May 03, 2008
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Categories:
General - systems and technologies
, User experience
When we tried out the Kindle a while ago, my son immediately began to touch the screen. But no, the only effect was to leave marks.
This morning in our local Border's I noticed that they had little notices stuck above the screens of their enquiry system. They said that these were not touch screen systems and that people should use the tracker ball and button.
It is interesting how things come to be expected ....
Related entry:
March 20, 2008
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Categories:
User experience
I was quite taken with the very plain University of Oxford home page. It is like a sign hung beside the front gate.
March 09, 2008
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Categories:
Libraries - distributed environments
, Libraries - organization and services
, Research, learning and scholarly communication
, Social networking
, Standards
, User experience
OCUL (Ontario Council of University Libraries) has released a nice white paper which discusses issues in providing an end-user access environment for its shared resources, and more interestingly, how that environment engages with the behaviors and expectations of its academic users. This document (pdf) was created to highlight opportunities and drive discussion for the OCUL consortium in both the short term through the launch of a new Scholars Portal server in 2008, and in the long term by incorporating more 'social' means of sharing and organizing information within OCUL's Scholars Portal and the larger academic community that it serves. [Scholr 2.0]
There is a pdf version and a commentpress version with the benefit of reader comments.
As one might expect from a discussion white paper, there is a focus on questions and potential directions. Recommendations are given in several areas:
Enhance and improve the user interface
• Enrich Scholars Portal content by bringing in metadata from sources outside the journal repository
• Explore the implementation of controlled vocabulary, thesauri and authority control
• Add user tagging functionality [Scholr 2.0]
Connect the citation network to user workflow
• Provide table of contents (TOC) RSS feeds with links that facilitate authentication. If it is possible, allow users to generate their own RSS feeds.
• Provide users of scholarly resources with social bookmarking services
• Consider services that support the whole of the user’s research process and the development of online space for OCUL research communities.
• Seek means for Scholars Portal to be integrated into Learning Management Systems used by OCUL [Scholr 2.0]
Embrace standards and technologies that will allow present and future network discovery systems to make use of what we offer
• Provide both permalinks as well as COinS OpenURLs in the Scholars Portal server and to encourage OCUL libraries to adopt their own versions of LibX or promote other COinS readers
• Investigate how to take advantage of the attribute-based information that Shibboleth can provide
• Consider what semantic metadata could be provided through Scholars Portal [Scholr 2.0]
It usefully brings together a range of material. Worth a read.
March 04, 2008
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Categories:
Search
, User experience
, ebooks and other e-resources
 Somebody I was talking to recently mentioned that they liked they way Microsoft implemented book search. In particular they mentioned the visual presentation of where in a book matched search terms occurred.
I had a look. Here is a screen capture of the first result in a search done this afternoon Ireland and globalization.
It is indeed quite nice. Another example of glanceabiity: a measure of how quickly and easily a visual design communicates useful information.
Related entry:
February 27, 2008
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Categories:
User experience
The BBC is a major web presence, and many people look to it for example. I noted a while ago its pending redesign:
From a conceptual point of view, the widgetization adopted by Facebook, iGoogle and netvibes weighed strongly on our initial thinking. We wanted to build the foundation and DNA of the new site in line with the ongoing trend and evolution of the Internet towards dynamically generated and syndicable content through technologies like RSS, atom and xml. This trend essentially abstracts the content from its presentation and distribution, atomizing content into a feed-based universe. Browsers, devices, etc therefore become lenses through which this content can be collected, tailored and consumed by the audience. [BBC Internet Blog - A lick of paint for the BBC homepage]
Nicely expressed .... The new website is now live. It seems to me that they are taking quite a risk. They are complicating things for people who do not want to fiddle around with stuff themselves. It will be interesting to see how it fares.
On my earlier post, I wondered whether people would actually want to spend time customising what is largely a destination site. This is not like iGoogle or netvibes, after all, in that it presents its own content rather than providing a 'container' for other services. I suppose your interest in customization will depend on how much time you spend there. I tend to go there a lot, and am happy doing some modest reassortment to reflect my common interests (for example, I will tick a couple of boxes in the music section, or in the sports section, to limit what is presented to me in those channels).
Nick Baker left a comment on the first post:
More to the point, can I embed their widgets in my own site, or in my feed readers? If they only work on bbc.co.uk, then the BBC has missed the point. [QOTD: a universe of feeds, comment]
One of the good things about the BBC has been their widespread use of RSS feeds. There don't seem to be any feeds at the level of the new home page which is strange. I assume they are on their way. You can still pick them up at lower levels.
What would be nice would to be able to select an assortment of channels (news, sport, music, blogs, ...), specific content feeds within them (e.g. football in sport, folk/country in music, ....), and then to have those choices pass over into a set of RSS feeds available to you. .
February 23, 2008
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Categories:
Libraries - organization and services
, User experience
Fiona MacCarthy has a very nice article in today's Guardian about Colin St John Wilson and the building which was to become his life's work.
Perhaps only an intellectual modernist such as Wilson could have tackled the architectural challenges inherent in designing the largest public building in Britain in the 20th century. The British Library is almost certainly the last great public building of such scale and seriousness that we shall ever see. Most great public buildings have their share of problems, and the British Library's epic history of setbacks is well known. As governments changed - from Harold Wilson through to Margaret Thatcher - policies altered and funding was cut back. The site was moved from Bloomsbury to Euston Road. Detailed plans for the building had to be amended in the light of the constantly evolving, complex new technologies of the "information age". For the architect himself, the commission that had seemed something of a national honour was transformed into the endurance test he used to refer to as his "30 years' war". ...... His first ambition would have been to build a great cathedral, but a library came second. He retained a childlike vision of a "magic mountain of all the knowledge in the world". ...... Is this a factory or is it a temple? A library needs to be a bit of both. The approach from Euston Road through the temple-like main portico across the piazza with its little built-in amphitheatre focuses the mind. Wilson's ideal libraries were always places redolent of intellectual continuity, alive with "the buzz of scholars of the past", and the walk across the courtyard evokes a corresponding buzz of previous architects:..... [ A house for the mind | Art & Architecture | guardian.co.uk Arts]
Related entries:
February 20, 2008
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Categories:
General - systems and technologies
, Marketing
, User experience
iSoton is an interesting web presence from the University of Southampton. I wonder how well it is being received and used.
There are six panels. One displays a (short) list of university podcasts; another displays standard virtual tour stuff.
The other four are more interesting. One displays the University's wikipedia entry. One displays photos from Flickr (I am not sure how they are being selected: is it more than the 'university of southampton' tag?). One displays videos from Youtube (again, I am not sure if these are any videos which show up on a 'university of southampton' search or if some other selection criteria apply).
And finally, one displays a tag cloud which links through to underlying del.icio.us pages of links to University of Southampton pages. So, for example, the jobs tag links through to a page of links about University policies, amenities and so on that might be of interest to somebody looking for a job. In this case, there is more active management of the collection by the user 'Southampton'.
I liked what I assume to be the intent here (there are no links to explanatory material). Although, this seems like a sketch for what one might do, rather than the fully worked through presence. For example, why not display the full del.icio.us tag cloud which gives richer access to the Southampton pages? What would the best approach be to showcasing research and learning outputs?
The site is designed by Precedent, "specialists in strategic thinking, digital communications and brand communications". A moment with Google revealed:
James Soutar, a senior branding and communications consultant at Precedent, said the web would be "the principal battlefield" in the competition for students. Information on consumer and social networking sites, such as Facebook, could become as influential as that on universities' own websites, he added. [Times Higher Education - Post-92 websites fail on the basics]
December 30, 2007
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Categories:
General - systems and technologies
, User experience
In libraries we worship interoperability, in the abstract at least. We believe it is an unalloyed good.
My snappy interoperability tag is "recombinant potential": things are interoperable to the extent that they are capable of being combined or recombined with other things.
We are traveling with a laptop, head phones, two cell phones, a Blackberry, a digital camera and three iPods (two Nanos and a shuffle). I am sure that there is other stuff I am not remembering or do not know about ;-)
This requires us also to carry a variety of chargers, and, as they are US devices which we want to use in Ireland, a couple of adapters. Can we mix and match these, combining chargers and devices? Using headphones with the cell phone with music on it? Of course not, or only in limited ways.
I mentioned the other day that I had left my laptop cable behind. Can I borrow somebody else's laptop cable? Of course not. And we need to find another way to charge the iPods.
Sure, there is a small industry creating various 'recombining' devices, but this requires additional thinking and investment, something we are not organized or inclined to do.
Now, I am sure that I could rustle up a literature on the economics of all of this, suggesting why vendors are interested in this level of lock-in. But for the moment, I just wish that their recombinant potential were higher, reducing our traveling clutter and increasing our convenience.
December 30, 2007
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Categories:
Libraries - organization and services
, User experience
I was interested to receive a note about the new Pew study [pdf] on how people go about solving problems involving information needs. It was interesting to see the positive message about libraries.
The survey results challenge the assumption that libraries are losing relevance in the internet age. Libraries drew visits by more than half of Americans (53%) in the past year for all kinds of purposes, not just the problems mentioned in this survey. And it was the young adults in tech-loving Generation Y (age 18-30) who led the pack. Compared to their elders, Gen Y members were the most likely to use libraries for problem-solving information and in general patronage for any purpose. [Information searches that solve problems]
I am still away so have not had time to digest the report, and I am sure that there will be a lot of comment in coming days and weeks. I will certainly be reading it closely on my return.
However, my eye was caught by one important finding. While 58% of people surveyed said that they turned to the Internet when faced with one of the problems posed, 53% said that they turned to a professional (doctor, financial expert, etc). This is unsurprising in itself. These are "information professionals"; they "manage knowledge". If it means anything, this is part of what living in an 'information society' means: the management of information and knowledge is an integral part of large areas of what we do. Libraries and librarians have an important role here. The professional outlook of the archivist is becoming more important in interesting ways. However, against this wider background continued use of the phrase "information professionals" seems an increasingly misguided practice. Information management is central to many professional practices and many types of information are managed.
December 16, 2007
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Categories:
General - distributed environments
, User experience
The BBC website is a major network hub. It has been through a redesign and a beta site is available for inspection. The home 'page' becomes a "page composition layer".
From a conceptual point of view, the widgetization adopted by Facebook, iGoogle and netvibes weighed strongly on our initial thinking. We wanted to build the foundation and DNA of the new site in line with the ongoing trend and evolution of the Internet towards dynamically generated and syndicable content through technologies like RSS, atom and xml. This trend essentially abstracts the content from its presentation and distribution, atomizing content into a feed-based universe. Browsers, devices, etc therefore become lenses through which this content can be collected, tailored and consumed by the audience. [BBC Internet Blog - A lick of paint for the BBC homepage]
I will be interested to see how this plays out. Will people actually spend a lot of time customizing it for their use?
December 09, 2007
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Categories:
Digital asset management
, General - distributed environments
, Research, learning and scholarly communication
, Social networking
, User experience
Network services have accustomed us to move from the personal to the global. Think of iTunes. I have my own local library on my PC which I can synchronize with mobile devices. It is also tightly integrated with the global network iTunes. And the MiniStore uses aggregate buying patterns to make recommendations to me based on what I have in my 'library'.
Variations of this pattern are repeated everywhere. Flixster allows me to rate movies, and relates those to those of my 'friends' and to the aggregate global network level (Flixster drives the Movies application in Facebook). del.icio.us, LibraryThing, Flickr: I can move from my own collection to a global resource in various ways, often assisted by navigational features based on shared attributes across collections and items.
Of course, the dynamic is different in different places. In LibraryThing, for example, the 'global' data level is made up from aggregate personal collections, and central to the service is the idea that connections between our collections are important connections between us. In iTunes, the 'global' data level is already provided as an indication of available purchases, and I do not get to see other people's collections. Although, as already suggested, I benefit from 'hints' based on aggregate buying decisions. In this way, the balance between 'personal' and 'social' value varies across services.
At the same time, we have seen a related interest in all sorts of ways in creating personal collections which may draw materials from many services. Look at Zotero or the work of the SImile project for instance. These personal collections may or may not connect up to global or shared data layers.
Whatever the context, and whether or not the service has a social orientation, the idea of traversing from the personal to the global is becoming an important characteristic of our web experience. Yet another thing for libraries to think about as they work towards reconfiguring services for the web environment ...
Aside: I am reminded of Dan Chudnov's suggestion that the professional mission of librarians is to help people build their own libraries.
Related entry:
December 02, 2007
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Categories:
User experience
, ebooks and other e-resources
I got hold of a Kindle at work the other day, only for an evening as I had to pass it on. I didn't have it for long enough to form any realistic impression and I did not read a book on it. However, even based on this limited exposure, I thought that the reaction of my 9-year old son, Eoghan, was interesting.
He loved it, and for a few hours it even made it to the top of his Christmas list ...
What really struck me was that his positive reaction seemed to relate to how the device brought together a web experience and a book experience. It made reading more like the experience of the web, and it is the latter that conditions his experiences. But it did it in a way that made the experience portable.
So, he liked the fact that he could see reviews, other books by the author, samples and so on. He liked the ability to search, to browse other titles while reading, to collect materials into his own space.
He thought that the searching was poor, because it required you actually to spell things correctly ;-) His searching expectation includes spelling correction or a 'did you mean' feature.
In short he liked the 'in-book web experience' or maybe the 'in-web book experience'. He liked the ways in which reading a book mapped his more general web experience, and that he could carry it around.
This was in addition to a reading experience which seemed to work very well - he read several of the downloaded samples concentratedly. The expressed design goal of making the mechanics of reading disappear into the experience seemed to be achieved.
Sure, the device is not as smooth as an iPod but this didn't seem to be an issue for him: maybe it would be over time, I don't know. What was more important for him though than any clumsiness of navigation or control was what could be done with it.
The main downside to emerge - remember in a very short exposure - was the size of the available collection on Amazon. He was impressed that various titles were available, but we only found between a third and a half of what we looked for.
That said, Guitar Hero III has gone back to the top of the Christmas list ;-)
Related entries:
November 18, 2007
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Categories:
User experience
, ebooks and other e-resources
The whole world seems to have seen that Newsweek is carrying a cover story about Kindle from Amazon ;-) The story is pretty positive.
One notable aspect is the tight coupling of the service for delivering ebooks and other materials and the device for presenting them. This is a model we are familiar with from iTunes, but no intermediate computer is required here. The Kindle can connect wirelessly (using an EVDO-based service).
Specifically, it's an extension of the familiar Amazon store (where, of course, Kindles will be sold). Amazon has designed the Kindle to operate totally independent of a computer: you can use it to go to the store, browse for books, check out your personalized recommendations, and read reader reviews and post new ones, tapping out the words on a thumb-friendly keyboard. Buying a book with a Kindle is a one-touch process. And once you buy, the Kindle does its neatest trick: it downloads the book and installs it in your library, ready to be devoured. "The vision is that you should be able to get any book—not just any book in print, but any book that's ever been in print—on this device in less than a minute," says Bezos. [Amazon: Reinventing the Book | Newsweek.com]
The article, by Steven Levy, also discusses adoption of ebooks in general terms. It spends some time discussing patterns of reading and wonders to what extent the Kindle will support or shape new expectations. I suppose that this type of discussion is inevitable, but this type of yes_it_is/no_it_isn't the shape of things to come exchange is a little tedious. Our expectations and behaviors are continually being reshaped.
See the discussion by David Rothman on Teleread ("Do publishers and readers really want Amazon or Google to be the ultimate controllers of interactivity?") and Richard MacManus on Read/WriteWeb ("And now it looks like Amazon has, finally, taken the always-nascent eBook industry to the next level.").
I look forward to seeing one and trying it out. Levy notes: "Though Bezos is reluctant to make the comparison, Amazon believes it has created the iPod of reading." Of course, one important difference from the iPod model is that folks transfer their CDs to the iPod as welling as buying materials through iTunes. We will not be able to transfer the books in our current personal collections to the Kindle in the same way.
Related link:
November 17, 2007
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Categories:
User experience
I just did an entry on the new report [PDF] on licenses and the re-use of digital materials in the cultural heritage sector from the Eduserv Foundation.
Reading the report, it occurred to me that a major rationale here is to reduce the transaction costs involved in using resources by making the conditions of re-use available. Transaction costs are the costs in effort or money involved in making a transaction. These may include the costs of finding stuff, of figuring out whether it can be used, of finding people to talk to about re-use, and so on.
High transaction costs present barriers. One of the main goals, for example, of the major web hubs is to reduce transaction costs. They want to make discovery as rich as possible, finding the best ways to let you discover stuff of potential interest, and then they want to reduce the number of steps you have to take between discovery and fulfillment. It is very easy to buy something on Amazon, and they give you a lot of help in finding stuff! High transaction costs for the user translate into lost revenue.
Much of the focus in library systems in recent years has been on the reduction of transaction costs: resolution (trying to streamline the discovery to fulfillment chain), metasearch (trying to reduce the effort of searching many resources), and newer discovery environments (finding better ways of letting people discover things of interest).
Related entry:
November 10, 2007
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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.
November 01, 2007
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Categories:
General - systems and technologies
, Learning and research - systems and technologies
, Libraries - systems and technologies
, Marketing
, User experience
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 series of posts 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 .....
October 31, 2007
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Categories:
Libraries - systems and technologies
, User experience
I was in CISTI in Ottawa yesterday and saw an interesting and regrettably brief presentation from Glen Newton about the work of their research group They are doing some nice things to layer useful functionality across large data sets (e.g. clustering, mapping citation patterns, recommendation, ...).
Some examples of their work are visible through CISTI Lab:
CISTI Lab is an experimental site for demonstrating and evaluating prototype software and services developed by CISTI staff and research partners. [NRC-CISTI, Welcome to CISTI Lab]
Projects are linked from a Wiki. They include Ungava:
Ungava - explores ways of navigating full-text search and the visualization of search results for articles in the NRC Research Press collection (demo) and the Colorado State University Libraries catalogue (demo). Includes a drill cloud implementation. [Main Page - CISTI-ICIST LAB WIKI]
The public test collections are smallish. Ungava is built with Lucene and incorporates some work from the Simile project at MIT, including the exhibit and timeline. It implements Coins. It also uses what it calls drill clouds:
Ungava extends tag clouds to make them a useful tool for search refinement. That is, to use a tag cloud to refine an existing query by adding new elements to the query through interactions with the cloud. As this results in a kind of drill-down search behaviour, these new clouds have been named drill clouds. [Drill Clouds - CISTI-ICIST LAB WIKI]
October 21, 2007
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Categories:
Digital asset management
, GLAM
, User experience
Quantity has a quality all its own. A focus on quality is one reason that libraries, archives and museums have not moved their collections in large quantities to the web. This reduces their visibility and impact as the web becomes central to research, learning and civic engagement. Scale matters, and fragmented small-scale activities do not map well onto behaviors in a web environment. Our intricate attempts to describe and present a few choice collections have resulted in expensive, but little-used websites. And the rest of our collections remain largely invisible. We need to stop thinking of our lovingly crafted sites, designed specifically for a particular collection, as the only way people will discover our content. While researchers value the description and organization that we bring to collections, they don’t want to have to consult dozens of specialized sites to find what they need. [Shifting Gears: Gearing Up to Get Into the Flow [PDF]]
These words are from a brief and provocative report [PDF] about special collections and digitization just written by my Programs colleagues Ricky Erway and Jen Schaffner. The report is based on speaker suggestion and enthusiastic audience reaction at a forum convened in August as part of an RLG Programs project called Bringing special collections into the large-scale digitization milieu.
The report discusses how current practices will need to change if this activity is indeed to be scaled up in the ways that are discussed. The report presents key areas where assumptions must change if we are to make progress.
Scaling up digitization of special collections (here defined as non-book collections, such as photographs, manuscripts, pamphlets, minerals, insects, or maps) will compel us to temper our historical emphasis on quality with the recognition that large quantities of digitized special collections materials will better serve our users. This will require us to revisit our procedures and policies. Should we be digitizing for both preservation and access, or optimizing procedures primarily for access? How can our selection approaches help us maximize both throughput and impact? Have projects produced reusable infrastructures? What is the appropriate level of description for online materials? How can we make smart partnership agreements in order to build a collective collection that will be valued by a broad audience? [Shifting Gears: Gearing Up to Get Into the Flow [PDF]]
Materials from the forum are also available: Digitization matters: Breaking through the barriers—scaling up digitization of special collections, an event co-sponsored by RLG Programs, the Society of American Archivists, and the Newberry Library.
Read the report and leave a comment on the RLG Programs' blog.
October 16, 2007
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Categories:
Digital asset management
, Libraries - systems and technologies
, Libraries - organization and services
, Marketing
, Metadata
, Research, learning and scholarly communication
, The cultural and scholarly record
, User experience
I find it convenient to think about current library systems activities in terms of support for three materials workflows: bought/print materials, licensed/electronic materials, and digital/digitized materials. This is being pragmatic rather than pure, and is open to challenge on many grounds. I have discussed these at more length here, and suggested some ways in which they are developing. Development is in two directions: each of the areas continues to develop itself, while at the same time there is a growing desire to find better ways of working across them (e.g. at the discovery layer, or in terms of a more unified approach to metadata creation/management).
Now, we have an agreed and well-understood set of processes around the first category. These are encapsulated in the integrated library system, and still quite strongly influence library organization. These include things like selection, acquisition, cataloging, circulation, catalog, and so on.
We have a less well agreed set of processes around the second area, and an emerging apparatus of systems support. This includes resolvers, ERM systems, A to Z lists, metasearch, and so on. A level of agreement is apparent in that substitutable systems are now available to support this activity. However, differences in organizational structure to support the area and low takeup of ERM systems suggest that we are in early days. One place where there is likely to be further evolution relates to the creation, management and sharing of the data used to drive these systems.
And we have a much less well agreed set of processes around the third area. Libraries are exploring repositories for digitized collections, they are creating institutional repositories, and building workflows for content preparation and ingest, metadata creation, and so on. In fact, there is no agreed level of service in this area: you do not naturally expect to find particular services here in the way, for example, that you expect to find a circulation system. Of course, this lack of agreement makes this a potentially expensive area. There is a lot of figuring out what to do, and routine off-the-shelf tools or services may not necessarily exist across the range of what you want to do.
This is an overly complex systems landscape, and it will have to be rationalized in coming years so that libraries can spend more time putting their systems to work in support of their users and less time actually getting their systems to work together at all.
Anyway, this is by way of prelude to an observation about repositories. A couple of repository launches have come over my horizon in recent weeks.
The first is the Digital Conservancy at the University of Minnesota, which I mentioned the other day. This aims to provide services in relation to two classes of material: faculty research outputs and university administrative materials that traditionally would have gone to the University Archives. As I suggest in my post this makes a lot of sense: the repository aims to support the full range of institutionally produced intellectual outputs.
The second was the Open University's Open Research Online, "a repository of our research publications and other research outputs." In this case, the service aims to provide support for all the research outputs of OU academics. So, what you will find are deposited open access materials. However, you will also find citations to books, journal articles, and so on, which are not actually available in the repository: you may be referred to a publisher site. The repository aims to provide a full record to research activity, not only the open access materials.
What we have here, then, are well-worked through services which offer overlapping but different views onto their University's intellectual outputs. This is not a major issue as universities work towards a view of what should be offered and what their constituencies value.
However, in the longer term, lack of agreement about services and supporting processes may be a barrier, on the management side where different systems support is needed, or on the user side where different services from different universities may lead to confusion, reducing the gravitational pull that familiarity supports.
Aside: Of course, in the longer run also, there are interesting questions about the relationship between these institutional services and network level services but that is a discussion for another day.
Related entries:
October 15, 2007
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Categories:
Digital asset management
, Research, learning and scholarly communication
, Social networking
, User experience
We have become used to managing collections of digital resources: images, music, citations. Zotero is one response to the question of how we will manage collections of scholarly resources. Raymond Yee's suggestive triple does good service describing the motivation: we want to be able to easily gather, create, and share resources. This general question has emerged strongly in library contexts recently.
The interesting Digital Lives project was advertized on various lists the other week.
As we move from cultural memory based on physical artifacts, to a hybrid digital and physical environment, and then increasingly shift towards new forms of digital memory, many fundamental new issues arise for research institutions such as the British Library that will be the custodians of and provide research access to digital archives and personal collections created by individuals in the 21st century. ... ... Digital Lives is a major research project focusing on personal digital collections and their relationship with research repositories. It brings together expert curators and practitioners in digital preservation, digital manuscripts, literary collections, web-archiving, history of science, and oral history from within the British Library (one of the world’s leading research libraries) with researchers in the School of Library, Archive and Information Studies at University College London, and The Centre for Information Technology and Law at the University of Bristol. [Digital Lives :: About]
The project blog notes the related work of RLG Programs in this area. Here is the scope: Problem statement: Personal collection-building tools abound in the online environment, from social bookmarking sites (De.li.ci.ous, PennTags, CiteULike, Zotero etc.) to iTunes and LibraryThing. As libraries seek to integrate their services into the flow of online scholarship and research and to build collections that mirror and support current scholarly practice, they must reexamine the place of personal collections in the research lifecycle. Are research libraries responsible for creating or supplying tools to support personal collection building? Are they responsible for acquiring and preserving the personal collections of the researchers, student,s and faculty they serve? Little is known about how the range of available tools might be integrated in the library service environment, or what opportunities are available for collaborative sourcing of solutions that can meet the needs of libraries, archives, and museums. [Personal Research Collections program [OCLC - New modes of research, teaching & learning]]
September 28, 2007
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Categories:
General - systems and technologies
, Knowledge organization and representation
, OCLC
, User experience
A quote about URIs:
I propose that a resource and its URI ought to have an intuitive correspondence. …. URIs should have a structure. They should vary in predictable ways: you should not go to /search/Jellyfish for jellyfish and /i-want-to-know-about/Mice for mice. If a client knows the structure of the service’s URIs, it can create its own entry points into the service. ….. URIs do not technically have to have any structure or predictability, but I think they should. This is one of the rules of good web design, ….. [RESTful web services. Leonard Richardson and Sam Ruby. P. 83]
And in Jon Udell’s review of the book:
Lacking a Strunk and White Elements of Style for URI namespace, we’ve made a mess of it. It’s long past time to grow up and recognize the serious importance of principled design in this infinitely large namespace. [RESTful Web Services « Jon Udell]
I was reminded of these while reading Michael Panzer's discussion of URI patterns and Dewey the other day.
Although the Dewey Decimal Classification is currently available on the web to subscribers as WebDewey and Abridged WebDewey in the OCLC Connexion service and in an XML version to licensees, OCLC does not provide any “web services” based on the DDC. By web services, we mean presentation of the DDC to other machines (not humans) for uses such as searching, browsing, classifying, mapping, harvesting, and alerting. In order to build web-accessible services based on the DDC, several elements have to be considered. One of these elements is the design of an appropriate Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) structure for Dewey. [025.431: The Dewey blog: Designing identifiers for the DDC]
Many organizations are probably having similar discussions, and this is certainly part of a general exploration of this issues within OCLC.
September 19, 2007
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Categories:
Learning and research - systems and technologies
, Social networking
, User experience
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 ...)
September 16, 2007
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Categories:
Metadata
, OCLC
, User experience
Worldcat Identities now has subject clouds. These are based on FAST headings in records associated with the identity. Here is the cloud on the page for Conor Cruise O'Brien.
Click on the image to get through to the Identity page. Then click on one of the headings in the cloud to get the top 100 names associated with that heading. And each name will have a similar cloud attached to it.
Here is Thom on the data: We're still working the bugs out of some of these pages, so they may change over the next few days. We currently have about 1,800 pages for genre clouds (e.g. Love stories) and over a million subject cloud destinations. There is some overlap between the 'subjects' and the 'genres' which we are still trying to understand and rationalize. [Outgoing]
September 16, 2007
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Categories:
General - distributed environments
, Libraries - distributed environments
, Marketing
, Search
, User experience
I have been using the phrase 'discovery happens elsewhere' in recent presentations. I think it captures quite nicely an increasingly important part of how we think about our services.
No single website is the sole focus of a user's attention. Increasingly people discover websites, or encounter content from them, in a variety of places. These may be network level services (Google, ...), or personal services (my RSS aggregator or 'webtop'), or services which allow me to traverse from personal to network (Delicious, LibraryThing, ...).
This means thinking about services in different ways. About how we disclose stuff to other discovery environments; about where our metadata is; about URL structures, RSS feeds, and so on.
I have suggested before that it would be an interesting experiment to think about our services as if they had no user interface. Here maybe it would be interesting to think about services as if they could only be reached from some other place. It makes you think about the variety of other places that discovery happens.
Credits. 'Discovery happens elsewhere' is influenced by Steve Rubel's use of the phrase 'traffic happens elsewhere' in his discussion of what he calls the 'cut and paste' web.
Related entries:
September 06, 2007
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Categories:
Books, movies and reading ...
, Marketing
, User experience
The iPod hookup with Starbucks has had a mixed reception. I thought that it was intriguing as one of those little newsflashes from the future. From a story about how the current iPod form factor will be replaced by one based on the iPhone. In a curious marketing twist, Apple will take advantage of the machine's wireless capability by linking up with the Starbucks coffee chain. Customers who hear a song they like playing in the cafe will be able to download it immedi |
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