The JISC has made a report on digital preservation costs available. "This study has investigated the medium to long term costs to Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) of the preservation of research data". One aim was to provide a methodological foundation on research data costs for national and institutional initiatives.
Our case studies suggest that the service requirements for data collections and the best structure for organising relevant services locally will be more complex than many have thought previously. Both Cambridge and KCL are developing central repositories to work with departmental facilities and discussing federated local data repositories for research data preservation combining services and skills from central and departmental repositories. Costs for the central data repository component at Cambridge and KCL are an order of magnitude greater than that suggested for a typical institutional repository focused on e-publications alone. [Keeping research data safe : JISC]
The authors are my former work colleague Neil Beagrie, Julia Chruszcz and my current work colleague Brian Lavoie. Neil outlines the contents on his blog:
The report itself has chapters covering the Introduction, Methodology, Benefits of Research Data Preservation, Describing the Cost Framework and its Use, Key Cost Variables and Units,the Activity Model and Resources Template, Overviews of the Case Studies, Issues Universities Need to Consider, Different Service Models and Structures, Conclusions and Recommendations. There are also four detailed case studies covering the Universities of Cambridge, King’s College London, Southampton, and the Archaeology Data Service (University of York). [Neil Beagrie’s Blog]
I sense some renewed interest in digital preservation of late. For example, the following two reports came over my desk on the same day a couple of months ago.
Phil Barker looks at FRBR in the context of learning object metadata.
The proposed object model borrows from the scholarly works application profile (SWAP) application model, which in turn is based on the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) entity model. The rationale behind this was that, firstly, scholarly works may be considered learning materials in higher education, so any model for learning materials would have to describe scholarly works, secondly, the FRBR model is well-tested and seems generic enough to describe many other types of resource (e.g. musical scores and performances, images, online resources). [Learning Materials Application Profile Domain List]
Our activities in the network world leave traces. The analysis of these traces is now a major undertaking as organizations mine this data to understand behaviors, to improve their systems, and to refine their offer.
Tony Hirst has a seriesofposts about 'course analytics':
In contrast to the academic analytics, one of the things I set out to explore was how an off the shelf web stats analytics tool (Google Analytics) could be used to help me learn more about what students were doing with our online course materials, and help me identify what - if anything - a "learning site's" goals could be, and what the site might be optimised for. [OUseful Info: Course Analytics - Prequel]
And further ....
For the moment, what I am interested in is how website analytics can be used applied to online course websites in order to gain a better understanding of online study habits and the bahaviour of students taking an online course. [OUseful Info: Course Analytics, Part 1 - Visitor Behaviour]
He provides some interesting analysis, looking at how students use course materials. He then extends the question to the library website, and based on discussion with his Open University library colleagues he suggests a list of questions that might be tackled with this approach. What sort of search engine searches result in referrals to the library website, for example. How well is actual page popularity mapped by front page navigation options? And so on.
He wonders what success looks like:
How to define library website goals is another interesting exercise... If the site was Amazon, where the aim is to sell goods, a relevant goal page would be a "Thanks for the cash - the goods will be with you in a day or two" page. What is the range of useful, successful transactions on a Library website? [OUseful Info]
He is interested in hearing from libraries who use Google Analytics, or similar off the shelf approaches, and about what they are measuring. If you have some experience, leave him a comment .....
We use the following collections grid from time to time to help focus attention on particular collecting patterns in libraries. The bottom right hand corner represents materials that have not been highly stewarded and which are usually unique to a particular institution. The types of material which go in here are research and learning outputs (e.g. preprints, data sets, learning objects) and institutional administrative records (annual reports, and so on).
These share some characteristics. And in some ways, we can see them becoming the 'special collections' of the future when they move into more stewarded environments.
In this context I was interested to see the University of Minnesota's Digital Conservancy. Effectively, it is looking at stewarding the material in that quadrant: institutional research materials and administrative records.
The University Digital Conservancy is a program of the University of Minnesota Libraries that provides long-term open access to a wide range of University works in digital formats. It does so by gathering, describing, organizing, storing, and preserving that content.
Works produced or sponsored by the University of Minnesota faculty, researchers, staff, and students are appropriate for deposit in the UDC. Works might include pre- and post-prints, working papers, technical reports, conference papers and theses.
An interesting report [pdf] from the University of Minnesota Libraries looks at the behaviors of researchers in the sciences. It extends the earlier work done by the Libraries on researchers in the humanities and social sciences.
Not unsurprisingly there is a major focus on having resources available online and when online reducing the number of clicks required to use something. There is also considerable discussion about research data issues, covering the need for better ways of organizing and managing data outputs.
Scientists make heavy and regular use of
library resources availably electronically, but regard the physical library
buildings as a place of last resort -- where you go when you have no other
way to find something. Library buildings are places of “disclosure” rather
than “discovery,” inasmuch as researchers go to libraries to retrieve what
they have already identified. At the same time, many scientists speak
nostalgically about the lost art of browsing and serendipitous discovery in
libraries and depend on technology to provide browsing proxies. [Understanding Research Behaviors, Information Resources, and Service Needs of Scientists and Graduate Students: A Study by the University of Minnesota Libraries]
The findings appear consistent with the RIN report on researchers' use of libraries [pdf] which was released a short while ago, although it ranges over wider ground.
The Open University has one of the best logos I know. It does actually communicate something about the institution. And as an institution it is a significant achievement.
At one time, TV programs were a major way the OU delivered courses. And for people of my generation, the off-peak OU programming was very much a part of our television experience. Prompted by Tony Hirst, I had a look on YouTube and it just seemed like yesterday .....
Here is the real thing:
And here is a pretty good spoof by Fry and Laurie (yes, that is the Laurie now to be seen in House). Look past the intro:
Aside: I was interested to see the fancy - Apple-inspired? - presentation of related videos in the YouTube window at the end of the clips.
A report on the use of information and communications technologies among prospective university students was commissioned by JISC from Ipsos MORI. The findings have just been published [pdf].
I was interested in the popularity of social networking sites. 501 people responded to an online survey. 65% used social networking sites regularly, 23% used them sometimes.
The most popular two sites were Facebook and MySpace. Most of the participants had a Facebook profile, and many had recently 'graduated' from a MySpace profile to Facebook. Some saw Facebook as a more mature site - and, by the nature of its layout and features, more appropriate for university applicants. MySpace was seen as a means of expression, rather than networking and communication. it was seen as more spontaneous, and, whether a positive or negative attribute, less 'mature'. [Student expectations study, July 2007. PDF]
Found via Andy Powell, who concludes his discussion in this way:
Furthermore, I always somewhat sceptical about these kinds of surveys in terms of how questions are phrased and, therefore, what they are really telling us. That said, the report is definitely interesting and worth a read. [eFoundations: Student expectations of ICT at university]
Incidentally, I was interested to read this at the end of the methodology section:
As JISC has engaged Ipsos MORI to undertake an objective programme of research, it is important to protect their interests by ensuring that it is accurately reflected in any press release or publication of the findings. As part of our standard terms and conditions, the publication of the findings of this report is therefore subject to the advance approval of Ipsos MORI. Such approval will only be refused on the grounds of inaccuracy or misrepresentation. [Student expectations study, July 2007. PDF]
It is slightly surprising that JISC would agree to such a statement in a report they commissioned.
(I am not sure if the 'their' in the first sentence is supposed to refer to JISC or Ipsos MORI ...)
The goal of an academic library is to be the best in the world at serving the unique teaching, learning and research needs of its home academic institution by being active participants in the creation, transmission and dissemination of knowledge. [p. 10]
She closes the chapter like so:
We cannot simply rest on our knowledge that the students, members of the rising Net Generation, are different. We must understand how and why and embrace those differences - not ignore, reject, or dismiss them. Our roles as translators requires us to meet undergraduates where they are, mentally, physically, and virtually, and help bring them to where the faculty reside. If we cannot begin to deepen our affinity with undergraduate students now, how much more daunting and difficult the task will be when they become our Net Generation faculty. [p. 11]
I have been in a couple of discussions recently which raise a related issue. To what extent is faculty's perception of the library based on memories of their use when they were undergraduates and graduate students?
In her final chapter, the author discusses five guiding principles for the academic library under the following headings:
Adopting an R&D culture
Rethinking "library as place"
Accepting that the library is not the virtual place
Jane Hart is compiling a list of the top tools folks use in their learning and working lives. It is aggregated from the top tens of contributors active in e-learning.
It is broadly what you would expect near the top, with Firefox, Skype, Delicious and Google stuff heading the list. Some of the individual lists have some less pervasive 'tools' and they are worth a scan.
I was interested to see that Google Reader was joint third (mentioned by fourteen people), ahead of Bloglines which was in ninth (mentioned by ten).
And while talking about other lives, those interested in thinking more about Second Life in an educational setting can follow the discussion on the Eduserv Foundation blog (second life on eFoundations) where this is a particular interest. They held a dual-world symposium (rl-sl does not quite have the ring about it that ac-dc does) recently around the theme Virtual worlds, real learning? See the debriefing and follow blog commentary via Technorati.
Andy Powell (aka Art Fossett) has a short video briefly describing Eduserv, the Foundation and its Second Life activities. Watch out for the discussion of, ahem, slashups (i.e. second life mashups), and the description of the recent Eduserv Foundation grants to projects exploring educational uses of Second Life.
OpenID has been generating quite a bit of interest as a lightweight decentralized approach to identity management on the web. There is a nice overview article by Andy Powell (Eduserv) and David Recordon (VeriSign) in the current issue of Ariadne, with some reflections on OpenID in an e-learning environment.
In the future, it may be the case that our institutions remain as Identity Providers (i.e. as the providers of usernames and passwords) in the way they are now. But it also seems increasingly likely that our students will begin turning up at schools, colleges and universities with perfectly good online identities (in much the same way that they now turn up with perfectly good email addresses) and that our educational institutions will have to begin functioning as Relying Parties (i.e. as the recipients of externally authenticated users). In short, students are part of the wider online community and their educational identity (persona) is only one facet of their lives. [Main Articles: 'OpenID: Decentralised Single Sign-on for the Web', Ariadne Issue 51]
This Ariadne issue carries its usual interesting range of contributions.
Chapter 6 is about the Managed Learning Environment (MLE), a term used for the ensemble of systems and services which support learning in an institution. Weller identifies portal, library, student record system and content management system as important other components in the MLE. His discussion about libraries and the interaction with the VLE is concentrated in this chapter.
The relationship between VLEs and library systems reflects the changes in practice and internal politics wrought by the advent of e-learning perhaps more than any of the other systems. There is a sense in which the very identity of libraries and their function in the educational process is at stake. Just as e-learning has induced much navel gazing and concern amongst educators regarding their role, and the potential commoditization of education, so it is with librarians. The answer, however, is largely the same - e-learning makes the store of information less significant, but in such an information-rich world it makes the skills of dealing with information more valuable. [p. 67]
He then suggests a continuum of potential for the library, from redundant to central. "At one extreme the need for a library becomes superfluous - at its simplest this might be categorized as 'I've got Google, what do I need a library for?'" [p. 67] In this redundant model, necessary materials are loaded into the VLE, and it points to other resources out on the open web.
In the central approach, the library mediates access to content within the VLE, providing value in selection, purposing to particular tasks, metasearch and so on.
The VLE and library interface then is one fraught not only with problematic technical issues, but also with a political dimension. There have been no shortage of projects examining the interface between the two, indeed there is something of a project overload, without a real consensus reached as to the ideal configuration. The main areas where the two systems interface is with the location of resources, and more specifically the following:
locating and importing resources into a VLE;
storing data about new types of resources, for example learning objects, within library catalogues;
managing rights and clearance for resources;
indexing and describing resources. [p. 68]
He mentions that the VLE may be managed within different organizational contexts, including some in which it is located within the library. The relationship between the library and the learning management system has indeed been a topic of much discussion in recent years. And we are seeing a growing discussion about the role of the library in relation to e-science and data curation. As more activities move onto the network, workflow and information management become pervasive issues which prompt interesting questions about how academic support services are best configured.
I was very interested to read (via eFoundations) a note on the Ancient Geeks blog by Martin Poulter. He talks about what the students at the University of Bristol use the network for according to the University's network management folks.
Facebook is the most popular site by hits, accounting for 20% of requests. 85% of students are signed up for it and Martin notes that students regard it as their 'shared space', using it to 'organise ... their social lives'.
Students regard email as a formal communication channel, for keeping in touch with “older people” such as tutors and parents. For communicating with each other, they use instant messaging. A very large proportion are signed up to MSN, and Skype is also used. [The Ancient Geeks What do students use the Internet for? ]
He also talks about some students having streaming radio on all day, and the use of Internet TV services and the Slingbox. As well as P2P applications like Skype, Joost and World of Warcraft.
And what services do they want from the university network?:
... students say they want video podcasts, or failing that audio, of their lecturers. They don’t want less personal contact with teaching staff, but they want to be able to catch up with lectures on a video iPod on the train. They also want ubiquity: they expect high quality access, wirelessly, everywhere. Having been brought up with Google and Amazon, they have very high standards of ease of use. [The Ancient Geeks What do students use the Internet for? ]
Is this typical of other campuses? Things are moving along ......
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.
Thomas J. Hacker and Bradley C. Wheeler describe how changing research practices are creating new support demands and argue for the benefits of centralized cyberinfrastructure on campus. They talk about strategies for managing the conversation with schools who are developing their own infrastructure. This is in an article, Making Research Cyberinfrastructure a Strategic Choice, in the current Educause Quarterly.
We argue that the right approach to answering these questions is to create an institutional cyberinfrastructure that synthesizes centrally supported research computing infrastructure and local discipline specific applications, instruments, and digital assets. As noted above, cyberinfrastructure combines high-performance computing systems, massive data storage, visualization systems, advanced instrumentation, and research communities, all linked by a high-speed network across campus and to the outside world. These cyberinfrastructure building blocks are essential to support the research and creative activities of scholarly communities. Only through careful coordination can they be linked to attain the greatest institutional competitive advantage. Ideally, a campus cyberinfrastructure is an ongoing partnership among the campus research community and central IT organization that is built on a foundation of accountability, funding, planning, and responsiveness to the needs of the community. [EDUCAUSE Quarterly | Volume 30 Number 1 2007]
They do not discuss how some of this capacity might be collaboratively sourced further up in the network, at the CIC level for example (the authors are from Purdue and Indiana University, respectively). Some of the same arguments around cost, redundancy, and efficiency could be advanced, although the political questions would be different.
Chris Rusbridge is the Director of the Digital Curation Centre at the University of Edinburgh. About the DCC:
Scientists, researchers and scholars across the UK generate increasingly vast amounts of digital data, with further investment in digitisation and purchase of digital content and information. The scientific record and the documentary heritage created in digital form are at risk from technology obsolescence, from the fragility of digital media, and from lack of the basics of good practice, such as adequate documentation for the data.
Working with other practitioners, the Digital Curation Centre will support UK institutions who store, manage and preserve these data to help ensure their enhancement and their continuing long-term use. The purpose of our centre is to provide a national focus for research and development into curation issues and to promote expertise and good practice, both national and international, for the management of all research outputs in digital format. [About the Digital Curation Centre]
Chris came through OCLC recently, and gave a thoughtful presentation which nicely framed some of the issues that data curation poses: "To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow:" the players on the curation stage [ppt: 6.2MB/63 slides].
Some of these issues also come up in the report on the recent ARL/NSF meeting on data stewardship:
Washington, DC—In late September, the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) and the National Science Foundation (NSF) hosted a workshop funded by NSF to explore new approaches—including the roles of research libraries in partnership with other organizations and entities—to the stewardship of scientific and engineering digital data. The final report of the workshop, To Stand the Test of Time: Long-Term Stewardship of Digital Data Sets in Science and Engineering (Washington, DC: ARL, 2006), is now available on the ARL Web site at http://www.arl.org/info/frn/other/ottoc.html. [ARL Announces...]
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.
We have just come back from seeing X-Men: the last stand at the very congenial Studio 35 (where you can have beer and pizza while watching movies).
In the opening action sequence, Wolverine seems more casual than his life-threatening situation warrants. However, it turns out that they are participating in a simulation, a learning experience for the students at the school for mutants. An interesting example of 'learning technology' in the mainstream.
Educause Review publishes its latest top ten IT issues list:
The elevation of Security and Identity Management to the number-one spot among the top-ten IT issues caps a steady four-year rise. Whether it retains this ranking will depend on its perceived importance relative to Funding IT and Administrative/ERP/Information Systems, which have dominated the top-two positions in the last six years. A related challenge that the Current Issues Committee has wrestled with in the past two years is whether Security and Identity Management should be split into two distinct issues. The EDUCAUSE Identity Management Services Program (http://www.educause.edu/imsp), launched in 2005, is just one measure of the complexity and attention that this aspect of the issue has engendered. [EDUCAUSE REVIEW | May/June 2006, Volume 41, Number 3]
It is interesting to note most of these issues identified are general across other types of enterprise also: ERP, disaster recovery/business continuity, the introduction of web services, identity management, and funding and leadership issues. Interesting also is the fact that enterprise portals have dropped off the list. The authors (Barbara I. Dewey and Peter B. DeBlois) offer two suggestions: the portal may be wrapped up in a wider ERP application, and in many institutions deployment is mature enough no longer to be an issue at this level.
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.
The Open University, supported by the Hewlett Foundation ($4.45M), is going to make learning materials freely available for use and reuse on the web. This continues the OU tradition of open broadcast of its television teaching materials.
The Open University will draw on its experience in supported open learning to provide an environment which contains both high quality learning materials and a range of learning support and informal community building tools. There will be one site that is primarily for learners, where material with suggested learning pathways will be offered. A second site will be primarily for other course creators; it will foster the concept of sharing and re-use of materials. Through the development of both sites the University plans to take open content delivery on to a new level. [The Open University : Open Content Initiative : OCI Press Release]
The mention of community building tools is interesting, as are the descriptions of the posts they want to fill in connection with the intiative.
An interesting announcement from Stanford and Apple about making Stanford materials available on iTunes:
Stanford on iTunes will provide alumni--as well as the general public--with a new and versatile way of staying connected to the university through downloads of faculty lectures, campus events, performances, book readings, music recorded by Stanford students and even podcasts of Stanford football games. At launch, the service will contain close to 400 distinct audio programs, and the university will continue to add new content as it becomes available. [Stanford provides access to university content through iTunes]
I was interested in this because it echoed something I asked in my presentation at Access 2005. What would it mean to deliver a library service if you could only use commonly used web-based services (Flickr, Technorati, Google, ...) and tools (RSS, blogs, Wikis, Firefox extensions, ...).
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.
Wilbert Kraan of CETIS has a nice overview of some recent meetings surrounding the IMS Melbourne meeting. Discussion about service-oriented-architectures, repositories, metadata and all the usual suspects.
Having said all of that, John's main argument is that the e-learning is in the middle of a second wave. The first was about the spread of VLEs, which was necessary and useful, but VLEs are often "delibarately restricted in their ability to share and re-use". The second wave are about the spread of repositorires, or, in John's admirably self-deprecating phrase a "Content bridge over a river of uncertainty [of VLE vendor viability and choice]". [CETIS-Interoperability state of play at IMS Melbourne meeting]
(A virtual learning environment is a learning management system or course management system.)
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