Participate in JISC Landscape Study
Apologies, firstly, to Ann Chapman and Rosemary Russell over at UKOLN that I haven’t done this post a bit earlier. They are both currently working on a landscape study to understand how people use Web 2.0 tools and services as part of the shared infrastructure services (SIS) programme to both set the current work in context and also to understand what we need to do into the future.
There is more information on the UKOLN blog for the project at http://blogs.ukoln.ac.uk/jisc-sis-landscape/ so if you are working with Web 2.0 tools and services please visit and fill in the survey.
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.
Information Environment Rapid Innovation Grants
We (Andy, Amber, Balviar, David, James) are happy to announce that we are about to issue a new Grant-Funded Call for rapid innovation projects within the Information Environment on 6 March 2009. You’ll be able to read all the text about what money is available and the conditions for using it in more detail in the Grant but to give an overview of what we are looking for:
- Innovative projects that create a ’something’ related to a user need from a named community. That something could be a new interface, a service that brings together existing services or a tool of some sort;
- The scope is quite simply something that is within the Information Environment (see: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/themes/informationenvironment.aspx for definition). We are not being overly prescriptive;
- The projects should be up to six months in length and between £15,000 and £40,000;
- The documentation for everything in the Call is going to be kept lightweight so we can keep the focus on solutions to user needs rather than filling out forms. We’re just looking for five pages in the bid and the project documentation is going to be kept to blogs or wikis so we know what you’re aiming to do and how you are getting on with achieving it but you don’t spend hours telling us about it;
- The approaches should be agile or open. We’d like to see early engagement with users and for that engagement to be kept up so what is produced responds to their needs and is user-led rather than technology-led.
The drivers for this grant have come from a number of different directions:
- dev8D (http://dev8d.jiscinvolve.org/) proved to be very successful in getting users and developers together to create innovative solutions to user needs. We felt we should be doing more of this in the Information Environment;
- Whilst we recognise that certain big central services such as the UK federation could and should be provided by JISC, we also recognise that there needs to be funding for smaller, lighter tools, services and interfaces that help users achieve their goals;
- Whilst there is a place for bigger projects that involve senior managers, we feel that there is equally a place for projects where the bulk of the money goes to developers;
- The last few years have seen an increase in the development of lightweight solutions that respond rapidly to user needs across both the academic and commercial sectors.
We’re looking forward to seeing what bids come back. This forms the perfect opportunity for:
- Those who have bid for funding before and would like funding to try out new areas where we may not want to fund via a big project;
- Those new to JISC who would like to dip their toe in the water and try a smaller JISC project before going for something bigger;
- Developers who have good ideas that they might not have quite enough time to fully develop within their normal schedule;
- Technical managers who may want to have funding to ‘try out’ new members for their team on a student placement basis, for example.
The tag for discussion on this rapid innovation Call is jiscri. Please use this if you’re commenting on the Call via Twitter or posting on other blogs and social media about it so we can easily gather all those comments together and learn and respond as we go along. Subscribe to the JISC-ANNOUNCE list at www.jiscmail.ac.uk to get notified about this or other funding opportunities from JISC or go along to http://www.jisc.ac.uk/fundingopportunities.aspx on 6 March to get the call.
Grant Funding Opportunities
An update on funding opportunities …
This month, November 2008, we will be releasing a Call for projects for grant funding. Outline details are on the Grant Funding Roadmap. UK FE/HE institutions are eligible to bid, with some types of projects restricted to HEFCE- and HEFCW- funded institutions, due to funding streams.
We’re finalising the Call at the moment, but you won’t go far wrong if you start thinking about what you want to do in:
- implementing automated metadata and textmining
- starting up repositories for research data, research papers, learning materials
- networking and enhancing repositories
- preservation in relation to repositories
- short technical projects to improve repository services
- connections between services to support particular disciplines
Bidders will have until January to prepare proposals, and succesful projects will be expected to start by 1st April 2009.
For those of you most interested in supporting research, please note there will also be a Call for projects related to Virtual Research Environments.
If learning and teaching resources are of particular interest, in December there will also be a Call for the forthcoming HEA/JISC Open Educational Content programme.
Date for your diary: Monday 15th December will be a Briefing Day for anyone who would like to come and hear about the funding opportunities related to the Information Environment and Virtual Research Environment Calls. It will be in Central London, probably 10-4. Details will be released soon.
If you’re not based in UK FE/HE, you may be interested in the Funding Roadmap for Invitations to Tender. These are open to anyone, so if you think you have expertise relevant to the sort of issues reported on this blog, then tenders are very welcome.
We will announce the Call on this blog as soon as it is released.
Repository widgets
JISC funded a small piece of work to produce some repository related widgets that could be used on platforms such as Netvibes and iGoogle. ICO3 carried out the work for us and I am pleased to say that there are now a number of widgets available.
You can read about the widgets and add them to your netvibes and iGoogle page at: http://www.rwidgets.co.uk/wiki/doku.php
Or to see them in action, go to the netvibes universe: http://www.netvibes.com/rwidgets#General
My favourite of these is the SherpaRoMEO widget, which works really well.
ICO3 will be doing some work to get community feedback on these widgets so if you are interested in helping ICO3 to review the widgets or if you just want to express an opinion, post a comment below or contact me directly http://www.jisc.ac.uk/contactus/staff/andrewmcgregor.aspx. I’d be really interested to hear your opinions and ideas.
The purpose of this work was to explore the possiblities of repository related widgets in this area, not to produce polished tools so I think that there is plenty of room for further development both of these widgets (I’d really like the sword one to have a drag and drop interface) and of other widgets related to repositories and the information environment.
Changing library services…and some views on digital repositories.
I have just read the Ithaka report on Key Stakeholders in the Digital Transformation in Higher Education 2006, Housewright & Schonfeld, published August 25, 2008. I hadn’t intended to spend Sunday morning reading this but a colleague, Dicky Maidment-Otlet, sent me an email about it and it seemed well worth a read.
It sets out an analysis of the most significant findings from some surveys of academic librarians and academics (faculty) mainly focused on scholarly communication and library services. The US based surveys were carried out in 2000, 2003 and 2006 and the changes are reported. Although I would say there are not many surprises in the report, it does help reveal some trends and issues that libraries and those interested in serving learning and research need to get to grips with. The library functions are categorised as 1) purchaser 2) archive 3) gateway and the perceptions of librarians and academics toward these are set out, it tends to focus a little more on the academics views. Some of the main findings and conclusions are:
* The library is generally becoming less visible and the perceived dependency on the library reduced (humanities academics having more dependency than scientists). The report summarises this as ” although librarians may still be providing significant value to their constituency, the value of the brand is decreasing”;
* Academics see the role of the library as a gateway as less important but librarians still think this is a core function; although this is coloured by users accessing resources from other places (e.g. search engines/remotely) so they may not always realise they are accessing a library resource.
* The report says ” Libraries are providing these high growth fields [information provision to scientists] value in the acquisition of resources - for example licensing costly journal collections - but otherwise have been relatively absent from the workflow…”;
* Increased importance on electronic materials for academics and librarians and readiness to cancel print subscriptions or depose of print materials (although again there is a disciplinary difference between humanities, social scientists and scientists, with the scientists being furthest towards the electronic trend and using resources remotely);
* Librarians seeing value in e-books but academics being far less enthusiastic;
* Visibility of research being more important to scholars than open access publishing;
* The case for shared preservation initiatives for journals being made;
* In order to support cross disciplinary and cross institutional research and learning there is a need for “system-wide approaches” and shared standards and protocols.
Overall the report makes the case for the need to better understand user requirements so that relevant services can be provided, and for the ability to change where appropriate to be taken seriously. It also makes the point that: “Deep consideration of how the library community can best serve scientists and preserve scholarly values in the face of a rapidly changing and increasingly commercial ecosystem is needed, both on a local and the system level.” These all appear to be sensible and helpful conclusions that libraries (and organisations like JISC) need to respond to.
I think the changes implied by the report require work at various levels for example these changes might include any of the following: marketing, a different strategic approach to service delivery for different disciplines, tackling changes by working across a range of stakeholders not just libraries and academics, but management and funders too, providing change at a local level but also being prepared to provide what the report calls “system wide” services.
The issues raised in the report are all relevant to the UK academic library sector (the data being from the US will mean some differences) and the Information Environment programmes and other JISC activity. I think the findings mainly support work we’re doing, examples being the LOCKSS pilot, the e-journal archiving registry, work that will follow on from the JISC/SCONUL Library Management Systems study, further user requirements analysis etc. But defining how best to deliver information services is a real challenge and one we need to put a lot of effort into if we are to provide a relevant infrastructure for research and learning. Sometimes aspects of this are about significant longterm change and not about immediate benefits. We need to take a long view with regards to change and impact, whilst also dealing with the here and now and quick wins. Perhaps the report could’ve dealt with these different aspects a little more (although that probably wasn’t the purpose of the report), and it does cover them, in particular it points out that some disciplinary groups are early adopters.
Since a lot of our programme activity has centred on digital repositories over the past five years I thought I’d end on the digital repository section (pages 24-26 in the report). The following statements from the report do in some respects challenge some of ways in which digital repositories are sometimes viewed. Whilst I think none of this is cut and dried and digital repositories can both support the stewardship of resources and more effective scholarly communication (indeed I think repositories are definitely helping improve access to research) I think these points are worth raising and I’d be interested in people’s reactions to them.
“Although a popular topic of discussion is the possibility of repositories to transform scholarly communications, this objective is not widely held by librarians.”
“Faculty interest in objectives for repositories basically matches those of librarians, being interested principally in using them to organise and preserve local material.”
“…we do not foresee institutional repositories yielding a transformative influence on the business side of journal publishing. Other types of digital repositories, especially those for storing images and special collections, are much more likely to continue to grow in importance at all types of institutions.”
Inventory of digital resources catalogues 3,707 free collections
The JISC Digital Repositories and Archives Inventory project has finished phase 2 and has catalogued a total of 3,707 online collections that staff and students in higher education can access for free. These catalogue records will be added to the IESR.
The brief of the inventory was to identify all the repositories and achives in the UK that are relevant to UK higher education and are free at point of use. For the purposes of this project a very loose definition of repositories and archives was used. The only sites that were excluded were those that restricted access and those with little or no structure.
Phase 1 of the project discovered 1,924 resources and phase 2 discovered 1,783. The records from phase 1 are already in the IESR and records from phase 2 will be added soon.
Phase 2 also enriched the metadata collected about all the resources and contacted resource owners to approve or extend the data collected about their resources. This produced a very positive response with approximately 800 resource owners providing extra information about their collections.
The final report from the project is available now (http://ie-repository.jisc.ac.uk/244/) and has some very interesting results on preservation, usage rights, subject coverage, discovery, collection owners and the availability of information about the collections.
Repositories and Preservation Programme Synthesis
We are proposing to undertake a synthesis of the repositories and preservation programme which will support action. This means that the outputs need to be targeted at decision makers with additional information for those that will have to implement the decisions.
We have taken as a starting point the idea that decision makers are most likely to take note of what we are saying if repositories or preservation address problems that they are already worried about, and that many of these will stem from government, funding council or similar policies which they have to implement.
We have identified policies, decision makers who are concerned with them and ways in which we think that repositories or preservation can help.
We are aware that there will be other policies out there that we should be considering, that there may be other ways in which repositories or preservation could help and there may be other people we need to address.
We would very much welcome comments and thoughts on our thinking so that we can take it forward and start the synthesis.
Please comment either by posting comments or by email to Tom Franklin who is leading on this (tom@franklin-consulting.co.uk).
Research
The Research Excellence Framework is of concern to many at the moment including senior managers, research managers, researchers and librarians. We believe that it is likely that institutional repositories will make collection of the relevant information easier and cheaper and will support whatever metrics are likely to be selected. It is also possible that open access repositories will lead to research being found more easily and therefore cited more widely. This also supports increasing research recognition.
Funding mandates from funding bodies such as research councils and Wellcome can be addressed through the use of required repositories (such as UK Pubmed Central), but through the use of suitable institutional repositories that support things like embargo periods.
Community and business engagement requires that information is made accessible to those that might effective use of it. Institutional repositories may assist here.
Teaching and learning
Cost reduction may be achieved through better sharing of learning materials, including learning objects, this will be of interest to both managers and teachers who need to then implement and make use of repositories, but contributors will also have to think about using appropriate standards. Integration with the VLE would also enable the most current version of materials to be easily accessible.
Quality assurance of courses, especially franchised courses for instance between a university and FE colleges is of concern to senior managers and teachers and could be supported by making learning resources available across the group through use of repositories.
Many institutions and their managers are concerned with retaining control over the IPR of their learning materials, institutional repositories for learning objects offer one way of controlling access effectively.
Information services and libraries
All managers and Staff are concerned with meeting their legal and Contractual requirements including self-deposit / open access and being able to enforce embargoes. Institutional repositories can help with these issues.
Help wanted
Are these the most important drivers?
Are there other drivers that we should consider?
Have we correctly identified the key audiences who can help to identify these things?
Posted by: Tom Franklin
Click streams -Library Managment Systems
I’ve been meaning to do a short post about the recent library systems study that JISC commissioned with SCONUL so people know about it. So here it is. I’ve been reminded of it as I’m at the Eduserv Symposium today and Ken Chad who worked on the study asked a question related to it.
The Eduserv Symposium is focusing on disruptive technologies and what the impact might be on the organisation. So in our case universities and colleges, and as Andy Powell pointed out in his introduction there is also disruption for related service providers such as Eduserv (and for that matter JISC). So one question is how should the academic/education sector respond to the ‘disruptive’ technologies (for that read web 2.0/ service provision on the network e.g. google and amazon services). Ken Chad mentioned the opportunity that the sector has in terms of the data known about users;for example click streams. The library management systems study (that Ken worked on with Sero Consulting) sees this as an opportunity for academic libraries to make their services more relevant to users. Of course there are delicate issues surrounding the use of click streams; not in the least privacy as Larry Johnston, NMC, pointed out in response to Ken’s question at the Eduserv Symposium.
The report covers far more ground that click streams, it is a horizon scan of what is happening in the UK academic sector in terms of LMS provision and what might be the requirements in the changing context that libraries now find themselves.
http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/resourcediscovery/libraryms.aspx
1,924 collections added to the Information Environment Service Registry
The Information Environment Service Registry is now richer by nearly 2,000 resources. These resources are collections of content that are hosted in the UK, relevant to UK higher education and free at point of use. The information about these collections was collected by the recent Digital Repositories and Archives Inventory.
The inventory completed in October and discovered 1,924 collections. Phase 2 of the inventory is due to complete in June 2008 and is expected to push the total number of collections up to approximately 3,000. The collections gathered from phase 2 will be added to the Information Environment Service Registry sometime after June 2008.
Users will benefit from this content being added to the Information Environment Service Registry as the resources can be easily discovered by portals and other applications. Similarly the collection owners will benefit as this represents another mechanism for discovering their resource.
Posted by: Andy McGregor