UKCoRR Summer 2009 meeting pt 2

Continuing on with the UKCoRR day at Kingston University

Integration of Repositories with other systems, Wendy White, Southampton

This session looked at how the repository interacts with all the other systems that an institution uses.  Not just technologies but people as well, the repository can help identify and nurture your star performer academics.  Recognising the role the repository plays as a knowledge management system.  But also as a location for marketing, to tell stories, myths and legends of your institution’s research is a role the repository can play.  Also the repository managers themselves are the star performers that institutions need to hold on to, by recognising them and ensuring their pay and benefits encourage them to stay.

Integration of Repositories with other systems, Morag Greig, Glasgow

This talk aimed to take a more practical overview of the same issue, which started with Morag giving an overview of Glasgow’s repository.  Like Leicester they aimed to join the repository and publications database together.  It was important to develop policies and procedures to enable departments to engage with the repository on an on-going basis.  Started by going out to talk to HoDs and research chair/champions in each department.  Gathered information on their current practices on how they gathered current procedures.  Self deposit for two depts, mediated for large faculties and proxy for most small to medium sized departments.  Issue with materials in PMC going unharvested.

Training sessions were run for administrators (from 30 depts) including the wider context of OA, something which I think is very important.  Even if you are just adding material to a repository as part of your job, it is important you understand why it is important to academics and the institution as a whole; not to mention the global dimension.  Glasgow are planning a large scale import of data going back to 2001, and adding staff number.

Embed, John Harrington, Cranfield

In this talk John explained how his repo emerging from the embedding phase and into the mature phase.  He looked at the problems they initially faced.  Then he moved to look at the various sweeteners they could use to sell the repository and the publication cycle.  Using a model like Leicester (alerts and request) to obtain materials got a low awareness in the academic community.  They concluded that this was an unsustainable model for scaling up, something I agree with.  RAE didn’t help, but elements of bibliometrics raised importance of the repository which they used as a basis for renewed advocacy push.

Adrian Mschiraju, Royal Holloway

Adrian told a cautionary tale about what happens if it people are seduced by bought in systems.  They have bought Equella an Australian developed system for all purposes teaching objects, research publications, data and theses.  14 months of developer time so far to customise for their purposes – however, had to drop their requirements down to a level that eprints could have done on day 1.  [Post-event I spoke to their developer Alison on twitter, who said actually the picture wasn’t quite as bleak as this – and indeed their repository actually offers a lot more functionality]

Susan Miles, Kingston

Susan talked about maintaining momentum with a repository team over time.  They have 7 people who have editorial rights over their eprints server, which is a considerable number for a smaller institution.  However, repository work has to be competed for with all the other competing demands – these are not dedicated members of staff.  As a team distributed over 4 campuses they have been using Sharepoint to draw the team’s activities drawing together.

Finally Mary Robinson, talked about the UKCoRR repository skills set document which has ended up being used around the world.  Dominic talked about the JISC recruitment tool kit for digital repository projects – which frankly was just the sort of basic things you get told at all kinds of recruitment training and didn’t appear to offer much of novel use – JISC reinventing the wheel again? 

Over all this was another very useful day and gathering of people in the rare position of being repository managers (there’s still less than 100 people in this country in this position – so it’s a very small but active community).  I learned a fair bit and let’s hope I was able to share my own experiences with a fair few people.  Let’s hope it’s not 18 months before the next event.  And maybe we can have it North of the M25 (or on the south coast – I’m not fussy!).

Twitter feed from the event.

UKCoRR Summer 2009 meeting pt 1

It seemed a long way to go, longer than going to Edinburgh for the Fringe the other week, but in the end thanks to my handy in-laws as an overnight venue, getting to Kingston UIniversity wasn’t such a difficult destination after all.  Aside from some early morning shopping, the event today was all about sharing practical experiences of repository managers.

Keynote: Bill Hubbard, UKCoRR Can!

Bill (SHERPA/Centre for Scholarly Communication, Nottingham) talked about the founding of UKCoRR and the purpose of a membership organisation as a safe haven for repository managers to meet and discuss issues, away from other stakeholders in open access.  He went on to talk about the vision and purpose behind UKCoRR – key among that being the professionalism and recognition within HEIs.  He highlighted the RIN Mind the Skills Gap report as one that illustrated a clear role and need for repositories and their staff, not just libraries, as key partners of all those involved in the research process.  The UK remains a significant global player in the world repositories, and potentially gives us the chance to lead the world.  Need remains to get the disciplinary repository people involved in UKCoRR as well.  NECOBELAC (Latin America, Caribbean and Europe Repo collaboration).

 Repositories should remember simple as a key feature – simple to access, simple metadata and simple content; although in particular the REF will seriously change the role of the repository.  As managers we may need to be able to fight our corner and our significance against competing demands, which we might feel isolates us.  How does the repository know when people are mandated to deposit by funders?  There is a need to be involved in the research process from the start, not as an after the fact activity.  And this is a position few if any HEI repositories are in.

Here is where UKCoRR can help by supporting peer networks, by identifying needs, supporting collaboration, seeking funding, sharing best practice and acting as a voice for we repository mangers.  There is a need for organisations like JISC to be lobbied by UKCoRR to support repository managers and processes from the top down.  If senior administrators and academics hear about this from a body like JISC, then they might just take more note of our concerns and expertise.

Following this talk Jenny Delasalle, Mary Robinson and Dominick Tate talked about their role as the inaugural UKCoRR Committee.

Theo Andrews, Central funds for open access publishing

This talk looked at the open access publishing side of open access, with Theo giving an overview of the current situation.  The Gold OAP Route avoids a lot of the problems.  There are a lot of new publishers jumping on board (e.g. PLOS) but also traditional publishers offering hybrid journals; with the option of the author paying a fee to retain rights or not.  How can this be funded, how can this be managed and how can this change be communicated? 

 Mechanisms for payment in this way are not totally new, with page charges for images in articles being around for years.  Often these have been paid from unallocated fund, and this is not really a sustainable nor easily managed way.  Wellcome Trust awarded additional funds to 30 HEIs, and other HEIs can apply to reclaim costs.  At Edinburgh using this as an opportunity to step in for advocacy, and provide support to managing the funding.  Noted that FEC can be included in calculation for researcher fees in grants. 

The feeds issue means that a lot of different departments and stakeholders within an institution are involved in the issue (finance, research, administrative staff, library, committees etc).  No matter what they do, institutions need to coordinate these funds centrally and along the lines of acceptable standard policies.  Edinburgh will be introducing a mandate in Jan 2010 and are spending the 6 months in the lead up to that talking with departments about how this will impact and how the repository can help them to meet the requirements of this.  Noted that once you have introduced the idea of a central fund to pay for publication, top sliced from research grants, you have to maintain it – even if income decreases.

 Glasgow, Nottingham, UCL, Brunel, Edinburgh, Warwick and Kingston are all already or about to start funding open access funding in a central.  Some Northampton academics very much against the idea of paying to publish though, as a matter of principle. Some publishers offer an OA option – but then increase their embargo to a length that means in order to comply with funders’ mandates, authors need to pay for OA option as IR will not be able to meet the requirements.  As Bill Hubbard put it – “They’re back into a double dipping approach to getting money.”

Event slides are here.

Lincoln SUETr Event (Feb 10th 2009) – enhancing your repository

Yesterday I went over to arctic Lincoln for a SUETr (Start-Up and Enhancement Training) repository related event; which was introduced by Steph Taylor (UKOLN). What follows are my notes on the day.

Julian Beckton talked about embedding a dual purpose repository at Lincoln – hosting research and learning objects within the same environment. Initially it got external funding, but there were issues over getting staff resource. It started as an archive for student projects, but had to deal with some unusual teaching materials (3D) models but difficulties of visual browsing. He demonstrated the MACE Project visual object browser as an ideal best practice example, but one far beyond what they were funded to create. In trying to bring about innovation within the institution and the team considered using the Collis & Moonen 4-Es model (1991) and the Rogers Diffusion of Innovation (1962) approaches. Ease of use was a concept that was highlighted in both these models, and something that Julian suggested was not exemplified by repositories.

He contrasted the discovery of vitamin C and the 200 years for this to be adopted as S.O.P. for Navy, as opposed to rapid up take of new weaponry and ship design. People implement what they understand, and this is true for repositories – most academics don’t really understand what they’re for and why they’re there; with the knock on effect that engagement with them is reduced. Lincoln’s repo automatically transcodes many multimedia formats into flash animations for ease of viewing, but you are still able to download the original format. Noted that many learning objects (e.g. powerpoints of lecture slides) have a short life-span, and aren’t an ideal ingest for a learning object repository. Lincoln has added social bookmarking tools (e.g. RSS, commenting and user-tagging).

Next moves are a full launch, repository advocacy (local champions) and statistics. Comments in discussion that followed about the importance of good data in the repo accessible via common protocols, far more important than building a sophisticated local service layer. This is something I have to agree with, the underlying repository and data must work well and be accessible; after all statistics continue to show that few end-users come to a repository via the home page. Access is at the object level.

Steph Taylor talked briefly about her role at Bath as both a repository project person and author. Then she opened the floor to debate turning to look first at policies and S.O.P, a topic SUETr (and myself) will be returning to at the event at the National Library of Wales next week. An interesting comment from one institution where if a research output isn’t in the repository it’s not counted in research returns. Discussion ranged around mandates, author pays funding streams and sustainability.

Sally Rumsey, from Oxford Uni was next and started off by talking about repository branding and the route of access to the objects in the repository.  Oxford University is not just looking at the repo as a silo of output, and is very much considering digital archiving for the long time. Lots of large collections available to them that they can put into their storage. Sally talked about the advantage of making local digital collections available globally, and how this is a very desirable thing to the global scholarly community. Their Fedora based system underpins effectively multiple repositories (e.g. an image collection, special collections) as well as the ORA (Oxford University Research and Archive). Notably as the ORA was there first, they are able to drive the standards for these other repositories.

She looked at ROAR, Intute RS and OAIster as resources for increasing visibility of repository contents; and how they are not well known by the common librarian or academic. Then it was looking at OAI-ORE and how it can take entire digital objects from repositories and reuse rather than just the metadata. Sally suggested that this is something that will be occurring more as the repository field matures. More complex objects are being ingested, and OAI-ORE may help with their curation and sourcing. Google remains the primary route into repositories, and making sure objects are exposed to it is a major route to enhancing user and reuse. UUIDs (Universal Unique Identifiers) are being used as these are very unique and persistent Ids that for the foreseeable future they should identify the object in the repository and no other. Possibility to use these as a Google search to ID the item and any citations to the original object, which will have a knock on effect for bibliometrics, though this is only just beginning to happen as most papers are too new to get many citations. Sally went through the statistics package that Oxford uses (PikiWiki) showing that virtually all discoveries of objects within the repository are via Google. GoogleScholar was noted as being more variable in finding repository items, even Oxford is ignored a lot – this seems to a problem across the sector that GoogleScholar is somewhat biased in search results returned.

Next Sally talked about development, focussing on her experiences with Fedora Commons, nothing that Australia and the US are leading in this area. Oxford are developing a semantic web architecture with Talis. She also highlighted the work of CRIG (Common Repository Interface Group) and their active developments – cutting edge but sometimes scary. Oxford are very involved with data archiving, but still early days and exploring the various issues around it is quite challenging. Oxford are involved in a range of projects such as the PRIUS (Publisher and Institutional Repository Usage Statistics) project – one that will be of considerable interest to any bibliometricians. Other projects mentioned include BID, PRESERV, BRII and DataShare Project. Notable Oxford has one full time dedicated developer working for the repository as well a range of other support staff; and that their involvement in these many projects is only possible due to their number of dedicated repository staff.

Sally noted her involvement in the wider repository scene is one way in which the ORA is made more visible globally, as well as learning what other people are doing. Sally mentioned that like Leicester, conferences at Oxford can have their papers hosted on the repository – the onetime non-Oxford academics are allowed to deposit. Finally she looked at the time commitments for the repository staff, and the need to be choosey about what they commit to be involved in within the wider profession. As a result of its successes Oxford University has been involved in all this global activity as a result of their work, not as a goal for their activities.

After lunch Lucy Keating, Newcastle, how to add value to repositories. Lucy spoke as an enthusiast and not an expert, and made a disclaimer that many of the things she was going to be talking about were not going to be embraced by her institutions; rather they were ideas and inspirations for the whole community. Newcastle’s repository began in 2005, but was more fully developed in 2007 with her appointment with a focus on articles and papers (6,000 items of which 25% are full text). Lucy demonstrated the repository, which displays the number of downloads per item for all to see; as a way of encouraging more access as well as transparency of simple metrics. Lucy noted that she has about 44% response rate to her enquiries and requests to academics. The university is developing an in-house MyImpact research information service (working along the same lines as Symplectic). The repository is going to be fully integrated to the RIS – which should reduce the interaction the academics are required to perform to record their research outputs and archive their papers.

She noted the involvement with the RIS and REF has opened doors that would otherwise be shut. She posed the question – what else can our repositories do beyond OA, preservation and description? She looked through some of the widgets that Les Carr at Southampton has suggested. She touched on mandates, and her personal reluctance to engage with them. They needed more thought before they’re introduced; it’s an all stick and no-carrot route to populating repositories. Other things that could be possible enhancers included enabling interaction and allowing others to form groups and make associations (e.g. tagging and rating) not just formal citations. Displaying content in different ways – visualising content – image wall, previews, tag cloud or broadening the context of the ingest. Finally she talked about ensuring the marketing department can link to original articles in the repository from press releases.

Some comments in discussion that engaging marketing staff on the right level, and on message, can be actually quite difficult. Then some challenging questions about how the repository could generate income or save time for the institution? She advocated the idea that the repository should be integrated into the research workflow, not something that happens at the end of the research process. Will repositories replace, supplement or merge with journals (the concept of overlay journals) is a challenging idea, and one that some repositories and academics are already beginning to exploit. A Group work session looking at case studies followed

Finally Mary Robinson from SHERPA talked about the international dimension of the institutional repository. Mary showed the 1,300 repositories in OpenDOAR, of which about 1,000 are IRs. Mary talked on some similar issues to Sally about making your repository more visible. She noted that there is a need to be proactive in marketing your repositories towards some of the international services, rather than waiting for them to find you. She listed certain guides to ensuring how your repository is visible, drawn from work on the OpenDOAR survey. Mary then moved to talk about the DRIVER project, which worked with European Repositories to provide an infrastructure that other services can plug into to aid repository discovery. DRIVER provides tools for subject communities for academics and tools for bringing together groups of repositories through a single access point (e.g. Spain).

She next turned to the DRIVER Confederation which tries to draw together a global voice for repositories, working with agencies and other stakeholders in the OA world. DRIVER online tool can automatically test the DRIVER guidelines, though currently running on the old version of the validation rules. Mary gave an overview of DRIVER’s activities and resources, including the Mentor service – which is something that I am sure we in Leicester could potentially get involved in.

The day finished with wrap up discussions and final points of interest.  Slides for the event are available.  Also my twitter feed on the event too: http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23suetr

Learning Futures 2

So, a little delayed but here’s the rest of my Learning Futures Festival write-up:

Keynote 2: Ralp Schroeder (Oxford Internet Institute)

Focused on virtual environments – which he defined as immersive environments that give a sense of being in another place than you are physically in & have visual & spatial aspects.

Argued there are 2 major versions of the technology that are likely to develop further.

1. Video-capture – e.g. video conferencing, talking heads.

2. Computer generated (CAVE technology), which can be programmed to do all sorts of things.

I’m afraid he lost me a bit after this, so I’m not sure how he saw the technology being used in education.

Workshop: Using narrative structure in projects

The most fun I had on the day, as how can I resist playing around with cartoon strips!? This workshop looked at how thinking about narrative structures (e.g. your hero, villain, story arc) can be used as another project management tool. We took a classical fairytale, in our case Red Riding Hood, and introduced novel learning technologies to see what impact they had on the narrative. We gave Red Riding Hood a mobile phone so she could warn Granny about the Big Bad Wolf, granny got the Wood Cutter to build a “hole in the wall” computer & the wolves used this to learn how to clone food so that they didn’t need to attack people!

Intervention panels

I’m afraid the title intervention panel had me envisioning us all reassuring one another that we weren’t addicted to web2.0 or something. It was actually more like a round table and general discussion. Points I picked up during the day were:

• Will web2.0 make surface learning worse?
• critical/evaluative skills of learners do not seem to be improving
• Has the fundamental nature of learning changed?
• Need pedagogical push & intelligent technological insights to provide best education e.g. use ebook readers flexibly, use virtual environments to improve on reality.
• Change form students having to search our specialist information to having to trawl through huge tracts of information that were not available in the past.
• Should be prepared to admit when we don’t know something – learn alongside our learners!
• Change in locus – from academics telling/teaching to new generation of learners that want to share what they know. Need a more collaborative learning process?
• New learners are multimodal & multimedia – live in a more immediate environment.
• HE systems are very inflexible compared to the outside world.
• We are all learners & we all have something to offer.
• In HE we still need to challenge students in how they learn as well as what they learn.

Blog Review meeting 2.0

Keith, Sarah W, Selina and myself just held our latest blog review meeting.  In lieu of minutes here are a few brief notes on our discussions:

• We reviewed the blog’s development to date and agreed that an excellent voice has been found for the posts by all authors.  As a result the blog could be regarded as a defacto standard for other potential Library blogs, along with a body of expertise to advise as needed.
• The award nomination from Alan, and praise from CILIP for our work was noted.
• We agreed that the community focus of the blog would remain those already invited to contribute (along with their successors and alternates) so as to ensure it remains relevant to the professional activities of the library.
• PMG have asked us to go talk about the blog to them, so I’ll be asking them for a date and sorting out which of us will go along.
• Questions from us to PMG include: whom should we advocate the blog to internally, whom would they be advocating it to, the matter of Twirl’s availability to those staff that require it and the possibility of PMG making a post occasionally (they are already encouraged to, but have not yet posted or commented).
• The new Enquiry Manager will be invited by myself to become involved with the blog in some respect.
• We agreed to take the requirement for each comment to be approved off to see if this increases the number of comments.  However, we’re not allowing anonymous commenting so we have an audit trail to follow if needed to the source of any comments.
• We agreed to tell suitable local contacts about the blog, if we’ve not mentioned it already.
• We agreed to notify all library staff about the blog, and invite them to comment.
• We agreed that we will remove the block on search engines detecting the blog in January, thus making the blog visible to all and in keeping with the OA movement.  Noting that it is already visible if you are aware of the URL.
• We agreed to meet to review the blog again in Feb/Mar 2008

So all in all, we are pleased with the blog as a tool

Library Users Forum Nov 08

Just back from LUF which was more lively than the last one, with the Library reps asking a fair few questions of Louise and the rest of PMG.  Sadly non of my reps made it again, but I guess they must be too busy teaching/researching.  Bit of a shame as there were a fair few developments that I think they would have been interested to hear.  Among them were:

• We went through the library strategy, new resources and materials budget for 08/9.  Dollar/Euro look like they’re hitting our sector a bit, but no journal cuts needed and book budgets glowing and healthy. 
• Plenty of encouragement to spend the book budget to ensure student satisfaction levels are met as well as continuing development of the research collections.  Something I know I keep reminding my reps about, and when I get a moment I’ll be going through all the chemistry module books to see if we’re missing anything!
• A brief resume of the awards the DWL’s won, and is nominated for.  I wonder if we’ll be getting a big trophy cabinet?
• We’ve had a 50% increase in foot traffic to the DWL since we opened (compared to last year)
• 14th Janurary we’ve a Sepcial Collection event, celebrating our collections as well as illustrating what academics can and are doing with them.
• Quite a bit of discussion on open access and pay-up front model of publication and what the University is doing about this.
• A good bit on how much VFM our document supply costs are, especially in contrast to the other nearby institutions.
• The LIBX toolbar will be launched in two weeks time (it’s in beta testing right now).  I hadn’t had a chance to try this out myself yet (way too much teaching/prep) but it looks very promising in giving desk top access to the library key pages as well as easing EZProxy access to resources without going through the A-Z.list page.
• News about Hywel and Anne moving on was also announced.

Now if I can just work out why we’re a blended library not a hybrid one I’ll be a happy man…

CILIP Editorial Panel Meeting*

On Friday 31st I went down to London for the second of my trips to CILIPHQ.  This time it was for the first meeting of the new Editorial Panel, which has replaced the old and more formal Editorial Board earlier this year. 

It was an interesting meeting, very much of two halves.  The morning was mostly given over to reports from the Gazetteand Updateeditorial team, with the older hands weighing in from time to time.  As a newbie I kept uncharacteristically quiet, as I was still working out the social dynamics of the 17 other people in the room.  Perhaps a few too many, but the idea is to have representation from all library sectors and apparently the old Board suffered from far too few members.  As it was after lunch we kicked off into a more chatty part of the meeting as the ice had well and truly melted, and naturally I got my oar in at every available moment.

One of the most interesting debates was around the new digital Edition of Update, which looks like it will be having additional content over and above the print addition.  In part this is to drive traffic to the site, but it also is intended as a member benefit; since the issue is only visible to logged in CILIP members.

Part of my role on the panel, as well as using my expert judgement to feedback on each issue, is to seek comments and suggestions from the wider library community. I came away with a series of questions and action points, some of which I pushed out onto Twitter during the meeting.   In case you’re not Twittered up here are the main questions:

• What are the hot issues that should be tackled?
• What themes should issues focus on? We’ve had RFID, JISC and Health of late.
• Who should be writing articles in Update?
• Did you know who was on the cover of November 2008 without looking inside?
• Does Update use too much “in-house language” and should more effort be made to demystify acronyms used?

Usefully I’ve come back with a load of extra copies of recentissues, which I’ve left in the staff room to share the CILIP news a bit further.  So in

The meeting ended with a plea for contributions to the Update blog, whichI confess I’d forgotten to look at for a few weeks – stop by if you get the chance – though worth noting that unlike the Communities part of the site the blog is actually open access - something I wholeheartedly support.  So anyone can read it, though you do need to be logged in as a member to actually comment. 

Oh and did you all spot the picture/quote from me in the latest copy of Gazette?  Personally I think I look grumpy…

*You know with a super-exciting post title like that, that this entry is just going to be crammed full of interesting stuff; don’t you?

Reviewing the blog – the next meeting

The Gang of Four (Selina, Keith, Sarah and myself) have now set a date in mid-November to review the blog once again, and discuss all the various issues, opportunities, challenges and the like that have come up since we widened the gateways to let more people know about this place.

If any of the rest of you out there in reader land have any questions or suggestions, then please add them in the comments below – we’d be more than grateful for your input.

Bloggy review meeting

The four of us (Selina, Sarah, Keith and myself) had a meeting this morning to reflect back on the development of this blog, and how we move into the next phase for it.  Looking at the posting stats we were quite pleased to see that we’ve had an average of 1 post every two days (or .75 posts/day if you only count the week days) which isn’t a bad ratio.  Goodly amount of discussion and comment too.

Major things we decided were:

• To continue with the blog as an internal reflective tool for library staff
• To appraise management of our experiences so far
• To invite a select group of additional people to start reading, commenting or posting (our Population II Group)

There were one or two other matters, mostly in terms of layout and design as well, which I’ll tweak shortly.  But all in all we agreed that this had been a very useful tool for expanding our individual knowledge of developments and issues across the UoL library service.  Come the end of October we’ll look back at it again, and consider what the next phase should comprise – potentially making it available to all lib-staff to read at the least.

About a blog

I had a very productive meeting with Keith, Sarah and Sue Wednesday morning talking about various Biology related matters.  It’s always nice to stroll down to the ClinSci library, though I wish I’d remembered that we were meeting first thing before I trudged into the DWL Office first.  Would have saved on shoe leather.

One of the things we did talk about, that wasn’t strictly biological related was this blog itself.  We agreed that we’d:

• Meet in about three weeks to review the progress so far.
• Invite all those who came to the Web 2.0 day from the library to become contributors/readers.
• Consider the longer term plans for the blogs usage.
• Review the blogs progress after a further month.

I’ve a feeling organising this meeting will fall on Sarah or myself!