Reflecting on the JISC developer days event

I’ve now had a couple of weeks to reflect on the busy and interesting JISC developer days event (also known as dev8D) that was held in London on the 24th - 27th of February. The purpose of the event is to get software developers from across higher education and related sectors put them in a room and give them opportunities to network, learn and sink their teeth into challenges posed by new software or datasets. We believe that this approach leads to interesting new ideas and approaches to issues, better trained developers and better connected developers who are more effective because of those connections.

I don’t propose to review the event because you can get an impartial review from some of the many blogs written by people who attended the event. This post is meant to collect the interesting things that were done at and after the event into one place so people can easily find out more about what the event produced. 

Despite this not being a review, reviews are an excellent way to get an overall flavour of the event. So here are a few of the thoughtful reviews produced by people who attended dev8D.

As well as these reviews you can also see the feedback that delegates left about the event on the wiki.  

One of the benefits of dev8D is the networking. Dave Challis of Southampton has used the twitter accounts of people attending the event to illustrate how people’s networks grew during the event

If you have a hankering then you can access all the dev8D tweets from before during and after the event.

The dev8D blog also talks about networking and why it’s important.  

We were lucky at this year’s dev8D to have a really diverse bunch of attendees, here are some examples of the people who attended:

Adrian Stevenson has also posted some video interviews with some people at dev8D over on the eFragments blog. 

The event was jam packed with opportunities to learn. These came in the form of guided sessions to learn new languages, quick 15 minute intros to topics, freeform workshops and ad hoc meetings.

All this learning activity is neatly summed up in Milly Shaw’s  post on the dev8D blog. You can also get a flavour of how the delegates felt about the training from the review posts linked above.

What does this kind of event produce? Well, not finished software but demonstrators and new ideas abound. This year at the event a number of organisations offered prizes for developers who came up with an interesting solution to a problem or did something interesting with their technology. There were 9 of these prizes offered by people as diverse as Microsoft Research, MLA, IMS, Edina, Memento and the Internet Archive.

A description of all the entries to these competitions is available on the dev8D blog The prototypes produced for these challenges are often worth much more than the prizes offered. Sam Adams, the developer who won the Memento challenge, is going out to visit the Memento team in the US as a result of his entry and Rob Sanderson who ran the Memento challenge commented to me that Sam’s entry was likely to have a real impact on the work of the Memento team.

In a similar vein, the winner of the Microsoft Research challenge has been asked to do a show and tell on his entry at the Open Repositories conference in Madrid.

The ideas weren’t limited to those entering the competition for prizes. There were fascinating ideas people bought along to the event or worked on while they were there:

For a complete listing of event outputs see the happy stories page of the dev8D wiki which collects interesting ideas, experiments, thoughts, etc.  

In summary, it was an amazing event, so much happened and I missed far more than I managed to see. The enthusiasm and energy that organisers and attendees put into the event was astonishing and I am still digesting a lot of the things I saw and learned. The devCSI project who organised this event as part of their remit to support a community of developers in UK HE did a fantastic job and keep an eye on their blog for more events like this. 

March 11, 2010 | Filed Under devcsi, dev8d, developers, events | 2 Comments 

OUJISCO - Digital Scholarship at the OU

Yesterday I attended one of the current JISC eResearch Roadshows at the OU in lovely Milton Keynes with the great hashtag #oujisco. It was an interesting day with talks from David Ferguson from NeSC and Graham Pryor from DCC both speaking but my real reason for attending was to find out more about the work that the Open University is doing around Digital Scholarship.

[For a general report on the day Doug Clow liveblogged the event.]

The Digital Scholarship project at the OU is led by Professor Martin Weller and Dr Nick Pearce and is focused on researching just what Digital Scholarship is but also promoting the uptake of Digital Scholarship within the OU. This obviously leads to a slightly schizophrenic project as on one hand they need to be slightly sceptical about things whereas on the other they are acting as cheerleaders. That said it seemed to me that the two of them were a good balance in this respect as martin was obviously a committed cheerleader whereas Nick demonstrated a little more scepticism!

The main aim of Digital Scholarship is to find a way to give academic activity on the open web the same weight as outputs in more traditional scholarly outputs (book chapters, conference speaking, journal articles etc). In order to do this it is closely following the principles of Boyers Scholarship - 2MB PDF here and mapping digital activity against them.

A standard issue that they have been facing with the evangelism element of the project is that there remains a lack of trust in the stability and sustainability of many of the social web tools. Will they be around in a month, year, decade, longer. I think in alot of ways this argument isn’t quite as relevant these days - there is rarely any need for a single point of failure. A presentation has every chance of getting considerably more views on Slideshare but that doesn’t mean that for preservation reasons it might not be best to have a version in another location (i.e. an institutional respository). One of the strengths of the UKOER programme was the insistence that OERs were released to a minimum of two locations - one of which had to be JorumOpen. This allowed projects to release resources out into the wilds of the open web if they wanted - greatly increasing the possibility of takeup but also having the peace of mind that the resources would be properly preserved (though perhaps digital preservation is more of a preoccupation for JISC than the creator of the resources.) Currently this does increase the workload for staff tasked with depositing resources and maintaining them but tools that allow deposit in multiple locations via one interface are now more than possible and hopefully just around the corner.

A case for the speed of digital outputs against the slower processes of traditional publishing methods was made when Nick discussed the fact that he research the use of technology (particularly web tools) by academics in 2007 and he has a paper due to be published based on that work later this year. However the original research does not feature one mention of Twitter as it was barely a blip at the time of the research whereas now it has a much higher profile. That fact will immediately date the paper.

There are alot of parallels between this activity and many of the ideals of openness that JISC supports across our work. It certainly seems to be close to both the Open Access and Open Education agendas. [I actually like the idea of the Open Scholar as defined in this quote.]

“the Open Scholar is someone who makes their intellectual projects and processes digitally visible and who invites and encourages ongoing criticism of their work and secondary uses of any or all parts of it–at any stage of its development.”
http://www.academicevolution.com/2009/08/the-open-scholar.html

The OU is seeking to build this kind of concept into the ‘personality’ it portrays externally. It has already taken the (unusual?) step of adding participation in the open web to the promotion criteria for academics alongside more traditional measures (though they admitted they were still working on appropriate measures for this kind of activity.)

Currently they are working hard on developing appropriate metrics for contributions to the social web and are asking questions like:

It was briefly mentioned that perhaps what was needed is something like the famous Google 20% time (or the less famous BBC Radio Labs 10% time ) that allowed academics the time to participate and experiment on the open web to find their voices and their communities.

Alot of the talk around creating metrics and perhaps build up an ‘online reputation’ score (despite fears that this could be ‘gamed’) made me think of some of the work around ‘whuffie’ that Cory Doctorow wrote about and the upcoming book from O’Reilly. It is an interesting and hugely difficult area of work that many people are trying to crack for different reasons on the web (in a previous job it was a constant topic of conversation in the office). Finding a reliable way of doing this for the academic community would be really very impressive and potentially important. Again I think it is the sort of thing that would be of equal interest to the OER community as the digital scholarship one. Recognition and reputation should never be underestimated as a driver for contributing to the open web.

It was pointed out that one side-effect of a high profile in the world of digital scholarship was increased opportunities to take part in more traditional scholarship activities! Well respected bloggers are often invited to speak at leading conferences and contribute to books & journals.

Not surprisingly Micheal Wesch was pointed to as the poster child for Digital Scholarship. The success of his YouTube videos has been amazing and massively enhanced not only his own reputation but also that of Kanses State. To some extent though this is a dangerous comparison as the huge success of Wesch is unlikely to be something that can replicated any time soon.

Throughout the presentation(s) a list kept popping up that covered the most common issues/barriers that the project had identified for academics to really make the jump to digital scholarship. One of the things that immediate struck me was that it could be exactly the same issue for anyone looking to take part in the OER movement - or in fact just become an active participant on the web with any kind of work related focus. None of these issues are insurmountable and for many of them the perception is a bigger problem than the reality but they do continue to be identified as obstacles time after time;

This brought to mind the work Forrester did around identifying how and what people actually contributed to the web and actually how few of them were actually creators rather than consumers.

I found it to be an interesting day that left me with a great deal to think about - not to mention a couple more blogs to read. I’ll be following this work closely in the months to come particularly looking out for opportunities to join it up with both OER and open access work.

March 11, 2010 | Filed Under web2.0, events | 3 Comments 

Repositories and the cloud - useful links

JISC and Eduserv are jointly hosting a meeting to discuss repositories and the cloud on Tuesday 23rd of February. Full details are on the event website and Andy Powell has written a great blog post introducing the event and asking for people’s views.

To accompany Andy’s post I thought I’d share a selection of links to information that might be useful to those attending the event and to people interested in cloud computing and repositories.

Repository specific links:

General cloud information:

JISC links:

That’s the list we’ve got so far, what else do you think is worth reading in this area? Leave a comment and I’ll add it in.

For those of you who are not able to attend the event, we will be writing up the event to ensure there are useful outputs from the day and you can follow and join discussion at the event on Twitter by using the #repcloud tag.

February 15, 2010 | Filed Under events | 1 Comment 

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.

October 29, 2009 | Filed Under digital curation, libraries, preservation, funding, events | 1 Comment 

Modelling the ‘library domain’: a consultative workshop on June 19

The challenge of making library resources visible and accessible in the Web 2.0 environment was a major focus of last year’s JISC/SCONUL study of Library Management Systems.

The JISC TILE (Towards Implementation of Library 2.0 and the e-Framework) project was subsequently commissioned to draft a high level ‘library domain model’ which could be used to further thinking about the functions and processes that library systems need to support in future.

We are now organising a workshop to consult on the domain model proposed, and how it might be used in the future.

Who should attend?

The workshop is intended for a mix of senior and middle library managers in a range of roles (so, not confined to colleagues with formal IT/systems management responsibilities).

Where and when is it?

Friday 19th June 2009 at the Institution of Engineering and Technology, Savoy Place, central London.

What is the programme for the day?

The programme consists of a mixture of presentations and group work.

How do I register?

Due to the consultative nature of this workshop, we have a limited number of places. If you would like to attend, please register your interest by 18th May 2009, and we will contact you thereafter to confirm your place or add your name to a waiting list.

April 28, 2009 | Filed Under libraries, resource discovery, metadata, web 2.0, events | Leave a Comment 

Library round up: event, discussion and new domain model

This post more or less repeats some JISC news items (sorry) but I wanted to make sure readers of this blog saw some JISC library related activity that has been discussed, published and presented this week. In particular I want to draw attention to Peter Murray-Rust’s blog posts on the Library of the Future, in case anyone wants to contribute before he speaks at the JISC/Bodleian Library event on 2 April. You can register to attend the Libraries of the Future event in person or in Second Life. Related information:
Overview. Speakers. Registration. Agenda.
Event tag: LOTF09

Peter has blogged some ideas and sought feedback (you’ll need to scroll through a few pages on his blog to see all of the discussion). He has identified some people and organizations that, as a scientist he personally considers relevant to librarians / libraries of the future. He only includes a couple of librarians; the list of those identified leans towards computer scientists not information scientists. In general (my crude summary of a wide ranging discussion!) he appears to be highlighting the need for a revolutionary attitude, more experimentation and for academic librarians to be promoters of good policy and practice with regards to ownership and access to scholarship, and the need to move to the web.

“…the librarians of the future. They build vital, communal, information resources. They invite collaboration, either directly or implicitly. They overthrow conventional wisdom and entrenched systems and interests.”

The blog discussion is interesting, there have been quite a few contributions, and I think it points to the importance of communication between librarians, computers scientists, researchers, learners and university managers.

And to briefly draw your attention to some other library focused activity from JISC this week:

The TILE (Towards the Implementation of Library 2.0 and the eFramework) project report and briefing paper has been published. This includes a library domain model developed to identify what the library processes are in the networked environment in the light of changing behaviour and information provision. The work has focused in particular on two increasingly important areas in delivering relevant services, these are context/personalization and contribution. There will be further consultation on the domain model via a workshop later in the year.

Finally at the JISC Conference this week there was a session on the Future of Academic Library – this discussed issues such as shared services, the evolving library collection and introduced a collaboration between JISC, SCONUL, BL, RLUK and RIN to consult and develop positions on the way in which libraries can respond to change.

March 27, 2009 | Filed Under JISC09, LOTF09, libraries, shared services, web 2.0, events | Leave a Comment 

Prepare to get happy

The JISC Developer Happiness Days event is approaching fast.

If you are:

Then the Developer Happiness Days event is for you.

We’re bringing together the cream of the crop of educational software developers along with coders from other sectors, users, and technological tinkerers in an exciting new forum.

Share your skills and knowledge with the coding community in a stimulating and fun environment and come away with new skills, fresh contacts – and you might even win a prize.

The top ideas generated at the event will be documented, publicised and made available to the community. 

Full details of the event can be found at: http://www.dev8d.org 

Further announcements about accommodation and details of the event competitions will be announced via the event blog: http://dev8d.jiscinvolve.org/

The tag for the event is dev8D.  

January 13, 2009 | Filed Under dev8d, training, events | Leave a Comment 

Information Environment (IE) & Virtual Research Environments (VRE) call for proposals: Briefing Day notes/Q & A

On 15th December a briefing day on the Information Environment and e-Research JISC Circular (12/08) was held. The event was held in order to provide an overview of the circular and to give people the opportunity to ask questions. The circular has £11m of JISC funding against it which is quite substantial. The calls in 12/08 focus on: digital repositories for learning and research, virtual research environments, use of text-mining and automatic meta-data generation and digital preservation. So in short the circular is seeking projects that are mainly about the creation, management and sharing of information that is part of the research and learning process in ways that support researchers, learners, teachers and administrators.

Here are the links to the presentations from the Briefing Day:
Policy and bid submission
Automated Metadata and Text-mining- strand A1
Digital Repositories: Start-up, rapid innovation and enhancement - strands A3- A5
Developing e-infrastructure to support research disciplines and digital preservation exemplars - strands A2 and A6
Virtual Research Environments (VRE) - strands B1-B3

Notes of the discussion and questions and answers from the briefing day:

IE and VRE Circular 12/08 15 December Briefing Day questions and answers

For some notes of the whole event as it went along see Andy Powell’s (Eduserv Foundation) live blog.

A few points of context:

JISC has funded projects and services in all of these areas previously. So what is different this time? I would say there are three general issues that underpin the projects sought in this circular:

* reflecting the maturity of digital repositories and other types of ‘e-infrastructure’ this circular is seeking further and improved alignment of these systems with user requirements. An emphasis in the calls is the need to involve/take into account end-users and a bringing together of these ‘e-infrastructure’ systems with research and learning processes.
* both the IE and the VRE strands of activity are about building on previous investment and lessons - so these are not completely new areas of activity. In the case of repository and digital preservation activity for example we’re seeking more repositories, improved repositories and policies, further integration with other systems and in areas such as digital preservation we’re looking for actual implementation of solutions that have previously been developed. However although this circular is generally about implementing areas where there has already been substantial work the projects are about improvement and so will involve new ideas and development.
* recognition that in many cases cross domain teams and skills are required to create, manage, use and develop digital systems, supporting policies and related practices within institutions.

The decision to publish the IE and VRE call strands together was partly a practical one as both funding areas were due to issue circulars at the same time, but there was more to this decision than that. Publishing them together was, I think, essential in terms of showing that information systems should not be developed independently of the requirements of the research process. I think if we’d published the calls separately there would’ve been a danger of perpetuating this often unhelpful division. In particular the projects sought under A2, Developing e-infrastructure to support research disciplines bridge both areas and seek to bring the research process and scholarly communications requirements together with underlying information systems. This particular strand in the IE calls also represents the fact that developing the Information Environment (or e-infrastructure) is not just about managing and disseminating information it is about supporting and improving research (and of course learning and teaching, although the projects called for under A2 focus on research). I think the connections that are emerging between both the IE and VRE programme areas are a good thing and are inevitable to progress.

January 4, 2009 | Filed Under sustainability, resource discovery, interoperability, research, learning and teaching, preservation, open access, events, general, metadata, repositories, Uncategorized | Leave a Comment 

Roll up, roll up for the Developer Happiness Days

JISC are sponsoring an event aimed at software developers in HE on February 9th-13th 2009.

The event will consist of training activities, a development competition, community focused events and a whole lot of networking opportunities.

The event will take place in London. Entry will be free and is designed for developers working in all areas of HE.  Developers from outside the UK and from the commercial sector are also very welcome to attend. If you aren’t a software developer but are still interested then you may want to come along to learn, network, observe and maybe provide a user perspective for the developers participating in the event. 

There is an event blog which has a registration form and some further details http://dev8d.jiscinvolve.org/.

Please sign up if you are interested. There are places for about 200 people.

The blog will be updated with more details of the event in due course. 

The event tag is dev8D, please use it when discussing the event. 

If you have any questions about the event, please leave a comment on the event blog or email d dot flanders at bbk dot ac dot uk or  a dot mcgregor at jisc dot ac dot uk.

December 3, 2008 | Filed Under dev8d, events | 1 Comment 

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=0099469693

All 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.  

November 28, 2008 | Filed Under mashlib08, libraries, tools, events | 2 Comments 

Next Page →