Living Blogging http://www.ucl.ac.uk/ls/rioja/ see http://is.gd/N8T or , in fact, see below…

Update (8 July 2008):

This is my first attempt at using coveritlive.com (as used very sucessfully many times by Andy Powell at Eduserv). On the whole thought it was sucessful, and the software was great.

Few points: The software doesn’t seem to allow you to edit entries, I guess this keeps with the spirit of liveblogging but can be a pain when you notice a mistake just after sending a message. In fact trying to take notes and listen to what is being said lead to quite a few typos etc, the small font on the screen - further away on my lap than it would be on a desk - didn’t help. Secondly, difficult to let people know you are doing this (the other extreme would be to bombared mailing lists announcing your intentions), so some who may have had an interest in keeping an eye on the days event would not have been aware of this.

For me as a reader, I think I find the more traditional blog post of these events more useful as a (slightly rough) written report of the different talks. However, I was keen to try out this software and knew that someone else (who is far better at it than me) was doing this. At the recent Talis Xiphos research day there was a combination of the two (here and here), and I thought this worked pretty well for those watching the day from afar.

The JISC and SCONUL have just released a Review (Horizon Scan) of Library Management Systems (LMS or ILS). Intersting stuff. A lot of stuff to be expected, and some interesting findings:

• Dire need to embrace web 2.0 and to get OPACs out of the 90s
• The need to intergrate with campus systems such as Financial and registry systems.
• Open Source is used within current systems, and as systems in their own right, the latter have no real penetration in the UK market and are unlikely to do so in the short term (lack of advantages), and are not currently more ‘open’ than other systems.
• Most major systems are much of a muchness (they put it far more elegantly, though after glancing through 100 odd pages I’m not much inclined to find each quote), little reason to change system at the moment. Especially as…
• It is a good time for the role and definition of a LMS to be looked at.
• We are already moving away from the ‘one big system approach’ i.e. Aquabrowser, ERMs and Metasearch are all separate products. Almost certainly going to move in this direction, and this is a good thing. This requires standards and cooperation for different systems to talk to each other.
• UK market is small compared to global market, though not that different to the norm, except for BL ILL server and our concept of Short Loans.
• Libraries have not made good use of looking at how users work and interact with their systems.
• There is a need and movement to liberate data (silios and all that)
• LMS may become a back of house system (though this should not be seen as a bad thing)
• Recommends that libraries increase the value of their investment by implementing additional services around the LMS. Which is fine if these new services are using standard protocols to interact with the LMS, if their are using proprietary api’s or talk direct to the database then it is another thing to lock the library in to one provider (or at least, another reason why changing LMS will have a large impact).
• Procurement process is overall expensive, especially when LMSs are more or less the same-ish.
• Encourages libraries to review their contracts (ie not changing system, just getting more - or better value - out of the current system with better contract).

One thing that interested me were the Vendor comments (and something the report reccommends to libraries) on the lack of consortia in the UK, and noted that other countries make good use of this (ie this is best practice). I can certainly see scope for this, especially as (like the report notes) the software has already been designed to handle consortiams.But what would the consortiams be? geographic based (London? South East? M25 group? Scotland) or perhaps using other groupings (Russel group, 94 group, CURL). Or perhaps smaller groupings based on counties or similar institutions.

I’ll quote two bullet points in their reccommendations:

• The focus on breaking down barriers to resources is endorsed, involving single sign on, unifying workflows and liberating metadata for re-use.
• SOA-based interoperability across institutional systems is emphasised as the foundation for future services and possibly the de-coupling of LMS components

The report also says “Libraries currently remain unconvinced about the return on their investment in electronic resource management systems.” Not really, we’re just waiting for a good one to come to market

I like a comment from one of the reference group “Since around 2000 there has been a growth in the perception of the library collection not as something physical that you hold, but as something you organise access to.” Nothing new, but nicely put.

Report can be found here [pdf], took ages to find where it is on the JISC website (JISC website? confusing? surely not!), but it is here (and the key item - the report - is at the very very bottom of the page (why?). I originally found the report via Talis’ Panlibus blog.

Just come across Wordpress WMU. Allows you to manage multiple Wordpress blogs within one installation, and do handy things like allow users to use the same account (with different permissions) across different blogs.

This could well be handy as I’ve recently setup a number of blogs at work for various purposes, all Wordpress, and while quick to install and upgrade, and time to do this starts to add up. Worth checking out.

Aside 1: writing this blog post in flock.
Aside 2: Discovered Wordpress WMU while trying to guess at the url for a blog on the next version of Prism - the web catalogue for the library system from Talis - a blog which probably doesn’t even exist (they have one for their new readinglist system). While trying various guesses for the potential directory name for the (non)blog in question, I got a ‘hey create a new blog with this name’ instead of a 404. nice.

[was clearly being a bit of a retard when I wrote this and failed to copy two letters correctly, it is Wordpress MU - for multiuser - not WU. I only noticed this a few weeks later when googling for Wordpress WU and finding my post as the first hit]

Tags: wordpresswu, talis, flock, blogs

After coffee a little more talk about new features and the future as we ran out of time before. Christopher Gutteridge has now turned up, he may have had a few grown up fizzy drinks last night.

(lost concentration here: salt grain take) Eprints plugin will try and pick when people enter their names wrong (e.g. get first/lastnames mixed up). Report an eprint (or report an issue with an eprint) link on item/record pages?

3.1 beta: should be released in a day or so. Live CD available.

When will the new template (for records/items) including related papers (or ‘people who liked this also liked…’), html designer working on this. Can recreate abstract pages daily for fresh data (e.g. i think for stats/other papers).

People come in via Google for an item and the leave again. Soton ecs put links to postgrad prospectus and more on abstract pages for items, found hits to postgrad prospectus tripled.

Talking about more finely grained controls ans privileges , i.e. who can edit what, and where, and giving people additional power. Includes, for example, this person can edit wording of fields/help, but not edit workflow.

11:42: now moving on to research assessment experience.

Bill Mortimer - Open University.

How Open used eprints to support the RAE experience.

used eprints as a publication database because it was publicly available and helped increase citations. Also because of the reporting tool developed for eprints.

Open use mediated deposit but also imported records and self deposit.

Only peer reviewed items in ORO. Had up to 7 temp ‘editors’ processing the buffer.

Very slow uptake when mediated. Now have just under 7,000 items in ORO.

Simplified the workflow (which of course ep3+ have improved). Researchers responsible for depositing items for RAE submission.

Pro: increased awareness (of IR) increased deposits.

con: overlap of perceptions of ORO and RAE process (some felt RAE took over the IR). Lots of records but only 16% carry full text (% of full text varied by department).

Slide with some future ideas, good, see presentation on (though not currently there) http://pubs.or08.ecs.soton.ac.uk/

12:06am

Susan Miles - Kingston

metdata only repository at the moment but plan to add content and full text this year.

uni departmental structure and hierarchy has been the most controversial thing. Didn’t use RAE tool, wasn’t out the box.

Subject team staff created records, but focused moved to collection of physical items. (some) staff really got in to the IR, but this had the downside that many left with their new skills and experience!

misc bits

• non existent items
• people trying to pass off others work
• items being removed and then re-entered constantly at the last minute for the rae
• over sees academics caused issues.
• proof of performances and other ‘arts’ outputs were a challenge (next time get the academics to do it).
• a barrel moving back and forth in a room was a piece of research to be submitted for the RAE (How. evidence, metadata)

Unexpected, but lots of interest in the IR across the University. But lots of things in the buffer and no staff.

University committee has endorsed the IR as the source of publication data.

Because of using subject team staff for IR RAE, subject support now have good knowledge of the IR, which is good.

12:27

Wendy from soton

higher profile in Uni due to RAE work means people are including her - and the IR - more in discussions across campus such as looking at the REF.

question (from me): were any academics reluctant/against their rae information being put online? Answer: no

[anon comment, etheses mandate being reviewed regarding animal rights issues etc]

William Nixon: also planning to upload rae data. Does not foresee any problems, BUT recommend to not flag items as rae08 as some academics may have issues with this.

Les: HEFCE put metadata for items submitted to rae on web anyway.

q for open: you are currently only published peer reviewed items, do you plan to change this.

a: yes reviewing.

At the sucks-less-than-dspace Eprints track today. First up Eprints 3.1 and Future. Haven’t seen anything about 3.1 before this, v3 was released over a year a go so looking forward to seeing what is new.

9:10am: Les Carr is talking. reviewing v3 released last year. Talking about the large amount of work surrounding a repository (for all), which he experienced first hand running the soton ecs repository, and the work they have put in to help this. He found that when he contacted academics to point out problems he has fixed with their items/records they seemed pleased glad that someone was doing this. Last year they (eprints team) wanted to focus on ‘things on the ground’ to make things easier and not focus too much on rejiging the internals.

9:20: 3.1 more control for users. manage the repository without needing technical time (especially as University IT services often want to just set something up and leave it). showing Citation impact for authors.

Eprints 3 platform is built of two parts: ‘core’ backend, and plugins. Plugins control everything you see (I didn’t know plugins were used to this extent). A lot of the new things are just new plugins ’slotted in’. Plugins can be updated separately which means upgrading specific parts of functionality is easy and doesn’t affect the whole system.

Lots of things moved from the command line to the web interface.

Administration: user interface for creating new fields and and configuring administrative tasks (sounds good).

Easily extend metadata, what gets stored, in a nice user interface.

9:31: live demo of adding new fields: ‘manage metadate fields’, you can edit them for each dataset e.g. document, eprints, users, imports. First get a screen showing all existing fields, a text field to enter a new field name (and something to show if you have any fields half created, to continue). Interface looks similar to creating an eprint item. select the different types of field e.g. boolean date, name, etc, lots of them, with descriptions of what they are, also one is a set where you can add a list of defined options, another is compound which can have various subfields. This is looking great.

9:38: next screen, loads of options: required? include in export? index? As name was selected on prev screen various options specific to the name field type. lots more. Has help (click on the ‘?’).

9:41: next screen set of questions about how this is displayed in the user interface, i.e. text user would see, help text. Again seems well designed. Editing XML in the past wasn’t rocket science but it was easy to forget steps or get syntax wrong, plus (certainly for v2) you had to do it with no items in the archive (not easy on a live repository!)

By default new fields appear in the MISC step (screen) of the deposit process for users. which can be changed by editing the workflow.

9:53: configuration (via web interface), fairly crude at the moment but looks to be useful (though not turned on for the demo repository), basically can edit things that are in cfg files. plan to turn this in to a full user interface in the future (not sure if for 3.1 or beyond).

9:58: running through some of the thins in the cfg files, such as how to make a field mandatory only for theses.

Quality Assurance. ideas of an ‘issue’ (something amiss) and an ‘audit’.

issue: stale, missing metadata. issues reported by item and also aggregated by depository.notification of issues can be emailed to authors. We cn define all this, i.e. what counts as an issue in the cfg files. can also check for duplicates (good as it will make my god awful script we use at Sussex obsolete).

Can have a nightly audit, and see if anyone has acted on the alerts and issues. reports can be generated for people.

10:07: batched editing. do a search and then batched change any fields for those search results. nice. running short of time so not demo’ing.

manage deposits screen (for users) icons on the right of each item of yours, to see, delete, move, etc. you change what columns you see on this screen by using icons at the bottom of the screen, can also move them around.

Impact Evidence: citation tracking, researchers can track citations counts and rank papers. volatile fields don’t change the history of a record. download counts from irstat.

Better bibliographies. can reorder, choose what to view, better control. this is very much needed as different researchers want their publication list in a different way. uses stylesheets.

Complex objects: all public objects have official URIs. expanded document-level metadata .

Versioning (based on VERSION project). ’simple and useful’. pubished material ‘pre post or reprints’. unpublished materail, early draft, working paper. looks good.

10:19: Improve Document uploader. can upload a zip file of many files.

10:25 discussion about versions, e.g. how a user may add a draft (with limited metadata) and then go on and re-edit the item later on when they have a published version.

‘Contributers’ field. roles taken from dc relator names (225). large list of roles, may want to cut down.

A new skin, but not for 3.1 - i.e. record/abstract page will show a thumbnail of the item at the top, because the item is the important thing not the metadata (which is what is emphasised in the ui at the moment), i.e. in the same way that flickr shows the photo as the main thing on the page, and metadata at the bottom, good idea. new layout looks good.

Future: no time to talk: cloud computing, amazon eprints services perhaps (you just sign up to a IR on amazon and one is automatically created). On top of Fedora (saw folks on IRC talking about the same for Dspace the other day), or the Microsoft offering just announced. In a box (i.e. comes out the box as a pre-installed server) honeycomb.

For a while now I’ve been running a weekly script which connects to ROAR and grabs the number of records for each UK based Institutional Repository. I’ve finally got around to writing a web front end to this, which you can see here. All quite basic at the moment, and I have lots of ideas of what I could do to improve this (one idea based on the compare average number of deposits per repository). Have a look and let me know what you think, and let me know of any bugs.

UK Repository Records Statistics (the name sucks!)

Google released an API for their Book Search at the end of last week. You can implement this in two ways: static (just linking to a URL with a ISBN inserted) or dynamic, which basically means using javascript, which will check to see if Google have the book available as the page loads and can show a link accordingly.

The (very rough and basic) ‘catalogue’ I recently created already had a link to Google Books for each item. This was just a very simple URL with an ISBN stuck on the end, e.g. http://books.google.com/books?as_isbn=0596003722

Tonight I have made the first steps in adding links to items using the Google Books API using both the static (simple) and dynamic methods.

You can see an example here http://www.nostuff.org/tdn/6b/item.php?item=0596003722.

You can also do a search via http://www.nostuff.org/tdn/6b/

The layout is currently very rough, and the dynamic search is broken in that it will only show a result for the first ISBN for a given item (I know why but don’t have time to fix now).

I have to confess I know very little javascript. The examples from Google only use a few lines of code but not really understanding what it did, did not help. For example, for the dyanmic display, I found it did not work at all, until I added a second paragraph tag for every ISBN. I can’t see what in the js makes this so

You may have already seen that a while a go I had a little play with the Talis Platform, and specifically a ’store’ on the platform called ukbib which holds bibliographic records. I’ve written some pages on learning about the various parts to the platform. I had seen on the Talis Developer Network (TDN) various web services, but they all blurred in to one, the pages linked to above first work out the simple ones (e.g. linking to catalogues, holdings etc), this helped clear up the different bits that are available.

The pages then move on to playing with the ukbib ’store’ which returns XML, you can then use XSLT to turn this in to (x)html.

So, after playing with XML, XSLT, and improving my CSS along the way, I can show the very first ’work in progress’:

demostration of the library catalogue search.

All very early days, layout is quite basic and a number of things don’t work.

Things that don’t work (or sometimes don’t work):

•  The options on the right are based on the first ISBN found. Some recordshave several ISBNs andthe first one may be a ‘odd’ one, therefore searching Amazon, Wikipedia, libraryThing based on the unusal ISBN will probably produce either no result or the wrong item.
• “See Books by” Author search on the bottom right hand side doesn’t work. The formating of the author’s name is probably not helping, and because this is being done in XSLT I can’t call [the php function] urlencode to turn the author names in to nice strings for the URL.
• Some of the Subject searches don’t work or return odd results. This will hopefully be simply to fix.
• holdings from libraries are not there yet.

Things you can do:

•  in the google-style search box you can prefix any field name to the front of a search term, e.g. Title:”programming perl”

• title:programming title:perl author:wall

• subject:”DDC: 005.72″

• You can basically use any field name, I didn’t write this, it is part of the way the platform works, see here for more.

• link to the same item (if we have the right isbn, see above) on a number of other web sites, including wikipedia, Amazon, LibraryThing etc (let’s face it, this isn’t rocket science).

This is very much a work in progress, will hopefully have another update soon.

Now I need to find out why the above search uses ”author:wall” when the underlying xml uses ’creator’ not ’author’. hmmm.

A few days a go I was bored. I had read loads about the ‘Talis Platform’ a open standards ‘you can talk to it with an API’ type thing that holds data, and shares it with you (or more to the point, shares it with your application).

Could a non-programmer like me make use of this? Hello No! but I did wonder if a non-programmer like me could cut ‘n’ paste their examples and play for myself.

Read my experience of it (though it is a little like watching the slow boy in the corner trying to read Roger Red Hat)

As an aside, I wrote this article using Wordpress, but as ‘pages’ not blog entries - Wordpress has basic Content Management features like creating standard pages. (Richard: that’s why it didn’t show up on RSS!).