Join the Information Environment Team ?
Amber Thomas has just left the Information Environment Team to go on maternity leave. We are recruiting a one year maternity cover to Amber’s Programme Management position. The role mainly involves managing programmes and projects in the areas of digital repositories and open educational resources.
The deadline for applications is coming up very soon : 9am on the 17th September, but I thought I’d mention it here in case anyone that has missed the advert and is interested happened to come by this post. Further details. .
Brief view from the Beyond the Repositories Fringe – Edinburgh 09
The Beyond the Repositories Fringe event at Edinburgh University was very enjoyable and it was good to see presentations from JISC repositories projects. Ben O’Steen and Sally Rumsey (Oxford University Research Archive) key note presentation on “where are repositories going” was particularly interesting that it talked about the change over time in our thinking about repositories in that we a no longer thinking of repositories as a “box” – “paper in and paper out” but that the thinking has moved to the “integration with other hard and soft systems” and it’s also a collaboration of all stakeholders e.g. librarians, information technologists, archive and record managers, faculty, and administrators etc rather than just one stakeholder. In terms of future development what I thought was also interesting was the idea of separating out the services and storage. In terms of the Repositories Search Project Paul Walk (UKOLN) had come to this conclusion within the project last year, in that he decided to decouple the search service from the harvested content to allow for other services to be able to call on the aggregation of UK repositories and these could also be alternative “on the fly” presentation services. Again in thinking about separating out the storage from the services - in previous meetings with JISC projects we have been thinking about how we can enhance the data that we have so that intelligent services can present the data in interesting and appropriate ways for the users without the developer having to reengineer the data before being able to develop the services on top. This work includes things like Dublin Core application profiles, persistent identifiers for objects and personal identifiers (names). Ben also talked about the relationship between “things” or named things as being very important for discovery and there is a move towards providing the information as Linked Data in RDF. The JISC RKBExplorer project demonstrated how it can present a unified view over many repositories linked to many other datasets, showing links between resources. The JISC dotAC project will be building on this.
Another reoccurring issue that came up at the workshop was the issue of making deposit easier – Julian Cheal’s (UKOLN) Repository Deposit Tool using Adobe Air was certainly interesting in that the interface was simple and easy to use. It has the potential to be enhanced with the auto look-up tools and take into account such things like the Scholarly Works Application Profile (SWAP)…but these would need further development. Single deposit in multiple repositories was also something the key note presentation bought up as an area for further development. Automation was another area that was mentioned to help speed up deposit. One of the discussion outputs of the Policy-making for Research Data in Repositories session came to the conclusion that mandating deposit was not seen as something that, in of itself, would increase deposit, but it was the ease and the use of the tools themselves that would change behaviour workflows. JISC is planning a show and tell deposit event on the 12th October 09 to identify deposit tools (and perhaps combinations of tools) that would clearly benefit repository users if they could be taken up easily and with confidence, and to plot a path for those tools toward widespread and sustainable take-up.
In the plenary session - Cliff Lynch spoke about the requirement for data repositories and the different requirements for storage and we should be looking at the repository as suit of services that exist as components of a larger eco system. He talked about the repository possibly becoming a computational environment. He also talked about name authority and important piece of the scholarly infrastructure - we need to connect repositories to new name management infrastructure – identity management, federated access management, author IDs… He talked about the importance of annotation in repositories and also preservation policies and for when you preserve, destruct, transform etc. Unfortunately I had to leave the conference before the end of the plenary to catch a flight, so I missed that last nuggets of his repository wisdom…
Rachel Heery
My JISC colleagues and I were very sad to learn that Rachel Heery, formally of UKOLN, died last Friday after a long term illness. We will miss her and I am certain she will be missed by many in our community.
Rachel has contributed an enormous amount to the work of JISC over the years. She has helped to shape JISC strategy, programmes, projects and services. Most recently she worked with us in the area of digital repositories. Rachel’s contribution is so great that this sad occasion must not go by without acknowledgment of that, and acknowledgment of both her professionalism and friendship. Everyone I know that worked with Rachel enjoyed doing so.
Despite having to retire in December 2007 on the grounds of ill health, she continued to be an active member of the Repositories and Preservation Advisory Group and all that it entailed, as well as undertaking some pieces of consultancy for JISC.
The Information Environment Team was fortunate enough to spend a few days with Rachel this May in Birmingham at our Repositories and Preservation programme meeting. Rachel was there to present on her latest piece of work; the Digital Repositories Roadmap Review: towards a vision for research and learning in 2013. This piece of work represents for me some of the fabulous qualities of Rachel and why working with her was such a delight. She was able to really understand the context of work from the perspective of different stakeholders, she always seemed to understand the policy and the strategic drivers, she acted as a bridge between the technical people and the planners, she understood vision and pragmatism, she could assimilate diverse and complex trends and issues and make sense of them. This report is still current for us and we are using it as part of our planning processes.
Rachel has been involved in a long history of JISC related work, and in particular that relevant to the Information Environment programmes and services. She was involved in the e-Lib programme, the MODELS workshops, the Distributed National Electronic Resource and the subsequent Information Environment. At a recent meeting where we were discussing the Information Environment Rachel made a point that I felt was a good one that succinctly helps to articulate where we are now in relation to the DNER. The DNER (and subsequently the Information Environment) has been about access to distributed heterogeneous resources, Rachel made the summation that now we are concerned with both heterogeneous resources and heterogeneous services. A simple point, but an example of how good Rachel could be at getting to the nub of the matter and clarifying things.
What follows is just a few highlights from Rachel’s significant contribution to JISC work and that of the digital library community; these highlights come nowhere close to being comprehensive. They only cover some of her more recent work.
In 2005 she undertook an examination of the status of digital repositories in collaboration with Sheila Anderson. This helped lay the foundations of our programmes of work in this area. In 2006 she wrote the Repositories Roadmap with Andy Powell of the Eduserv Foundation. Andy had previously worked alongside Rachel at UKOLN where they were both Assistant Directors. As referred to above she recently reviewed this roadmap for us. These reports have had significant impact on the JISC investment in the area of repositories.
The Augmenting Interoperability across Scholarly Repositories meeting was held in New York in 2006, hosted by the Mellon Foundation and Microsoft. It focused on common areas of key interoperability and Rachel was a major contributor to that meeting. She presented on what was termed the ‘put’ interface. After discussion amongst colleagues in the UK, including CETIS, this was seen as a key technical solution to the population of repositories. What resulted from this was the creation of the SWORD protocol (Simple Web-service Offering Repository Deposit). This work continues to date and has had wide adoption, well beyond repositories.
When we returned from the New York meeting we were very aware of the significance that Hebert Van De Sompel’s work on OAI-ORE would have in terms of interoperability across repository content. Our funding timetable did not match direct involvement at that stage and Rachel and I discussed how we could try and ensure the UK digital repository community could continue discussion and be engaged in the issues of common repository interfaces and specifications. This resulted in the establishment of the Common Repositories Interface Group (CRIG) led by Jim Downing and Les Carr. The course of the Group changed somewhat but it has been the basis of discussions around specifications and the Dev8D event that proved to be very successful.
Rachel’s influence is still present in a lot of the work we now have underway. She was always robust and willing to be critical, and she would always pull out the stops to help when we might be up against it in terms of time for the issue of funding calls. As recently as December 2008 she gave our “12/08″ circular a critical eye and improved it immensely prior to it’s issue. We are lucky to have worked with Rachel and to have benefited from her expertise, humour and friendship. We miss her.
Our thoughts are with her family and friends.
Rachel’s publications.
[edit: I have seen a number of tributes to Rachel, Stu Weibel’s mentions a phrase that really does remind me of Rachel, “Hang on…” she did often use it when she was questioning something.]
User Behaviour Observational Study: analysis of usage data
In support of the study carrying out detailed observation of how individual students and researchers in Business and Economics use electronic information resources (my post of July 2), CIBER at UCL have provided an initial analysis of their e-book and e-journal usage data in Business and Economics as a working paper.
To quote from the Conclusions to the paper:
“Only tentative and draft conclusions are offered here because the study is ongoing and more data are to be evaluated. However, on the basis of the data we have evaluated it is clear that Business/Economics stands out in regard to e-book use in that:
1. these subjects are major and significant users of e-books in that they view them more, spend longer viewing titles and undertake much busier and intensive sessions
2. their e-book users tend to search off campus and are more likely to access the books via VLEs
3. a high proportion of e-book use comes from the newer universities (this is true for other subjects too)
In regard to e-journals, where a good deal more data evaluation has to be completed, it appears that Economists:
1. are significant users, especially so the ones from universities with big business schools
2. tend to search more out of hours and on weekends
3. have a strong preference for tables of contents and abstracts
4. read relatively low impact factor journals and have a tendency to favour current material”
CIBER’s main report will be included as an appendix to the report from the User Behaviour Observational Study later this year.
Information Environment programme start up meeting
We held a start up meeting for the projects in the Information Environment Programme 2009-11 and VRE phase 3 in Leicester on the 7th and 8th of July.
The event was focused around getting projects to network with each other and passing on some information that was important for projects to know. From my point of view the event was a success there was a great atmosphere, people partcipated in the sessions with enthusiasm and there were lots of interesting conversations happening. Here are some more impartial records of the event:
Presentations from the event are now up on the JISC website. The list is not complete yet but will be added to as the presentations are available.
The videos of the 30 second pitch that each project gave at the event are available on youtube and on the individual project pages on the JISC website. Again, not every video is up there yet but they will be added by the programme mangers shortly.
We used the tag inf11 for the event and you can view the twitter conversation for the event and the delicious bookmarks. We will continue to use the inf11 tag throughout the programme for twitter, blogs, bookmarks, videos, pictures etc. You can see an aggregation of all this content on the public netvibes page for the programme. The project blogs will be aggregated on netvibes too.
Reflections on the Repositories and Preservation Programme
Some of you will recall that back in May, we invited those of you who participated in the JISC Repositories and Preservation Programme #rpmeet (2006-2009) to come along to the Aston Business School to reflect on what the programme achieved, what knowledge it generated, what value it delivered and what we learnt from it.
Judging by the feedback we got and our own perceptions of the event, it was a highly productive meeting and certainly gave us JISC programme managers food for thought. We thought it would be useful to combine those thoughts with some of the helpful comments we received in the feedback forms and share them with the community in the hope that we might continue to generate commentary and opinion about some of the themes that were raised at the meeting.
The full document is available on the JISC website at: http://bit.ly/nJQW2
The document (5 pages) is in 6 sections and refers to a total of 38 issues. These issues are clustered in sections as follows:
1. Meeting Planning
2. Programme Design
3. Dissemination Issues
4. Knowledge
5. Strategic Ideas
6. Potential Areas of Work
To give you an idea of the content, the last two sections follow …
5. Strategic Ideas
* A small working group might be convened around the subject of ‘research information management’.
* Some further work is required to secure the sustainability of software outputs, where those outputs are designed to be more substantial offerings to the community than simply trials or demonstrators.
* Corporate business requirements (rather than research and learning imperatives) can also drive the success of a repository. They can help clarify the aims of repository work by showcasing implementations, workflows and the amassing of content. There are a number of drivers acting upon institutional repositories and this diversity should be supported.
* There will be an increased requirement to link research outputs with data and this will need collaboration between JISC, Research Councils and HEI’s.
* The top 3 issues discussed in the ideas room, in order of popularity were:
- how do we increase the content in repositories?
- what does a successful repository look like?
- what features are missing from repositories?
Delegates ideas to address these issues were captured in writing and on video and represent important input for JISC in scoping further work.
* Discussion of the preservation and curation of learning materials largely hinges around roles and responsibilities. The drivers to preserve in this area are precautionary rather than for the purposes of active re-use. Preservation specialists may profit from directing their attention to those with administrative rather than teaching responsibilities.
* Text-mining is potentially a powerful core tool for repositories.
* Further exploration is required around the business models and benefits of individual and shared model repositories using cloud based strategies.
* Further development may be needed for repository solutions that support rich local requirements and further integration with the Web.
* Some raised awareness of the issues around quality assessment of repository content may be valuable. National data centres do not accept everything they are offered but institutional repositories operate within a diversity of contexts. It may be sensible for some IR’s to accept all deposits whilst others may be selective. Assessing the quality of research outputs is a complex problem.
6. Potential Areas of Work
* Demonstrating the value of embedding the repository into the workflow of research and learning is very important, rather than simply relying on a consensus opinion that it makes sense to do so.
* The startup and enhancement element of the programme has, in some cases, had a demonstrable impact on the status of staff within institutions (i.e. project staff have been made permanent). It may be useful to try and find out how participation in the programme has affected the career and professional prospects of those involved; this is also an issue that could be explored more generally across programmes.
* The repository roadmap is an important document that will support further phases of strategic input; the issue of meaningful measures and metrics regarding proportion, quality, use and other impact is a particular challenge that needs to be further addressed.
* More work needs to be commissioned to help institutions set up internal systems for managing learning materials.
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?