Bridging the Divide: The role of libraries in the sciences
http://www.flickr.com/photos/mikolski/3269902495/
While libraries come to terms with new forms of scholarly communication and the technological transformation of the academy, has one academic domain already drifted beyond reach?
Have the sciences already become self-sufficient in their information needs? Are libraries lacking in the services and information resources that scientists require?
In the first of three reports on Research Support Services for Scholars: Chemistry Project, a study being undertaken by Ithaka S+R on UK institutions, it is clear that within chemistry, and arguably the sciences more generally, a growing distance is developing between the everyday work of chemists and the library. As the report makes clear:
“This gap in mutual understanding prevents partnerships from developing between chemists and the library”
While the Chemistry Project is a researcher-centric approach to understanding the scholarly and information needs and requirements of Chemists, this first report update has taken the library and liaison services as a starting point.
The report is based on conversations with research support professionals (mostly liaison librarians) and has some very interesting headlines:
- An unbalanced relationship: While librarians felt their relationship to the department was critical for doing their job well, many librarians expressed concern about the distance between the daily work of chemists and the library.
- The library as purchasing arm: The conversations and interactions between departments and library almost entirely revolve around collections budgets, acquisition and preservation of content.
- A student focus: Connected to the point above is the increasingly centralisation of library services and spaces into a central library (or science library). Such consolidation usually focuses on delivering services to students, rather than the researcher. Where there are interesting service and tool developments for chemists these are usually done independently of the library, and are led by academics who identify a need in their own work.
- The role of repositories and researchers is an interesting one, and in the context of this study seems to suggest that the library will have a role in promoting its use to chemists, and will be a ‘significant new research support service provided by libraries’.
- The importance of graduate students was recognised by a number of participants in the interviews. This seems a group that bridges the divide between the department and the library. They provide an opportunity to influence research methods and practices before habits are formed.
- There are also a number of emerging needs identified by participants that include: Research data management, discovery, research funding and open access. These emerging requirements were perceived as offering opportunities for libraries to engage with the chemistry researchers in a different way.
A few things strike me about the findings that have emerged so far from the library discussions:
How do you bridge the divide between the sciences and the services of the library? One potential answer might be that libraries shouldn’t – the relationship that currently exists works for chemists, and libraries need not expend resources on developing unnecessary and unused services.
Are graduate students the answer? There also seems to me to be an implication that something like a ‘hybrid’ researcher/librarian will develop. Is a convergence of subject knowledge and domain expertise going to be the future of library liaison?
Related to the above point is the idea of library services being embedded into the department. In the case of the group-model for chemistry departments and research this could be fruitful.
These interim findings should provide a nice complement (contrast) to the subsequent researcher based conversations and interviews, and it will be interesting to see if there are obvious opportunities for libraries and their engagement with the sciences.
Find out more about this project on the JISC webpages, and find out more about the role of libraries in the digital humanities in this recent post.
Beyond Grid vs Cloud – EGI Community Forum 2012
‘The grid? Shouldn’t they all be doing cloud computing now?’ As a JISC programme manager working with the National Grid Service (NGS) project people ask me this question more and more often. ‘Absolutely’ and ‘not at all’ is the seemingly contradictory answer I usually give, for instance the other week when I mentioned I would attend the European Grid Infrastructure Community Forum 2012 in Munich.
conference coffee break revelations: EGI delivers -- cloud, grid and cake!
I give this answer because the question originates from a double misunderstanding. The first is about the nature of cloud computing that, despite some marketing claims, is not the answer to everything and in some ways more a new business model than a new technology as such. The cloud is neither the solution for all computing needs, nor is it always the cheapest option – as a recent study commissioned by EPSRC and JISC (PDF) shows. The second misunderstanding relates to branding and the history of research computing. When projects like the National Grid Service were envisaged, grid computing was the dominant paradigm and their names reflect that. These days however, they are looking at a broad range of technologies and business models for providing compute resources, and mostly refer to themselves by their acronyms: NGS and EGI in this case. So at least for the initiated it was no surprise that the EGI conference was as much about the cloud as it was about the grid.
The conference, hosted by the LRZ supercomputing centre and the Technical University of Munich, was a five day event to bring together members of the research computing community from across and beyond Europe. With several parallel strands and many session to attend I won’t summarise the whole conference but instead pick out a few themes and projects I personally found interesting.
First of all I noticed there was a lot of interest in better understanding the use of e-infrastructures by researchers and, related to that, the impact generated by this. In some ways this is a straightforward task insofar as easy to capture and understand numbers can be collected. The EGI for instance now has over 20,000 registered users. You can count the number of cores that can be accessed, monitor the number of compute jobs users run and measure the utilisation of the infrastructure. However, this becomes more difficult when you think of a truly distributed, international infrastructure such as the EGI. Will national funders accept that – while the resources they fund may used by many researchers – much of that usage originates from abroad? If we want to support excellent research with the best tools available we have to make it as easy as possible for researchers to get access to resources no matter which country they are physically based in. Thinking in terms of large, distributed groups of researchers using resources from all over the world, often concurrently, the task of understanding what impact the research infrastructure has and where that impact occurs (leading to who may lay ‘claim’ it in terms of justifying the funding) can make your mind boggle. We need business models for funding these infrastructures that don’t erect new national barriers and address these problems from the angle of how to best support researchers.
Business models, not surprisingly, was another theme I was very interested in. Complex enough already, it is made even more difficult by commercial vendors now offering cloud nodes that for certain, smaller scale scenarios can compete with high performance computing – how do you fairly compare different infrastructures with different strengths and very different payment models? Will we see a broadly accepted funding model where researchers become customers who buy compute from their own institution or whoever offers the best value? Will we see truly regional or national research clouds compete against the likes of Amazon? What the conference has shown is that there are emerging partnerships between large academic institutions and vendors that explore new ways for joint infrastructure development. One example is a new project called ‘Helix Nebula – the Science Cloud’, a partnership that involves CERN, the European Space Agency and companies like T-Systems and Orange. Such partnerships may have a lot of potential, but finding legal structures that allow projects based in academia to work in a more commercial environment is not always easy. A presentation from the German National Grid Initiative explored some of these problems and also the question of developing sustainable funding models.
In order to develop good models for funding e-infrastructure we also need to understand the costs better. As far as institutional costs are concerned these are mostly hidden from the researchers, whereas the costs of commercial providers are very visible – but not always easy to understand in terms of what exactly it is you get for a certain price per hour. As our cloud cost study shows this is an area where more work needs to be done, and so I was happy to find a European project that aims to address this. e-FISCAL works on an analysis of the costs and cost structures of HTC and HPC infrastructures and a comparison with similar commercially offerings. It already lists a useful range of relevant studies and I hope we will see more solid data emerge over time.
In the commercial/public context I found it interesting to see that some academic cloud projects aim to take on commercial players. BeeHub, for instance, was presented as an academic DropBox. Now, to be fair to the project it aims to be an academic service for file sharing in groups and to address some of the concerns one might have regarding DropBox, but I wonder how successful they will be against such a popular offering.
I was also very interested to learn more about initiatives that address the critical question of training. Usually these are researcher training or more technically focussed programmes, but the EU-funded RAMIRI project offers training and knowledge exchange for people (hoping to be) involved in planning and managing research infrastructures. Because of the increasing complexity of this task in terms of legal, cultural, technical and other issues better support for those running what often are multi-million projects is highly desirable.
As I cannot end this post without referencing the more technical aspects of research infrastructure let me point you to a project that shows that grid and cloud can indeed live together in harmony. StratusLab is developing cloud technologies with the aim of simplifying and optimizing the use and operation of distributed computing infrastructures and it offers a production level cloud distribution that promises to marry ease of use of the cloud with grid technologies for distributed computing.
To sum up, it is not a question of grid versus cloud. It is about selecting the technologies that are best suited to facilitate great research – and then do deal with the non-technical issues from training to sustainability and cultural change that will decide how well we will be able to make use of the potential the technology offers.
Developing our Creative Commons
Last week I had the great pleasure of meeting with Cathy Casserly (Chief Executive Officer) and Diane Cabell (Counsel and Corporate Secretary) of Creative Commons. Over a couple of days I had many conversations about open licensing, open education and the routes ahead.
I was a panel member for a CC Salon on OER Policies for Promotion. The panel was chaired by Joscelyn Upendran of CC UK, and comprised Cathy Casserly (CC), Patrick McAndrew (OU) and Victor Henning (Mendeley) and myself.
To prepare, I had mapped out some my thoughts on how to encourage open content approaches in education, and some ways that we could be thrown off track.
Preview below. View on Prezi.
We talked about what funders and institutions can do to encourage open educational practices. As is often the case, discussion of open access research publishing and open educational resources often blended.
Some key points percolating from my discussions last week:
- Educational institutions have everything to gain from “open access”, it is mainly publishers who have to adjust and find new models. In contrast, in the case of “open education” educational institutions have to adjust and find new models. In fact publishers are one of the contenders for providing open education.
- The most successful “open” approach since the birth of the web so far has been open source. What we saw there were the vision and leadership of the early proponents branching off into a wide range of business models, both pure and hybrid. I anticipate a similar hybridisation emerging in the “OER” space: the purist approaches will continue and mature, but there will also be hybrid approaches taking parts of the model: open processes but with closed products (collaborative textbook authoring), or open products with closed processes (open courses with paid for accreditation) etc. Expect a diffusion of implementation.
- I am thinking more and more that OER as a term that marks out reusable adaptable teaching resources is one thing, open content that is available for anyone to freely copy and remix is a slightly different thing and a much larger venn circle. Trying to meet both needs in one platform and one definition might be too much compromise and frustration. To draw on the parallel above, the structure of the open source ecosystem is hidden to most end users. Github and sourceforge are for developers, who reuse the code in ways that end users can be unaware of. If we are to deepen approaches to educational reusability we may have to branch those platforms off from the places that end users find the content (We are currently exploring this on the oer-discuss jiscmail list: join in!).
- Speaking of platforms, it’s recently come onto my radar that there is a strong dependency in the way the web works between the terms and conditions of service of something like YouTube or slideshare or prezi, in what rights and responsibilities lie with the content contributor, what r&rs lie with the user, and where the choice of content licence fits into that. There is potential for all kinds of overrides between them. I’m also very aware that in app style software it is often pared down to a minimum interface, so where is the small print in every little “put” or “get” action? We already know through various JISC innovation projects that RSS feeds, APIs and open data models implicitly encourage particular types of content use, but the licensing is rarely explicit. If an item of content is easily embedded into a third party platform through code snippets or widgets, doesn’t that imply such uses are allowed? Pinterest made it the technology too easy to override the licence! I suspect this is going to be an increasing focus: the role of platform T&C and functionality in facilitating content licences.
- Creative Commons are hearing over and over that privacy is now a key concern in the flow of content on the web. The ways in which the licensing backbone that CC provides might support or be parallel to, activities regarding consent, takedown requests and ethical considerations is coming up a lot. The team at Newcastle Medical School have been exploring the concept of consent commons for a while now, and I anticipate we’ll hear more of that sort of issue.
- Mark-up and embedding of licence terms into the vast range of digital formats is really important. I have been hoping to commission some work on that, and will be exploring ways of helping map out the options, at content, platform and ecosystem level.
- As the open educational resources space grows, we need to look for how to support the infrastructure in sustainable ways. CC are forming an OER Policy Registry. Here at JISC we are assessing the network of services required to support open access to research: what lessons can we share from that? What services can we share? The potential for alignment is there, but avoiding dilution and scope creep are always concerns.
- Lastly, thinking of ecosystems I’ve been noticing there may be lessons from the green movement in how to mainstream openness and build business models around it. Think of reuse as recycling. Manufacturers mark products as made from a particular percentage of recycled materials, they also indicate which aspects of the product is itself recyclable. As consumers we can use the logos to know which products can be recycled according to the schemes that collect our reycling. Shared services like rubbish collections and council waste processing contracts, take our recycling to specialist recyclers who then supply the recycled materials on to manufacturers. We all have a part to play in the ecosystem of reuse. So it goes, I think, with trying to make open content sustainable (except the most valuable commodity is the labour behind the content rather than the content itself!). There is a whole other blog post in that (with a bit of fairtrade and organic thrown in!).
These thoughts, and more, will be framing my contribution to the Creative Commons consultation on v4 of the licences over the next month or so.
“Creative Commons staff, board and community have to date identified several goals for the next version of its core license suite tied to achieving CC’s goal and mission. These include:
Internationalization – further adapt the core suite of international licenses to operate globally, ensuring they are robust, enforceable and easily adopted worldwide;
Interoperability – maximize interoperability between CC licenses and other licenses to reduce friction within the commons, promote standards and stem license proliferation;
Long-lasting — anticipate new and changing adoption opportunities and legal challenges, allowing the new suite of licenses to endure for the foreseeable future;
Data/PSI/Science/Education — recognize and address impediments to adoption of CC by governments as well as other important, publicly-minded institutions in these and other critical arenas; and
Supporting Existing Adoption Models and Frameworks – remain mindful of and accommodate the needs of our existing community of adopters leveraging pre-4.0 licenses, including governments but also other important constituencies. “
Creative Commons has asked me to promote this consultation to you. They would love to hear from you, as providers, users and facilitators of openly licensed content.
Data-Driven Library Infrastructure: UKSG 2012 Presentation
Below is a copy of the plenary presentation I gave to the UKSG conference 2012. I have also included a much reduced transcript of the talk to provide some context to the slides.
My presentation was about looking at library services and systems from a data-centric point of view. Specifically, it was about the potential that library data has for the creation of new services and improved systems.
This isn’t a radically new vision – indeed the idea of data-driven is something that seems all pervasive at the moment (data-driven journalism etc). Rather it is a way to refocus, or possibly to re-align our thinking so what may appear problems at the present are viewed as new opportunities.
There is also a video of the presentation available:
I began my presentation with a video. The video was made by University of Lincoln students without formal permission from the university and upoaded to YouTube.
So, I think the film highlights nicely the three main themes of my presentation:
- Situating services and infrastructure within the wider ecosystem (this might be institution; community; society etc) – allow innovation to flourish anywhere, and ensure you’re in a position to take advantage of it;
- Redistributing effort – focus on the services that have an impact for users, ensure you have the talent to recognise those emergent opportunities and embrace them;
- Covering all eventualities: Future proofing – become agile and more entrepreneurial. The barriers for students creating the video were incredibly low: flip cam and youtube. Barriers to students using library data should be low too
1. Ecosystem
Taking a data centric approach enables the library to affect the entire ecosystem that they inhabit.
Focusing on the data forces us to think about the other sources of important data within the institution: the Repository, VLE’s, student records etc. The wider data ecosystem becomes evident, and the potential of the data underpinning those systems can be realised.
A really good example of this is the Discovery work that’s currently being undertaken by JISC and RLUK and Mimas at the Uni of Manchester. Discovery’s aim is to provide a metadata ecology’ for UK education and research – and it does this by focusing on open and accessible data.
What happens, suddenly, is the data ecosystem starts to mingle with the human ecosystems libraries are inevitably a part of. The free flow of data provides the fertile ground for new ideas and services to grow – Innovation is allowed to flourish everywhere on campus – not just within the confines of the traditional walls of the library.
Libraries and their institutions need to ensure an environment where this flourishing of innovation can happen, and that there are the right skills and people to recognise those opportunities, and help develop further the ideas and prototypes.
2. Effort
3. Eventualities
Enhancing Digital Infrastructure to Support Open Content in Education: announcing 15 new projects
I am very pleased to announce fifteen new projects to enhance the digital infrastructure to support open content in education.
The Call for proposals was released in November 2011. We received 34 proposals, the competition was very tough. I’m grateful to all the expert reviewers who helped evaluate bids. Because of the high standard of proposals we were able to allocate more funding than anticipated to approximately £350,000 of HEA/JISC OER Programme funds.
These projects will be completed by November 2012, hence they are Rapid Innovation projects using open innovation methods: plenty of blogging, lots of user involvement, and they are driven by delivering new tools and functionality.
Here is a taste of what they cover
wordcloud created with the free tool wordle.net
OER Rapid Innovation Projects: the full list:
| Attribute images | Further developing a tool that allows users to upload images (singly or in bulk), select a Creative Commons licence and specify the name of the copyright holder, publication date and a URL. The tool will then embed a licence attribution statement in the image. It will have integration with Flickr. | University of Nottingham |
| Bebop | The main outcome of this work will be a WordPress plugin that can be used with BuddyPress to extend an individual’s profile to re-present resources that are held on disparate websites such as Slideshare, Jorum, etc. | University of Lincoln |
| Breaking down barriers | Developing open options for Landmap and geo-aware functionality in Jorum. To enable easier and richer sharing of geo-based resources. | University of Manchester, MIMAS |
| CAMILOE | This project reclaims and updates 1800 quality assured evidence informed reviews of education research, guidance and practice that were produced and updated between 2003 and 2010 and which are now archived and difficult to access. | University of Canterbury Christchurch |
| Improving Accessibility to Mathematics | Turn an existing research prototype into an assistive technology tool that will aid accessibility support officers in their task of preparing fully accessible teaching and assessment material in mathematical subjects by translating it into suitable markup. | University of Birmingham |
| Linked data approaches to OERs | Extending MIT’s Exhibit tool to allow users to construct bundles of OERs and other online content centred around playback of online video | Liverpool John Moore’s University |
| Portfolio Commons | Create a plugin for Mahara open source e-portfolio software that will enable users to select content from their portfolio and deposit it into Jorum and EdShare. | University of the Arts London |
| RedFeather | RedFeather aims to provide users with a lightweight Resource Exibition and Discovery platform for the annotation and distribution of teaching materials. | University of Southampton |
| RIDLR | Dynamic Learning Maps meets Learning Registry UK node (JLeRN) to harvest OERs for specific topics within curriculum and personal learning maps and share paradata. | University of Newcastle |
| SPINDLE
|
This will be using cheap/free automatic transcription services to transform video to text to enable richer subject specific metadata for cataloguing purposes, using recognised standards and data formats. | University of Oxford |
| SupOERGlue | Will pilot the integration of Tatamae’s OER Glue with Dynamic Learning Maps, enabling teachers and learners to generate custom content by aggregating and sequencing OERs related to specific topics. | University of Newcastle |
| SWAP sharing paradata across widget stores | Using the Learning Registry infrastructure to share paradata about Widgets across multiple Widget Stores, improving the information available to users for selecting widgets and improving discovery by pooling usage information across stores. | University of Bolton |
| synote mobile | Creating a new HTML5 mobile version of Synote to will meet the important user need to make web-based OER recordings easier to access, search, manage, and exploit for learners, teachers and others. | University of Southampton |
| TRACK OER | OER in the wild can get lost. This project will add a tracer to find where they go for attribution, research and remix. | Open University |
| Xenith | Adding HTML5 as a delivery platform to Xerte Online Toolkits, allowing content to reach a much greater range of devices. | University of Nottingham |
See the JISC strand page for more detail.
Is it a good thing that my favourite idea on JISC Elevator has the least votes?
JISC Elevator, JISC’s experiment with letting the crowd decide which projects should be funded, is a couple of weeks old now. There are 4 ideas on there and my favourite of those added so far, code.ac.uk: A Bounty Hunt, has the fewest votes. Is this a cause for concern or does it just mean the Elevator is working?
As a JISC programme manager I am used to evaluating project ideas and to my opinions having an influence on what projects get funded. This is one of the great privileges of the job and it is something my colleagues and I take extremely seriously. With that in mind, I don’t mind admitting being a little disconcerted to find the idea that I like the most is so far proving the least popular on Elevator. However, despite this being disconcerting I think that this is a sign that JISC elevator is working.
The purpose of JISC Elevator is to offer a new avenue for funding projects to complement our existing processes, one that is demand led and closely linked to what people in colleges and universities need and want. In my experience at JISC, innovation programmes work well when they manage to balance top down drivers for change linked to strategic aims with bottom up development driven by innovators working closely with users. At JISC we already use existing funding methods to fund both of these types of innovation. However, I think that one thing that is very difficult to show in a proposal for JISC funding is that there is demand for a project’s deliverables. This is where elevator comes in. That is the first hurdle that bidders need to overcome. If demand can’t be demonstrated through voting then the idea will not be considered. And votes need to come from more than one institution so this should show that the idea has the potential to benefit a number of institutions and therefore offer good value for money on the JISC investment. So, in theory, my opinion as a JISC programme manager about what should be funded is of little relevance in this model. What people in universities and colleges want is the yardstick for success. This leaves me free to concentrate on ensuring that what is produced is delivered in a way that benefits as much of the sector as possible and ensuring that lessons learned during the project are communicated in a way that enables others to follow in a project’s footsteps (or just as valuably, avoid pathways that prove to be unproductive).
As I said, we’re 2 weeks into the experiment with Elevator and I’ve been very impressed with the ideas so far. All of them have been pitched very clearly, all of them will be useful to multiple institutions and all of them have had clear deliverables and benefits to people in universities and colleges. I have also been surprised at the speed of the votes. Educational Egaming at the time of writing has 91% of the 150 votes it needs to be considered for funding. It has been live for less than 48 hours! I’ve also been pleased to see that the votes are coming from a range of institutions. To pick on Educational Egaming again votes so far have been cast from 25 different institutions, far exceeding the target of 7 we set.
Aside: the metrics I can get from Elevator have been my favourite thing about the pilot so far, it adds a whole new dimension to evaluating ideas and I think that the metrics may be a very useful side benefit for thinking about and planning JISC innovation.
There are still 31 days to go for the pilot so there is plenty of time to get your ideas in and get people voting on them. I am excited to see what else gets added. We have suggested some areas where we think projects would be interesting and I am particularly hoping we get some ideas for student led projects. Of course, as the last 2 weeks have shown, one of the refreshing things about this approach to funding is that my opinion doesn’t matter a whole lot. So feel free to ignore those recommendations and plough your own furrow. The crowd are your markers now.
Does the library have a role to play in the Digital Humanities?
What role does the library have to play in the increasingly data driven, technologically evolving humanities?Humanities and the social sciences have traditionally been disciplines aligned closely with the institutional library and its resources and services. Increasingly, in my conversations with librarians, there is a concern that while the library as a space remains popular, this masks a growing distance between the services the library provides and the needs and expectations of researchers (to say nothing of undergrads).
As subjects like digital humanities find themselves transformed by their engagement with technology, is the library facing the threat of redundancy?
There has been a flurry of research recently including the RLUK report: Re-skilling for Research and JISC Collections’ UK Scholarly Reading and the Value of Library Resources, exploring the evolving role of the library in supporting researchers.
Similarly, Ithaka S+R in the US is exploring the changing support needs of scholars across a variety of disciplines. The researcher-centric programme has recently published a ‘memo’ on the interim findings of their NEH funded History project (they are also exploring Chemistry, funded by JISC). And, as the report makes clear:
To many in the history field and in libraries, it is unclear what the role of the library should be in digital humanities. This is not to imply that there is no role for libraries – only that this role has not yet been widely developed and adopted effectively. Libraries remain very much in transition when it comes to expanding models for supporting research on campus
So, I wanted to explore some of the roles that libraries might have in the Digital Humanities:
- Managing Data: This has undoubtedly become a cliche, but it’s the transformative factor changing research practice. Humanities researchers are increasingly interacting with large corpora; how do libraries support them in this, and the data that is an output from this type of research? This might involve libraries supporting the data management infrastructure, or providing one-to-one support for departments and researchers on best practice. I see libraries playing a role in the collection, re-purposing and organising of data that may lead to further analysis by individual researchers or (sub)departments. What’s critical is that libraries work collaboratively with the researchers/departments: This is not ‘selling’ library services; it is about understanding researchers needs and providing the right support.
- Closely connected to this point is the idea of the ‘embedded’ librarian: Providing the support wherever the researcher is; a distributed approach to library services. The librarian becomes the campus Flaneur: Inhabiting the campus and acquiring an understanding of its practices. This active role participates in the activity of the academic metropolis, while always maintaining a distance. The embedded librarian provides immediate support, while always maintaining an eye on the evolution of research practice and relevant support.
- Digitisation and Curation: The examples above assume that much of the data being managed by the library will, in some way, be created by the researcher themselves. Libraries, are of course, great sources of content and this means they often hold the expertise and infrastructure for digitisation. Libraries have a very meaningful role in the digitisation and curation of that content.
- Digital Preservation: Libraries, probably better than anywhere else on campus, understand preservation. It is unlikely that developers and researchers involved in a DH project probably do not, although they will acknowledge its importance. Closely linked with sustainability this is a significant area for libraries to play a role. Close collaboration early on will ensure the library is able to provide advice and guidance on standards and best practice. However, as the Preservation of Complex Objects Symposia makes clear – digital resources tend to be complex and their preservation far from straightforward. This is an area that libraries can build on and start having a real impact on these research outputs and their ongoing preservation.
- Discovery and Dissemination: Libraries are increasingly judged by the services they provide, not as a large store of content. This means that for digital humanists the library can play a critical role in enabling the discovery of content from across academic, and cultural heritage. Furthermore, this role may evolve into one of dissemination of scholarly outputs. Whether this is through campus-based publishing or aggregation of research outputs, advising on metadata and formats to enable dissemination and discovery, and tracking impact across new platforms and interactions (what is increasingly being termed altmetrics).
Questions remain around the ability of the library, and the wider institution, to adapt to the changes that are affecting scholarly practice. While much of the focus of research has been on the library services and how these can be made attractive to researchers, it is clear that a researcher-centric approach needs to be adopted to ensure requirements and future needs are clearly understood.
Finally, I wonder if the values the library represents (openness, access, contemplation etc…) might also be something that needs ‘capturing’. If we only focus on researcher needs, is there a danger that what they see as the value of the library is lost? Is the library an expression of knowledge and prestige within the research community, and does this have a value in itself?
Digital Infrastructure Directions Reports
An effective digital infrastructure for UK FE/HE needs to enable researchers, teachers, learners, managers and support staff to accomplish a wide variety of things if it is to fulfil its purpose, and different approaches are required across this variety.
The innovation activities of the Digital Infrastructure portfolio contribute to the rich vision of infrastructure for education and research. They contribute to the delivery of JISC’s strategic objectives with particular emphasis on the following objectives as set out in the JISC Strategy:
- Provide cost-effective and sustainable shared national services and resources
- Help institutions to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of their corporate and business systems
- Help institutions to improve the quality of learning and teaching and the student experience
- Help institutions to improve the quality, impact and productivity of academic research
The JISC Digital Infrastructure team oversee a wide range of programmes to support these objectives. Over the years, the team has scoped, funded and steered a number of pivotal reports, such as the Google Generation report joint with the British Library, and the Houghton Report on the Economic implications of alternative scholarly publishing models.
We know that these sorts of reports are highly valued and we want to ensure that we produce further timely and quality reports out of our work. The Digital Infrastructure Directions strand focuses on this need and aims to identify and highlight key issues within the team’s work that need bringing to the attention of the sector.
We are currently at the expert review stage of preparing a Digital Infrastructure Directions Report on the Benefits of Text Mining.
Current Funding Opportunities
We are commissioning five new reports that are designed to build on existing work to make it better understood and more widely accessible. These are being commissioned through Invitations to Tender, which is open to anyone to bid for, including international and/or commercial organisations.
- The deadline for bids is 12 noon UK time on Friday 9th March 2012
- Bidders will be notified of outcomes by 27th April 2012
- Work should commence by 14th May 2012
The outline details of each contract are summarised below, but please refer to the ITTs for a full specification of the work required.
Advantages of APIs
- Anticipated effort: 30 Days
- Work should complete by Friday 24th August 2012
- JISC Lead: Andy McGregor
Embedded Licences: What, Why and How
- Anticipated effort: 30 Days
- Work should complete by Friday 24th August 2012
- JISC Lead: Amber Thomas
Activity Data: Analytics and Metrics
- Anticipated effort: 30 days
- Work should complete by Friday 24th August 2012
- JISC Lead: Andy McGregor
The Open Landscape
- Anticipated effort: 60 days
- Work should complete by Friday 5th October 2012
- JISC Lead: Amber Thomas
Access to citation data: a cost-benefit and risk review and forward look
- Anticipated effort: 150 days
- Work should complete by February 2013
- JISC Lead: Josh Brown
It is our intention to release these reports under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) Licence to enable the widest possible reuse.
Please see the JISC Funding Opportunities page for further details, and bookmark this blog post for updates
Putting the User at the Heart of Education
This is an update on a recent Usability workshop held by Ben Showers and Torsten Reimer as part of their work on the Usability and Adaptability of User-Interfaces.
Background
As universities and academic institutions increase the focus and investment on improving the ‘student experience’, so the ‘user’ needs to find their way into the heart of everything the institution does, not just the teaching and learning.
Usability and user experience (UX) have become important considerations in the design and creation of new websites, software and systems for universities. With increasing investments in digital infrastructure and content, addressing the needs of the users is one of the best ways to ensure the uptake of these investments – be it in research, administration or learning.
UX should become a critical tool in the sector’s response to the challenges of rising student fees, the need to make every investment count in the light of reduced budgets and increasing expectations from students and staff who are used to new sleek gadgets and web 2.0 environments.
In light of this context, Torsten and I recently held a two day workshop exploring usability in higher education.
The first day focused on JISC funded projects that were exploring the Usability and Adaptability of User-Interfaces. The second day involved a broad range of delegates from both within and outside universities, including the library, institutional web managers, systems managers, usability consultants and academics.
The workshop resulted in some very rich discussions from the delegates, and we have attempted to capture some of the themes and main topics of conversation below.
Emerging themes
We have grouped the themes under some broad headings:
Affecting the project/development culture
Embedding Usability
It was clear that usability and considerations of the user are usually a ‘bolt-on’ to institutional developments and projects. The workshop reiterated the need for usability to be part of the project from the start – furthermore it should be the framework from within which you undertake your project. This point was echoed by a number of the projects that took part in the JISC usability programme (an example being the British History Online project).
Indeed during a ‘programme design’ session it was suggested that future usability project funding should aim to embed usability into the institution. This could be achieved by a kind of ‘pay it forward’ idea whereby the successful project then initiates its usability lessons into another of the institutions developments.
Strategic buy-in
Connected to the above poin is the need to make strong arguments to the senior managers who make the decisions about resources as there may not always be a strong appreciation of the benefits of a user-centred approach.
An appeal to the usability of the product is a first step, but more may be required. One suggestion was exposing senior managers to the user’s pain – let them watch the UX sessions you undertake. Let them see every grimace and hear all the expletives!
Training and Skills
It was clear that there are a number of significant skills gaps within the current training and teaching of developers and project managers for usability practice and methods. JISC programmes of work are often addressing the skills gaps in their area specifically, and this may be something that any future work in the UX environment should confront.
However, there was agreement that it’s important to be able to share best practice, and enable institutions to have conversations with each other and experts to ensure they’re able to get hold of the right skills externally if necessary (one of the projects: UsabilityUK, has exactly this remit).
Demonstrating Impact
One of the most interesting discussions at the event was the difficulties involved in demonstrating the impact of usability. Functional requirements are easy to quantify (it either does or doesn’t do as requested), non-functional requirements (like usability) are harder to measure.
What potential does including metrics in the National Student Survey, as an example, have to demonstrating the impact usability could have within HE? Maybe more fundamentally having a clearer idea of how you measure impact more generally could help clarify how the user experience is evidenced.
Communication
Usability by any other name…
I am guilty of it in this post, and I even started day two of the workshop with an admission of guilt: I would use the phrase usability without unpacking it. Worse, I used it as a synonym for a group of similar terms (user experience, user-centred design, human computer interaction).
However, this may well be one of the issues that contributes to a misunderstanding of usability, and confusion around the different terms. A number of the delegates felt it would be beneficial to ensure terms were well defined. If you’re communicating with non-experts, such as developers, you need to be sure they’re able to understand you and your requirements.
On reflection, I do wonder whether this is a reflection of usability as a research discipline. Is the real message that the user needs to go at the heart of everything the academy does; it needs to become truly user-centred. Does the concern for semantics get in the way of this goal?
Inter-communication
Connected to the above is the difficulty of communicating with the members of your team or project. While you might be able to capture the requirements of your users, it is essential you’re able to then communicate these directly and precisely to your developer.
One potential answer is a very agile approach to development that sees the developer coding with the user(s). This was an approach that the ALUIAR project took at Southampton, and it worked well for the project.
Not always talking to the converted
One of the interesting aspects of the workshop was that we had a pretty good mix of professional UXers, researchers, institutional system people, librarians and learning technologists. However, most had a very good appreciation of the benefits and importance of UX to their institutional mission.
Indeed, a number of delegates made the point that it was important that we addressed the un-converted.
Usability is dead, long live usability
Finally, two points seem to provide interesting conclusions to the workshops discussions:
In its practical application within an HE environment, usability is closely meshed with other similar issues: impact; accessibility; sustainability. The aim is simply to make software easier for users.
Usability should be the driving principle behind projects within HE (especially in JISC funded ones); but this doesn’t that the only way to address this is through a usability programme. Rather, usability should pervade projects without defining them.
What’s next…?
The workshop was incredibly useful as a way to start thinking about how JISC might continue to help support usability practice within HE.
Indeed, it gave us a clear message that usability/accessibility is one area of the HE picture that is in real need of some focused activity. Torsten and I already have a few concrete ideas we’d like to start developing – if all goes well nthrough JISC-funded activities later this year.
Watch this space for more news!
—–
Many thanks to the delegates and projects who made the workshop so successful and the discussions so rich. And to Addy Pope of Edina and the USED project for the use of his camera and pictures.
Digital Infrastructure for Learning Content Update: February 2012
So much has been happening since my last update in November 2011, I thought it would be useful to round up the news around JISC work on digital infrastructure relating to learning content.
OER
The Call for OER Rapid Innovation Projects closed on Friday 27th January and I’m pleased to say we received 34 bids. Thank you all for your hard work! The bids are out for evaluation now, and in parallel we are looking at how to best present the collection of Use Cases. Bidders should hear back by early March. Note there is likely to be a big UKOER Programme Meeting on 26th March, venue tbc. So if you’ve bid to run an OER RI project, please pencil it in your diary. You should know a few weeks beforehand if you’re successful, so there will be time to make travel arrangements then.
Other news on the UK Open Educational Resources (UKOER) Programme:
- work commissioned by the HE Academy will be moving ahead, including a set of Case Studies on topics I suggested around OER and student as producer, OER and marketing, OER and public engagement and more.
- the OER Themes projects are steaming ahead, covering a wide range of topics. If you want to start following their early steps, subscribe to the UKOER3THEMES agreggated RSS feed.
- the project to explore visualising UKOER activities and outputs pioneers onwards, producing some really interesting graphics, check out the Mashe blog for the latest progress.
- coming soon … an animated guide to open licensing for OER, from the OER IPR Support team.
OER beyond the UK OER Programme
Our sister strand in the eContent programme, OER digitisation is now underway, and the OER WW1 project will shortly be announced.
Open is a major theme for JISC in 2012. I blogged my individual take on openness in My Story of O(pen) but watch out for future JISC activities in Open, building on the Open Access section and case studies but taking it broader and deeper and drawing on the richness of JISC-supported work. This includes a study I’ll be managing on the Open Landscape (see below). I hope you saw the pieces in the current JISC Inform on Joi Ito: education is at the core of creative commons and the Round up of what’s happening in open access publishing. There will be more about openness in the next issue.
Globally, March 2012 will see the very first Open Education Week , and April 2012 is the joint OCWC and OER conference, so expect to see more around the issues of supporting open content and open practice.
Developing supporting infrastructure: including two developer challenges!
The JISC Learning Registry Node Experiment (JLeRN) is coming to life, see their introductory blog post. They ran a Hack Day on 23rd January for people to understand how they might work with these approaches. They are also sponsoring a Challenge for Dev8D
“Are you interested in capturing, sharing, mashing up or otherwise using paradata, AKA data about the use of open educational resources?
Are you thinking about exploring where and how teachers and learners are using resources, or sharing them via social media, or what they are saying about the resources?”
See The JLeRN Experiment Paradata Developers’ Challenge at Dev8D 2012
The Jorum team are doing so much at the moment its hard to know where to start. See their blog for an inside update. Highlights for me would be they are exploring how best to provide analytics to users, as part of that they are developing a dashboard approach. They are also running a Challenge for developers;
Are you interested in exploring new ways to extract, share, visualise, search, collate or mash up the thousands of open educational resources available in Jorum?
See The Jorum Developers’ Challenge 2012 at Dev8D: Releasing Open Educational Resources into the Wild
Pssst … If you’re a developer working on educational technologies, then I will whisper a rumour at you that it might be worth keeping 29th & 30th May pencilled in your diary for our very first DevEd event. Shhhh! We’ll tell you more as we plan it!
Meanwhile, the UKCoRR repository managers community ran a session on OERs on 27th January. The presentation from Phil Barker is a really useful whistlestop tour of different approaches to managing and disseminating OER
Funding opportunities for digital infrastructure work
There is currently a major Call for Proposals out from the Digital Infrastructure team . Most closely related to the area of digital infrastructure for learning resources, I would flag up the potential of Research Tools – Projects to Develop Sustainable and Open Vocabularies for Research and Information Management , and also a Synthesis Project. Worth watching also will be the access and identity management projects arising from this Call.
Also due out very soon are a set of Invitations to Tender for a range of Reports on Digital Infrastructure Directions. I’ll be managing a report on Embedded Licences: What, Why and How, and an Open Landscape study that focuses on how openness supports institutional objectives. Also requested will be a Report on the Advantages of APIs and one on Activity Data: Analytics and Metrics, one on business models around open source, and one on citation.
Sign up to JISC announce to get funding opportunity alerts via email.
Some hot topics
E-books, i-books and open books have been a big topic recently (E,I,E,I,O!). Apple caused a stir with their announcements. If you’re interested in ebooks, there is a wealth of technical material and guidance in the JISCPub Technical Monograph Landscape Study . JISC Digital Media are running a webinar on Getting Started with eBooks on 22nd February.
There is a growing interest in the role of libraries and librarians for OER. CETIS have been tracking this opportunity . A nice edtechpost sums up what this might mean all for emerging roles. Talking of libraries, my colleague Ben Shower’s post on the future of Library Management Systems, the Squeezed Middle has implications for how the role of content management within institutions might develop.
I had the pleasure of joining a NIACE workshop on open educational resources on 20th January. I gave a presentation on the benefits of content sharing and reuse . The big take home message of the day for me is that in HE we have a wealth of support, content and tools for both adult learners and the people to teach, tutor and support them. There is so much more we can do to promote open and free learning beyond HE, as highlighted in the soon-to-be-released OER Report on Open Practice across sectors .
JISC has been busy behind the scenes coordinating evidence and responses to Hargreaves review of copyright. That warrants a whole blog post which I won’t attempt here!
… (pause for breath) …
Coming soon …
Major reports due out soon which may be of particular interest :
- a report on the Mobile Web, from the JISC Observatory
- a set of case studies on HTML5
- a report on TextMining
- OER evaluation and synthesis team outputs
- and not quite a report, but watch out for a cute animation from OER IPR Support Team
I’ll be out and about a bit this month too. I’ll be running a session at Dev8D with CETIS’s Lorna Campbell about digital infrastructure directions for learning content, 2-4pm on Wednesday 15th Feb . As well as attending the Learning Registry session at the CETIS Conference , I’ll be contributing ideas on the potential of social network analytics for education and research on 23rd February.
And thus endeth my update for February 2012.
Hope this update is useful! A lot of this work has involved my colleagues in the UK OER Programme, JISC CETIS and Mimas, as well as the many expert projects we are lucky enough to work with. Feedback on this update is very welcome.
