Lorcan Dempsey's weblog: Learning and research - distributed environments Archives

Learning and research - distributed environments

You're so vain ... you probably want to look at your h-index

And speaking of Elsevier, several colleagues and I received an email invitation from "the Scopus team" to look at our h-index [Wikipedia entry] on our very own Scopus profile page. Here is some of the text from the invitation:

The h-index * can help you evaluate and benchmark your research output and that of your peers. It provides an indication of the quality and the consistency of the researcher's work by looking at the number of articles published and the number of citations received over time. In Scopus the h-index presents a metric that takes all of an author's articles published between 1996 to present into account and thus provides a transparent mean to evaluate the impact of an author in the most recent 12 years. You will also find quick links to your publications, citation counts and co-authors.

I am sure that this has gone to many readers of this blog also.

A very superficial examination shows that Scopus provides some useful approaches for merging and demerging result sets based on knowledge provided by the searcher. It pulls together a lot of contextual data in its profiles, based on mining of article details. I found it useful. I have not looked at Web of Knowledge recently so I do not know how it compares.

Four overlapping things struck me about this invitation and the service:

Reputation management. The direct appeal in the invitation is to the author's interest in his or her research impact or reputation. Reputation management is of growing interest, for individuals and for institutions. I think that this creates an interesting intersection between research support/administration services and library/information services around such things as the relationship between institutional repositories and the recording of faculty publications, consistent naming of authors and institutions so as not to fragment impact through incorrect pulling together of publications, faculty expertise databases, citation management, and so on. The interaction between personal disclosure (what I put on my website, or social networking sites, or ...), institutional management, and third party data aggregation/manipulation will also be interesting to watch.
Making data work harder. The SCOPUS profiles are based on extensive mining and manipulation of data to create the context on their pages (affiliations, citations, cited by, h-index, etc). Increasingly, in many cases, we will expect to see such further analysis to create context and depth. Think of what we see in a Google Book Search page, an Amazon results page, a Worldcat Identities page.
Socialising Knowledge networks. The academic literature and the tools we have created to organize it reveal networks of knowledge. Citations, subject indexing, cross-reference structures, and so on, create connections between people, documents, ideas, institutions. Increasingly, we can mobilize these connections in digital environments, and make other connections. Alongside these 'classical' networks, we are seeing newer social networks emerge. One of the more interesting developments we will see will be the integration of our classically created networks and these new social networks. I was interested to see for example discussions around user-driven name disambiguation at Crossref. SCOPUS offers you the opportunity to submit feedback on a profile: presumably this will develop over time to allow greater interaction between those doing the profiling, based on available data, and those profiled, based on their knowledge.
We know where you live. Related to the last point, I was interested, and quite impressed, that they could send me an email pointing me to my profile page and that it all worked out. I do not have a very common name; I wonder what criteria they had in place before they would send you an email, and how many of them went astray. It is also interesting to see a publisher of a bibliographic tool reach out to users/authors in this way, with an incentive for them to get interested in a particular product. It potentially creates an interesting dynamic for the library.

Parents at the party

November 10, 2007 • Categories: Learning and research - distributed environments , Social networking , User experience

From the Guardian:

Online spaces are blurring, as universities that podcast and text their students have shown. The Jisc project manager, Lawrie Phipps, explains how the battle lines are being drawn: "Students really do want to keep their lives separate. They don't want to be always available to their lecturers or bombarded with academic information." [Students tell universities: Get out of MySpace! | Students | EducationGuardian.co.uk]

We are only beginning to explore the trade-offs between disclosure, either willed or as a result of usage data, and the services that can be built with that data. And we are only beginning to think about how to create social value in our applications. Much of the early work involves 'pushing' existing applications into social networking sites. However, this lacks the social dimension which characterizes the more successful applications there.

I liked Tony Hirst's empasis on 'pull', benefit and incentive, and on value, personal and social, in his post on Facebook apps (which led me to the above article):

The idea was simple - we would provide a tool that would provide students on Facebook with a personal benefit by helping them to enrich their profile with a course profiles badge that listed their OU courses, and then optionally provide them with a social benefit that would allow them to discover each other through that voluntary display of personal information, that is, through a shared declaration of their affiliation with a particular course. [OUseful Info: Helping Students Make More of Facebook Without Stealing Control...]

Via Sarah Horrigan via Tony Hirst.

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Syndicated readings

November 08, 2007 • Categories: Learning and research - distributed environments , Metadata

I think that reading lists and citation managers are interesting sites of connection between environments. They are potentially 'portables', travelling portals onto resources. I was interested to see the following discussion of reading lists on the Intute blog:

One solution is to provide links to key quality Internet resources within your VLE (Virtual Learning Environment) or university webpages. However, maintaining these is a challenge for lecturers, because of the time and effort required to regularly link check and update the web pages (2 ). Intute has developed the MyIntute service to make it easy to create and maintain personalised lists of resources that have already been carefully evaluated. It’s then simple to export and publish these. An optional dynamic link between Intute and your VLE or webpage (using JavaScript) automatically updates the links when they are checked by Intute staff. In addition our RSS feeds can provide a regular update of the latest resources added to Intute. Lecturers can also encourage students to keep their own personalised lists within MyIntute, knowing that they can rely on their quality. [Intute Blog » Blog Archive » Integrate Intute content]

They point to an example at the University of Leeds Library where an Intute search box and MyIntute lists have been integrated into their subject pages. The 'selected resources' are from MyIntute lists.

Intute is a national UK initiative, distributed across many universities, which supports effective use of web resources through a directory and other services. They have recently launched their blog.

Intute is run by a national network of academic subject, Internet and information specialists from UK universities, who will use this blog to post news, views and reviews about Intute services, but also about the use of Internet resources to support higher education and research. [Intute Blog]

Via Emma Place.

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References

July 07, 2007 • Categories: Identity management, IPR and e-commerce , Learning and research - distributed environments , Research, learning and scholarly communication , The cultural and scholarly record , ebooks and other e-resources

Alma Swan has an interesting post discussing the value added by the publisher in copy editing and concludes that it is ... variable. She notes a publisher study:

Wates and Campbell looked at copy editing changes carried out on a set of science, humanities and social science articles at Blackwell Publishing (as was) and reported that the biggest category of corrections by the publisher was concerned with the references (42.7% of all copy editing changes), the next biggest category (34.5%) was concerned with minor syntactical or grammatical changes and a small proportion (5.5%) of changes corrected author ‘errors that might otherwise have led to misunderstanding or misinterpretation’. [OptimalScholarship]

I was interested in the attention to references. And I wondered whether the variety of tools introduced in recent years to help with the capture and management of such citation data (RefWorks, Zotero, etc) had reduced the number of errors spotted in a paper's references. It would be interesting to know how the corrections break down, as between errors in bibliographic sources, transcription errors, stylistic or completeness errors, and so on.

In the longer term, it will be interesting to see whether such data flows more easily with the potential introduction of citation microformats (I don't know what the status of this work is), or, say, if it were to happen, the introduction of support in something like Microsoft Word to allow structured data of this sort to be imported or exported. I still believe that we will see greater use made of a new 'bibliographic tissue' which connects the user environment and database resources through resources like citation managers, reading lists, social bookmarking, microformats and RSS feeds.

Incidentally, the discussion of copy-editing is by way of introducing a JISC-funded project looking at differences between versions of articles (different author versions, publisher version):

VALREC will ask stakeholders what levels of validation they would like to see, and what broad categories of differences would be helpful, such as ‘editorial differences’ and ‘content differences’. The project will then develop the technology to measure differences and generate a digital certificate for any article detailing the differences. An example of such a certificate is on the VALREC website. Not only will there then be a means to itemise the exact differences between the author-final and published version, but between other, earlier, versions of an article too, perhaps those first exposed on blogs or wikis. This will permit better formalisation and monitoring of the scholarly record, especially as authors move to early-use of repositories and informal web tools as part of the communications process. [OptimalScholarship]

The project is a joint one between Alma's company, Key Perspectives, which has done a lot of empirical work on open access and researcher behaviors, and the University of Southampton, which has been a major producer of tools, systems and data analysis in support of open access directions (see, for example, the eprints.org site).

The network reconfigures the library systems environment

July 06, 2007 • Categories: Featured , Learning and research - distributed environments , Libraries - systems and technologies , Libraries - distributed environments , Libraries - organization and services , User experience

One of the main issues facing libraries as they work to create richer user services is the complexity of their systems environment. Consider these pictures which I have been using in presentations for a while now.

Reductively, we can think of three classes of systems - (1) the classic ILS focused on 'bought' materials, (2) the emerging systems framework around licensed collections, and (3) potentially several repository systems for 'digital' resources. Of course, there are other pieces but I will focus on these.

In each case what we see is a backend apparatus for managing collections, each with its own workflow, systems and organizational support. And each with its own - different - front-end presentation and discovery mechanisms. What this means is that the front-end presentation mirrors the organizational development over time of the library backend systems, rather than the expectations or behaviors of the users.

You have the catalog here, maybe several options for licensed resources (a-to-z, metasearch, web pages of databases, and so on) over there, and potentially several repository interfaces (local digitized materials, institutional repository) somewhere else.

This is one reason that people have difficulties with the library website. Effectively, it is a layer stretched over a set of systems and services which were not designed as a unit. Indeed, in some cases, they were not originally designed to work on the web at all. So what do we have?

ILS: a management system for inventory control of the 'bought' collection (books, DVDs, etc). The catalog is bolted onto this and gives a view onto this part of the collection. In effect, in virtue of its integration with inventory management, the catalog provides discovery (what is in the collection), location (where those things are) and request (get me those things) in a tightly integrated way. The ILS and catalog may be part of a wider apparatus of provision, and may have mechanisms for interfacing to resource sharing systems of one sort or another. The management side may have interfaces to a variety of other systems for sharing and communicating data: procurement, finance, student records. And there will be a flow of data into the system, from jobbers, as part of a shared cataloging environment, and so on.

Licensed: This has been an area of rapid recent development as the journal literature moved to electronic form. On the backend we now see a variety of approaches, and the frontend can be very confusing with lists of databases and journals presented in various ways, often in uncertain relation to the catalog (where do I look for something?). We are now seeing the emergence here of an agreed set of systems around knowledge-base, ERM, resolution and metasearch, and there is rapidly developing vendor support. This is the range of approaches for which Serials Solutions has proposed the ERAMS name. These systems require the management of new kinds of data, and mechanisms are being put in place, certainly not yet optimal, for the creation, propagation and sharing of this data. With journals data, discovery, location and request are not so tightly coupled as they were with the catalog. Discovery has happened in one set of tools (A&I databases), but then the appropriate title may have to be located in another tool (the catalog for example) and, if not available locally, requested through yet another system. The importance of the resolver, and the enabling OpenURL, has been to tie some of these things together and remove some of the human labor of making connections between these systems. And metasearch has been seen as a way of reducing human labor by providing a unified discovery experience over disparate databases. However, this whole apparatus is still not as as well-seamed as it needs to be, and users and managers still do more work than they should to make it all work.

Repository: Libraries are increasingly managing digital materials locally and supporting repository frameworks for those. This includes digitized special collections, research and learning materials in institutional repositories, web archives, and so on. There are a variety of repository solutions available, some open source. Typically, the contents of the repository backend may be available to repository front-ends on a per-repository basis. Here, discovery (what is there), location (where is it) and request and delivery are typically tightly integrated. Repositories may also have interfaces for harvesting or remote query. On the management side, metadata creation and material preparation may still be labor-intensive.

OK, so here are some general observations about this environment:

There is still a major focus - in terms of attention, organizational structures, and resource allocation - on the systems and processes around the ILS and the bought collection. In academic libraries, we will surely see some of this move towards the systems and processes around the licensed collections given the rising relative importance of this part of the collection. The repository strand of activity, associated with emerging digital library activities, may, in some cases, be supported from grant or other special resources. It will need to become more routine.
The fragmentation of this systems activity, the multiple vendor sources, the different workflows and data management processes, and the absence of agreed simple links between things mean that the overall cost of management is high.
There has been much discussion of library interoperability, but it has tended to be about how to tie together these individual pieces, or about tying pieces to other environments (how do I get my repository harvested for example). There has been less focus on how you might abstract the full library experience for consumption by other applications - a campus portal for example.

This in turn means several things.

We will see more hosted and shared solutions emerge, which offer to reduce local cost of ownership. And, of course, we are seeing vendors consider more integration between products. In particular it is interesting seeing the concentration on support for the licensed e-resources emerge strongly, as well as discussion about integrated discovery environments.
Over time, we can expect to see some more reconfiguration in a network environment. Shared cataloging and externalizing the journal literature have been two significant reconfigurations in the past. The pace of current developments suggest that we may be ready for other ways of collaboratively sourcing shared operations. For example, does it make sense for there to be library by library solutions for preservation, social networking, disclosure to search and social networking engines, and so on.

The next picture tries to capture an important direction that has emerged in the last year or so.

For many of the reasons identified above, we are seeing a growing interest in separating the discovery and presentation front end from the management backend across this range of systems. Why? Well, because it is becoming clearer as I suggested in my opening that legacy system boundaries do not effectively map user preferences. And because fragmentation adds to effort and accordingly diminishes impact.

What about the discovery side? So, we saw metasearch, a partial response to fragmentation of A&I databases. We are now seeing a new generation of products from the 'ILS vendors' which look at unifying access to the library collection: Encore, Primo, Enterprise Portal Solution. However, discovery has also moved to the network level. So, folks discover resources in Amazon, Google, Google Scholar. And OCLC is working to create discovery experiences which connect local and network through Worldcat Local, Worldcat.org and Open Worldcat.

And on the management side? Here the variety of workflows and systems adds cost, as resources are managed on a per-format basis. We can expect to see simplification and rationalization in coming years as libraries cannot sustain expensive diversity of management systems. The National Library of Australia's discussion of a 'single business' systems environment, or Ex Libris's discussion of Uniform Resource Management are relevant here. It is likely that there will be a growing investment in collaboratively sourced solutions, as libraries seek to share the costs of development and deployment.

As discovery peels off, then the issue of connecting discovery environments back to resources themselves becomes very important. It is interesting to look at Google Scholar in this regard, as different approaches are required for the three categories identified above. It has worked with OCLC and other union catalogs to connect users through to catalogs and the ILS; it has worked with resolver data to connect users through to licensed materials; and it has crawled repositories and links directly to digital content.

Given this great divide, several issues become very important:

Routing, resolution and registries become critical, as one wants to enable users to move easily from a variety of discovery environments to resources they are authorized to use. We need a richer apparatus to support this. (I have discussed the role of registries elsewhere.)
Libraries have thought about discovery. There is now a switch of emphasis to disclosure: libraries need to think about how their resources are best represented in discovery environments which they don't manage. (I have also discussed disclosure in more detail elsewhere in these pages.)
And again, how we present library services for consumption by other environments becomes an issue. For example, we are lacking an ILS Service Layer, an agreed way of presenting the functionality of the ILS so that it can be placed, say, in another discovery environment (shelf status, place a hold, etc).
Better discovery puts more pressure on delivery, whether from a local collection, throughout a consortium, or in broader resource sharing or purchase options. Streamlining the logistics of delivery and providing transparency on status at any stage for the user (as they can do with UPS or Amazon) become more important.

And finally ....

We are used to thinking about better integration of library services. But that is a means, not an end. The end is the enhancement of research, learning and personal development. I discussed above how we want resources to be represented in various discovery environments. Increasingly, we want to represent resources in a variety of other workflows. These might be the personal digital environments that we are creating around RSS aggregators, toolbars and so on. Or the prefabricated institutional environments such as the course management system or the campus portal. Or emerging service composition environments like Facebook or iGoogle. As well as in network level discovery environments like Google or Amazon that are so much a part of people's behaviors.

Libraries need to focus more attention on reconfiguring library services for network environments. This is the main reason for streamlining the backend management systems environment. It does not make sense to spend so much time on non-value creating effort.

Data curation again

June 21, 2007 • Categories: Digital asset management , Learning and research - distributed environments , Research, learning and scholarly communication

I mentioned the forthcoming report on data from Liz Lyon of UKOLN the other day. It has now appeared.

Liz Lyon

Dealing with Data: Roles, Rights, Responsibilities and Relationships - Consultancy Report

[Word] [PDF] (Permalink) [UKOLN - staff - Dr Liz Lyon]

Despite its UK focus, this report should make interesting reading more widely. It provides a useful overview of practice and policy across a variety of stakeholders: funders, nationally funded data centers, other policy bodies, local institutions. The environment is interesting given the range of national data centers, a situation which is not replicated everywhere else, and their relationship to research funding.

It is provides some discussion of general issues and it contains an interesting table which helpfully proposes a set of stakeholder roles and suggests associated rights, responsibilities and relationships.

Readers here may be interested in the following statement: "The polarisation of views regarding the role of institutional repositories for data was marked. "

The report emphasizes service and policy fragmentation and notes outstanding technical issues. However, it also shows an environment which is organizationally well-developed enough to be able to have discussions between major players about better coordination in these areas.

Related entries:

Data curation: a couple of things

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Excitation - making connections with citations: a couple of presentations

March 30, 2007 • Categories: Learning and research - distributed environments , Libraries - organization and services , Metadata

I was interested to see a presentation about Sakaibrary [ppt] at Getting in the flow. The focus was on creating citation lists from library resources and making them available in Sakai. This is an example of what I have spoken about as bibliographic tissue, the growing interest in lightweight approaches to creating and sharing bibliographic data and making connections with it (reading lists, citation managers, RSS feeds, ...).

Testing suggested how the approach created value for particular stakeholders:

Faculty: easy way for students to create and share citation lists within Sakai
Faculty: "Do it yourself" e-reserves
Students see it as helpful in writing research papers.
Librarians: prefer native search interfaces and valuing the investments made in library websites.

Susan Hollar, giving the presentation, spoke about her desire to go further and "free the citation". I am not quite sure if I understood what she meant, but I associated it in my mind with Tony Hammond's presentation [ppt, blog summary], given a few weeks ago at the first open meeting of the LC Working Group on the Future of Bibliographic Control. He spoke about Nature's interest in "fielding machine-readable metadata to support value-add services". And he spoke among other things about tagging ("As a descriptive language tags and tagging are decidedly ‘street’.") and microformats (as "design patterns with semantics" and as a way of making content become live on the web). He mentioned initiatives for microformats for citation.

Our digital identities: bricolage, prefabrication and disclosure

March 28, 2007 • Categories: Learning and research - distributed environments , Learning and research - systems and technologies , Research, learning and scholarly communication

In recent presentations I talk about workflow in quite general terms. I suggest that we have seen the focus of our attention shift from the database, to the website to workflow as the web environment becomes richer. We want to get things done on the network, not just find things.

Workflow, in this general sense, may be self-assembled from the range of resources available to us as network services (Flickr, for example); as widgets, extensions, and toolbars; as bookmarks and RSS feeds; and so on. Some folks may have elaborate apparatuses; others less so. However, there are also important prefabrications that may support workflow, course management systems or campus portals for example. And in between there are environments which allow us to compose resources to support what we want to do, My Yahoo or the personalized Google home page, for example. We do not currently share a 'composition' environment, although we are seeing a richer shared browser environment emerge, RSS support for example.

In this context I was interested to read a post by Tony Hirst of the Open University. He is talking about 'personal learning environments' or PLEs [Wikipedia entry on PLE].

Anyway, I think I've worked out what PLEs are - they're the set of web services we each use for our own purposes; and they're personal because the combination we use is unique to each of us (oh, you use Google docs do you - I use Zoho; GTalk? I'm on MSN; flickr? no, Photobucket; Typepad? Wordpress...) [OUseful Info: Scribd and the Role of Open Repositories]

These remarks are part of a more general discussion about network-level personal resource sharing services (that's my phrase) such as YouTube, Slideshare, Scribd, Flickr, and so on. As part of our personal digital identity we disclose and share traces and works on the network and we have various ways of doing that. Tony Hirst wonders why JISC in the UK does not support a national level version of a service like Scribd for academic materials. Many institutions, including his own, have institutional repositories but these are "independently hosted" and he is not aware of a discovery service across them. There is a national service, Jorum, for sharing learning materials, but it co-exists with institutional resources such as the OU's OpenLearn, without, again, an obvious shared discovery service across them.

And he observes:

The problem is, there are just soooooooooooo many places to share content now. And I'm not sure what the solution is? Maybe it's that I keep all my stuff where I want it, and then share it into the communities I want to, and let search engines/harvesters pull it into other communities where it's relevant (maybe letting me know when they do, and giving me the option of stopping them). [OUseful Info: Scribd and the Role of Open Repositories]

I thought that this was a really interesting post. For several reasons. First, it highlights how folks are in fact assembling personal digital identities from a variety of tools on the network, piecing them together in ways that make sense to get things done. Second, for me, and this may not be the intention of the post, it underlines some issues of institutional fragmentation. Scale and brand matter, and are connected, and in turn relate to incentives. If I want to manage stuff I may put it one place. If I want to share it with a broad community I may put it another. If I want it to be universally discoverable it needs to be in the right place. A national resource may be more compelling than an institutional one; a network-level one more compelling again. Consolidation has its uses as new network services show. Consolidated discovery is very important, whatever about actually consolidating resources themselves. And finally, it provides some interesting use cases for thinking about how to put institutional - library and other - services 'in the flow' of research and learning behaviors.

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Knowledge and health

December 03, 2006 • Categories: Learning and research - distributed environments , Libraries - organization and services

The UK magazine Update recently carried a story on how health information provision is being coordinated in the UK National Health Service. It contains a striking quote about the value of information - the 'application of what we know' - from Dr Muir Grey who has been very involved in this area for several years.

The visionary’s view of information as a key resource in clinical practice was set out in a recent consultation document, Best Current Evidence Strategy [.doc]. In it Muir (as he is known in health information circles) makes a challenging proposition: ‘The application of what we know will have a bigger impact on health and disease than any single drug or technology likely to be introduced in the next decade.’

According to Muir, ‘by putting knowledge into practice, we can prevent or minimise the seven universal problems of healthcare’. In his model there are three strands to working with knowledge: the Best Current Evidence Service (explored in detail in the report); the NLH [National Library for Health], which he sees as being charged with ‘organising and mobilising the evidence’; and the National Knowledge Infrastructure, which contains technical standards, tools and services. [CILIP | New roles for information professionals in the NHS - Stephen Singleton]

At the same time, Adam Bosworth of Google has been writing about how patients need better access to organized health information, better ways of controlling their own health information, and better ways of connecting to others with similar health interests. He highlights some of the ways in which inefficiencies in information access and use complicate diagnosis, treatment and choice of care-giver and goes on to say:

These are some of the health-related problems we're thinking through at Google. We don't have any products or services to announce yet and may not for quite some time, but we thought we'd share a bit about the problems we're interested in helping out on even before we introduce solutions. As we explore these problems and continue to work on them, we hope to share more about our efforts along the way. [Official Google Blog: Health care information matters]

In each case we see the value of 'evidence' and the importance of mobilizing it more effectively by practitioners and patients alike.

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Zotero again

October 06, 2006 • Categories: Digital asset management , Learning and research - distributed environments , Libraries - distributed environments , Metadata , User experience

I mentioned Zotero the other day. I am submerged in several assignments and will not be able to look at it myself for a little while. In the interim, here are some mild opinions, tentatively offered:

There are a range of generic options (create a new citation from scratch, capture current web page, capture link, create snapshot). More importantly, there are specific options when Zotero recognizes a page it knows how to scrape from: you see an icon in the location bar, like the RSS icon when Firefox discovers a feed. Click it to capture the citation. It did a decent job of grabbing book citations from our OPAC and from Amazon, and quite a nice job of grabbing article citations from JSTOR–with one important caveat, discussed below. By default it takes a snapshot when it creates a record, but this seems a little slow and I turned it off. Beyond individual books and articles, you see a folder icon when you’re on the search results screen in JSTOR: you can save the whole set of 25 records with one operation (though you need to check them off one by one: it needs a “check all” option). It takes a while, but it’s very cool. But turn off the snapshots: not only were they excruciatingly slow, they ended up as empty PDFs. [Quædam cuiusdam » Blog Archive » Zotero - A First Glance]

Read the full entry for more details.

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Some e-science resources

September 03, 2006 • Categories: Digital asset management , Learning and research - distributed environments , Research, learning and scholarly communication

One of the primary characteristics of current change is that the network is 'coming inside': it is becoming a part of routine activities and they are being reconfigured in the process. This is happening everywhere, and in science it goes under the name of 'e-science' or 'cyberinfrastructure'.

The UK Research Councils define e-science thus:

What is meant by e-Science? In the future, e-Science will refer to the large scale science that will increasingly be carried out through distributed global collaborations enabled by the Internet. Typically, a feature of such collaborative scientific enterprises is that they will require access to very large data collections, very large scale computing resources and high performance visualisation back to the individual user scientists. [Research Councils UK: e-Science]

This quote is from their e-science website and the links from this page point to a range of indicative activities.

In the US, the Office of Cyberinfrastructure established by the NSF plans to fund activities in similar areas. Its website points to funding initiatives, and a range of documents and reports. Including a vision statement for 'NSF's cyberinfrastructure for 21st Century discovery' [pdf]. There has also been recent exploration of these issues in the context of the humanities and social sciences also and the ACLS Commission on Cyberinfrastructure for the Humanities and Social Sciences has released a draft final report.

In this context, here are a few recent UK resources of potential interest.

The Digital Curation Centre has produced a short briefing paper on data curation:
Curation of data collected and developed during these investigations is vital for post-analysis results verification, further experimentation and cumulative analysis. Yet despite its importance, usually only a very small percentage of outputs are properly managed and curated for re-use. Failure to properly curate means that investments are not maximised, research cannot be validated or reliably extended, and may even result in data loss and incorrect interpretation. Vigorous curation practices should be implemented to address these risks, ensure data provenance and integrity, and enable reliable re-use. The scale and importance of the research means a holistic and interoperable approach to curating research outputs is required. Ultimately, this is an issue that can only be addressed on a collaborative scale, like the Grid itself, and requires input from all stakeholders across the entire data life-cycle. [Digital Curation Centre: Resource Centre: Briefing Papers: Curating e-Science Data]
This is one of several briefing papers published by the DCC, including ones on the curation of email and geospatial data respectively.
The Research Information Network ran an event called Data webs: new visions for research data on the web with presentations from Europe and the US. From the blurb: "The event provided an opportunity to examine and discuss the changing nature of scholarly publication and the use of lightweight Semantic Web and Web 2.0 approaches to improve access to, and interoperability between scientific research data". The presentations are available and are a useful overview of issues.
The Arts and Humanities Data Service has been exploring how e-science techniques and approaches might be of use in the arts and humanities. Outputs from their E-science scoping study are available on their website.

The nature of its support for e-science is one of the major challenges facing the research library in coming years, and there is no real consensus about response. Nor is there a clear sense of requirement coming through these various resources. I noticed a comment in the opening Data Web presentation. David Shotton [ppt] spoke about how typing pools gave way to self-created word processing, and about how telephone switchboards gave way to dialling one's own international calls. He suggests that librarians are being similarly bypassed by 'on-line journals'. He goes on to talk about how the database will give way to a 'distributed dataspace' as we enter the age of 'distributed personal data publication'.

ARL has a working group - Library support for e-science - which is exploring these issues. A part of its charge reads:

Engaging ARL members in the development of new roles for libraries as e-science infrastructure and service needs emerge at research institutions and promoting the contributions of research libraries in this arena. [home]

I look forward to seeing their recommendations.

(Incidentally, I notice that Richard Akerman is keeping a set of relevant links on Connotea under the name of the ARL group.)

A little learning ...

August 21, 2006 • Categories: General - distributed environments , Learning and research - distributed environments , Learning and research - systems and technologies

A couple of resources about learning, services and the network:

Scott Wilson has a nice roundup of thoughts and examples under the heading elearning and web services [pdf].
Edufilter is a new blog from Dave Tosh and Ben Werdmuller, the principals in Elgg:
Edufilter has been set up as a resource for those wanting to find out more about the various educational projects going on around the world and the people behind them. We will be discussing, reviewing and highlighting educational projects, software, services and research. [edufilter » About]
They have several interesting interviews on the site already, including one with Brad Wheeler talking about Sakai.

Seems to me that the intense focus on the relationship between library resources and instittutional learning environments has lessened a little in the last year or so. Perhaps, because folks are standing back a little as so much is still in flux?

I still wonder that we do not see more integration around reading lists, citation managers, and collaborative bookmarking approaches. Incidentally, I have not kept track of whether the RLI spec from IMS has been usefully deployed.

Conferring about learning

April 20, 2006 • Categories: Learning and research - distributed environments , Learning and research - systems and technologies

It is always interesting seeing how conferences are shaped. Sometimes you will just have a list of speakers strung around various social events. Sometimes you can actually sense the emerging shape of an area or a good overview of its concerns from a well-designed conference program.

I am not quite sure where alt-i-lab 2006 and the Summit on Global Learning Industry Challenges organized by IMS fits on this spectrum, but I found the overview of issues it presents an interesting snapshot. It is also interesting given the mix of academic and commercial voices.

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Games and digital libraries

December 15, 2005 • Categories: Learning and research - distributed environments

The relationship between gaming and education, and more specifically, between gaming and libraries, is of growing interest. John Kirriemuir has a background working with digital library initiatives and is currently researching gaming environments and behavior in an educational context.

He has an article in the current D-Lib magazine talking about games and information services.

Though digital library systems and online games provide extremely different services, there is much that the development community of each could learn from the other. Both types of "always on" service, used by millions of people, involve simultaneous participation by many distributed online people, accessing and affecting large quantities of data. Technical, interface, and communication attributes from online games are of relevance to the developers of online information and commercial services. Some tools, developed for games, are being used by such services. It will be interesting to see whether there will be a further take-up, or cross-pollination, of concepts, technologies and ideas between these sectors. [Parallel Worlds: Online Games and Digital Information Services]

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Coins magic

November 04, 2005 • Categories: Learning and research - distributed environments

I installed LibX a while ago to see what it is like. Every now and again it pops up an icon - what it calls a 'cue' - on a page where it thinks it is appropriate to link to Virginia Tech resources (it can be adapted to link to resources at other institutions). Quite nifty really, especially if I were a member of the VT constituency.

A little while ago I was looking through RSS feeds (I use the Firefox extension Sage), and lo and behold I saw the VT cue in several places on the feed from Qu�dam cuiusdam, Peter Binkley's blog.

Peter has embedded Coins in his pages. LibX recognizes the Coins and acts on them to bring the user into the VT resolver and onwards to the catalog.

Magic .... This is a nice illustration of something still quite new.

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Vernaculars of learning

August 18, 2005 • Categories: Learning and research - distributed environments , Research, learning and scholarly communication

New learning environments for the 21st Century, a presentation by John Seely Brown, is worth a look [pdf]. There are lots of suggestive moments. He looks at the learning and the learning environments of network people. "Today's digitally experienced students learn differently and have new vernaculars." These include the languages of cinema, games and the web. "The structure of visual arguments." "Blurring formal and informal learning becomes a way of life and identity construction." "The remix culture all supported by social software." "Hybrid models: passion-based particiation in niche communities of co-creation complemented by core curriculum or by the academy, itself."

In the flow

Via elearnspace.

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In the flow

June 24, 2005 • Categories: Featured , Learning and research - distributed environments , Learning and research - systems and technologies , Libraries - distributed environments , Libraries - organization and services , Research, learning and scholarly communication

Workflow is important. We often think of the network as multiple individual opportunities: a mass of websites. However, just as we increasingly work, learn, research, and play in a network environment, so will services evolve to reduce effort and improve effectiveness. These services will support flow construction and resource integration - tying together tasks and the resources needed to address them.

Libraries have always been eager to 'fit in' to their users' lives. In a network environment, this increasingly means 'fitting in' with evolving network workflows.

Think reductively of two workflow end-points.

The first is demand-side: we are constructing flows and integrating resources in our own personal spaces. We are drawing on social networking sites, blogs, RSS aggregators, bookmarklets, toolbars, extensions, plug-ins. These are variably configured, stitched together by what I have called the intrastructure of RSS, bookmarklets, tags, and simple web services. Participation is also variable. Some are developing elaborate digital identities, a personal bricolage of network services. Others are less actively constructive, working with what comes straight out of the box. However, whether built into our browser or available from a growing number of network services, we will increasingly have rich demand-side flow construction and resource integration facilities 'straight out of the box'. The advance of RSS and its integration with new Apple and Microsoft operating systems is interesting in this regard.

The second is supply-side, where workflow and integration have been pre-fabricated to support particular tasks. Think of a course management system, or a customer relationship management system. We will also see growth here, as processes are standardized and supported in applications.

One reason that supply-side customization and personalization services have not been more actively taken up is that it may be less important to me to be able to manipulate flows and resources within a supply-side environment than to be able to integrate them into my self constructed demand-side environment. So, for example the most important thing for me may not be to manipulate components within some user interface, or to have email alerts sent to me, it may be to have an RSS feed so that I can interact with a range of resources in a uniform way. The value may be in playing well with my aggregator, a central part of my workflow, of how I engage with network services.

What does this mean for libraries? We have begun to realize more keenly that the library needs to co-evolve with user behaviors. This means that understanding the way in which research, learning, and consumer behaviors are changing is key to unerstanding how libraries must respond. And as network behavior is increasingly supported by workflow and resource integration services, the library must think about how to make its services available to those workflows. Many of our recent discussions have in fact been about this very issue, about putting the library in the flow. Think of the course management system. If this helps structure the 'learnflow' then the library needs to think about how to be in that flow. Think of Google. It has reached into the browser and the cellphone. It is firmly in the flow of user behavior, and as libraries and information providers want to be in that flow also they are discussing how best to expose their data to Google and other search engines. Think of the iPod. If this is the preferred place to manage my liquid content, what does this mean for library content?

Here are some examples I have come across recently which may make this more real.

The first is a general one. In the past month or two I have heard two presentations from public librarians talking about digital audio books, and suggesting that they will be popular. The reason given is clear: in an iPod world, digital audio fits nicely into the 'commuteflow' or, indeed, the 'lifeflow'.

The second is from the very interesting work at the University of Rochester which seeks to understand research work practices in the context of the evolution of institutional repository services.

In the long run, we envision a system that, first and foremost, supports our faculty members' efforts to "do their own work"--that is, to organize their resources, do their writing, work with co-authors, and so on. Such a system will include the self-publishing and self-archiving features that the DSpace code already supports, and will rely heavily on preservation, metadata, persistent URLs, and other existing features of DSpace. When we build this system, we will include a simple mechanism for converting works in progress into self-published or self-archived works, that is, moving documents from an in-progress folder into the IR. We believe that if we support the research process as a whole, and if faculty members find that the product meets their needs and fits their way of work, they will use it, and "naturally" put more of their work into the IR. [Understanding Faculty to Improve Content Recruitment for Institutional Repositories]

I hope that it is reasonable to read this work in this way: based on their investigations, Rochester staff recognise that they need to describe and deliver the service in such a way that faculty see it supporting their workflow. The library has identified a flow construction gap, to do with the writing and sharing of papers, which they hope to fill by providing workflow support through augmentations to Dspace. Looking forward we might surmise that future success will be more assured to the extent to which the new support is a natural extension of current workflows.

The final one comes from a presentation [ppt] by David Tosh and Ben Werdmuller which draws on their work modeling 'learning landscapes' in the context of the evolution of e-portfolios. They see the e-portfolio as a place where the student constructs a digital identity, which connects resources, experiences, and tutors. Connection is important, because learning happens in contexts of communication and exchange beyond the formal course structures. The VLE (virtual learning environment AKA course management system) which in the terms presented above is a supply-side workflow manager is one part of this landscape. A focus of this work appears to be to develop capacity for richer demand-side integration. Now, I do not have the context to assess this work in terms of its own discipline but I think it has nice illustrative value and is interesting here for a couple of reasons. One, the 'library' is not present in this iteration of the landscape. But, more importantly, how would one represent the library if it were to be dropped in? As 'the library'? As a set of services (catalog, virtual reference, ...)? If as a set of services, which services? And, if a particular set of services, how well would they 'play' in this environment? What would need to be done for them to be in the flow?

The importance of flow underlines recurrent themes:

the library needs to be in the user environment and not expect the user to find their way to the library environment
integration of library resources should not be seen as an end in itself but as a means to better integration with the user environment, with workflow.

Increasingly, the user environment will be organized around various workflows. In fact, in a growing number of cases, a workflow application may be the consumer of library services.

The message for libraries is clear: be in the flow.

Note: this post has been stewing in draft form for some time. While writing it I read Peter Brantley's post on the 'assembly' of services. I like self-assembled and pre-assembled as ways of talking about some of these things.

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Of portals and portlets

June 09, 2005 • Categories: General - distributed environments , Learning and research - distributed environments , Libraries - distributed environments

General purpose portal frameworks are becoming widely deployed. uPortal and Oracle Portal are examples. This is turn has driven interest in portlets, and in the portlet technologies WSRP and JSR 168. A portlet is a 'pluggable' user interface to a remote service. Portlets are a means by which several 'channels' may be embedded in a portal.

Several resources which bring together discussion of portlets and library applications have come across my desk recently, which prompts this portmanteau post:

The CampusEAI Consortium provides a depository of supported portlets/channels for for members. You have to be a member to see what is in the depository, but the community source approach to sharing the burden of application development is interesting. The website suggests that portlets are available which "already allow students, staff, faculty and alumni to see their email, calendars, many learning management systems, news sources, library systems, and scores of other tools, all available to them in one central location."
UKOLN has published a feasibility study [pdf] on the use of portlets within the Grouplog project. There is some material specific to the project, but also a range of background material and pointers to further information. Included in the report is an exploration of re-implementing the RDN-I service as a portlet. RDN-I is service which allows the Resource Discovery Network search service to be embedded in a remote website.
The CREE project is looking at integrating a trial selection of information services into portal frameworks using portlet technology. The project deliverables include some technical reports. A couple of presentations are available which show screenshots of portlets for search applications embedded in a container portal application.
Sakai is a high profile initiative to build a community source suite of collaboration and learning environment applications. It is envisaged that these will be integrated into portal frameworks using portlet technologies.

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Linking libraries and learning management

April 28, 2005 • Categories: Learning and research - distributed environments

Here is a nice example of integration between library and learning environments.

The University of Michigan Library provides course reserves information to the Sakai-driven campus course management system through RSS. We will discuss the system's framework, describe technical challenges, and suggest collaborative strategies for implementing a similar service. Usage statistics, user responses, and strategies for overcoming technical challenges will also be discussed. [EDUCAUSE | Resources | Resource Center Abstract]

Note the use of RSS, which now seems to be everywhere.

Spotted in EdTechPost.

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Learn, click, buy

April 18, 2005 • Categories: Identity management, IPR and e-commerce , Learning and research - distributed environments

I was interested to see the following on the Amazon Web Services blog:

Concord USA has developed and released, free-of-charge, an Amazon course item module for colleges and schools that use the learning management system from Blackboard Inc. This module allows course developers to include books and other items from amazon.com in their Blackboard online courses.[Amazon Web Services Blog: Blackboard Learning Management System]

To note: the institution can collect a referral fee when students click through and purchase items.