“Good APIs”
What makes a “good” API”? Can we say anything about good practice in providing or using machine interfaces to third party services on the web? UKOLN have consulted widely and suggest, among other things, that providers of APIs should make it useful, keep it simple, follow standards and use consistent naming structures. For API users there is perhaps less obvious good practice, but it’s important to choose the API carefully (they explain what this might mean), to think about risks, and respect the API terms of use.
UKOLN are now asking developers to comment on these principles; do they seem right? Is it useful to document them? For whom? How?
If you’ve got views on this then here’s where to post comments: http://blogs.ukoln.ac.uk/good-apis-jisc/.
The Information Environment (and Virtual Research Environment) Call for Proposals November 2008
The JISC is calling for proposals relating to the ‘Information Environment’ and ‘Virtual Research Environments’. This blog post relates only to those elements of the Call relating to the Information Environment, that is Strands A1-A6:
- Automated metadata generation & text mining (JISC contact: Balviar Notay b.notay@jisc.ac.uk or Amber Thomas amber.thomas@jisc.ac.uk)
- Developing e-infrastructure to support research disciplines (JISC contact: Neil Grindley n.grindley@jisc.ac.uk)
- Repositories: start-up (JISC contact: Andy McGregor a.mcgregor@jisc.ac.uk)
- Repositories: rapid innovation (JISC contact: Andy McGregor a.mcgregor@jisc.ac.uk)
- Repositories: enhancement (JISC contact: Neil Jacobs n.jacobs@jisc.ac.uk or Andy McGregor a.mcgregor@jisc.ac.uk)
- Preservation exemplars (JISC contact: Neil Grindley n.grindley@jisc.ac.uk)
There is also an accompanying briefing document which describes important background information, and outlines some requirements that are being placed on repositories that are involved in bids under these headings. The Call itself spells out the aims and intended scope of projects under these headings, so I won’t repeat it all here.
There will be a Briefing Day on 15th December 2008.
The purpose of this blog post is to be the anchor for an FAQ relating to Strands A1-A6 of the Call. If you have queries relating to these strands of the Call, you can contact the relevant JISC person as noted above and in the Call document, or you can add a comment to this blog post. Either way, if the query would be relevant to other bidders then our response will be via a further comment added to this blog post. In this way we hope to build up an FAQ that all potential bidders can access easily and quickly. We’d also welcome comments (or emails) on the use of the blog for this purpose.
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.
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.
Web tools for programme management
We recently had an internal JISC meeting where we discussed what web tools we use to help us with programme management. Lawrie Phipps and I prepared a list of the tools that we use or plan to use to help manage ourselves and our programmes. I thought it might be worth posting the list here. I’d be interested to hear of any tools that people are using that are not on this list. Apologies for the length:
Community building
Twitter http://twitter.com/ – won’t suit everyone but is very good for little snippets, observations and off the cuff chats that the web has not really replicated until now. Could be used to build communities and for lightweight communication between projects. A useful feature is the use of hash (#) tags, placing the # at the beginning of an event or project tag to aggregate comments.
Blogs – persuading projects to blog regularly is great for the programme manager, for a community of projects and for anyone interested in the project. Blogging is not natural to everyone so perhaps in some cases, blogging can be used to replace project reporting?
A Project Manager’s reflection on the issue of keeping a blog:
So is it worth it? Speaking personally and (for once) completely frankly, I’ve been quite enjoying writing, for several reasons. First, it has allowed me to do a bit of self-indulgent vanity publishing, something for which I criticise other bloggers but, hey, I’m a hypocrite! Second, the requirement to be reflective has made me think about various aspects of the project, which is no bad thing. Third, as it has turned out, I haven’t had to trouble my conscience by using buckets of whitewash to tell a positive story; the project really has been going pretty well.
Ning https://www.ning.com/ – easily build your own social network, a good place for people to get to know each other online, communities can be closed or open and communication can be public or private. Ning is also a useful tool to run before a workshop for participants to start thinking, and during the workshop for getting delegates to write up discussions/findings, this is especially useful in, for example, plenary sessions where sometimes some delegates may have a tendency to dominate.
Facebook http://www.facebook.com/ – I am not your friend, I don’t want to be poked, I can not be brought and sold as a pet, I am neither a werewolf hunter nor a vampire slayer, I don’t want a virtual pizza, if I hadn’t contacted you just after I left school what makes I think to talk to you 20 years later? FaceBook? Just say no!
That being said, some project staff are using facebook to some effect, but we need to be aware of issues such as IPR.
Jiscmail http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/ – tried and trusted method of community building. Even with the plethora of web 2.0 tools available to projects, the most reliable way of reaching most of our academic community is through e-mail, the JISC Mail lists are simple and effective.
Current awareness
Delicious http://delicious.com/ – the most popular social bookmarking tool. A little limited in some ways and with an unattractive interface but lots of people use it and persuading projects to share bookmarks is a very useful thing to do as it highlights overlaps of interest and promotes serendipitous discovery of information. An important element when using it to share is to encourage the use of ‘notes’ when bookmarking.
Diigo http://www.diigo.com/ – a newer social bookmarking tool, allows you to be more specific about which part of a webpage is bookmarked, it also allows annotation of webpages. It supports creation of groups and preparation of web slideshows. However, not as many people use it already so barrier to participation may be higher.
Twine http://www.twine.com/ – a new social bookmarking tool, which permits bookmarking of any document and analyses bookmarks for common people, places and organizations. Also allows for creation of private groups.
RSS readers (google reader, netvibes etc) http://lifehacker.com/390619/best-rss-newsreaders – like twitter, won’t suit everyone’s habits but if you can find a reader that suits you and can get into the habit of building rss feeds into daily routine then it is a fantastic way to keep up to date with a potentially massive amount of information
Dipity http://www.dipity.com/ - a simple timeline builder. Could be useful in giving projects or a more general community an idea of the steps that led to now and a rough outline of programme timescales.
Crowdsourcing
Ideascale http://www.ideascale.com/ - a tool to source ideas from the community and to have ideas voted for and commented on. Worked very well for the IE team to solicit discussion and ideas from the repository community (http://jiscrepository.ideascale.com/) but plenty to be aware of here, including waning of user interest and expectations attached to voting. Also Dialogr http://www.dialogr.com/
Mechanical turk https://www.mturk.com/mturk/welcome- take advantage of a community that are willing to work for you on small tasks for micropayments. Here is a great description of a project that used mechanical turk http://waxy.org/2008/09/girl_turk/
Topcoder http://www.topcoder.com/ - tap into a large community of developers. The IE team are talking to topcoder about using their services for the developer community strand of the new programme.
mysociety.org http://www.mysociety.org/ - not really crowdsourcing but they build websites that utilise or support democracy and have worked for the government, bbc and google. Perhaps they could offer JISC something?
Collaborating
Google docs https://docs.google.com – can be used for collaboration on documents in a team or in the community.
Confluence https://wiki.jisc.ac.uk/dashboard.action - wiki for collaboration and communication
Communicating
Skype http://www.skype.com/intl/en-gb/ - instant messaging, internet phone and conferencing tool
Jing http://www.jingproject.com/ - a screencasting tool. Could be used for projects to communicate developments to the community.
Flickr http://www.flickr.com/ - picture sharing
Youtube http://www.youtube.com/ - video sharing
BlipTV http://blip.tv/ – video sharing
Flowgram http://www.flowgram.com/ - a way to create tours through various websites and content (an alternative to powerpoint or an introduction to a certain area)
Jiscmail – essential for large and active communities
Annotate http://a.nnotate.com/ - provide annotated documents e.g. templates
Slideshare http://www.slideshare.net/ - great for sharing slideshows, provides nice widgets and embeddable flash players, not so great at being searched by google.
Bringing it all together
There is little point giving projects 6 different tools without some way of bringing them all together. Here are some suggestions for amalgamating content.
Netvibes http://www.netvibes.com, iGoogle http://www.google.com/ig, Pageflakes http://www.pageflakes.com/ – can amalgamate content with flexible widget based approach. If it has an rss feed it can be displayed on these pages. However it is much more flexible than just rss (see repository widget work http://www.netvibes.com/rwidgets#General, or the exemplary widgets produced by tfl http://www.tfl.gov.uk/widgets/). I have put together an example page to show some of the things it can do. http://www.netvibes.com/amcgregor#Prog_management, obviously this page is shareable so can be used by projects as well as programme managers.
Ning https://www.ning.com/ – widgets using content from other tools can be embedded in ning. This is likely to be more difficult but more flexible than the netvibes style approach.
Getting things done
Tools for managing personal information or workflow:
Zotero http://www.zotero.org/ - a free bibliographic management tool. Only suitable for personal use at the moment but social features coming soon.
Google calendar https://www.google.com/calendar/ - a calendar application which is extremely easy to use and displays calendars of other users very nicely.
Remember the milk http://www.rememberthemilk.com/ – a to do list application that can be shared and can be used in a number of different applications (twitter, google calendar, blackberries and mobile phones).
Evernote http://evernote.com/ - a note taking application, includes ability to clip content from any application. Fully searchable. Can be easily used across computers and on mobile devices.
Outlook - task list, calendar all in one place and lots of people use it. Some useful plugins such as xobni http://www.xobni.com/ which takes advantage of the hidden social network in your inbox.
RSS readers - a way to manage information overload (see above)
Location and travel
Dopplr - http://www.dopplr.com/ - a social network for regular business travelers.
Have fire eagle http://fireeagle.yahoo.net/ and related geo data tools and social networks got anything useful to offer us?
More complicated stuff
Yahoo pipes http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/ – loads of cool tools including a way to set up persistent searches across a range of resources http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=1b71cfefcc9933e084970aef476518ab (a nice explanation of how to set up a persistent google search taking advantage of the new rss feature: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/readwriteweb/~3/8HqjuPpekeY/how_to_use_the_new_google_web_feeds.php ) and to amalgamate whole lists of blogs into one rss feed http://infteam.jiscinvolve.org/2008/10/17/rsp-blog-directory-and-yahoo-pipes/.
Roll your own newsroom http://radar.oreilly.com/2008/10/rolling-your-own-newsroom.html – a description of how an rss reader can be used to create a webpage of information relevant to colleagues. Could be used within JISC or within project community.
Notes
Tagging. It is important to think about tags at the start of programmes and projects so that searching across a range of applications is simple and effective.
It is very unlikely that simply advising projects to use a tool will work, the programme manager will need to devote some energy to promotion and provision of quality content to ensure that the resources are useful to projects. The best way to promote the use of a tool is to effectively use the tool.
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.
RSP blog directory and yahoo pipes
Last week while playing around with yahoo pipes, I found this useful tool: http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=ypEo0_zd2xGgEDTaJhOy0Q
If you enter a link to an opml file it will aggregate all the rss feeds from that file into one tidy rss feed with each item labelled with which blog it came from.
The RSP published a series of opml files for a whole load of repository related blogs. These are categorised by blog type, one example is the personal blogs: http://www.rsp.ac.uk/blogs/opml.php?type=personal. Pop this link into the yahoo pipe (the box that says ‘the opml file is located at’), enter the number of items you want to appear in your rss feed and you get a handy little rss feed showing all the latest blog postings from that section of the directory.
This has saved me an awful lot of real estate on my netvibes page.
There is an opml file for all the blogs in the directory but this didn’t work too well for me when I put it through the pipe.
Harvesting usage data?
I was talking with a researcher the other day who said that, despite his institution mandating deposit of research papers in his institutional repository, he didn’t comply - prefering to deposit in an international subject repository. Naturally, I asked him ‘why?’. He said that it was because he wanted each of his papers to be in one, and only one, place on the web, so that he could get accurate download statistics for it. Obviously, we’re aware in the JISC IE team of the various arguments on this topic, and we’ve funded a piece of work to look at the practical ways in which subject and institutional repositories might work together, which could address this issue among others. We’ve also funded various projects on repository statistics, such as ‘Interoperable Repository Statistics’ (which has developed a tool that repository managers can use to analyse and share statistics) and an ongoing small piece of work on harmonising article-level usage data formats. There is also MESUR and other projects in this space.
However, in the real world, it is likely that copies of some research papers are likely to be at various places on the web, and we wondered whether a tool could be built that used fuzzy matching to identify copies that were probably the same paper, some means of querying the servers on which they sat to get download data, and a reliable way of then aggregating that data into some acceptable statistics. Is that an important use case? Is feasible to build something that addresses it?
What’s the relationship (if any) with name authority services (see the JISC pilot Names project) or persistent identifiers (see the JISC Resourcing Identifier Interoperability for Repositories - RIDIR demonstrator)?
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
Repositories Support Project (RSP) Workshop
I attended a very useful workshop last week which was run by the Repositories Support Project (RSP). About 50 people were there representing around 30 organisations and there were presentations on the following initiatives:
JULIET
RoMEO
OpenDOAR
ROAR
The Depot
JORUM
EThOS
OAISter and BASE
Intute Repository Search
There was also time for some discussion and this highlighted a few issues that might be worth flagging up.
Bill Hubbard (RSP) commented on the lack of success in the U.S. of the Open Access Mandate at the National Institutes of Health. (see Open Access news article for background: http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/2007/12/oa-mandate-at-nih-now-law.html). There appears to be only a 5% compliance rate at the moment so that obviously hasn’t worked! Bill made the point that this clearly reinforces the notion that the most important factor in improving repository deposit rates is not telling people ‘they must’, but to ensure that deposit is an integral part of the scholarly workflow.
(Obviously it’s not all about quantity, the material in these repositories has to be high quality and JISC is commissioning some work that will investigate techniques to help determine the quality of that deposited material).
Another point Bill made … It’s worth remembering that the amount of research that should be going into repositories is very substanstial. 6 out of 7 UK Research Councils have an archiving policy, and 36 out 38 Russell Group/1994 universities (which account for more than 80% of HE sector research done in the UK) have repositories.
It was good to see some of the repository stats reporting tools that are available in ROAR (Registry of Open Access Repositories - http://roar.eprints.org/)
One of repository manager participants at the event said that she recently had a conversation with an academic who was much more impressed with the information about repositories that he could see in OpenDOAR and ROAR than he was with the idea that his own institution had a fully operational and well stocked DSpace repository. We talked about the quality of advocacy materials that were available for repository managers to ’sell’ their systems and wondered if more could be done.
Some Other issues/comments from participants …
* JULIET & RoMEO were very useful resources. More should be done to develop API’s for both of these so that information could be embedded into institutional repository (IR) interfaces.
* The diversity of information and resources for HE IR managers was confusing. There should be a ‘one stop shop’.
* SWORD looks really interesting. Multiple deposit could improve the versioning problem where 4 different authors of a single paper are all putting separate (and potentially different) copies into their IRs.
* Is Intute more important for librarians than academics?
* The focus on colour-coded Open Access types is confusing and unhelpful. Green/white/Gold etc.
* Perhaps when talking about copyright issues, there should be more information about what IS possible rather than what isn’t. Copyright is not an issue that a lot of people want to engage with and some clear enabling advice would be good.
* IR managers on the whole had not started to grapple with preservation issues in a methodical way
These are just some of the notes I jotted down and the RSP will be reporting on the workshop in detail. But a very useful session - highly recommended for anyone in the repository field - particularly those who are fairly new to the area.
forthcoming events - http://www.rsp.ac.uk/events/