page of content that you have created available as a public page. This could be useful for providing people with information about your project.
An example is the page we put together for an event called dev8D. There is also a page for the inf11 programme where you can see the delicious feed and the twitter feed for inf11 on the page. There is a separate page that aggregates the inf11 blogs.
iGoogle is a good alternative to Netvibes.
There are lots of tools to help manage RSS feeds and you may find that a feed reader tool is better than an aggregation web page. Google reader is a popular example of a feed reader and lots of email clients also include a feed reader function.
RSS FAQs
Q: How can you tell if an information source will work with an RSS feed?
A: Look for the RSS icon or a link saying feed.
Q: How do I add an information source to my RSS aggregator?
A: This varies by the different types of feed reader, but if you copy the URL for the RSS page then it should be straightforward to add it into your reader – most RSS readers have a button with a name such as “Add a subscription” where you can specify the URL for the RSS feed.
Note taking
Evernote is a fantastic application for note taking, storing photos, web clippings, screenshots and email clippings. I use it as a memory backup. An interesting recent development with Evernote is the ability to share notebooks with a group of people and this could be useful for a project knowledgebase.
Evernote can be used via a desktop application, a mobile application and a web interface.You can also share evernote notebooks with people via the web. This has the advantage of enabling people to monitor the notebook using RSS. This could be used to share a notebook across a project.
Evernote FAQs
Q: Is Evernote free?
A: Yes but there is a premium subscription model with extra storage and added features.
Part 3 of this guide will cover skype, publicising contact details and further information
‘Article level’ usage statistics from publishers and repositories
Usage statistics for electronic journals are increasingly standardised and usable thanks to the collaborative efforts of publishers, other information providers and librarians in developing and implementing the COUNTER codes of practice.
But what do you do if you need usage statistics for individual articles by a particular author published across different journals and also held across different institutional or subject repositories? This question is increasingly relevant when considering how to measure the ‘impact’ of research, for example.
The PIRUS (Publisher and Institutional Repository Usage Statistics ) project explored how usage statistics for individual articles could be collected from repositories and publishers and then combined to produce consolidated usage reports. PIRUS proposed a number of ways in which this could be done. A report was published in January 2009.
Now this work is to continue with a follow-on project - PIRUS2 - which has the following main objectives. To:
• Develop a suite of free, open source programmes to support the generation and sharing of COUNTER compliant usage data and statistics that can be extended to cover any and all individual items in institutional and subject repositories
• Develop a prototype article level publisher/repository statistics service
• Define a core set of standard useful statistical reports that repositories could/should produce for internal and external consumption
The project formally starts on 1st October 2009 and finishes as the end of 2010.
There are a number of project partners, the main ones being: MIMAS, Cranfield University (Library & Information Services), COUNTER, CrossRef and Oxford University Press.
This post is just to alert you to the existence of the project. More information about the project will be made available on the JISC Web site in due course.
US Google Book Settlement – What are your views?
We have set up a Write to Reply site to gather views from the community on the Google book settlement and its implications for UK Higher and Further Education.
From the JISC site: The US Google Book Settlement represents a major watershed in the digitisation and access to millions of books, including in copyright publications and therefore the rediscovery of a huge proportion of the world’s knowledge. Effectively it enables democratisation of access to information by making books available digitally to new audiences supported by fully searchable tools. It also provides a solution for out-of-print works. The settlement is supported by a balanced revenue share model with authors and other rights holders.
However, the settlement and its potential ramifications have sparked not only global support, but also controversy and opposition. Recently, the US Justice Department has urged the US New Court to reject the settlement because of the anti-trust and copyright issues it raises – not least because it would give Google the sole authority for books whose copyright holder could not be found (‘orphan works’) and provide inadequate protection to foreign rights holders.
Rachel Bruce, programme director at JISC said: “We are interested in gathering views from colleges and universities in the UK in order to help inform JISC’s approach to these issues, both in relation to the Google Book Settlement itself and more broadly. We can assume, even if the current US Google Book Settlement is not accepted by the Court on 7 October 2009*, that we will see subsequent settlements that affect UK rights holders and have an impact on access to information for education and research.”
“This is your chance to share your views about the Google Book Settlement and your response will also help JISC understand any potential implications associated with any possible future European settlement. We are interested to not only hear about your opinions leading up to the hearing but also what you think about the verdict.”
To share your views please respond via the Write to Reply website by 26th October 2009.http://writetoreply.org/googlebooks/
Thanks to Joss Winn and the JISCPress project for setting this consultation up for us.
* This date may be subject to change due to a recent appeal to delay from Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers
Guide to using some web 2.0 services in JISC projects - part 1 of 3
At the recent start up meeting for projects in the JISC Information Environment Programme 2009-11 some people suggested that it might be useful to produce a guide to using web 2.0 services in JISC projects.
With the help of Brian Brooks of the Clarion project, I have written the guide. It focuses on using tags to aggregate content about and related to the projects, to communicate about the project and to monitor any discussions related to the project.
The guide is quite long and likely to only have a relatively short shelf life so we have decided to serialise the guide on this blog and deposit the complete document in the ie repository.
Here is part 1 - setting up tags, blogs and twitter
Giving your project an identity – setting up a Tag
Perhaps the first thing to consider if you want to take advantage of the various web 2.0 services out there is to give your project a short catchy identifier – a “tag”. A tag is a label that is used to aggregate the content that gets stored and created on these services. If you consistently use the same tag in blogs, Twitter, bookmarks, etc, then it becomes an easy way for people to search for content across many systems.
Tags are usually an acronym or are similar to the project’s name. They should ideally be short and unique. They should not be a common word or name - you want the tag to stand out if someone searches for it in a search engine such as Google. When you’re deciding on a tag, it is worth doing a few Google searches with possible tags to see if they are being used by anybody else before you start to use them.
Example tags: We are using the tag “inf11” for the Information Environment Programme 2009-11. We use inf11 in all the web 2 tools that we use. You can type “inf11” into Google or other web tools and it will show content created under our programme. Another tag we use is “jiscri”, which we use for the rapid innovation strand of projects within this programme. We may use these tags individually or in conjunction depending on the audience we want to reach.
Tags FAQs:
Q: Is there a particular syntax for tags?
A: Use numbers and letters but no punctuation marks (hyphens, commas, spaces etc.)
Q: Do you recommend any tags for me to follow?
A: Yes we are using the tag inf11for the Information Environment Programmer 2009-2011 and jiscri for the JISC Rapid Innovation strand of projects. We are using this tag in a variety of different web 2 sites and the instructions below describe how to follow these tags in the various services. We recommend you follow your own project tag to see if anyone else is talking about your project.
Q: How can I find out what tags people are using?
A: There is no easy way to do this at present but UKOLN are developing a prototype in this area.
Blogs
Blogs are a great way to communicate about project developments or interesting issues, debates and problems that arise during the course of the project. This not only helps with project dissemination but acts as a project journal which makes the process of preparing formal reports about the project much simpler as deliverables and issues have already been written about and can be copied into the formal report.
Tagging is very useful on blogs as it allows aggregation across individual blogs via sites like Technorati and also enables subject specific RSS feeds from within a blog. So, for example, it would be easy to see all the blog posts from a project on the topic of software development.
If you do blog as a project then it is important to engage in the blogosphere and read other people’s blogs in relevant areas, link to them from your blog and comment on other’s posts. This helps make new contacts and encourages people to look at and comment on your blog.
Of course there are an awful lot of blogs and keeping up with them can be hard which is why it is essential to investigate feed readers and aggregation pages (see part 2 of this series) until you find the one that suits you. A good reader or aggregation page can be your subject-specific newspaper and can be an invaluable resource.
Blogs FAQs:
Q: How should I ensure that I keep up with relevant blogs?
A: Two main methods. First is to simply remember to regularly look at the blog’s website. Second is to use an aggregator (see part 2 of this series) to grab updates from all the blogs you’re following, and then read from the one location.
Q: Which are the blog hosting sites that are commonly used by JISC projects?
A: JISC runs a service called jiscinvolve which is a blog hosting platform. It is very easy to set up blogs on jiscinvolve. Simply go to jiscinvolve and follow the instructions. Of course there are plenty of other hosting options. One example is wordpress – it’s free and open-source. You can set up a site for your project, and you’ll get a URL such as myprojecttag.wordpress.com
Q: Can you give some examples of good project blogs?
A: You can see the aggregation of project blogs and other recommended blogs at the inf11 netvibes page
Twitter is a networking communications tool for short messages, essentially it is like text messaging on your mobile but communicating to many people instead of one or a few. It is free to use. The messages – “Tweets” – are visible to anybody, but can also be directed to specific people. Twitter is perhaps the most divisive of web 2.0 sites, you will find plenty of people who love it and plenty who hate it. However there are some very useful aspects of it that can be turned to a project’s advantage.
It can be used for communication and networking with your programme manager, other projects and other people working in similar areas. Twitter is only useful if you find a decent amount of relevant and interesting people to follow. Your programme manager will be able to suggest relevant people to follow and looking at who other people follow is also a good way of identifying useful people.
It can be a good dissemination channel for short, frequent bursts of information that are relevant to the area you are working in or that you have learned and want to share or simply something that you want to publicise.Twitter has a few conventions which are opaque to the first time user.
- You can address other people on twitter by prefacing their username with an @ symbol e.g. @andymcg. This sends the tweet to the named recipient, but be aware that it still shows up in your list of tweets
- You can add a tag to a message by putting a # symbol in front of a tag e.g. #inf11. The tag can be typed at any point of the message. Tags are very important in twitter as they allow you to see all the people talking about a certain topic even if you don’t follow them.
- You can publicise someone else’s tweet (re-tweet) by copying it and putting RT and the person’s twitter ID before the copied message.
We use twitter as a monitoring tool as well, so we have searches set up for mentions of jisc and use of relevant hashtags such as #inf11 and #jiscri. These searches are done using search twitter and the RSS feed of the search is grabbed and put in an aggregator such as netvibes (see part 2 of this series). This could also be done for project tags or for searches relevant to the project. Projects may be interested in monitoring the programme hashtags to see what the programme or other projects are up to.
This kind of tag monitoring is particularly useful at events where twitter becomes a back channel for conversations, questions and networking.
One important thing to be aware of is that Twitter does not let you search back for more than a couple of weeks of messages. Therefore if you want to keep an archive of all tweets using a certain tag then it is advisable to use a service such as Twapper Keeper to set up an archive for a particular tag. See the jiscri archive for an example
Twitter FAQs:
Q: Can you recommend a tool for managing and reading Twitter?
A: Twitter can be monitored using a normal web browser. Other alternatives include:
- Tweetdeck and Seesmic are popular options
- An aggregator page like netvibes or igoogle can also be used (see part 2 of this series for more on these).
Q: How do you use #tags in Twitter?
A: For example, the following message is tagged with “#jisc” and “#inf11”:
- This is a tweet containing tags #jisc #inf11
Q: I’ve seen webpages used at conferences to display tweets, what are they?
A: These include:
- Twitterfall – e.g. http://www.twitterfall.com/#inf11 will follow #inf11 tweets
- VisibleTweets – e.g. http://visibletweets.com/#query=#jiscri follows #jiscri
- These do not allow you to moderate the twitter stream so beware of spam. There is software that allows you to moderate the stream, these tend to be commercial software such as tweetriver but a site called twubs is free while it is in beta.
Q: Can I search Twitter?
A: Yes, at http://search.twitter.com
Q: How can I see what #tags are available?
A: Try for example:
- Hashtags - Displays current tags & allows searching
- WTHashtag - A list of what each #tag means
- Look out for an upcoming service from UKOLN.
Q: Can you recommend a site to learn more about Twitter?
A: Try for example:
Part 2 of this series will cover: social bookmarking, aggregation and note-taking
Part 3 of this series will cover: skype, publicising contact details and further information
Federated Access Management for repositories?
It can seem to go somewhat against the spirit of repositories, to be concerned with managing (ie controlling) access to them. Surely repositories are for sharing material? Well, yes, often. But there are reasons why repositories need to work with the developing access management federation in the UK, for example to enable depositors to benefit from single sign-on in their institutions. Some of these have been addressed by the Federated Access to Repositories project.
There are other scenarios, though, and we (well, actually Mark Hedges at the Centre for eResearch at King’s College) got together some repository and FAM experts and distilled these into a report with some proposed actions. JISC will be considering these actions; any feedback you might have would be welcome. The report’s here:
http://ie-repository.jisc.ac.uk/401/
Neil
Data in Nature
Finally got around to looking at the article on data that appeared on the Nature website last week.
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v461/n7261/full/461145a.html
Very nice to see JISC mentioned so positively in the editorial. They mention the Digital Curation Centre by name which is obviously one of the key pieces of support and infrastructure that JISC is funding to ensure that UK universities and colleges have access to advice and guidance in the handling and managing of research and other types of data.
Some other resources they didn’t have space to mention …The DCC (in collaboration with the Research Information Network) run the Research Data Manager’s Forum. This is a series of meetings that have brought a number of practitioners, funders and other stakeholders together to examine and discuss the issues facing data managers and curators.
http://data-forum.blogspot.com/
There is a mailing list available that is geared towards this community
https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?A0=RESEARCH-DATAMAN
There is a recent report (Nov 2008) that looks at the Benefits of Curating and Sharing Research Data.
http://www.jisc.ac.uk/publications/documents/databenefitsfinalreport.aspx
Another report (Jan 2009) looks at various national infrastructures enabling the sharing of data.
http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/preservation/nationaldata.aspx
Earlier reports are available … one looking at the skills, roles and career structures that are required to support data scientists
http://www.jisc.ac.uk/publications/documents/dataskillscareersfinalreport.aspx
All of which build on a report from 2007 authored by Liz Lyon, “Dealing with Data”.
http://www.jisc.ac.uk/publications/documents/dealingwithdatareportfinal.aspx
The JISC Research Data Management programme is now in full swing and is in the process of starting 8 new major projects that will examine various aspects of Data Management Infrastructure. These projects will be supported by the DCC and other initiatives that will progress specific areas of complementary work (e.g.Tools).
http://researchdata.jiscinvolve.org/
Join the Information Environment Team ?
Amber Thomas has just left the Information Environment Team to go on maternity leave. We are recruiting a one year maternity cover to Amber’s Programme Management position. The role mainly involves managing programmes and projects in the areas of digital repositories and open educational resources.
The deadline for applications is coming up very soon : 9am on the 17th September, but I thought I’d mention it here in case anyone that has missed the advert and is interested happened to come by this post. Further details. .
If you’re a developer interested in library services - AND you haven’t got anything to do this weekend…then read this:
The JISC MOSAIC project is holding a competition to discover what can be done with library usage data. It closes at 23.59 this coming Monday. They’re looking for compelling applications, interfaces and mash-ups that use the data in research, learning and libraries etc.
• First prize - £1000 sterling
• Second Prize - £250 sterling
• Third Prize - £100 sterling
The competition closes on Monday 14th September 2009
Further details about the competition:
http://www.sero.co.uk/jisc-mosaic-competition.html
Good Luck!!