A new climate for meteorological publishing?
***This is a guest post from Fiona Hewer on behalf of the JISC OJIMS project***
Scientific information about weather and climate change is being scrutinised more than ever to meet the need for advice to policy-makers on greenhouse gas emissions and their consequences. The Royal Meteorological Society (RMetS), a world-leading publisher, and the British Atmospheric Data Centre, a NERC repository, have been working on new ways to provide scientific quality assurance and access to meteorological data, to meet this need, and the wider requirements of the meteorological sciences.
The internet provides many ways to give access to data and information on-line, from online journals and institutional repositories to project and personal websites. ”Overlay Journals” are websites that can sit above all these sources, collating information on a particular topic and providing quality control information, such as through a peer-review process. So, for users with an interest in a particular topic, an overlay journal gives wide, quality-controlled access from a single web site.
The OJIMS project (Overlay Journal Infrastructure for Meteorological Sciences) aimed to investigate overlay journal mechanics, create an open-access repository and evaluate business models for potential overlay journals. It has been funded mainly by the JISC Repositories and Preservation Programme (Repository Start-up and Enhancement Strand) and also supported by NERC. The project has raised awareness of the potential benefits and obstacles to digital publishing in the meteorological community, including scientists and organisations in the public and private sectors.
The project activities included; surveys of scientists and stakeholder organisations; review of outputs from other JISC projects such as RIOJA and other work on open-access; identification of the benefits, risks and costs of two overlay journal scenarios; development of a document editor for overlay journals; and creation of a new document repository.
Fiona Hewer of Fiona’s Red Kite was engaged by RMetS to evaluate the business models. It evaluated the technologies and business cases associated with new overlay journals. It is hoped that this will lead to the publication of a data journal in the near future.
The OJIMS project outputs have been used to inform NERC’s information strategy.
The full reports can be downloaded here. More information is available on the project website including a link to the CEDA-docs demonstration repository.
The ‘library management system’: a round up of some (fairly) recent initiatives
This is rather a long post - but it is on a big subject!
Last year saw the publication by the JISC and SCONUL of a major report on library management systems used in UK higher education. A lot has happened since. So, I thought it might be useful to post an update - even a long one - on some related recent JISC activities.
The LMS report highlighted a number of issues to be addressed in order to make library resources as visible and accessible as possible in the digital environment, including:
• integrating library systems and other university systems so that relevant data can be shared between them and users can access services in different ways (within university portals, virtual learning environments, etc.)
• making library metadata (catalogue records) available to other services (such as web search engines and collaborative web tools) so that information about library resources can be easily found, used and personalised by users where and how they choose
• using library usage data (information about how many times an item has been borrowed and by what kind of user, for example) to indicate how individual library resources are being used, thereby providing a basis for user ‘rating’ for library resources – and doing this at a ‘network level’ (so not limited to one library) in order to have access to enough meaningful data
• improving the quality of search interfaces and reducing the number of different systems which users need to search to access the full range of resources available to them.
JISC is just one partner in seeking to address these issues with vendors of library systems developing new discovery tools, OCLC’s recent announcement about using WorldCat as the basis for effectively a shared library management system and SCONUL investigating the potential for shared library management systems, for example.
So, what has been happening on the JISC front?
The TILE (Towards Implementation of Library 2.0 and the e-Framework) project has investigated the use of Web 2.0 tools by library services, outlined a possible new model (a ‘library domain model’) for how library services might fit in the wider information environment (to help inform further development of library systems) and proposed testing the extraction and combination of usage data from a number of university systems to provide the bases of user ratings for library resources.
As you may know from some earlier posts, reports from the TILE project are now available on the JISC web site and there is a workshop on the domain model planned for June 19. Further work is planned to test extracting and combining usage data as noted above.
Meanwhile, EDINA and MIMAS are developing the search interfaces for SUNCAT (the national serials catalogue) and COPAC (the national research libraries’ catalogue) as part of the D2D (Discovery to Delivery) project. The work includes providing Web 2.0 and other tools to enable users to share metadata and to link from bibliographic records to ‘the thing itself’ (or a means of obtaining it). The project partly builds on the recommendations and findings of the DPIE (Development of Personalisation for the Information Environment) investigations of 2008.
Continuing the theme of ‘joining up’, the JISC Scholarly Communications Working Group recently commissioned a study into the existing and potential links between library management systems and digital repositories.
And the winning entry at the recent Dev8D Web Developers event was a prototype reading list system which aimed to make it easier to extract information for reading lists from catalogues, Amazon and elsewhere and then make the reading lists available in different applications.
Following the major ‘Google generation’ report of early 2008, efforts also continue to understand what information services people actually need with the launch of a new British Library/JISC study of young researchers’ use of online and physical information environments. JISC’s Publishers’ Action Group has also commissioned an observational study of how individual students and academic staff in Business and Economics use electronic information resources.
So, there is a lot going on - and that is just within a JISC context. If nothing else, the activity in this area illustrates that the ‘library management system’ is even more the subject of debate than it was when the JISC/SCONUL study was commissioned not so very long ago …
Repositories and Preservation programme meeting - Day 2
Neil Grindley introduces day two of the Repositories and Preservation Programme Meeting in Birmingham:
The tag for the meeting is rpmeet. Follow on twitter
Repositories and programme meeting - liveblog
The link below will take you to the liveblog for the Repositories and preservation programme meeting
Repositories and preservation programme meeting
This live blog will bring together tweets about this discussions happening at the forum session at the programme meeting.
The forum will consist of two tables and will discuss the following topics:
- 4-4.30 What role for repositories as part of an institutional research information management infrastructure
- 4.15-4.45 Where next for repositories and learning and teaching materials
- 4.30-5.00 How can text minig support repository tasks
- 4.45-5.15 What is the scale of of the problem in relation to sharing research data
- 5-5.30 Sustainability and institutional impact: how can we exploit the value of innovation projects?
Close of the repositories and preservation programme
The repositories and preservation programme is coming to an end and over the next two days we will be gathering all the projects together for a final meeting to think about what we have learned and where we are going next with repositories and preservation.
This blog will be used to gather outputs from the event.
First up we have Neil Grindley introducing the event and talking about what will happen on the first day.
Of course there is already further work going on in this area. The Information Environment Programme 2009-11 (tag: inf11) has started and the projects in that programme are just getting going. You can read all about them on the JISC website.
“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/.
A recruitment toolkit for JISC projects
The JISC Repositories Start Up and Enhancement (SUE) strand is coming to an end now. There were 44 projects in that strand all working with repositories in some way or another. One of the most common problems experienced by the projects was with recruiting staff to work on the project. In some cases the problems were so severe that the project outputs needed to be scaled back.
In an effort to help future projects avoid the recruitment problems experienced by the SUE projects, we commissioned Brunton Consultancy limited to produce a recruitment toolkit to help project managers with recruiting.
The toolkit is available now and is full of helpful advice, templates and resources that deal with the whole process of project recruitment from planning through advertising to the job offer. It also has a section on employing consultants.
The toolkit was commissioned specifically to help repository projects so some of the information is specific to that community, however most of the toolkit will be relevant for anyone who finds themsleves having to recruit staff for a project.
Developer Happiness Days Winners Announced…Soon!
As many of you will know from the longtail of developer happiness days (tag: dev8D), the shortlist for the developer decathlon has now been announced. Potential winners of the Five Thousand Pound Grand Prize (or even the two-thousand pound runner up prize) include:
(IN NO PARTICULAR ORDER):
“List8D” prototype by Team Bsmmmm
“Lazy Lecturer” prototype by Team Three Lazy Geeks
“sh!” prototype by team Rangtangdingdong
“splashurl” prototype by team halfHourHacks
“SpACE tool” prototype by team SpACEmen (second video here):
STAY TUNED FOR THE ANNOUNCEMENT OF THE WINNERS THIS WEEK!
Happy developers
As mentioned before on this blog, last week we ran a large event aimed at software developers in HE. Slightly tempting fate, the event was called developer happiness days, but judging by the mood of the event, the feedback and by the happiness meter that one of the delegates cooked up, it lived up to its name.
The event was organised and driven forward with immense enthusiasm by David Flanders, one of two new recruits to the JISC Information Environment team (look out for a future blog post for further news on that). I was fortunate enough to be able to help David with the event and also attended for 4 of the 5 days. The event was a hive of activity, much of which was captured on either Twitter or the event blog. I wanted to highlight some of the really interesting things that have emerged from the event so far:
There were a number of interesting talks given at the event, perhaps most relevant to this blog were:
- An introduction to agile development methodology by Graham Klyne
- A talk on the problems with PDF by Peter Sefton (video)
- A discussion on collective intelligence led by Tony Hirst
The industrious delegates also knocked up some interesting tools during the event:
- The happiness meter mentioned above was developed by Sam Easterby-Smith to use Twitter to measure the happiness of those at the event. It will be able to be reused for other events. Ben O’Steen (who had a large role in designing the event) has a really useful summary of the use of Twitter at the event on his blog.
- Chris Gutteridge was particularly industrious, producing:
- A url shortening service for people giving demonstrations and presentations
- A JSON output for EPrints
- A new way to deal with Microsoft Office documents for EPrints, as described on Les Carr’s blog
These are just some highlights of a great event and the most interesting outputs may be yet to come. The main focus of the event was a competition called the developer decathlon where delegates were asked to show us the future of academic software. There was a strong focus on the user in the competition as 10 users were brought in to come and talk to the delegates about their software issues. We ran a dragon’s den to give feedback on the delegate’s ideas and the dragons were all very impressed with the ideas of the 11 teams who ventured into their den.
The winner of this competition will be announced in a month’s time and this will coincide with a more thorough report on what was a very rich event. In the meantime, the event blog has lots of useful content and is worth exploring.
Repository Software Event
The JISC Repository Support Project is putting on a Repository Software Day on 19th March 2009 in Manchester. The event looks really interesting. There are open source and commercial repository software providers attending and the programme is a good mix of case studies, surgeries and discussion sessions. More details can be found on the events page of the RSP site.
From the event announcement:
The aim of the day is through exhibition and demonstration, to introduce Repository Managers and Technical Support Officers to a range of existing and developing Repository software and technology; and to allow the chance for discussion and solution discovery between delegates and software providers through exhibition, case studies, surgeries and user groups.Programme highlights include:
- Repository Software Exhibition
- Repository Software Case Studies
- Repository Software User Groups
- Repository Software Surgeries