EC Digital Libraries and Digital Preservation Call
I went to a meeting in Peter Mandelson’s basement the other day, otherwise known as the Department for Business Innovation and Skills just next to Westminster Abbey. Lord Mandelson (if you go up about 17 levels of management) is my boss, so it’s good to know where the orders are coming from.
Anyway … the meeting was a briefing day and a chance for the European Commission to explain a bit about the priorities and procedures that people should think about if they want to apply for funding for projects in the Digital Libraries and Preservation area (Formally referred to as FP7 ICT Call 6). The presentations are now available online at http://bit.ly/3oPGFe.
The headline issues that I took away from the meeting were …
The whole funding decision-making process takes nearly a year and is extremely competitive. If you are a small organisation that is simply looking for money … it probably isn’t for you! The commission will be evaluating proposals according to 3 main criteria:
1. Are they proposing something that is useful and is technically robust?
2. Will they be able to achieve their objectives?
3. What impact will the work have?
They are looking for effective collaborations. Consortiums must have a lead and at least 3 other partners. How many partners and where they come from is - contrary to popular belief - not that important! There have been rumours in the past that people needed to hook up with Eastern European partners, or Southern European partners, in order to get funding. This is a fallacy. You just need to demonstrate that your consortium will be effective. In fact, once you have your core group of at least 4 EU partners, additional partners (with appropriate expertise) can come from anywhere in the world.
It is not generally the job of a research organisation to know about marketing and exploiting products that are created as part of a research programme. Join up with an organisation who knows about this stuff! It’s important to get it right and sustainability is EXTREMELY important.
Think hard about what sort of project suits your proposal … The models on offer are:
IP’s = Integrating Projects. Large scale (Euros 6 - 12m … sometimes more). R&D work, concepts, methods, tools, systems, often many partners. Advancing the state of the art - producing solutions that are within 3-5 years of being marketable.
STREP’s = Small to Medium Targeted Research Projects. (Generally Euros 2-4m). Focusing on more specific research problems with outputs that might be 5-7 years away from being marketable solutions.
NoE’s = Networks of Excellence. Advancing knowledge and bridging technological domains
CA’s = Co-ordinating Actions. Helping to ensure synergy between EC funded work
SA’s = Supporting Actions. Helping to maximise the effectiveness and impact of EC funded work
Total funding available for this call - Euros 69m
IP’s and STREPS = Euros 56m
NoE’s and C/SA’s = Euros 13m
Strikes me that a lot of people will be thinking hard and talking to other people over the next 12 months to really try and grapple with some of the hard problems in the Digital Preservation area and that is going to have a marvellous impact on the amount and quality of proposals that might end up flowing towards JISC. I’m not saying we’ll mop up failed EC proposals!! … I’m simply saying this has to be good for generally raising our whole collective game in the relevant areas of research and development.
OER Programme Meeting - 20/10/2009
On Tuesday I attended the OER programme meeting in London as the IE team representative. As it was only my second day in post my responsibilities were limited to a brief spell on the registration desk and sitting at the back of the room trying to take in as much as possible.
The event consisted of three parallel sessions in the morning; an IPR overview given by Jason Campbell from JISC Legal, a session on accessibility issues led by Sal Cooke from JISC TechDis and the session I attended which was about Internationalization of OER led by David Kernohan from the JISC eLearning team and Patrick McAndrew from OLnet at the Open University.
David spoke about the work done by Michigan State University working in Africa with OERs based around Agricultural studies and how they were initially surprised at the lack of take-up of their resources but after additional research discovered the ‘cultural context’ of the content was an issue; without a shared cultural background the resources were difficult to really understand.
In an effort to improve this MSU applied to the Gates Foundation for funding to run a project in partnership with the actual end-users of these resources (looking beyond academics and students to the actual farmers etc) to find a way to present the content in a way that is most suitable for them. While they are already having some success with this approach they have already identified that it is not truly a sustainable or transferable approach.
Patricks’ presentation picked up on the theme of ‘cultural context’ and the idea of ‘cultural colonisation’. The OU has identified that even the words used to describe their use of OER can be seen to loaded with significance and can be percieved to be more about spreading the OU brand than any form of altruism.
There were a couple of particularly interesting almost throw away moments during this talk that were picked up again during the day. The first was the assertion by Patrick that use of Creative Commons had saved OpenLearn £100k (that was the sum budgeted for legal advice that wasn’t required once they committed to CC) and also a comment from the audience along the lines of “I wonder why we bother with licenses at all as we know users will take no notice and do what they want with the resources!”
Issues around Creative Commons came up again and again throughout the day with questions around what is the right kind of option to choose the dominant topic.
The afternoon consisted of an update on some Communication/Evaluation/Synthesis issues and an interesting discussion on how to start the process for release of OERs to be recognised and rewarded by Institutions in a manner similar to the publication of research.
One of the things I was most interested in was the preview of the new JorumOpen interface built on DSpace and due for release early in 2010. The presentation consisted of screenshots rather than a live demo or a screencast so it was difficult to get a real feel for the interaction and as usual comments were made comparing it unfavourably to Flickr. This is always going to be an issue for a service like Jorum and it will be interesting to see how the live site compares as a user experience to something like Flickr (though the lack of a bulk upload option on launch for JorumOpen is going to be an issue I think.)
There was also a quick introduction to SCORE (Support Centre for Open Resources in Education) from the OU by Rose Webb which is a HEFCE funded support service for OER activity. This project is lagging behind the rest of the OER activity in this programme but there were a couple of interesting elements to the presentation; new OU short term Fellowships in OER that I am sure will be of interest to alot of people and also the creation of a Community Support Officer (part-funded by JISC) who will act as a broker between the OER projects and the huge amount of experience the OU has in working in this area.
All-in-all I felt it was a very interesting event which all the attendees seemed to be enjoying and finding valuable, I certainly did. Thanks to David and Heather for making it such an interesting day.
Look what you can do with library circulation data!
The JISC MOSAIC project Developer Competition attracted entries from England, Scotland, Wales and the United States. The winner of the £1000 award was Alex Parker, an undergraduate studying Computer Science at the University of Southampton, who developed a compelling presentation of the library user activity data represented as the ‘Book Galaxy’. The runners up were Andrew Isherwood (2nd place – University of Aberystwyth) and Alistair Young (3rd – University of Highlands and Islands)
The MOSAIC project is investigating the possibilities for data covering user activity such as book circulation across UK Higher Education libraries. In summer 2009, the project ran the Developer Competition to see what applications might be imagined and built on such data, looking for innovative approaches in terms of applications, query and display interfaces. Entries were required to use data released under Creative Commons licence by the University of Huddersfield, containing circulation records linked to the course affiliations of the borrowers.
The judges received 6 working applications, which exceeded expectations in terms in terms of quality and imagination. In addition to the award three winners, the judges commended entries from Tony Hirst and Owen Stephens of the Open University and from Sean Hannan of John Hopkins University. Ken Chad (Ken Chad Consulting) summed up the feelings of all four judges in commenting ‘I had an enjoyable couple of hours with these; it warmed my heart to see them - hats off to these guys!’
The applications covered three important areas:
Improving Resource Discovery:
- Navigate the ‘Book Galaxy’ through links based on borrowing habits–
- Users create and share reading lists
Supporting learning choices:
- Get a feel for a course based on the books students actually borrow
- Possible courses suggested based on books you’ve enjoyed reading
Supporting decision making:
- Assess circulation relating to departments and courses–
- Value the loans per courses as a collection performance indicator
The MOSAIC team will be seeking feedback from Higher Education library and learning practitioners on all six applications at the series of workshops over the next month at the Universities of Edinburgh, Sheffield, Sussex and the Open University.
The applications will also be featured at the concluding MOSAIC event at the University of Wolverhampton on Wednesday 18 November, which will inform the project recommendations to JISC and to the SCONUL Shared Services project on the opportunities relating to activity data and recommendation services that might be pursued within the sector. All interested parties are invited to sign up for the event by emailing david.kay@sero.co.uk.
Download this document for URLs and further details for the six entries plus the MOSAIC project demonstrator.
“Students like you also borrowed … Harry Potter” Assessing the possibilities and pitfalls surrounding the exploitation of library user activity data and recommendations
MOSAIC Project Event – Wednesday 18 November 2009 (10.00 to 16.00) at the University of Wolverhampton
Venue
This event is kindly hosted by the University of Wolverhampton in the MX Building on the City Campus WV1 1AD. There is mainline rail access (Wolverhampton) and nearby car parking (Wolves football ground).
Attendance & Registration
This event seeks to involve a cross section of managers and practitioners from university library and wider services. It will also be of interest to systems developers and vendors. It is limited to 30 delegates.Email philippe.ugochukwu@sero.co.uk to reserve your place(s) stating any special dietary or access requirements. Joining instructions will be issued.
Overview
The JISC MOSAIC project has been investigating the possibilities for exploiting the user activity and usage data that might be available to the Higher Education community – to benefit libraries, national services and their users.During 2009 the project has generated 7 demonstrators, worked with a variety of real library data and run a series of practitioner workshops. In the process it has gathered a great deal of intelligence about the possibilities and pitfalls for individual universities and national services.The potential to add value for students, researchers and lecturers is weighed against challenges in terms technology (scale, distribution, aggregation), data ownership and protection, quality of data, differences between media (books, journals, etc) and value relative to competing services in a Web 2.0+ world.This concluding MOSAIC event focuses the project findings in a series of key debates. We hope to draw on your professional experience to develop a shared understanding of the challenges, the desirable opportunities and potential early developments – informing the project recommendations both to JISC and to the SCONUL Shared Services project.
For more on the MOSAIC project see
http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/inf11/mosaic
http://www.sero.co.uk/jisc-mosaic.html
Event Programme
09.30 Refreshments on arrival at the University of Wolverhampton
10.00 Welcome– Fiona Parsons (University of Wolverhampton & SCONUL)
10.10 Introduction: the Problem & the Project– David Kay (MOSAIC)
10.25 Where is the data? Discussion
10.40 Keynote: ‘Activity Data and the Global Information Economy: The who, what, when, where, how, why of an emerging future’- Paul Miller (Cloud of Data)
11.10 Library & Service Perspective: The University of Huddersfield experience- Dave Pattern
11.30 Breakout 1: ‘Being Practical: What real uses are there for activity data?’ Session informed by the MOSAIC developer competition applications, with choice of groups (student, research, library uses).
12.15 Report back and discussion
12.40 Lunch & Opportunity to view demonstrators
13.30 Four Perspectives:
- ‘The MOSAIC Demonstrator: Approaches & Architectures’ – Mark van Harmelen (MOSAIC)
- ‘The good, the bad and the ugly- Data Protection v. Open Data’ – Ken Chad (MOSAIC)
- ‘Data is not the answer: An alternative view of user requirements’ – Paul Walk (UKOLN)
- Key findings from the recent library workshops at Sheffield, Sussex, Edinburgh & the OU- Helen Harrop (MOSAIC)
14.30 Breakout 2: ‘Challenges & Solutions’ – Choice between Technical, Data and Service breakout groups
15.15 Refreshments
15.30 Report back and panel Q&A – ‘Great ideas to desirable solutions’
16.00 Close
iPres 2009 - Preservation Infrastructure Track
In San Francisco at iPres sitting in the preservation infrastructure track.
Stephen Abrams (CDL) is telling us about micro-curation services. Lots of clear categorisation of types of services that institutions might require. Currently talking about storage requirements. Provide for safety through redundancy, meaning through context, utility through service. Rattling through too fast to capture detail.
Q. How do CDL services compare with iRods?
A. i-Rods are all part of one controlled environment. CDL Micro-services can run as small discreet functions
Pam Armstrong and Johanna Smith from Library and Archives Canada.
They have a trusted Digital repository project that is running from 2008-2010. They are showing a value management framework. The first concern is ’significance’. They are looking at government records and are trying to determine which records are important even before they arrive at the archive. Talking about a filtering process. Trying to deal with web 2.0 issues and are working on some guidelines.
They have established a records management task force with a high level of government support. A directive on recordkeeping is linked to a management accountability framework. If departments are found to be wanting with their records management function, they are denied the right to delete records. Good stick. There are functional requirements for EDRMS based on ISO. There is a proposed shared service for EDRMS for government info in Canada. They have built open source software eRTA for records managers. They have been working on metadata core set. They are using MODS and MARC and the info is discoverable by public. They have got to their summary already … my o my - these talks are quick!
The lessons learnt include the usefulness of the mandatory instrument that has consequences (see above).
Q. do you accept all formats?
A. No, they have acceptable formats. Can’t do all formats.
Q. How implemented is all of this?
A. The implementation is uneven. All the instances across govt are implemented inconsistently. They have got lots of work to do to bring the legacy information into line.
Robert Sharpe - Tessella
Representing PLANETS consortium. Title is “Are you Ready? Assessment of readiness of organisations for Digital Preservation”. (I’m interested in this talk. Wondering how this matches up with JISC-funded AIDA project). They did a survey. To establish whether people were ready to use Digital Preservation solutions. The target group for PLANETS is national libraries and archives. There are 96 of these in Europe. They also invited any other interested parties to contribute. They got 206 responses. 70% responses from Europe. They were a diverse community representing a range of roles.
15% digital preservation
16% in general preservation
22% curation
16% IT
also directors researchers data managers etc …
93% aware of DP challenges.
17% had not considered solutions.
52% did not have preservation policies.
They were 3 times more likely to have a DP budget if they had a DP policy in place. The majority had budgets to do capital activities. DP not really embedded in the institutions that responded still. What needs to be preserved? Stuff in file systems = 77% … many other categories going down to a long tail. National Libraries feel they have almost no control of the formats they have to accept. National Archives however claim high levels of control.
80% of organisations say they have less than 100TB to store in 2009. They think that by 2019, 70% orgs will have more than 100TB and 42% will have more than 1Pb. 85% have a solution or are working on one. They are generally expecting ‘plug and play’ components. That’s the trend and what people are expecting.
What functionality is important? Single most important function was that the repository must maintain authenticity, reliability and integrity of records. 17 different functions cited. Least important function is ‘checks for duplicate items’.Very little agreement on which standards should be used! (surprise surprise!) Of 13 standards on Robert’s chart, PREMIS in the middle in terms of who is using it already.
Summary …
Excellent start on getting DP message out
More work needed on policies and budgets
Wide range of types of digital info from range of sources
Significant quantities of data to preserve
Component-based solutions required
Best practice not yet clear
Early adopters are busy and planning to do more
Q. We are doing a good job with early adopters but what about the wider community. The success factor will be general users engaging with Digital Preservation
A. Yes
Q. The standards you showed, the figures are high for people not even having heard of them!
A. Yes.
End of session
Repositories and Research Management Systems
There have been discussions over the years about the potential of repositories to play a role in research management systems, supporting universities’ ability to report, for example, for the Research Assessment Exercise. A few universities have gone down that road a long way, while others have not. Indeed, various surveys (eg infoNet work) suggest that research information management in UK universities is supported by a rather patchy infrastructure.
A new JISC report from Rightscom gives a summary of the extent to which repositories and research management systems are integrated in the UK, and abstracts from this a table of institutional drivers that would support such integration. This will be a useful tool to repository managers and others building a case for a role for institutional repositories in research information management.
Of course, this needs to be seen in the wider context of UK and worldwide developments in research information management.
Guide to using some web 2.0 services in JISC projects - part 3 of 3
This is the final post in a 3 part series about using web 2 services in JISC projects. This final part briefly discusses using skype and dealing with meetings before moving on to general advice about IPR, publicising details and further information.
Part 1 of the series discusses using tags for projects, twitter and blogs.
Part 2 discusses social bookmarking, aggregation and note-taking.
The full document of all 3 parts can be downloaded from the JISC Information Environment repository.
Skype
Skype started off as a telephone service which ran over the network. It has now been extended to provide other services including instant messaging, video calls, file-sharing, screen-sharing. If you have a headset and a microphone it is a useful way to hold teleconferences with multiple participants.
It is also a useful way to get instant answers from contacts as you can see when people are online and available to be contacted to ask questions using the telephone service or the instant messaging service.
Skype FAQs
Q: Do you have to pay for Skype?
A: No – not for basic services. There are some functions that require payment. Details are on the skype site.
Q: How do I find out who is available using Skype?
A: Skype has a directory look-up service built in. It also has services whereby it uses your email list of contacts to see if any of your friends are Skype users.
Getting consensus – scheduling meetings, doing surveys
Doodle is a simple but very effective free website that you can use to do things such as agree a meeting date or do a simple survey. It is easy to set up a list of possible dates or options, and you then can email a URL to everyone, so that they can specify their preferences.
Publicising your project’s contact details
All publicity is good. Make it as easy as possible for people to discover your project and keep up to date with developments by making it easy for people to see what sources are available. List them on your project website and any publicity materials and put them in your email signature. Details that are useful to share include:
- Your project’s name (and acronym expansion)
- Your project tag and any other relevant tag
- Relevant twitter ids
- Website and blog site
- Links to relevant resources or public aggregations of resources that provide further information about the area you are working in.
- Your contact details – including Skype if you use it
Further information
Of course it is good practice with using all of these services to read the terms and conditions first to make sure they align with how you want to use the service. There is a useful toolkit called web2rights which can help you navigate IPR in a web 2.0 world.
This is only a limited overview of some of the services available. A more comprehensive list can be found in a previous post on this blog.
There is a JISC project called web2practice being run by Netskills to produce guides to using web 2.0. Guides on:
- Social Media;
- RSS;
- Collaborative Writing;
- Podcasting;
- Microblogging;
can be found on the web2practice blog.
Feedback and the future of this guide
So that is a brief overview of some of the most useful services. Obviously there are glaring omissions from this guide and we would really appreciate hearing from you which web services you find useful in managing your projects and how you use them. We will gather feedback into an updated and more thorough guide in the future.