Growing Knowledge at the British Library

On Monday 13^th Dec Terese Bird and I paid a visit to the British Library to take part in an assessment session for the Growing Knowledge exhibition. The purpose of the Growing Knowledge exhibition is to showcase ‘innovative research tools’ to researchers. The exhibition space itself provides a futuristic space for experimenting with new technologies. Attractions include a tweet-o-meter, computers with 2, 3 and 4 screens as well as a touch screen, and a Microsoft Surface. The idea is to evaluate how researchers are working in different ways: we’re doing more things at once, so do we need more screens to support the multi-faceted nature of research work?

The exhibition room

As part of the evaluation we were let loose to play with the research tools on this range of devices. Terese Bird and I used the touch screen computer to look at some of the academic initiatives online, including the Allen Brain Atlas, Semantic Web Applications in Neuromedicine, Jane Austen’s Fiction Manuscripts and the Journal of Visualized experiments. Each of these shows ways in which the web is being used by scholars in diverse fields for research, collaboration, visualisation and dissemination.  

Terese has identified the Microsoft Audio Video Indexing System (MAVIS – a software system using speech recognition technology to allow searches of audio and video files) and the Galaxy Zoo as her stand-out tools in her blog post about the day. Both of these tools facilitate research that would be arduous or even impossible without them. My own favourites were the Journal of Visualised experiments and the eDance project.

JoVE leads the move toward making the communication of research more visual by presenting research methods in video format, thus “allowing the intricacies of new methods to be demonstrated far more effectively than is possible in text.” This is the kind of knowledge that really benefits from being shared in non-written media.

The eDance project has developed tools for collaboration between performance and practice-led research in dance, enabling researchers to chart movements in three dimensions. While I didn’t have time to gain a full understanding of how these technologies can be used, they seem symbolic of a shift in ways of thinking when it comes to research in the Arts. The idea that description and comment can happen on the artwork itself, rather than as a separate piece of writing, surely has implications for research into any kind of visual or moving-image text.

My favourite piece of hardware was the Microsoft Surface, which displayed a digital version of the 19^th century Garibaldi Panorama – the world’s longest painting – and shows how the challenges of viewing and collaborating on such an artefact can be overcome.

Microsoft Surface Table

As a whole, the exhibition raises questions about the role of libraries in storing and curating digital heritage and in supporting new academic behaviours, some of which are discussed in the podcast of the British Library debate: Is the physical Library a redundant resource?

USTLG Spring Meeting Redux (Afternoon)

Following on from my post USTLG Spring Meeting Redux (Morning), here’s few notes on the afternoon.

Theme for afternoon: social networking.

Advocating professional social networking to academics. Paula Anne Beasley and Linda Norbury, University of Birmingham.

• The subject librarians are well placed to advocate Web2.0 tech for gathering information via social networks.
• Found a knowledge gap for those not using Web2.0 or not of the generation to ‘just have a go’ at things & prefer some training.
• Surveyed staff in College of Physical Sciences & Engineering about their use/knowledge of Web2.0 using a free text survey.
• Responses variable, but enough interest to offer training session.
• Major issues from survey were whether Web2.0 tools were secure/stable, whether there was a University policy on using them and a lack of knowledge.
• Anne & Linda managed to get the College Academic Enhancement Group interested in the session, and all invites went out from that group rather than from the Library.
• The training session that was offered was originally going to cover blogging and twitter. However, as Linda got stuck abroad due to the ash cloud it became focused only on blogging on the day.
• 31 attendees for session: academics, admin staff, researchers & Emeritus Professors.
• Got very good feedback and the attendees were enthusiastic about blogging on the day.
• They hope to follow-up with seminars on social networking and social bookmarking, plus a support course in Blackboard.
• No-one else in their University is currently offering training in this area.

‘Do Librarians Dream of Electric Tweets?”, Gareth Johnson, University of Leicester.

The next presentation was from our very own Gareth, who gave a very enthusiastic talk on using Web2.0 technology for networking, and in library services.  Main points were:

• Why use things like twitter & Blogs?
• For professional networking, self-reflection, sharing experiences, staff development, answering enquiries, motivating staff etc.
• Can be very powerful tools.
• Like Gareth, I pick up lots of useful information and links to new reports via twitter now rather than by other routes.
• When using these technologies it is important to be human: respond to people, don’t just broadcast, share things.
• The best use of web2.0 csome when you allow it to overlap your personal, workplace and professional lives, but if you’re not comfortable with this level of engagement it can still be useful when used only in work hours.
• Important to “find the right tools for you”.

Gareth’s full presentation:

Do Librarians Dream of Electric Tweets? Making the most of blogs & microblogging

View more presentations from Gaz Johnson.

USTLG Spring Meeting Redux (Morning)

Royal Society of Chemistry, Burlington House. Photo by Matt_Fom_London via Flickr Creative Commons.

Gareth had already blogged about this event, but here’s my take on it too.

Theme for the morning: Go to the users, wherever they are online.

Taking your service to scientists: embedding subject-specific resources within VLEs. Jon Fletcher. Nottingham Trent University.

• Talked about embedding library resources & links into the VLE so student “don’t have to remember where to go” to get stuff. Student feedback suggested that they often forget how to use resources between years/terms/f2f sessions.
• University mandate that all courses should have a VLE site.
• Includes links to catalogue, metalib, referencing guidelines, library homepage etc in all science courses.
• 5 step guide to embedding: Consult/design resources using a team approach, get permission/access to VLE course, embed resources, consider sustainability & update when needed.
• Often need to ‘sell’ the resources/need to embed to the academics, but once in a few courses then get a snowball effect due to good student & course team feedback.
• Embeds all his teaching resources as well as core library resources.
• Sustainability: think about time/workload required, timescales and the tools needed. E.g. previous html editor wasn’t up to the job so now uses Wimbacreate. There approach is to use a repository and link all courses to one version of core resources page so easily updated in one place by more than one person.
• Updating: design so it only needs updating once or twice a year.
• This initiative has led to more visibility, embedding of f2f sessions, more liaison with academics and more enquiries.
• Currently a trial and only being done by Science team.
• Just about to start using TalisAspire for reading lists.
• Approx 1-2 weeks of time needed to build resources & embed them.
• Moved subject-based library pages within the VLE and linked out to other types of library pages.
• Stats on what is being accessed via the VLE.

MyLibrary – building a Library dashboard application. Mark Gavillet. University of Newcastle

• Creating a MyLibrary dashboard app using a customisable online tool (JQuery UI). A project which will go live for students to trial in new academic year.
• App draws info from various places e.g. library systems, shibboleth (for authentication, google etc.
• Tracks what resources are being used.
• Wanted to identify 80% of ‘start’ points for 80% of tasks that 80% of users do 80% of the time by asking 130 students where they look for resources.
• Student feedback was that there start points for university work/resources were google, OPAC, reading list, Blackboard VLE, databases, library homepage or student homepage (in that order of preference).
• The first place they go when sitting at a university PC: Uni email, Google, Blackboard, Facebook.
• Key library services: ejournals, renew books, search resources.
• They do not use the library homepage as anything other than a gateway & don’t read library news.
• Happy to use search tools but unsure of finding the right search tools in the first place.
• customer journey mapping of tasks such as finding an article form a reading list showed very convoluted routes to get there! Hope MyLibrary tool will help get them there quicker.
• Can put MyLibrary button in variety of places they use frequently such as Facebook and VLE.
• MyLibrary tool tabs for modules, resources, announcements, eResources/eJournals, MyItems(loans) & more.
• eResources pulled from subject categories on Metalib.
• eJournals via SFX (can search & choose favourites).
• MyItems/MyRecord from Aleph library system & can renew via tool.
• Opening hours & events from Library Google calendars
• TOCs from JISC tic TOCs service.
• GO TO WHERE THE USERS ARE, rather than expecting them to come to the library homepage. If the tool is successful then they will re-evaluate the role of the library homepage.
• Several months work and development.

RSC Publishing beta – Have your say…Richard Blount and Louise Peck, Royal Society of Chemistry

Got a quick overview of the new RSC interface and they are very keen for librarian feedback. Either via their survey or as beta testers. Quick look at ChemSpider, an excellent, free chemical structure resource.

Innovations in Reference Management Part 3

Moving Targets: the role of web preservation in supporting sustainable citation (Richard Davis & Kevin Ashley)

This was a rather different talk to most of the others at the event as it was looking more at the question of how we can cite the preserved version of ephemeral type of data, such as blogs, that we often see on the web these days.

• Some web preservation already happening: URI/DOI/Handles & other solutions, Wayback machine and UK Webarchive.
• Are we educating people to use links to sustainable archives/ Should we be recommending linking to the UK Webarchive version and not the original version?
• Used the example of citing a blog post that might disappear.
• Will our “collections” look different in future, will they be blog type posts rather than journal articles or books?
• Talked about the JISC project ArchivePress which allows you to use a RSS feed to create a preserved blog archive: this will allow Universities to create their own repository of blogs. For example, it could integrate with Research Repositories that use applications like DSpace. Should the Leicester Research archive be looking into preserving research blogs as well as other research outputs?
• Heidelberg University and others have created a Citation Repository for transitory web pages: this was specifically to deal with the problem that their researchers were having when researching China, due to the volatile nature of the Chinese internet. There might be rights issues with this approach but many of the original web pages had disappeared.
• Should we be teaching people about sustainable resources/publishing as part of our information literacy efforts?
• Can argue that citing a URL is like citing the shelfmark of a book in a library, as it’s the location of the information rather than the information itself. Should we be looking for a better citation system?
• Possible solutions: Institutions can offer archive mechanisms, authors need to use archive mechanisms, if a blog is being preserved than it needs to expose that permanent citable link for people to use (e.g. ArchivePress link) and permalinks should be a bit more “perm”!

Help me Igor – taking references outside traditional environments (Euan Adie, Nature.com)

Euan gave an overview of some of the projects they are working on as part of the Nature.com remit:

• Looked at how referencing might be achieved if you were using GoogleWave as a collaborative tool to write articles etc.
• Decided to create a 3rd party GoogleWave widget called Igor.
• Igor lets you fetch references from Connotea or PubMed and insert them into the Wave: it does this by typing in a command in Wave.
• Igor uses an open API to retrieve data (XML or RDF) and is only a proof of concept widget at the moment. it is OpenSource and people are welcome to develop it further.
• Euan did point out that the formats that most reference software uses (RIS/BIBtex) are not very easy to use with web APIs.
• Mentioned ScienceBlogs: an initiative to aggregate well known science blogs through Nature.com. E.g. finds if blogs link to Nature articles (via html, DOI, PubMed): blogs already comment on articles when they’re published so Nature wants to link the comments/blog posts to the articles.
• Have a API available that allows you to feed in am article DOI and see what blogs aggregated through Nature.com mention that article.
• Mobile devices: have made Mac app Papers available on iPhone. thinks people are not as likely to read articles on mobiles but save the reference for later instead.
• Nature.com always willing to experiment and collaborate with other projects.

Innovations in Reference Management Part 2

These talks focus more on tools for researchers:

Social Bookmarking for paper discovery, or why keeping your references openly on the web is good for academia (Kevin Emamy, CiteUlike)

Kevin gave an overview of how CiteUlike sees its role in helping researchers and how it works.

• There is a huge amount of research information out there, so how do you find the good stuff?
• CiteULike helps you save reference data as you search via a CiteULike browser button, or inputting hte URL into your CiteULike account. You can gather the references from a lot of well known science resources, add it to a CiteULike group and/or tag it for you and other people to find. Tags help subject collections grow.
• Can have RSS feeds at tag, article, user or collection/library level.
• Helps with social discovery by automatically making your collection of reference open for anyone else to see/search.
• If you visit someone you find it interesting to browse their bookshelves – CiteULike allows people to do the same thing with your personal research bookshelf/library.
• Allows you to find socially filtered information and follow users/groups/tags you like.
• Can search the CiteULike database and also see what the post popular papers are via CiteGeist.
• Can also get data out by downloading machine readable data sets/libraries etc and/or export to other tools such as Mendeley/EndNote/RefWorks.
• Set-up recommendations (you might also like…) service to find tags/articles/people you might like.
• No interest in providing cite’n’write type functionality as main function is the social discovery aspect.

I do wonder how biased this and other tools are towards the sciences? Are there other subjects using them, or do they tend to use other tools such as delicious?

 Mendeley: from reference management to real-time impact metrics (Victor Henning)

I’d been hearing a few things about Mendeley in the twitterverse, so I was interested to see it in action.

• It is being produced by ex-researchers or recent postgrads (no librarians… they said this is a blessing and a curse!), and the main aim is to help researchers manage and discover knowledge.
• Venture capitalist funded (some of the people behind Skype and Last.fam) and they have taken a lot of their ideas and model from music sites like Last.fm.
• There is a Mendeley desktop app and a web account, which you can synch up.
• The desktop app is designed to retrieve bibliographic data from PDF articles you have saved, and create a searchable database of your PDFs.
• Can also read and annotate PDFs. helps you organise your research material and allows you to search within the fulltext a PDF and across all the PDFs you have saved.
• Citation plugin (write’ncite type app) for Word and OpenOffice.
• Can drag and drop references into Googledocs, emails and other apps.
• Can create shared collections (up to 10 people) and synchronise your PDF libraries across everyone’s desktop app.
• The desktop app synchronises with the web account and uploads/downloads your data and PDFs (but 500Mb limit on amount of data).
• Social aspect: Mendeley automatically makes all your references private, but gives you the option to share with your Mendeley contacts if you wish using collaboration tools.
• Getting data into Mendeley (other than via your saved PDFs): import from CiteULike or Zotero, bookmarklet fro extracting data from academic databases or web sites using COinS
• Data goes into web account and then downloads to desktop app when synchronised.
• Impact Data: can look into what is the most read document/author/tag on the desktop app. Also working on a recommendation engine based on user preferences and analysing keyword and fulltext of papers.
• Can creat public collections: subscribe by email or RSS and embed collection in other websites.
• Web app has user profiles where you can share info on your publications, appearances, teaching etc
• More than 100k users and 11million fulltext research papers uploaded (217 million references) – at current rate of growth it could become the biggest research database within a year!
• What could this mean for impact factors? – potential for Mendeley to measure the interaction with the actual documents: the audience for it, how long people spend reading it, repeat readings, peer-review via comments/ratings, data available in real-time once paper published. Data on type of reader, impact within discipline or regions of world.
• Real-time Mendeley stats available via web app and will be releasing an API to make data freely available for people to study.
• Future plans: sustainable funding by charging for premium accounts (where you can have more file space), for fine grained stats, for shared accounts with more than 10 people and an enterprise version for companies.
• Future plans: collaboration tools for assigning tasks and for discussion, recommendation engine, search (but not download) fulltext), custom stats, integrate with library systems/openURL resolvers, free alternative to EndNote etc, free addition to Scopus/WoS.

As the event had quite a few Librarians in the room, one of the first questions was about the legality of sharing PDFs and copyright implications, as when you create a shared collection for up to 10 people the whole group gets access to all the PDFs everyone else in the group has uploaded. It wasn’t particularly clear to me from victor’s answer exactly what they are doing about copyright implications other than taking PDFs down when publishers notify them that they are unhappy (they mentioned Springer).

Their argument seems to be that there is a lot of research papers that are free to share, so there are legitimate uses for the software. Another is that researchers often email papers to each other and this offers a more efficient way to share them, and that staying within copyright law is the responsibility of the individual rather than the software. Not sure how the publishers will react to this over time…!

I’ve not had a chance to play with CiteULike or Mendeley yet so I’d be interested to hear about your experiences with them.

As a library service we need to discuss whether we teach/train people on these tools, as well as on the ones we already have available (EndNote/RefWorks), and the support implications. I’m leaning towards doing sessions to make people aware of these free services but making it clear that we cannot provide technical support for them. What do others think? Anyone else already teaching them? (I know AJCann was looking at using CiteULike in a Biological Science course.)

Higher Education in a Web 2.0 World Reprise

Higher Education in a Web 2.0 World: Cover

Following on from Gareth’s earlier post on this subject, here’s my thoughts & questions:

• Information Literacy is a major component of this report – it argues that it is a growing area that students are deficient in. Recommends that it is a high priority for HEIs to train their students in & keep their staff updated on.
• “Information literacies, including searching, retrieving, critically evaluating information from a range of appropriate sources and also attributing it – represent a significant and growing deficit area”
• However, no mention anywhere of how to do this or that libraris have been struggling to get this on the agenda for years.
• Q: What do we do with this report? Take it to VC? Take it to teaching & learning committees? What strategies & solutions do we suggest for training students & staff? Do we take a take roots approach with lecturers? Do all of the above?
• Web 2.0 skills (communication, networking, sharing) are becoming employability skills.
• Students are living in a Web 2.0 world and might expect Web 2.0 solutions in the future – though at present they expect a traditional face to face approahc in HE and do not equate social software with learning. This may change as the next few generations come through the school system.
• Students are currently consumers of content in the Web 2.0 world rather than creators – we need to find hooks i.e. show them how the technology helps them.
• Q: What are the hooks for staff and for students in using Web 2.0 in a learning context?
• Three types of online space: Personal (emails & messaging), Group (social networking sites) and publishing (blogs, wikis, youtube).  Students will not want us in their personal space but there is scope for utilising group and publishing space for learning & teaching.
• Information literacy should incorporate other web awareness issues e.g. plagarism, data protection, personal data on the web and online identities.
• Q: How do we do this? How do we work with others in the institution who teach/train on these issues? How do we update ourselves in all these areas?
• Upskill staff on e-pedagogy: as this will be needed for them to take advantage of using Web 2.0 technologies.
• Q: How skilled are we as librarians in this? What training do we need in order to offer the information literacy teaching the report advocates?
• Report suggests there are already examples out there of good practice in the use of digitised materials and online learning resources at module level. Though no specific examples included. It asks how these can be supported and used on a wider/larger scale.
• Q: What good practice are we already using or aware of with regards Web 2.0? Does it upscale? What opportunities are there for us to work with other colleagues inside & outside the institution to provide services?
• Take into account the prior experience and the expectations of students.
• Q: How do we do this? Do we cultivate more links with school librarians in the UK? What about overseas, distance learning and mature students?
• Digital divide still exists – don’t forget that!
• “Means of access will be multimedia, mobile and pocket-sized”
• Q: Are we prepared for the next wave of multimedia and mobile type resources?

Overall, this report is good for librarians and the information literacy cause as long as we DO something about it. Take action & not just talk about it!

Modelling the Library Domain

JISC have just released a new briefing paper: Modelling the Library Domain, which is part of the TILE Project (Towards Implementation of Library 2.0 & the E-framework).

Here’s some of the key points that I managed to pick out of the JISC Speak:

Library Domain Ecosystem Diagram from Briefing Paper

– Libraries need to look at providing widgets: integrate resources into web environments of the user’s choice.

– Supply value-added services.

– Tailor content to different types of users & encourage user generated content (reviews, ratings, comments).

– Regarding the diagram above: Corporation refers to content providers (Unis, Libraries, Publishers), Channel refers to the means of delivering the content & Clients are users involved in academic work.

– Libraries can either concentrate on managing and delivering their local assets/content, or look at widening their remit to include working with other channels in Higher Ed (e.g. reading lists, feedback, VLEs etc).

– “The wider role empowers libraries to provide a full set of services to meet a rich variety of locally identified user needs, potentially an institutional unique selling point.”

– More must be made of the user activity data available e.g. circulation data, number & types of downloads, which could possibly be linked through to student information (course, subject) without compromising data protection. This could provide the spark needed to engage user communities & encourage user generated content.

– “captured click streams rather than volunteered contributions (eg ratings, reviews, lists) are the surest source of intelligence about ‘users like me’.”

– If Libraries wish to provide more channel type services then the paper suggests encouraging concentration of services/content fro particular user groups & understand how they can become a trusted channel, the way services such as google are.

In a Few Years Time: Digital Library Strategy – slides and mindmaps

Some weeks ago a lot of us attended a Digital Library Strategy workshop here in the library, led by Ken Chad.  I’ve written about the day, but I’ve just been passed Ken’s slides and the mindmaps from the session.

• In a few year’s time: UoL Digital Strategy by Ken Chad [PDF]
• Mindmap from digital strategy workshop[PDF]

The mindmap was generated by small groups talking about the challenges, opportunities and issues around each of the 4 areas of discussion. They reflected back on the presentations from Ken and Richard, but also on the experience and insight of the various group members taking part.  They’re in no way a comprehensive point of view, and as you can see no ranking order is applied to them.  Each one is a comment, idea or concept in its own right.

But these will help the Library in shaping its future Web 2 and digital strategy developments for the next 3 or so years.  More about that in the near future…

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.

Library 2.0: Balancing the Risks and Benefits to Maximise the Dividends

Brian Kelly:

Web 2.0 Training Day at the Library

Still fresh from the web 2.0 training day  last Thursday a group of web 2.0 enthusiast subject librarians have decided to cultivate an active blog.  Yes we want people to take part.  UoL Library Blog is intended initially for library staff at the University of Leicester to share news and ideas, but who knows, we may expand.

Back to the web 2 training day, there was lots of positive feedback which is always nice,  and a few interesting points:

• Facebook – should we go beyond the ‘corporate’ page approach?  Probably not, but how do our personal identities / work identities blend together?
• RSS feed readers: should we be writing this into our training (esp Outlook in Windows 07). I expect you are going to tell me you already do / have.
• Twitter – I am trying to sort out getting Thwirl installed (we need administrator access) – if there are no ‘technical’ hitches.

There will be a follow up session in the Autumn.  Any suggestions for things we could include are more than welcome.