A selection of tools for setting up an ideas forum

I find the ideas based discussion forum to be a really useful tool for promoting discussions around a certain topic or for managing suggestions and ideas from a community. These sites are widely used by communities, corporations and government organisations. A couple of good examples are:

There are now a range of fairly easy to use tools that you can use to set up these kind of sites so I thought it might be useful to summarise them on this blog.

Uservoice  - example: JISCpress - there are free and paid versions of this site, the free version is limited in terms of how many people can participate in your forum and in terms of flexibility and downloading of the data stored on the site, but the design is good and it is easy to use.

Slinkset -  example: UK Uni Start-ups - this is a free site and seems to be very flexible. There is no option to download the data from the site.

Stackexchange - the software that powers Stackoverflow - this is free while it is in beta. Pricing details for when the beta phase ends are on the site. The ability to download your content on the site as a database is planned.

Ideascale - example: Open Austin - there are free and paid versions of Ideascale. The free version is unlimited in terms of how many people can participate on the forum but limited in terms of flexibility and data downloading.

I think these sites are really useful for focusing specific discussions around a certain topic or event and also for ongoing idea and suggestion management. I recommend seeding the site with a few ideas or questions as a blank slate is often intimidating for contributors.

Of course, as with all community focused websites, a community won’t spring up on its own, it requires a lot of work from a moderator or moderators to monitor and promote the site to ensure that it is useful and that it does not stagnate.

I have probably missed lots of tools, so if you have any suggestions you would like included please add them in the comments. I would also be interested to hear from people about their experiences of using these sites, what works and what doesn’t.

November 30, 2009 | Filed Under tools, web 2.0 | Leave a Comment 

Data Management Policy - An Interview with Paul Taylor

Dr. Paul Taylor works at the University of Melbourne and has just finished a 2 week secondment in the UK with the JISC-funded EIDCSR (Embedding Institutional Data Curation Services in Research) project based in Oxford. This is an approximate transcript of a quick 5 minute interview between Paul and Neil Grindley (JISC Information Environment Programme Manager)

NG
Hi Paul, thanks for sparing the time out of a very busy schedule … what role do you have in the EIDCSR project?

PT
Thanks Neil … I’m here to help them come up with a draft policy for the management of research data and records. It’s something we’ve had in place at the University of Melbourne since 2005 and we’ve just completed a revision of the policy to hopefully help make it a little more useful for researchers.

NG
Tell us a little bit more about how that policy has been developed at the University of Melbourne and the reactions to it from researchers and data managers.

PT
As I said, we’ve had policy in place since 2005 and early this year we were asked to work out how compliant we were with it, on the basis that if you have a policy and no-one pays any attention to it, its probably not much use keeping it there! Not surprisingly, we found out that most people weren’t compliant and also didn’t really know that the policy was there. We’re hoping that was the reason that they weren’t compliant rather than any sort of animosity against policies in general - but that’s still to be determined.

We reviewed the policy for two reasons: firstly to try and make it of more use to researchers (… there’s limits to that because when you are writing a policy to go across the institution, it has to contain really high level principles about the management of research data. If you get too specific you rule large populations out and then people pay even less attention to it than they did before). Secondly, its to get some attention and a bit of refocus on the data management area. There are a lot of things happening at the university at the moment in terms of the services that the university intends to provide for it’s researchers and some other changes in the Australian environment. We’re hoping to lock the high-level principles away in policy documentation and focus on keeping the guidance, information and support materials up to date and relevant for researchers.

NG
The sustainability of keeping that guidance and information for researchers up to date is a real issue. Capturing their feedback and working it back into future iterations of those materials (and ultimately the policy documentation) is a desirable outcome but also a big challenge isn’t it?

PT
Yes, it is.

NG
How do you think that the policy that you’ve developed in Melbourne transposes to the University of Oxford?

PT
That’s a good question … one of the things that we’ve learnt from the 2005 version of the policy is that its not enough to have the central policy on its own. There needs to be some kind of localisation of the policies and so with this new version of our policy we’ll be asking faculties to come up with their own enhancements so that it makes more sense to their researchers, and then probably get departments to do the same thing. I’d imagine the same sort of system could work at Oxford but it would be a little more complex with the number of people that would need to be involved in coming up with these localised versions of the policy. The hope is that there will be a trickle down effect from the high-level policies which have a practical influence on the way that researchers go about managing data.

In the meetings that I’ve had since I’ve been here, there have been some excellent examples of data managers and data management researchers (I guess you’d call them) who are working closely (one-on-one) with researchers who have come up with some excellent and novel solutions. I think the more that that can happen - a sort of resourcing at the coal face - then the more likelihood there is of high level principles trickling down to meet some of the very local one-on-one researcher-based developments. At that stage, perhaps there would be a general improvement in the management of research data across the institution.

One of the things I’ve heard a lot from people is the need for it to be a federated system. A lot of the departmental research groups have come up with their own systems for managing their own research data. Anything new that is provided centrally from the university has to try and complement those processes rather than take them over. That wouldn’t work well here (in Oxford) and it wouldn’t work in Melbourne. It would tend to antagonise people rather than improve the situation.

NG
Yes … that principle of embedding existing processes and workflows into broader policy initiatives is an important concept for institutions grappling with these kinds of issues at the moment. Thanks very much Paul.

PT
Thanks

University of Melbourne - Policy on the Management of Research Data and Records (2005)
http://www.unimelb.edu.au/records/research.html

Review of Policy on the Management of Research Data and Records (2009)
http://research.unimelb.edu.au/integrity/conduct/data/review

EIDCSR Project (Embedding Institutional Data Curation Services in Research)
http://eidcsr.oucs.ox.ac.uk/

#res3

November 25, 2009 | Filed Under digital curation, advocacy, data, research, records management | 1 Comment 

Forthcoming call for projects on library systems

We are currently scoping a call for short projects in the area of library management systems to start in April 2010. For some further information, please visit the JISC Funding Roadmap. We are aiming to publish this call in mid-December with a deadline for proposals in early February. Please note that these timescales could change.
For any Twitter/other online conversations about this call as things develop, please use the tag #jisclms

November 19, 2009 | Filed Under jisclms, libraries, resource discovery | Leave a Comment 

Dates for 2010 dev8D announced

Following on from the very successful developer happiness days event in February of this year. The dates for the second dev8D event have been announced.  It will take place 24th-27th of February 2010 in London. This year’s event will run from Wednesday to Saturday with each day designed to stand alone but are also designed to fit together to provide a complete experience. So delegates can choose to come to as many or as few days as suit them. Learning from successful events like Barcamp London 7, Saturday was included in the event to expand the potential audience.

Free accommodation will be provided at a boutique hostel. Accommodation is basic and rooms will be shared but we hope that by providing this it will enable a greater range of people to attend.

Dev8D in 2009 was a very successful event. Exciting prototypes were produced as part of the event and the dev8D competition winner, a reading list prototype called list8D has since been funded as a JISC rapid innovation project. An early version of the list8D reading list software has been released recently for others to experiment with.  Dev8D 2009 was mentioned in the Edgeless University Report produced by Demos as a good example of experimentation that can:

help uncover not only new educational tools but also new uses for educational materials, and can draw on the energy and ideas of new constituencies. (p 48)

The sign up sheet for the event will be released soon and I look forward to seeing lots of new people at the event.

November 13, 2009 | Filed Under developer, devcsi, jiscri, dev8d | Leave a Comment 

Do your library catalogue and repository talk to each other? Report now available

A JISC funded study by the Centre for Digital Library Research at the University of Strathclyde on the links between library catalogues and institutional repositories has just been made available.

The study found limited technical interoperability between library systems, institutional repositories and other institutional systems. You’ll find an announcement about the report, and links to it, HERE

The report makes a number of recommendations about how this situation could be improved.

Recommendations for universities looking to make improvements in this area include:

The report illustrates the growing use of ‘resource discovery platforms’ (such as Primo) as a way of providing more ‘joined up’ searching across catalogues and repositories but sees them as a partial solution.

You might also be interested in a recent RELATED REPORT on links between repositories and research management systems.

I’d welcome your comments on the following ‘where next’ questions that occur to me or any other issues that occur to you in reading the report.

How big an issue is lack of interoperability between your library catalogue and repository for you at a day to day level?

Do you see Resource Discovery Platforms (such as Primo) as a way of providing the information seeker with a more coherent view of what is available to them from their ‘local’ catalogue and repository and with simpler access?

How big an issue is managing the quality of metadata in repositories for you?

Is there a clear enough benefit to your institution of better integration between its systems that hold information about its research outputs to justify and motivate the effort required to achieve it?

November 11, 2009 | Filed Under Uncategorized | 2 Comments 

Part 2 of 2: Evaluation of the ‘Deposit Tool Show and Tell’ (Features and Flows of Deposit)

NOTE TO READER: JISC IS CURRENTLY IN THE PROCESS OF DRAFTING A CALL FOR PROPOSALS TO FURTHER EMBED DEPOSIT TOOLS AND SOLUTIONS INTO THE AUTHORS DAY-TO-DAY WORKBENCH. PLEASE SUBSCRIBE TO ONE OF JISC’S MANY FUNDING ANNOUNCEMENT FEEDS FOR FURTHER INFORMATION ON THIS CALL.

PLEASE ALSO SEE PART 1 OF 2 WHICH PROVIDES A REPORT ON THE ‘DEPOSIT TOOL SHOW & TELL’ MEETING INCLUDING A LIST OF WHAT TOOLS WERE SHOWN ON THE DAY

Published by: David F. Flanders (JISC Programme Manager)

There were three parts to the ‘Deposit Tool Show & Tell Meeting which provides the scope for what a deposit tool is:

  1. Types of deposit tools (e.g. drag and drop, email, file/folder, etc). These “tool types” are listed in this presentation by David F. Flanders.
  2. Types of features present within the deposit tools (e.g. auto name lookup, publications management, recommendations, etc.). These “tool features” are listed here in the the following set of pictures as they were written out on the day (also see the list below).
  3. Types of (work)flows that the author’s research content can go through to be published as Open Access (e.g. author deposit to publisher then publisher push to repository, author deposit to personal platform with repository auto-archiving information, etc.). These“deposit flows” are listed here in this set of pictures as they were written out on the day (also see the below list along with images).

It is the evaluation of the latter two (’DEPOSIT TOOL FEATURES’ and ‘DEPOSIT FLOWS’) that provided the most significant implications on the day. What follows is a very brief evaluation of what participants on the day decided were priority areas for deposit features and flows (please keep in mind this is only a ’straw pole’ taken on the day) .

DEPOSIT TOOL FEATURES:

During the first half of the day twenty-some deposit tools were shown off, while these tools were being shown off each one of their features was listed on a piece of large piece of paper (i.e. flip-chart), these features were then hung up around the room during lunch time for people to go around and vote on them (by placing a green sticker on their preferred features, known as ‘dotmocracy’). Listed below is that list of deposit features along with the votes that each one recieved (to note: the fifty-some participants had 3 votes each).

Please note: these votes are only a snapshot of what people were thinking on the day and do not reflect a definitive list of features or concerns. Rather the vote was only intended as a way to engage people in the features listed and to help further specify which were of significant interest on the day.

DEPOSIT TOOL FLOWS:

The list of deposit (work)flows was presented by Jim Downing as part of the ongoing Repository Handshake work which is being lead by Pablo de Castro who was also present on the day.

The five flows presented were (in order of the vote, also see images below):

  1. Publish via Personal Publications Management System, e.g. system to sync various versions of publication out on the Web (12 votes);
  2. Author Self-Publishing, e.g. via website, blog or other personal publishing platform (9 votes);
  3. Publish via Broker, e.g. a broker service watches with publications appear on a publisher platform and pull content into an embargo area until publisher allows for open publishing of content (5 votes);
  4. Publish via Repository, e.g. author gives to institutional repository and repository is responsible for passing out to other platforms and publications systems (3 votes);
  5. Publish via Single Event/Theme, e.g. conference publishing system or other publishing platform provided by an organisation for others to contribute around a common theme/tag/node (0 votes).

1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

Again please note: these votes only represent a view of the priorities placed on the day and do not represent a comprehensive list.

PLEASE ALSO SEE PART 1 OF 2 WHICH PROVIDES A REPORT ON THE ‘DEPOSIT TOOL SHOW & TELL’ MEETING, INCLUDING A LIST OF WHAT TOOLS WERE SHOWN ON THE DAY

November 3, 2009 | Filed Under Uncategorized | 6 Comments 

Part 1 of 2: Report on #DepoST (Deposit Tool Show & Tell) Meeting 2009-12-10

NOTE TO READER: JISC IS CURRENTLY IN THE PROCESS OF DRAFTING A CALL FOR PROPOSALS TO FURTHER EMBED DEPOSIT TOOLS AND SOLUTIONS INTO THE AUTHORS DAY-TO-DAY WORKBENCH. PLEASE SUBSCRIBE TO ONE OF JISC’S MANY FUNDING ANNOUNCEMENT FEEDS FOR FURTHER INFORMATION ON THIS CALL.

PLEASE SEE PART 2 OF 2 ON THE EVALUATION (FEATURES AND FLOWS) OF THE ‘DEPOST TOOL MEETING’

Published by: David F. Flanders (JISC Programme Manager)

Just before I sat down to write this post, I quickly went back to have a look at the originalSWORD (Deposit API) Project to look up when the first draft specification was published, to my amazement version 1 was published *exactly* two years to the date of the “Deposit Tool Show & Tell” event: 12 October 2007. And quite significantly (as you’ll see below), there are well over twenty different applications and deposit tools built atop the SWORD Deposit API since that first 1.0 publication. So, CONGRATULATIONS ON YOUR TWO YEAR ANNIVERSARY SWORD! A little tip of the hat to Rachael Heery who brought a bunch of us hackers to sit around a table to talk about how deposit could be improved, your focus and drive in this space is missed.

The show (and tell) -must of course- go on, accordingly here is agenda for the day along with the people who attended. The rest of the story is picked up by our blogger-on-the-day Bashera Kahn:

12 October 2009, London, UK. JISC held a one-day Barcamp at the University of London focusing on author deposit tools, ahead of the DSpace User Group Meeting at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden.

The Deposit Show & Tell event is one of the first steps in JISC’s plan to invest £300,000 in sustained improvements to author deposit tools. It followed the September 2009 JISC report into how and why UK researchers publish and disseminate their findings, which provides an excellent contextual backdrop to the challenges facing the architects and users of repositories and deposit tools.

‘DepoST’, as it was tagged, brought together developers and stakeholders from across the UK and Europe who have already broken ground on creating and refining author deposit tools and interfaces.

Several lightning-fast rounds of demonstrations proved that the development space in this area is thriving, with a strong focus on making the deposit process quicker and easier for users authoring research content, from academics to students, librarians to archivists and curators.

JISC’s David F. Flanders stressed in his welcoming address the importance of adding improved ‘feedback loops’ to the deposit process, to provide authors with more information during and after the process than just ‘Okay’.

Flanders mentioned a few patterns he’d observed in the showcased tools which adopted workflows and interactions that would be familiar to users from commonplace computing or online experiences, such as:

David’s Slides on: The ‘Deposit Tool Show And Tell’ Event (Introduction to the Day and Overview of Deposit Tool Types for Author Publishing)

<–!DFF: The twenty some, short and fast (”lightning talk”) ’show and tell’ presentations followed with five minutes a piece to SHOW their app, with five minutes ‘question and TELL’ following:

Shown & Told:

(1) Julian Cheal, SUE/SIS Systems Developer, UKOLN

(2) Dave Tarrant, Postgraduate researcher, University of Southampton

(3) Pat McSweeney, ePrints project developer, University of Southampton

(4) Peter Sefton, eScholarship Tech Team Manager, University of Southern Queensland, Australia

(5) Richard Jones, Symplectic Limited

(6) Alex Strelnikov, UKOLN

(7) Jan Reichelt, Mendeley

(8) Ian Stuart, Software Engineer, EDINA

(9) Joe Lambert, University of Southampton

(10) Viv Cothey, Gloucestershire Archives

(11) Tim Brody, EPrints WebDav, University of Southampton

(12) Theo Andrew & Fred Howell, The Open Access Repository, EDINA

(13) Stuart Lewis, IT Innovations Analyst & Developer, University of Auckland Library

(14) Alex Wade, Director for Scholarly Communication, Microsoft External Research

(15) Seb Francois, University of Southampton

(16) Julian Tenney and Patrick Lockey, Xerte, University of Nottingham

(17) James Ballard & Richard Davis, University of London

(18) Dan Needham, University of Manchester & Alan Danskin, British Library

The second half of the day focused in on the FEATURES that each of the above tool provided to the end-user along with the various work(FLOWS) that depositing research content could take:

PLEASE SEE PART 2 OF 2 ON THE EVALUATION (FEATURES AND FLOWS) OF THE ‘DEPOST TOOL MEETING’

November 3, 2009 | Filed Under publisher, developer, depost, author, repository, developers, dev8d, deposit, tools | 2 Comments