CALL RELEASED: Podcast on jiscDEPO & jiscEXPO Call.

Yesterday the JISC Grant Funding Call 2/10 (Title: “Deposit of research outputs and Exposing digital content for education and research”) was released on the JISC website.  The two Strands in this Call are asking for separate sets of project bids and I’d like to clarify each in its own right:

These two strands of projects will be separate in their project remits, however there is significance in our suggestion that the Web can and should act as the primary place where open content should reside.  It is essential that both the process of deposit and then expose is as simple and as straightforward for the user as possible.

To help clarify each of these strands I’ve had my JISC colleagues quiz me on the Call document for each strand so that we can give a basic overview of how to read the Call document.

To note, the following resources will be referred to in both podcasts so please make sure to have the following on hand while listening:

12 minute podcast discussion between David and Andy to give an overview of Strand A (Deposit) of the Call document (jiscDEPO):

Podcast on jiscDEPO Call

12 minutes podcast discussion  between David and Frederique on an overview of Strand B (Expose) of the Call document (jiscEXPO):

Podcast on jiscEXPO Call

Please don’t hesitate to call or email me (David F. Flanders) if there are any further questions with regards to both strands.

March 10, 2010 | Filed Under Uncategorized | Leave a Comment 

CALL ANNOUNCEMENT: Exposing Digital Content for Education and Research

PLEASE WATCH THIS SPACE (subscribe to the feed for this blog) FOR FURTHER INFORMATION ABOUT THE “EXPOSING DIGITAL CONTENT FOR EDUCATION AND RESEARCH” (aka Linkeddata) CALL.

London, University of London Student Union.  Today at the #Linkeddata #London meetup JISC announced that a Call will be issued in March requesting bids for projects to make content available on the Web working using linked data approaches.

To note, the above announced call was originally labelled on the JISC funding Roadmap as “Innovative ways to Deposit, Expose and Discover Web Resources”.  The original grant funding call was planned for issue in early January but due to the funding letter from DBIS to HEFCE on 22 December 2009 it was put on hold whilst funding implications were assessed.  At the HEFCE Board meeting in late January the decisions regarding the  final impacts on current capital budgets were agreed.   As a result of this the grant funding Call will now go ahead, albeit with a changed scope and a lower budget, it’s emphasis will still be upon deposit and exposure of content.  The re-scoped Call is summarised below.  We aim to have this call out in March and there will be a six week bid preparation period.

Strand Title Description Total £ Max £ per project Range £ per project Max number of projects Max Duration
B Expose Projects that enable content to be made available on the Web using structured data, in particular linked data which increases its potential value to researchers, teachers and learners. £750,000 £100,000 £10-£100k 20 12 months

As soon as this call is approved by policy we will announce that the call is live and that we welcome proposals.  If you have any queries in the meantime please contact d.flanders@jisc.ac.uk for further information.

This Call strand will also be released with the Deposit strand of the Call.  Please see separate post for further information about the Deposit Call.

February 24, 2010 | Filed Under Uncategorized | 1 Comment 

Happy Christmas 2009

Wishing you a Happy Christmas and all best wishes for the New Year!

jisc-ie-team-xmas-card-small.jpg

December 14, 2009 | Filed Under Uncategorized | Leave a Comment 

Repositories and preservation programme - evaluation

From 2006-2009 JISC ran the repositories and preservation programme. This represented a 14 million pound investment in repositories to store the outputs of research and learning, the preservation of those outputs and the infrastructure and technologies necessary to manage this large scale curation of content. Full details of this programme and the 92 projects associated with it can be found on the jisc website.

We have recently received the evaluation report from the programme evaluators Evidence Base.  The report can be found in the Information Environment repository. The report provides a good overview of what was acheived in the programme. However since the report is 98 pages long and few people outside of JISC will be interested in it in its entirety we thought it would be a good idea to summarise the report in a series of posts on this blog.

The posts will appear over the next few weeks and will address the following areas:

  1. Repositories
  2. Tools and innovations
  3. Standards and interoperability
  4. Shared infrastructure services
  5. Preservation
  6. Conclusions and the future
December 13, 2009 | Filed Under Uncategorized | Leave a Comment 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

November 11, 2009 | Filed Under Uncategorized | 2 Comments 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

DEPOSIT TOOL FEATURES:

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

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

DEPOSIT TOOL FLOWS:

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

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

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

1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

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

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

November 3, 2009 | Filed Under Uncategorized | 6 Comments 

Look what you can do with library circulation data!

The JISC MOSAIC project Developer Competition attracted entries from England, Scotland, Wales and the United States. The winner of the £1000 award was Alex Parker, an undergraduate studying Computer Science at the University of Southampton, who developed a compelling presentation of the library user activity data represented as the ‘Book Galaxy’. The runners up were Andrew Isherwood (2nd place – University of Aberystwyth) and Alistair Young (3rd – University of Highlands and Islands)

The MOSAIC project is investigating the possibilities for data covering user activity such as book circulation across UK Higher Education libraries. In summer 2009, the project ran the Developer Competition to see what applications might be imagined and built on such data, looking for innovative approaches in terms of applications, query and display interfaces. Entries were required to use data released under Creative Commons licence by the University of Huddersfield, containing circulation records linked to the course affiliations of the borrowers. 

The judges received 6 working applications, which exceeded expectations in terms in terms of quality and imagination. In addition to the award three winners, the judges commended entries from Tony Hirst and Owen Stephens of the Open University and from Sean Hannan of John Hopkins University. Ken Chad (Ken Chad Consulting) summed up the feelings of all four judges in commenting ‘I had an enjoyable couple of hours with these; it warmed my heart to see them - hats off to these guys!’  

The applications covered three important areas:         

Improving Resource Discovery:     

Supporting learning choices:       

Supporting decision making:       

The MOSAIC team will be seeking feedback from Higher Education library and learning practitioners on all six applications at the series of workshops over the next month at the Universities of Edinburgh, Sheffield, Sussex and the Open University.  

The applications will also be featured at the concluding MOSAIC event at the University of Wolverhampton on Wednesday 18 November, which will inform the project recommendations to JISC and to the SCONUL Shared Services project on the opportunities relating to activity data and recommendation services that might be pursued within the sector. All interested parties are invited to sign up for the event by emailing david.kay@sero.co.uk.  

Download this document for URLs and further details for the six entries plus the MOSAIC project demonstrator.

October 21, 2009 | Filed Under Uncategorized | Leave a Comment 

“Students like you also borrowed … Harry Potter” Assessing the possibilities and pitfalls surrounding the exploitation of library user activity data and recommendations

MOSAIC Project Event – Wednesday 18 November 2009 (10.00 to 16.00) at the University of Wolverhampton

Venue

This event is kindly hosted by the University of Wolverhampton in the MX Building on the City Campus WV1 1AD. There is mainline rail access (Wolverhampton) and nearby car parking (Wolves football ground). 

Attendance & Registration

This event seeks to involve a cross section of managers and practitioners from university library and wider services. It will also be of interest to systems developers and vendors. It is limited to 30 delegates.Email philippe.ugochukwu@sero.co.uk to reserve your place(s) stating any special dietary or access requirements. Joining instructions will be issued.

Overview

The JISC MOSAIC project has been investigating the possibilities for exploiting the user activity and usage data that might be available to the Higher Education community – to benefit libraries, national services and their users.During 2009 the project has generated 7 demonstrators, worked with a variety of real library data and run a series of practitioner workshops. In the process it has gathered a great deal of intelligence about the possibilities and pitfalls for individual universities and national services.The potential to add value for students, researchers and lecturers is weighed against challenges in terms technology (scale, distribution, aggregation), data ownership and protection, quality of data, differences between media (books, journals, etc) and value relative to competing services in a Web 2.0+ world.This concluding MOSAIC event focuses the project findings in a series of key debates. We hope to draw on your professional experience to develop a shared understanding of the challenges, the desirable opportunities and potential early developments – informing the project recommendations both to JISC and to the SCONUL Shared Services project.

For more on the MOSAIC project see

http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/inf11/mosaic

http://www.sero.co.uk/jisc-mosaic.html

Event Programme

09.30 Refreshments on arrival at the University of Wolverhampton

10.00 Welcome– Fiona Parsons (University of Wolverhampton & SCONUL)

10.10 Introduction: the Problem & the Project– David Kay (MOSAIC)

10.25 Where is the data? Discussion

10.40 Keynote: ‘Activity Data and the Global Information Economy: The who, what, when, where, how, why of an emerging future’- Paul Miller (Cloud of Data)

11.10 Library & Service Perspective: The University of Huddersfield experience- Dave Pattern

11.30 Breakout 1: ‘Being Practical: What real uses are there for activity data?’ Session informed by the MOSAIC developer competition applications, with choice of groups (student, research, library uses).

12.15 Report back and discussion

12.40 Lunch & Opportunity to view demonstrators

13.30 Four Perspectives:

14.30 Breakout 2: ‘Challenges & Solutions’ – Choice between Technical, Data and Service breakout groups

15.15 Refreshments

15.30 Report back and panel Q&A – ‘Great ideas to desirable solutions’

16.00 Close

October 21, 2009 | Filed Under Uncategorized | Leave a Comment 

iPres 2009 - Preservation Infrastructure Track

In San Francisco at iPres sitting in the preservation infrastructure track.

Stephen Abrams (CDL) is telling us about micro-curation services. Lots of clear categorisation of types of services that institutions might require. Currently talking about storage requirements. Provide for safety through redundancy, meaning through context, utility through service. Rattling through too fast to capture detail.

Q. How do CDL services compare with iRods?

A. i-Rods are all part of one controlled environment. CDL Micro-services can run as small discreet functions

Pam Armstrong and Johanna Smith from Library and Archives Canada.

They have a trusted Digital repository project that is running from 2008-2010. They are showing a value management framework. The first concern is ’significance’. They are looking at government records and are trying to determine which records are important even before they arrive at the archive. Talking about a filtering process. Trying to deal with web 2.0 issues and are working on some guidelines.

They have established a records management task force with a high level of government support. A directive on recordkeeping is linked to a management accountability framework. If departments are found to be wanting with their records management function, they are denied the right to delete records. Good stick. There are functional requirements for EDRMS based on ISO. There is a proposed shared service for EDRMS for government info in Canada. They have built open source software eRTA for records managers. They have been working on metadata core set. They are using MODS and MARC and the info is discoverable by public. They have got to their summary already … my o my - these talks are quick!

The lessons learnt include the usefulness of the mandatory instrument that has consequences (see above).

Q. do you accept all formats?

A.  No, they have acceptable formats. Can’t do all formats.

Q. How implemented is all of this?

A. The implementation is uneven. All the instances across govt are implemented inconsistently. They have got lots of work to do to bring the legacy information into line.

Robert Sharpe - Tessella

Representing PLANETS consortium. Title is “Are you Ready? Assessment of readiness of organisations for Digital Preservation”. (I’m interested in this talk. Wondering how this matches up with JISC-funded AIDA project). They did a survey. To establish whether people were ready to use Digital Preservation solutions. The target group for PLANETS is national libraries and archives. There are 96 of these in Europe. They also invited any other interested parties to contribute. They got 206 responses. 70% responses from Europe.  They were a diverse community representing a range of roles.

15% digital preservation

16% in general preservation

22% curation

16% IT

also directors researchers data managers etc …

93% aware of DP challenges.

17% had not considered solutions.

52% did not have preservation policies.

They were 3 times more likely to have a DP budget if they had a DP policy in place. The majority had budgets to do capital activities. DP not really embedded in the institutions that responded still. What needs to be preserved? Stuff in file systems = 77% … many other categories going down to a long tail. National Libraries feel they have almost no control of the formats they have to accept. National Archives however claim high levels of control.

80% of organisations say they have less than 100TB to store in 2009. They think that by 2019, 70% orgs will have more than 100TB and 42% will have more than 1Pb. 85% have a solution or are working on one. They are generally expecting ‘plug and play’ components. That’s the trend and what people are expecting.

What functionality is important? Single most important function was that the repository must maintain authenticity, reliability and integrity of records. 17 different functions cited. Least important function is ‘checks for duplicate items’.Very little agreement on which standards should be used! (surprise surprise!) Of 13 standards on Robert’s chart, PREMIS in the middle in terms of who is using it already.

Summary …

Excellent start on getting DP message out
More work needed on policies and budgets
Wide range of types of digital info from range of sources
Significant quantities of data to preserve
Component-based solutions required
Best practice not yet clear
Early adopters are busy and planning to do more

Q. We are doing a good job with early adopters but what about the wider community. The success factor will be general users engaging with Digital Preservation

A. Yes

Q. The standards you showed, the figures are high for people not even having heard of them!

A. Yes.

End of session

October 5, 2009 | Filed Under digital curation, records management, preservation, Uncategorized | 3 Comments 

Guide to using some web 2.0 services in JISC projects - part 1 of 3

At the recent start up meeting for projects in the JISC Information Environment Programme 2009-11 some people suggested that it might be useful to produce a guide to using web 2.0 services in JISC projects.

With the help of Brian Brooks of the Clarion project, I have written the guide. It focuses on using tags to aggregate content about and related to the projects, to communicate about the project and to monitor any discussions related to the project.

The guide is quite long and likely to only have a relatively short shelf life so we have decided to serialise the guide on this blog and deposit the complete document in the  ie repository.

Here is part 1 - setting up tags, blogs and twitter

Giving your project an identity – setting up a Tag

Perhaps the first thing to consider if you want to take advantage of the various web 2.0 services out there is to give your project a short catchy identifier – a “tag”.  A tag is a label that is used to aggregate the content that gets stored and created on these services.  If you consistently use the same tag in blogs, Twitter, bookmarks, etc, then it becomes an easy way for people to search for content across many systems.

Tags are usually an acronym or are similar to the project’s name.  They should ideally be short and unique.  They should not be a common word or name - you want the tag to stand out if someone searches for it in a search engine such as Google. When you’re deciding on a tag, it is worth doing a few Google searches with possible tags to see if they are being used by anybody else before you start to use them.

Example tags: We are using the tag “inf11” for the Information Environment Programme 2009-11.  We use inf11 in all the web 2 tools that we use. You can type “inf11” into Google or other web tools and it will show content created under our programme. Another tag we use is “jiscri”, which we use for the rapid innovation strand of projects within this programme. We may use these tags individually or in conjunction depending on the audience we want to reach.

Tags FAQs: 

Q: Is there a particular syntax for tags?
A: Use numbers and letters but no punctuation marks (hyphens, commas, spaces etc.)

Q: Do you recommend any tags for me to follow?
A: Yes we are using the tag inf11for the Information Environment Programmer 2009-2011 and jiscri for the JISC Rapid Innovation strand of projects. We are using this tag in a variety of different web 2 sites and the instructions below describe how to follow these tags in the various services. We recommend you follow your own project tag to see if anyone else is talking about your project.

Q: How can I find out what tags people are using?
A: There is no easy way to do this at present but UKOLN are developing a prototype in this area.

Blogs

Blogs are a great way to communicate about project developments or interesting issues, debates and problems that arise during the course of the project. This not only helps with project dissemination but acts as a project journal which makes the process of preparing formal reports about the project much simpler as deliverables and issues have already been written about and can be copied into the formal report.

Tagging is very useful on blogs as it allows aggregation across individual blogs via sites like Technorati and also enables subject specific RSS feeds from within a blog.  So, for example, it would be easy to see all the blog posts from a project on the topic of software development.

If you do blog as a project then it is important to engage in the blogosphere and read other people’s blogs in relevant areas, link to them from your blog and comment on other’s posts. This helps make new contacts and encourages people to look at and comment on your blog.

Of course there are an awful lot of blogs and keeping up with them can be hard which is why it is essential to investigate feed readers and aggregation pages (see part 2 of this series) until you find the one that suits you. A good reader or aggregation page can be your subject-specific newspaper and can be an invaluable resource.

Blogs FAQs:

Q: How should I ensure that I keep up with relevant blogs?
A: Two main methods.  First is to simply remember to regularly look at the blog’s website.  Second is to use an aggregator (see part 2 of this series) to grab updates from all the blogs you’re following, and then read from the one location.

Q: Which are the blog hosting sites that are commonly used by JISC projects?
A: JISC runs a service called jiscinvolve which is a blog hosting platform. It is very easy to set up blogs on jiscinvolve. Simply go to jiscinvolve and follow the instructions. Of course there are plenty of other hosting options. One example is wordpress – it’s free and open-source.  You can set up a site for your project, and you’ll get a URL such as myprojecttag.wordpress.com

Q: Can you give some examples of good project blogs?
A: You can see the aggregation of project blogs and other recommended blogs at the inf11 netvibes page 

Twitter

Twitter is a networking communications tool for short messages, essentially it is like text messaging on your mobile but communicating to many people instead of one or a few. It is free to use. The messages – “Tweets” – are visible to anybody, but can also be directed to specific people.  Twitter is perhaps the most divisive of web 2.0 sites, you will find plenty of people who love it and plenty who hate it. However there are some very useful aspects of it that can be turned to a project’s advantage.

It can be used for communication and networking with your programme manager, other projects and other people working in similar areas. Twitter is only useful if you find a decent amount of relevant and interesting people to follow. Your programme manager will be able to suggest relevant people to follow and looking at who other people follow is also a good way of identifying useful people.

It can be a good dissemination channel for short, frequent bursts of information that are relevant to the area you are working in or that you have learned and want to share or simply something that you want to publicise.Twitter has a few conventions which are opaque to the first time user.

We use twitter as a monitoring tool as well, so we have searches set up for mentions of jisc and use of relevant hashtags such as #inf11 and #jiscri. These searches are done using search twitter and the RSS feed of the search is grabbed and put in an aggregator such as netvibes (see part 2 of this series). This could also be done for project tags or for searches relevant to the project. Projects may be interested in monitoring the programme hashtags to see what the programme or other projects are up to.

This kind of tag monitoring is particularly useful at events where twitter becomes a back channel for conversations, questions and networking.

One important thing to be aware of is that Twitter does not let you search back for more than a couple of weeks of messages. Therefore if you want to keep an archive of all tweets using a certain tag then it is advisable to use a service such as Twapper Keeper to set up an archive for a particular tag. See the jiscri archive for an example

Twitter FAQs:

Q: Can you recommend a tool for managing and reading Twitter?
A: Twitter can be monitored using a normal web browser.  Other alternatives include:

Q: How do you use #tags in Twitter?
A: For example, the following message is tagged with “#jisc” and “#inf11”:

Q: I’ve seen webpages used at conferences to display tweets, what are they?
A: These include:

Q: Can I search Twitter?
A: Yes, at http://search.twitter.com 

Q: How can I see what #tags are available?
A: Try for example:

Q: Can you recommend a site to learn more about Twitter?
A: Try for example:

Part 2 of this series will cover: social bookmarking, aggregation and note-taking

Part 3 of this series will cover: skype, publicising contact details and further information

September 23, 2009 | Filed Under Uncategorized | 2 Comments 

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