This post goes through some of the techy stuff behind it. If you’re just interested in features, I’m afraid there’s none yet, but you can now compare more than 4 repositories, but that’s as far as you’ll want to read.

Subversion and Track

The first thing I did a few months a go was create a Subversion repository. I seemed to time this quite well in learning how to use subversion just as every man and his dog gets excited by GIT.

I also installed Trac (using Dreamhost’s useful one-click install), which I haven’t really used other than to browse the code and view changes (time-line).

The repository is publicly available from here: http://svn.nostuff.org/ircount/

The trac site (which can be used to browse the code) is found at: http://trac.nostuff.org/ircount/

It took me a while to get svn working well. Originally I would edit the files in a local working copy of my Macbook, and then use subversion to load these to the server to test. Of course, this meant every little change had to be manually checked in to test it. I got apache and php working on the Macbook, and setup the Mysql db (on the Dreamhost server) to allow connections remotely which allowed me to test/use files located in my local copy. This seems to work well.

I use svnx as a GUI Mac client. It’s free and is easy to use.

The code. The rewrite

I don’t do much code writing or developing. Anyone glancing at my work will take that as plain obvious.

I’ve realised when writing code I have a tendency to be very linear and unconsciously put efficiency before good design. Anything more than one database call per page was unthinkable, loading in other pages a sin, which often led to large unwieldy while loops processing the results from a massive database call. Database calls are mixed with html output mixed with logic.

This is just about ok when showing information about one Institutional Repository. But when comparing a number, it becomes unreadable, and not in any state to be reused. The key aspect of comparing a number of IRs is that you need to ascertain a number of facts for the page as a whole (the earliest data collection date for the page, the higher record count for the page – for the chart for example – which could be from any of the IRs).

My  aim was that the page files should be little more than calls to a few discrete functions.

I’m not quite there yet, but it’s a start. archive.php is mainly a set of function calls, but there is still too much in there, and random bits of html code dotted around. There’s also too many arrays holding information the repository (php) objects can provide. include.php holds the functions, but is now a little bit unwieldy itself, with functions ordered randomly. The third file of note is class.archive.php. This is a repository object, which can grab data from the db for the repository, and return it to the calling page in various ways.

My original plan was to merge the code for showing one repository, with the code to show more than one, to make it easier to implement changes (not having to update two files). By the end of it, I’m now wondering if it would be easier to have two files again, for the little changes, which both call the same core functions.

Google Chart

Google Chart is a great API and I recommend anyone to play with it.

However one of the problems of the last version of ircount is that the URLs for the chart images often became too long (more than 2,000 characters) resulting in no chart being shown. The Chart URL includes each data point separated by a comma, so four repositories multiplied by 100 weeks (for example), multiplied by 4 or 5 digits per datapoint (4 digit number plus a comma), it soon adds up.

One solution was to only pass data per month rather than per week (roughly reducing the number of data points to a quarter of the original). Another would have been (and probably will do in the future) to make use of Google Chart’s encoding function, made easy using these helpful functions.

Overcoming this in an efficient way was a challenge. Originally I had a Google Chart PHP object. IR data would be passed to it in one method, and another method would return the URL.

This seemed sensible at the time, but deciding which php object did what became confusing. For example, the first thing the chart object needed to do was decide if the URL would be too long for the Repositories in question, taking in to account the data we had for each repository. Should the chart object loop around each data point for each repository to first decide how many there are? or should the repository object be handling this by telling the chart object how much data it has? How to avoid the need to loop through the same data several times. Does it matter which object does the work? It’s for the chart, so the chart object should do it, yet other parts of the page may want this info about the repositories, so the repository objects should provide it for all.

In the end, I did away with the chart object and used a function instead, which is passed an array of repository objects, which in turn handle a lot of work.

Future

The foundations are about there. For any page I (or anyone else) wishes to create. A couple of lines are all that are needed to take one or more repository IDs passed in the URL and load in all the data for them, ready to be used as needed. We can then easily call a table or chart to display for these repositories (or a subset of them).

As I mentioned above, the only real improvements are the ability to show more than 4 repositories at once (the chart stops showing once you get to about nine repositories), and the chart is more robust and will now show when it would have failed to do so in the past.

Google Chart does have an encoding which allows far more to be passed in a condensed way, and this php function looks very useful for using it.

If I was starting again today I would look to use a framework such as Zend Framework or CakePHP, or maybe even have a go at Ruby on Rails. But perhaps a third rewrite is a little over the top for now.

I need to tidy up the table view a bit (some nasty code there) and then look to a few new features, may be collecting more data, and exposing it in some computer friendly formats such as atom.

So ircount is really no more than a play thing for a bad coder to make mistakes and learn a little bit along the way. slowly. but if you have any ideas or thoughts I would love to hear them.

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Related posts:

1. ircount : Repository Record Statistics
2. ircount : new location, new functionality

I round up my findings here:

Three twitter clients

Twirl

Adobe Air based, with a simple, effective and attractive interface. It just works and has some nice features. You can activate searches so that their results appear in your main feed. updates can appear on screen in small popup notifications. In many ways I see it as the baseline of what a client should be.

Very occasionally it’s non native Air roots would show through with quirks with widgets and UI controls (e.g. a scroll bar not behaving like it should). It could be easy to miss replies and mentions that come in when you are not looking, once off the screen there is no indication that they are there. Some of the newer clients go further than Twirl with integrating with third party apps and displaying conversations. Clicking on a hashtag will open a web browser twitter search, it would be neater if it opened it’s own search tab instead.

Seesmic Desktop

Seesmic bought twirl a while back, and their website now implies Seesmic Desktop is the main client. It’s currently my twitter client at work.

The good: (often) auto completes on usernames. Handles multiple accounts well (they all seem to handle more than one account). Two (or more) column layout works well, but seems to require less screen space than TweetDeck. A good all around client, similar to Twirl

The not so good. Interface could be better, and perhaps too cluttered. On my work PC the interface stutters a little when new tweets come in, a slight delay while new avatar images load which for someone reason is noticeable and a little distracting.

A mention must also go to Seesmic web client. An excellent choice if away from your normal computer. Acts like a desktop client in a web browser.

Echofon

This is the client I have stuck with on the Mac.

The Good: Nice simple interface. One of it’s best features is it’s pop out draw which shows conversations, this is useful, click on the conversation button next to any tweet to see the whole thread, including those you do not follow.

Another nice feature, clicking on a link to an image (on twitpick, yfrog, flickr etc) opens a window showing just the image, no need to load a webpage to have a quick look at an image.

When replying/mentioning someone you can undo the twitter ‘reply’ functionality (i.e. so it’s just a tweet that mentions their username, rather than a tweet which replies to a specific tweet), useful because twitter will only show your reply to those who also follow the person you are replying to (i.e. probably most your followers will not see what you are saying).

Not so good: no auto complete on usernames. when I’m in the middle of composing a tweet and click on ‘reply’ next to a person’s tweet, I want their name to appear where the cursor is, not at the start of the tweet, this is quite annoying. It has a search tab, but no way to auto-update search results (e.g. when following conference tweets), or for them to appear in your main stream.

TweetDeck

Seems to be the most popular client in use at the moment. Like Twirl and Seesmic Desktop it is Adobe Air based.

The Good: Allows for users to be put in to groups and different columns for different groups, e.g. a group of core friends you don’t want to miss anything from. Seems to be the choice of power users. Auto completes usernames.

The not so good: interface isn’t great, and seems to take up a lot of space, with each tweet taking up more room, and the need of multiple columns. Personally, I know it’s very popular, but the interface has never worked for me. Partly because I prefer my twitter client to tick away on one side of the screen while I work in another app which uses the rest of the screen. Tweetdeck doesn’t seem to be designed with this in mind.

Tweetie

I haven’t tried but some people I follow on twitter highly rate it. Not free but sounds like it is worth checking out.

Twitt

Seems quite a new twitter client for the Mac, see their homepage here.

I haven’t really looked at it other than start it up quickly, so can’t really comment. UI seems simple, uncluttered and nice, but there seems a lot of space around each tweet, so less tweets on screen at anyone time. One slight annoying thing, on first start up, rather than asking for a username, it just stated there was an error getting tweets, not a huge problem but not very welcoming. One to watch.

To Conclude…

Having tried a few clients, here are some of the features I like (or would like to see) and will keep an eye open for when looking at any new client.

• Seeing conversations with one click without needing to go to the browser (echofon does a great job here)
• Autocomplete usernames. (Tweetdeck/Seesmic Desktop), so I don’t have to remember the exact spelling of a username when I want to mention someone.
• A simple way to browse all the people I follow (sorted alphabetically and any other useful way), for when I want to mention someone but have no idea of their name but will recognise it when i see it, or recognise their avatar.
• A way to workaround Twitter’s broken replies (i.e. if you reply to someone only those who follow the person you are replying to will see your tweet, even if it is of general interest). When you reply to someone, some clients allow you to click a small button so that your tweet is a normal tweet (which so happens to mention another user) rather than a reply. Useful, but wonder if there is more clients could do to work around this.

There’s not much between them. I’m currently using Seesmic on my work PC and echofon on my home macbook, but would happily be using Twirl or Tweetdeck as well. All have useful features that others do not have, but none seem to have a killer feature which puts them above the rest. We should of course be thankful so many people and organisations have developed clients for free!

I’d be interested to here what features others find useful, and which clients they prefer. Why is TweetDeck so popular?

Update (2nd Dec) : A few days after I posted this I tried using TweetDeck again at work. I still don’t think the UI is as good as others, but it does have some nice features and gets most things right. Of note is the username auto completion. But perhaps its biggest selling point is that other clients tend to each miss one or two bits of useful functionality, where as Tweetdeck has most of the features you might find useful. For example, you can mark a user as spam and their tweets and replies are removed from view. Another example, from any tweet, you can do just about any action for the user of the specific tweet (see user profile, add user, email tweet etc). Seeing conversations, profiles and pictures within tweetdeck is also useful.

It’s weaker points (apart from UI): I have the window wide enough to see ‘All friends’ and ‘mentions’ and it’s easy to miss direct messages. Also, I’m not keen on how it handles multiple accounts. I had set-up Seesmic Desktop so that the main tweets column showed tweets for my main account. But the mentions column shows mentions for either my main account or a work related account (where it was important to respond to any reply that occasionally came in). It doesn’t seem possible to do this with Tweetdeck, and so far it seems that basically all settings are for all twitter accounts, i.e. can’t use different settings for different accounts.

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3. Apple Automator

Many attempts to use drap and drop to replace programming lead to confusing design. Examples are yahoo pipes, Business Objects, and most of all MS Access.

What’s impressive with Automator is that it always seems it was designed with the very problem you want to solve in mind.

My Problem (apart from the drink)

I use command+shift+4 to get screen grabs a lot. For twitter, for blogs (in fact for this very post), for documents, etc. However I end up with lots of images on my desktop called Picture 1, Picture 2, etc.

I want to keep these, for future use, but want a clutter free desktop.

The problem is, if I try and drag these in to a folder, there will already be a Picture 1, Picture 2 from previous occasions. Leading to annoyingly having to rename every file, or create a sub-directory for each time it runs.

Now I have a simple Automator script.

Each time I run it, it moves everything in to a folder, with the create date in front of the name. It was easy to search for ‘actions’ (‘move’, ‘rename’) and browse (‘Files’ -> ‘Find Files’).

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Curious, I read the Guardian article it linked to. A gagging order to stop a paper report the proceedings of parliament. This is not very good. I muttered and got back on with the this and that. A few minutes later another tweet from secretlondon came in:

Now we have seeds of information! To Hansard, To Wikipedia, To Google. Who were Trafigura, who were Carter-Ruck?

Soon other tweets were coming along about this, and I was adding my two pence too, re-tweeting the news and adding my own little links to what I was finding.

Hansard provided the details the Guardian couldn’t report, and it quickly became clear what they were trying to hide.

By now twitter was alight. Hashtags came in to usage. Following these produced more information, once someone found something, they didn’t just share with their followers, but with everyone now following those tags. Previous Guardian articles (amongst others) were brought to our collective attention.

Before this I had not heard of Trafigura or Carter-Ruck. I suspect many were the same, yet now we were angry about what we read about their questionable activities (one apparently dumps nasty stuff in Africa, the other boasts about suppressing the press, regardless of truth). A storm was brewing and I felt it had yet to peek. But it was late and sleep beckoned.

The next morning I was curious if there had been any developments over night.

First thing I came across was a Spectator online article (a publication on the other side of the political spectrum to the Guardian). It quoted the Guardian article heavily, but then went on to quote the part of Hansard that contained the question (and company name) that the Guardian could not and provided links. I tip my hat to them. #Trafigura was now trending, celebrity twitterers (including our Lord Steven Fry) were highlighting it and more.

It felt like it was everywhere, on the news, and over in coffee room colleagues were talking about it. The Streisand effect had truly kicked in. Before noon on the 13th the case had been dropped. The Guardian was no longer prevented on reporting on the story.

Five Days later

Five days later a Daily Mail columnist Jan Moir wrote a homophobic piece (since edited) about the very recent death of singer Stephen Gately. A similar thing happens. A storm brews up. Not organised. But distributed little efforts or raising attention, mainly through twitter, which leads to coverage in main stream media and changes to the article and headline.

Black Out and Breaking News

And back in February there was a ‘black out’ campaign because of a proposed repressive internet law in New Zealand. Again, partly due to the coverage on sites like twitter, the section in question was scrapped.

It’s not just campaigns and activism. Breaking news is spread rapidly via twitter, such as the plane crash in New York (Twitter broke the story, and first images of the plane in the water came from Twitter), and Michael Jackson’s death.

But twitter doesn’t always have it’s own way. There was a Green avatar campaign for democracy in Iran, which sadly never saw success.

We’re seeing two things here…

1 – That information is now able to spread much faster than it ever has before. This has always been the case with the Internet, and has increased each year with new technologies (blogs, social networking), but especially with twitter.

2 – That people spreading this information leads to the main stream press reporting on it, and those under pressure back tracking. (I wonder how essential that middle step is?)

Twitter is such a good tool for the first point. It is instantaneous, not just the web, but on computer twitter clients and phones, and messages are public by default (unlike many other social networking sites where they are restricted to a specific groups or trusted circle of friends). Having an Open technical platform (which allows any other website or application to access tweets) also helps.

So…

My instant reaction is that this must be a good thing. When something bad is happening in the world (sorry, that sounds very simplistic) twitter, and other websites, can spread the information quickly and widely, even to those who don’t follow the news each day. This can lead to positive change.

The Trafigura/Carter-Ruck case is a good example of this. Imagine if it had happened 10 years a go. People (well, only Guardian readers) would have read the Guardian front page but not had a clue what it was about. In fact The Guardian may well not have run it as a front page story (or at all) as it would have simply confused/frustrated their readership. The Guardian took a gamble by putting this on to the front page, knowing (hoping) it would then become a story in its own right. It did, probably more than they ever hoped.

Noteworthy information is a virus, once it is in the wild it is unstoppable.

But all is not rosy. It will be slippery slope. I’m reminded of the 1995 film ‘the Last Supper‘. In the film they start off killing of the worst people in society, but as time goes on, things become more complex and grey and less clear cut. The Trafigura case was clear cut. Those trying to stop the BBC putting Nick Griffin on to Question Time, less so. There’s a thin line between the people power righting wrongs and mob rule.

One final example – baby and bump

Last Christmas I came across a news story about a ‘Lapland in the New Forest’. Long story short it was a con. Promised a lot, but was little more than muddy fields and a few fun fair (pay to use) rides, two santas (queue for hours, not allowed to take photos) and the odd tree with fairly lights, with staff who were untrained and the worst possible people to be interacting with kids.

For some reason I looked up to find out more. And I came across a thread on a web based forum called baby and bump (you can guess what it’s for). The thread was the top result on Google so became one of the main exchanges on the web for those affected by this.

The thread starts off with a few excited people discussing going to the Lapland attraction and how excited the kids are, and how much they have splashed out (money they couldn’t afford to throw away). Then those who visited the first few days after opening reported back, while others are in denial that it can be that bad. Then it really starts, more report back, and others start to join the forum simply to add their experience.

Then the fact finding starts: the owners name and address, other business addresses, legal rights, who in the council to complain to, who in the press to contact, how to file a small claims, the owner is related to the leader of Brighton (my) Council!

I like this example. It isn’t the twitterati or tech-savy web2.0 types, but just families on a simple web forum. No one organised anything, but many added bits of info, supported others, or shared their experiences. I would say it very much played it’s part in the early closure of this cruel con. After returning from a horrible day, cold, upset kids, after paying quite a sum upfront, it must feel frustrating and helpless, I think even finding others who have been through the same must be of some help. The Internet can really help in such situations. But it’s not the power of the internet, it’s the power of people. The Internet just acts as a enabling tool.

So Twitter is allowing us to share information and become aware of facts/situations in a way not thinkable until now, and at a very quick speed.

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At the moment it is useless as I don’t really follow anyone on Google Reader, and they (probably good sense, and a firm value of their own time) don’t follow me.

So, people, here is a link to my shared stuff.

http://www.google.com/reader/shared/chriskeene

So feel free to add me as a contact in Google Reader, and I’ll do the same. And read interesting stuff. Because twitter, failblog, blogs and the web don’t already waste enough of my time.

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I’ve been updating this for this year, i.e. tables published in early/mid 2009 aimed at those starting in 2010.

You can see the UK Combined University league table data Google spreadsheet here and re-order as you please. I’ve updated the three ‘UK only’ lists, and will update the international lists in the near future.

Notes:

• This is a bit of fun, for my own interest. Don’t take it too seriously.
• There are plenty of good guides to UK Higher Education including The Guardian, The Times and plenty more. Use them, not this site, if you are thinking of studying in the UK!
• A quick glance will reveal that I have never studied statistics. In particular my made up scoring system is laughable.

You’ll find last years data in a seperate sheet, accessible via a tab at the bottom of the document. Are you able to produce anything interesting with this data?

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The first question that can arise from that is: is it important? I like to think yes without being able to provide particularly good reasons why.

In any case, I used to – and still – love to look at old photographs of the places I’ve lived and grew up in, found in local shops. museums and pubs.

In was perhaps this that was the inspiration back in 2004 to take some photos of an area of Brighton that was about to the redeveloped. The area in question was next to the main station and contained various crumbling buildings from the last 150 years sticking out of the undergrowth.

It’s not just a bunch of buildings, both being knocked down and built, but a whole area where the characteristics are changing completely. For example, on the edge of the area is a Primary school, it used to be next to a busy main road and now – not be coincidence – next to a pedestrian area. They didn’t just pave the road, the whole area is different. Plus they would have had views of the Seven Dials area high up on a hill the other side of the station, now behind several different buildings. How can we show how this has changed for those who arrive in the future.

I’ve updated the ‘Brighton New England Quarter‘ pages, and added a new batch of photos.

It also has a new address (well two):

http://brightonnewengland.nostuff.org/

Nice and short: http://d.nostuff.org/

There’s now a Google map with some of the key buildings on it (something I can’t believe it lacked until now), and the latest files have been uploaded to flickr (now pro!) and a local ‘Gallery 2‘ installation. Gallery 2 ensures I have a duplicate copy on the web which I have full control of, though the Gallery software and Dreamhost webservers are not the quickest in the world (I note that Gallery 3, in beta, is a complete rewrite). I added descriptive metadata to both but need to try and find a way to reduce double keying (perhaps by adding some in to Iphoto 09, just purchased).

The pages are now in Drupal. I’ve been looking for something to run in Drupal for a while, and these are some of the last static text file html pages which were an ideal candidate. My reservation about moving anything in to a CMS is that it may restrict what I can do on a page, e.g. adding embedded media, javascript or php. So far this hasn’t been a problem.

Dreamhost offer two kinds of ‘One Click Install’. Advanced, the most common, where the software/db is installed in to your area, so your free to amend/add themes/break/etc as you please. Drupal is only offered as a ‘Easy’ One Click Install. It’s hosted for you, you have admin access but can’t access the physical install. This means no worry for upgrades, but means I can’t add modules or themes. Which may be frustrating in the future. I could of course install it myself on my own site (I have full shell access) though that sounds like effort.

So now I’ve got some photos from before they started (well, annoyingly some buildings had already been knocked down before), to being built, to current day. Some plots are still waiting to be built on, including the plot next to the station for a 5 star hotel (original plans were for a massive – ugly – skyscraper). I was never organised enough to ensure I was taking photos from the exact same locations over time, but have taken so many that there should be a good number where there will be good before/during/after shots.

So, if interested, do take a look at the site and photos. Hopefully nostuff.org will be around long enough to of use to show our the area used to be.

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It’s a way for RSS/Atom feed consumers (feed readers etc) to be instantly updated and notified when an RSS is updated.

In a nutshell, the RSS publisher notifies a specific hub when it has a new item. The hub then notifies – instantly – any subscribers who have requested the hub to contact them when there is an update.

This is all automatic and requires no special setup by users. Once the feed producer has set up PubSubHubbub, and specified a particular, the RSS feed has an extra entry in the feed itself telling subscribing client systems that they can use a specific hub for this feed. Clients which do not understand this line will just ignore and carry on as normal.Those that are compatible with PubSubHubbub can then contact the hub and ask to be notified when there are updates.

It has been developed by Google, and they’ve implemented it in to various Google services such as Google Reader and Blogger. This should help give it momentum (which is also crucial for this sorts of things). In a video on Joss’ post (linked to above) the developers demonstrate posting an article and showing Google Reader instantly update the article count for that feed (in fact, before the blog software has even finished loading the page after the user has hit ‘publish’). It reminds be of the speed of Friendfeed, I will often see by friendfeed stream webpage update with my latest tweet before I see it sent from twirl.

I’ve installed a PubSubHubbub Wordpress plugin for this blog. Let’s hope it takes off

UPDATE: I’ve just looked at the source of my feed ( http://www.nostuff.org/words/feed/ ) and saw the following line:

<atom:link rel="hub" href="http://pubsubhubbub.appspot.com"/>

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First thing is to get a server ‘image’ to run in the cloud. Thankfully many have already been created. I went for a recent ubuntu server by Eric Hammond. This is basically a ubuntu server vanilla install, but with a few tweaks to work nicely as a EC2 virtual server. Perfect!

Signing up is quick and easy, it just uses your Amazon (the shop) credentials. Once created, you are taken back to the main control panel where you can see your new instance, including details like the all important public DNS name.  Just save a private key to your computer and use it to ssh in to your new server.

e.g.: ssh -i key1.pem root@ec2-174-129-145-xx.compute.amazonaws.com

(you may need to chmod 400 the key file, but all this is documented)

Once in, well it’s a new server, what do you want to do with it?

I installed a LAMP stack (very easy in ubuntu: apt-get update and then tasksel install lamp-server). I initally couldn’t connect to apache (but could from the server itself using ‘telent localhost 80′). I presumed it was a ubuntu firewall issue, but it turned out you also control these things from the AWS control panel. The solution was to go to ’security groups’ and modify the group I had created when setting things up and adding HTTP to ‘Allowed Connections’. This couldn’t of been easier. And then success, I could point my browser at the DNS name of the host and saw my test index page from the web server.

So now what? I pondered this out loud via Twitter, and got this reply:

Excellent idea!

Good news: vufind has some good – and simple – documentation for installing on ubuntu;

http://vufind.org/wiki/installation_ubuntu

Following the instructions (and editing them as well, they specified an earlier release and lacked a couple of steps if you weren’t also reading the more general install instructions) I quickly had a vufind installation up and running. Took around 20-25 minutes in all.

Now to add some catalogue data to the installation. I grabbed a MARC file with some journal records from one of our servers at work and copied it across as a test (I copied it just by using a scp command logged in to my ec2 server). After running the import script I had the following:

If the server is still running when you read this then you can access it here:

http://ec2-174-129-145-75.compute-1.amazonaws.com/vufind/

EC2 is charged by the hour, and while cheap, I can’t afford to leave it running for ever.

So, a successful evening. Mainly due to the ease of both Amazon EC2 and Vufind.

A final note that if you are interested in EC2 you may want to look at some notes made by Joss Winn as part of the jiscpress project: http://code.google.com/p/jiscpress/wiki/AmazonWebServices

Both Ec2 and vufind are worth further investigation.

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Personal Thoughts

Reluctant to give some thoughts as I know so little about the service. However… (!)

There seems to be two clear areas here: Data formatting and Data storing. There is some linkage (Preserving surely covers both, formats can become obsolete, Servers die), yet the two seem to be somewhat seperate.

Both require IT skills, but IT is a broad church, the former is technical metadata (and is very much IT and library) and in the general area that I sees covered in the Eduserv efoundations blog.

The latter in its simplest form is hard core infrastructure. Disks, sans, servers, security, but also has elements at the application level (how do we access it, using what software, repositories? CRIS? Fedora?).

On another issue, while it is easy to say that libraries should take the lead, I think we need to be cautious. With the current climate of frozen or decreasing budgets nationally, and journal subscription pressure, how wise is it to go to the University’s executive and demand funding for resources/staff for data management. We know it’s important and could make the process of research more efficient, but there are other things higher up a Universities list of priorities (NSS/atracting good students, REF, research funding). Even at a library level, journals help researchers do research (which brings funding), and keep students happy because we have the stuff they need (NSS). How many journals should we cancel to focus on Research Data? Why? The recent JISC call will help with providing a business case.

The problem at the moment is that there are not enough clear benefits for most Universities to steam ahead with this. Let’s clarify this: not enough benefits for the institution itself. The benefits are for the UK as a while (actually, the while world). It’s the UK-wide economy and research that will benefit. So maybe it needs UK-wide funding. It’s easier to convince someone (or something) to spend money when the benefits for them are clear. In this case the benefits are for UK so it should the UK which sets aside explicit cash (via HEFCE, JISC, and so on).

And this is happening, with the JISC call (talked about today), amongst other things it will help build examples.

But I’m not sure if the institutional level is the best one. Australia has been successful with a centralised approach. We have a number of small Universities, and those which only have one or two departments which are research active. Yet the resources/knowledge required of them will be similar to that of a large institution. Will this leave them at a disadvantage?

On another note, it seems the range of data is vast. When dicussing this, I always – incorrectly – picture text based data, of vearying size, perhaps using XML. Of course this is blinkered. For auido, images and similar should a data service just provide a method to download, or a method to browse and view/listen? When it comes to storage and delivery, should we just treat all data as ‘blobs’ – things to be downloaded as a file, and we no nothing more with it? This makes it easy and repository softwareapplications (eprints/dspace/fedora) are well placed to cater to this need. But I get the impression that this is somewhat simplistic. Perhaps this means a data service needs a clear scope, otherwise we could end up building front end applications which mimic flickr, youtube and last.fm all in one. A costly path to go down.

[all views are my own. are wrong, badly worded, ill thought, why are you reading this?, just think the opposite and it will be right, etc]

Related posts:

1. Event: The Data Imperative: Libraries and Research Data
2. Research in the Open: How Mandates Work in Practice
3. Linked data & RDF : draft notes for comment

Paul Jeffreys : Director of IT, Oxford University.

Started off giving an overview of where this has come from. e-Research is more than just e-Infrastructure. e-Research is not just about outputs, but outputs (articles/data) are a part of this, and an discreet area to work on.

This is a cross-discipline area, it needs academics, University executive, research office, IT and Library. Libraries have skills that have to be fed in to this.

EIDCSR : ‘Enough talking,  let’s try and do it’, selected two research groups to work with, but not a pilot, a long term commitment. He talks about Oxford’s commitment to a data repository, it stresses cross agencies, mentions business models and feeds in to a senior research committee (the quote is far too long to add here!).

As each HEI is facing the same issue, it makes sense for national activity. but how much is done locally and how much is done nationally.

What is the vision of research management data? To what extent is managing research data the role of the Library/librarians? Is data management and data repositories a new kind of activity? Is it Librarians or Information Professionals who are charged to take this forward? [cjk: i thought they were one and the same]

John K Milner : Project Manager UKRDS

Can’t just use existing subject specific data centres. Need for cross-discipline (eg climate change) and therefore universal standards and methods so one subject can use another subject’s data with ease.

Feasibility study:

Understand what is happening today? where are the gaps. Avoid re-inventing the wheel.

Four Case studies (Bristol, Leeds, Leicester, Oxford), views of ~700 researchers over all disciplines (inc the arts).

What did they learn?

About half of the data has a useful life of 10 years? 26% has ‘indefinite’ value, ie keep for ever’ Nearly all kept locally (memory stick, departmental server, [cjk: not good!]).

21% use a national/international data centre. 18% share with them.

UK has rich landscape of facilities, skills and infrastructure.

The management of data from a research project are now starting to be directly funded, which is important.

What are others doing? Are we in step with other countries? Yes. US spending $100 million on 5 large data centres. Australians are leading in this area, and have a central approach to it. Canada and Germany also have similar developments.

Aim: to set up a framework for research data.

Why Pathfinder: not a pilot but the start of a long term commitment.

[my notes miss a bit here, had to deal with a urgent work issue]

Service must be useful and accessible. Need a framework for stakeholder engagement.

This is non-trivial. Lots of parties involved, a lot of effort needed.

Citation of datasets is of growing interest to some researchers, this may help engage the research community.

Showing a diagram of UKRDS Basic processes. Split between ‘Research Project process’, Research data sharing process and UKRDS Services and Administration

Diagram doesn’t focus on curation but on accessibility (inc discovery, stable storage, identity) as this seems like the most important part. Discovery:Google, Identity(auth):Shibboleth.

Making it happen.

Need clearly defined service elements, will involve DCC, RIN and data centres.

HEIs need a reliable back-office service to handle working with data.

UKRDS is extremely challenging, nothing is easy and it is expensive. Needs support of funders and HEIs, need the right bodies to show leadership and shape policy. It will take time.

Q: Is it limited to HEI or public sector (museums etc). A: a more complicated issue, but they are working with the liked of Connecting for Health and DEFRA.

Q: Copyright. A: HEI often don’t own copyright. Data Management Plan (Wellcome are funding Data planning as part of funding)

Q: Is it retrospective? A: Could be. [he did say more]

Q: Could UKRDS influence ‘reputational kick back’ [nice phase!] e.g. for the REF. A: Yes, in discussion with HEFCE.

Q: Research Councils A: they are in discussion with RCs but Wellcome very much taking the lead (leap of faith) in the area. The whole key is a ‘value proposition’ which makes a case for funding this.

Q/point: Engage government/politicians.

Q: Challenge in explaining what it is, especially for subjects which are already doing something with data. How can we tap in to those already doing it? A: there is sometimes a missing link between researchers and subject national data centres. No real relationship between the two. Which is a problem in cross-subject research.

Research data management at the University of Oxford: a case study for institutional engagement – Luis Martinez, OeRC, Sally Rumsey, Oxford University Library Service

More of a ‘in practice’ talk, rather than high level.

Luis Martinez

Scoping study: ‘DataShare project‘. Talking to researchers they found some couldn’t understand they own old data, some wanted to publish their own data, some found data was lost when academics moved on.

Requirements: Advice/support across research cycle (where to store it, how, etc), Secure Storage for large dataset. Sustainably infrastructure.

Lots of different Oxford units need to be consulted (library, it, research technology, academics, legal, repository etc).

Findings after consultation: there is actually widespread expertise in data management and curation amongst service units, and other findings. DataShare: new models, tools, workflows for academic data sharing.

Data Audit Framework: (DAF) adapted this to Oxford needs and used it to document practices in research groups.

‘Policy-making for Research Data in Repositories : a guide‘ [pdf]

The EIDCSR challenge: two units that both research around the human heart. The two groups share the data between them and agree to produce 3d models using the combined data. They are helping this groups do this, using a ‘life cycle approach’.

Using the DAF to capture the requirements. Participating in the UKRDS Pathfinder (as above).

They have a blog http://eidcsr.blogspot.com/

Sally Rumsey

Starts of by talking about the roles required regarding the library. They have Repository staff, librarians, curators, but not so sure about ‘data librarians’.

What should of data should they be responsible for? Some stuff can go to a national service. There are vast datasets (eg Oxford Supercomputing centre), who has the expertise to make these specialised datasets available. Some departments already have provision in place, fine, why rock the boat.

Long tail. Every thing else (not above). No other home, lots of it, Academics asking for it, highly individual (ie unique), hums and sciences.

Things to consider: live or changing data Freely available or restricted? Long term post project?

Showing what looks like a list of random words/letters/strings of chars, an example of some data they were asked to look after from the English department.

Showing a diagram showing that Fedora (a repository system which is strong on metadata/structure but lacks an out of the box UI) is key to the setup. many applications can sit on top of it. Institutional Repository is just one application which runs on top of Fedora.

ORA (IR) for DATA: actual data can be held anywhere in University but ORA is a place of discovery. Allows for referencing of data. Might want to link to ‘DataBank‘ (a proof of concept to show what is possible).

Databank: how do you search/discover? First things added were audio files, perhaps then photos, how do you find them?

Showing Databank. Explaining that everything has a uid so we have cool URLs, and hence you can link to it [yes!]. Explaining how you can group an audio object, a related photo object and a related text object (perhaps explaining it).

End of morning discussion (I’ll just note some points I picked up):

This seems to raise such huge resource implications.

DAF is flexible, you can pick elements of it to use.

Non academic repositories, such as flickr, preservation issues, if they go down. [unlike the AHDS then!]

The Research Data Management Workforce – Alma Swan, Key Perspectives

Study commissioned by JISC, looking at the ’supply of DS [data scientists] skills’.

NSF Roles:

• Data Authors – produce data
• Data Managers – more technical people – often work in partnership with data authors
• Data Users
• Data Scientists – expert data handlers and managers (perhaps ‘Data Manager’ was a confusing name).

Our Definitions (but in practice the roles and names are fuzzy):

• Data creators or authors
• Data Scientists
• Data Managers
• Data Librarians

Data Creators

Using DCC Curation lifecycle model, these are the out ring. But not all of it, and do things not on the ring, such as throw data away.

Shows picture of an academics office. Data is stored in random envelops.

Data Scientists – the focus of this study

Work with the researchers, in the same lab. Do most things in the DCC model. Are computer scientists (or can be one), experts in database technologies, ensure systems are in place, format migration. A ‘translation service’ between Researchers and computer experts.

Lots of facts about this, based on the research. Often fallen in to the role by accident, often started out as a researcher. Domain (maths, chemistry) related or Computer training. Informatics Skills: well advanced in biology and chemistry. Majority have a further degree. Need People skills. Rapidly involving area.

Data Librarians

Only a handful in the UK. specific skills in data care, curation. Bottom half (or bottom two thirds) of DCC model.

Library schools have not yet geared up for training. Demand is low, no established career path. Good subject-based first degree is required.

Things are changing, eg library schools are creating courses/modules around this.

Future Roles of the library

train researchers to be more data aware

Pressing issue inform researchers on data principles, eg ownership.

Open Data : datasets

A growing recognition across all disciplines that articles aren’t enough, datasets are what are needed to be in the open.

Datasets are a resource in their own right.

Publishers do not normally claim ownership of datasets. Some are (usual suspects)

Funder may own Data, Employers may own data. No one seems sure. Several entities may own the data.

In some areas of research journals play role in enforcement.

Some journals are just data.

Using PDF for data is very very not good.

Do we leave preservation of data to publishers [cjk: no! they should have nothing to do with this, the actors are Universities, their employees and their funders]

Simon Hodson – JISC Data Management Infrastructure Programme

Something problem, not easy to tackle. Would be a mistake for institutions to wait. The Call is designed to better understand how its data management facility can be taken forward.

Detailed business cases are needed.

Needs everyone (HEI, funders, data centres, RIN, etc) to be on board.

the Call will have an Advisory Group.

‘Exemplar projects and studies designed to help establish partnership between researchers, institutions, research councils.

See DCC as playing a major role in developing capacity and skills in the sector.

Tools and technologies: tools to help managers make business case internally, institutional planning tools (building on DAT, DRAMBORA, and costing tools). Workshop 1oth June DCC to review progress/outcomes of DAT project.

Two calls planned for the early Autumn.

2 June Call: Infrastructure. To build examples within the sector. Requirements analysis -> Implementation plan -> Execution thereof -> business models.

Bids encouraged from consortia.

Briefing day 6 July. DCC will provide support for bids, including a specific helpdesk.

There may be a Digital Curation course in the next few weeks.

Libraries and Research Data Management; conclusions – Martin Lewis, Director of Library Services and University Librarian, University of Sheffield.

Martin had been chairing all day and here he sums up and bring the various threads together.

The library research data pyramid. Things at the bottom need to be in place before things higher up. At the bottom, training in library (confidence), Library schools. Then develop local data curation capacity, teach data literacy. Higher up: research data awareness, research data advice, Lead on local policy. At the very top ‘influence national data agenda’.

Summary

An excellent day and excellent knowledgeable speakers. Nice venue, and most importantly, I found the only plug socket in the room!

This is clearly an emerging area. Many are in the same posistion, they are aware of the (Opene) Research Data developments, but nothing has yet happened at their university, nor academics queuing up to demand such a service. This is a good thing and it needs to happen, and Universities need to start acting now. But there are many preasures on University resources at the moment. How high on the institutional priority list will this come?

[Very finally, I did another audioboo experiment. On the fly, with no pre-planning, I recorded about 2 minutes of talk during the lunch. It's random, with no thought, many umms, a pointless 'one more thing' and basically wrong. laugh at it here]

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Related posts:

1. The Data Imperative: Libraries and Research Data : comment
2. Research in the Open: How Mandates Work in Practice
3. or08: session 2b: Sustainability Issues

European Elections are this Thursday. I wont bore you with my long winded thoughts on the EU, but it basically sums up as: conceptually a good idea, fundamentally broken.

The world is changing, the big players include the likes of the US, China, India, Russia and Brazil. These all dwarf us little European countries, the EU can make us a voice on the international stage. Just as importantly, working together can be very good for us (and good for the economy). But at the same time, it wastes huge amounts of money, seems unaccountable and lacks a clear remit. Worst of all, the one thing that should be more important  than just about anything else – safe guarding energy natural resources – the EU failed massively on (the one pipe line which bypasses Russia which was up from grabs was bought not by the EU… but by Russia).

So who to vote for? I used a website aimed at matching your views with those of the closest mathcing parties. The closest match to me? Libertas. Liberwho? A new pan-European party who seem to basically think along the same lines: Not against the EU, but it needs a lot of fixing, limits and it needs to know it’s place.

I can’t say too much more as at the time of writing their website seems to be down http://www.libertas.eu/uk. Small parties can be a bit of a joke, but my brief glance of the site when it was up did not give the impression they are a bunch of nutters.

I like the Liberal Democrats overall positive approach to Europe, though would like to see a ‘we must spend carefully and make the EU more accountable’ element to their position. If the EU is to win the respect of its citizens then it needs to be able to abide by its own rules and treat each pound/euro as if it is its last. They also had the worst leaflet ever. Both visually (argh the colours) and content.

And while talking about leaflets (you weren’t?). The labour one had a cover like this:

A stock quote, using a stock photo with some (nice English sounding) made up names. To prove this obvious point I googled for ‘Karen Barford Brighton’, and would you adam and eve it, she exists! See her Facebook profile (which at the time of writing is public accessible). Not sure if I would want to be splashed over the front page of an election leaflet, even if I was a support of one party. Still, leaflet crap, much of telling us that Gordan Brown is the man we want. a: bad call, if anything try to seperate the european labour meps from Brown and co to avoid negative associated – and  b: what has Brown got to do with Europe. There wasn’t a single photo of the candidates in question, just pictures of Brown. Stalin would be proud.

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Related posts:

1. Brighton local council elections : May 2007
2. Brighton and Hove local elections

Slides can be found here (not available when I made this post, as semi excuse as to why my notes miss so much). These are rough notes, which I’m making available in case others are interested, apologies for mistakes and don’t take it as gospel!

After an introduction by Stéphane Goldstein, kicking off with Robert Kiley from the Wellcome Trust.

Wellcome trust mandate since 2006, anyone receiving funding from Wellcome Trust must deposit in to pubmed, now uk pubmed central. SHERPA Juliet lists 48 funder policies/mandates.

Two routes to complying to their mandate: (route 1) publisher in open access / hybrid journal (preferred), Wellcome will normally pay any associated fees. However when paying the publisher, they expect a certain level of service in return (deposited on behalf of author, final version available at time of publication, certain level of re-use. Route 2 Author self-archives author’s final version within 6 months of publication. It was stressed that the first option is very much preferred.

“Publication costs are legitimate research costs”. To fund Open Access fees for ALL research they fund would, they estimate. take up 1-2% of their budget.

Risk of ‘Double payment’ (author fees and subscriptions). OUP have a good model here.

Still to do:

• Improve compliance (roughly 33%, significant increase after letters to VCs),
• improve mechanisms (Elsevier introduced OA workflow which resulted in significant increase in deposits, but funders/institutions/publishers all need to play a part here),
• Clarifying Publishers OA Policies  (and re-use rights, didn’t catch this).

Research Councils UK – Astrid Wissenburg, ESRC

Starts of by talking about drivers for OA in the RC. Value for money, ensuring research is used, infrastructure and more.

Principles: Accessible, Quality (peer review), preservation (she’s moving through the slides fast)

April 2009 study in to OA impact, provides options for RC to consider.Findings

• Significant shift in favour of OA over last decade
• Knowledge/awareness still limited. Confusion
• Engagement with OA varies by subject area.
• Too early to access impact of RCs policies.
• Drivers
  • Not speed of dissemination
  • principles of free access
  • co-authors views are a big influence (mandates less so!)
  • some evidence that OA increases citation just after publication
  • limited compliance monitoring by finders
  • concern about impact of learned societies (but no evidence of libraries cancelling journals)
  • little evidence of use by non-researchers (CJK comment: interesting, I would imagine this may grow, wish newspapers would link/cite journal articles)

Both models (oa journals/repositories) supported by RCs, level playing field.

Pay to publish findings: limited use, barriers, costs, awareness, not RAE. would lead to redistribution of costs from non-academic to academic areas.

OA Deposit (repositories): from grant application from 1 Oct 2006, so a three year project starting then will only be finished in Autumn 2009. Acknowledges embargos but ‘at earliest opportunity’.

75% researchers were not aware of the mandate. diversity across subjects. ‘In general, no active deposit’.

A slide showing % of awareness broken down by RC, interesting.

From the highest level RCs are committed to supporting OA (this will increase). But change takes time.

Some issues: what do to with embargo periods, difficult for funders to manage (are there incentives we could use), depends on existence of repositories, multiple deposit options confusing to researchers, awareness/understanding.

UKPubMed Central – Paul Davey, Engagement Manager, UKPubMed Central

Aims to become the information resource of choice for biomedical sector.

Principles: freely available, added to UK pubmed central, freely copied and reused.

Departmental of Health have clear policy to make research freely available.

95% of papers submitted are taken care of (deposited?) by the authors. only 0.5% submitted by academics (PIs/colleagues)

1.6 milion papers in uk pubmed central. 366 thousand downloads last month.

Core benefits: transparency, cutting down duplication, greater visibility.

Text mining, grabbing key terms from an article  (a little like  OpenCalais does)

Mentions EBI’s CiteXplore, encouraging academics to ink to other research.

Pubmed UK includes funding/grant facilities search. Can link articles to funding grants.

In short, backing from key funders, will make researchers more efficient, researcher’s visibility will increase.

Beta out in the Autumn, new site in Jan 2012.

Questions:

Worried about text mining, need for humans to moderate this. response: Limited finding in this area so human intervention also limited. really need specialist to answer this fully.

Question about increasing visibility of UK pubmed central, referring to Google, response: getting indexed by Google very much part of increasing visibility.

Question about Canadian ‘pubmed central’, response confirms this and mentions talk of a European pubmed central. Potential of European funders using UK pubmed central as a place to deposit research (like everything here, not sure if I’ve noted this right).

PEER – Pioneering collaboration between publishers, repositories and researchers – Julia Wallace

Funded by EC, not a ‘publisher project’.

Three key stages of publication: NISO Author’s original, NISO Accepted Manuscript, NISO version of record.

Starts of talking about the project, interesting stuff but failed to take notes.

From the website:

PEER (Publishing and the Ecology of European Research), supported by the EC eContentplus programme, will investigate the effects of the large-scale, systematic depositing of authors’ final peer-reviewed manuscripts (so called Green Open Access or stage-two research output) on reader access, author visibility, and journal viability, as well as on the broader ecology of European research. The project is a collaboration between publishers, repositories and researchers and will last from 2008 to 2011.

Seven members: including a publisher group, university, funders etc. Various publishers involved, big and small and about six European repositories taking part.

Approach / content:

• Publishers contribute 300 journals, plus control
• Maximises deposit and access in participating repositories
• 50% publisher submitted 50% author submitted.
• Good quality, range of impact factors. Publishers set embargo periods, up to 36 months.

Publishers will deposit articles in to the repositories via a central depot for their 50% of articles submitted (50% fulltext, metadata for the remaining 50%). Publishers will invite authors to deposit for the ‘author’ 50%

Technical: using PDFA-1 (where possible) and SWORD

Three strands: Behaviour, Usage (looking at raw log files), Economic. Also looking at Model Development (the three strands will look in to this).

Question about why they chose PDF (not very good for text mining). A: wide range of subjects and publishers means that PDF the best fit

Economic Implications of Alternative Scholarly Publishing Models, also Loughborough University’s Institutional Mandate – Charles Oppenheim, Loughborough University

‘Houghton report’ looks at costs and benefits of scholarly publishing.

Link to report http://hdl.handle.net/2134/4137

Link to main website and models http://www.cfses.com/EI-ASPM/

• Massive savings by using OA, UK would benefit from this.
• Savings include: quicker searching, less negotiations, savings not just in library budgets
• 2,300 activity items costed.
• This report currently final word in economics of OA.
• Charles Talks about the various methods and work involved in producng this report.
• a 5% incease in accessibility would lead to savings (or extra money to spend) in research/he/RCs
• Hard to compare UK toll/open access publishing costs as one pays for UK access to content from across the world, the other pays for UK content to be world wide accessible.
• Keen to role this out to other countires
• Publishers response to report: furious!

Now for something completly different: Loughborough approve a mandae a few months a go, to come in to affect Oct 09. An intergral part of academic personal research plans (only those research items in the IR will be considered at the review). Now have over 4,000 items

Lunch and audioboo

During lunch I did an experiment using audioboo. Would I be able to summarise the morning, on the fly with no planning, in a brief audio recording. The answer, as you can discover, is ‘no’, but fun to try, and made me think of what I had taken in during the morning. Link to audioboo recording. or try the embedded version below.

Institutional Mandates – Paul Ayris, University College London

Paul starts off by shoing a number of Venn diagrams, for example: 90% of its research is available online, 40% available to an NHS hospital

What do UCL academics want

• as authors: visbility / impact
• as readers: access
• delivery 24×7 anywhere

UCL madate, a case study:

Looking global is an important part of UCL (for PIs rankings etc). Number of systems in their publication system: Symplectic, IRIS, eprints, data mart (and portico, FIS, HR). Symplectic (or similar tool) and IRIS seem central in this model. Plan to automatically extra metadata from other external places (publication repositories.

How did they get the mandate? Paul spoke at UCLs senate (Academic Board), the agreed: all academic staff should record they own publication on a UCL publication system, and, teaching materials should all be deposited in their eprints systems.

UCL are going to set up a publication board to over see the OA rollout; to advise, monitor, oversee presentation and more.

Next steps: market/exploit, set standards for online publication, to advise on ongoing resource issues in this area. Also, establish processes, Statistics and management information, advise on multimedia, copyright issues.

‘Open Access is the natural way for a global university to achieve its objectives’

Question about blurring the line between dissemination and publication, and that some of UCLs aims seem more fitting of ‘publication’. Paul agrees, still trying to figure this out.

HEFCE – Paul Hubbard, Head of Research Policy, HEFCE

Policy: Research is a process which leads to insights for sharing. So Scholarly Communication matters to HEFCE. Prompt and accessible publishing is essential for a world class research system.

Supporting research: JISC, RIN, Programmes to support national research libraries (UKRR), UKRDS. Mentions Boston Spa (BL) document centre as an example of our world class sharing.

Internet opens up new ways of scholarly communication and sharing.

What do HEFCE want to see:

• Widest and earliest dissemination of public research.
• IP shared effectively with the people best placed to exploit it (CJK comment, i don’t think it is publishers!)

Committed to: UK maintaining world leading research, funding that fosters autonomy and dynamism, research quality assessment regime that supports rather than inhibits new developments.

As we move forward, things may be unclear those HEIs with repositories will be at an advantage.

Paul finishes up with a personal view of scholarly communications in 2030. He sees to forms of communication: discussion (building up ideas), and writing up a formal firm idea/conclusion based on these. HEFCE supports – through the likes of JISC – a range of tools and systems to enable this. (sorry that was an awful summary, he said much more than that!).

Answered a question as to why IRs, HEIs are the places to administrate/manage. Websites people go to see research for a particular subject need to be overlay systems harvesting from IRs.

[hmm, does 'university requirement' sound better than mandate?]

Institutional Policies and Processes for Mandate Compliance – Bill Hubbard, SHERPA, University of Nottingham

99.9% of academics do not object to Open Access, but need to show it will not change how they work. Librarians going to be much more part of the research process. Most people (including most publishers) are in favour of Open Access.

Other pressures on the systems, lack of peer reviewers, rising prices of journals, growing need for different forms of scholarly communications (e-lab books, multimedia), public demand for highest value for money ‘public should get what they pay for’,

Not if we change, but how we change. Research has to change seamlessly. Mandates have a value-added basis with fast delivery of benefits. Need integrated processes, need integrated support (we don’t want researchers to hear different messages from their Uni, funder, publisher, etc).

Authors need to know ‘what do i meed to do’. Need to make it less confusing, need to make it clear when they can get help.

First step compliance: how can funders improve compliance, how can authors be supported?

All 1994 and Russel Group now have IR (Reading, I think, just setting one up now).

Compliance for mandates makes it better for us admin/support staff, and for the University generally.

Institutions need a compliance officer (perhaps repository manager). Funders need to ensure these people have the information they need. Share compliance information

I’ve missed so much of Bill’s talk here, he moves fast (and passionately) and lots of points.

After Bill’s talk there was a panel session.

Twitter

Finally check out some of the useful tweets from the day. (Twitter search only goes back about a month or so, so this link may not work after a certain date). Jim Richardson also created a permanent copy with the (new to me) webcitation website.

Conclusions

With such dodgy note taking I feel some concise summary is in order!

• Mandates are happening, by Universities and by Funders.
• HEFCE want research to be accessible to as many as possible as quickly as possible.  Coming from HEFCE, this holds a lot of weight.
• Funders (Research Councils / Wellcome) put mandates in place several years a go. They have not sat back and said ‘job done’. They are building on this foundation. How can they check? How can they enforce/encourage? How can they assist? How can they automate? How can they work with publishers and HE to share this information? Expect more to come in this area.
• Wellcome Trust prefers submission to Open Access Journals rather than author depositing in to a repository at a later date.
• HE Mandates are coming, we alreay have a few in the UK. Making them an intergral part of an academic’s review seems like a good idea. My opinion is that this is reasonable – even if there are those who disagree – surely an employer can (and does in every other sector) ask for a record of what an employee has been working on, and a copy of the end output, i.e. the full text in an IR.
• The report ‘Economic implications of alternative scholarly publishing models : exploring the costs and benefits. JISC EI-ASPM Project‘ is a thourough comprehensive look at the economic costs of Open Access and new forms of Scholorarly Communications.
• I think we are starting to see the larger Universities developing sophisticated network of systems to manage research/publications/OA/research-funding. See slide 10 of Paul Ayris presentation, and this article about Imperial’s setup as two examples.
• It makes sense to share information (between IT systems) between funders, HE and publishers. Examples: Funders sharing (bibliographic) information to a University about publications from its researchers, Universities (or publishers) passing information to funders linking publications to funding (or even the other way round?).
• This is an area which is still developing, fast, and will of course involve a culture change. Publishers seem unsure how to handle this new world.

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History in a nutshell:

• The card catalogue became the online catalogue, the online catalogue let users search for physical items within the Library.
• Journals became online journals. Libraries needed to let users find the online journals they subscribed to through various large and small publishers and hosts. They built simple in-house databases (containing journal titles and links to their homepages), or added them to the catalogue, or used a third party web based tool. As the number of e-journals grew, most ended up using the last option, a third party tool (which could offer other services, such as link resolving, and do much of the heavy lifting with managing a knowledge base).
• But users wanted one place to search. Quite understandable. If you are after a journal, why should you look in one place to see if there is a physical copy, and another place if they had access to it online. Same with books/ebooks.
• So libraries started to try and find ways to add online content to catalogue systems in bulk (which weren’t really designed for this).

The online catalogues (OPAC) were simple web interfaces supplied with the much larger Library management system (ILS or LMS) which ran the backend the public never saw. These were nearly always slow, ugly, unloved and not very useful.

A couple of years a go(ish), we saw the birth of the next generation catalogue, or search and discovery tools. I could list them, but the Disruptive Technology Library Jester does an excellent job here. I strongly suggest you take a look.

Personally, I think I first heard about Aquabrowser. At the time a new OPAC which was miles ahead of those supplied with Library systems and was (I think) unique as a web catalogue interface not associated with a particular system, and shock, not from an established Library Company. The second system I heard about was probably Primo from Ex Libris. At first not understanding what it was: It sounds like Metalib (another product from the same company which cross-searches various e-resource), is Primo replacing it? Or replacing the OPAC? It took a while to appreciate that this was something that sat on top of the rest. From then, VuFind, LibraryFind and more.

While some where traditional commercial products (Primo, Encore, Aquabrowser), many more were open source solutions, a number of which developed at American Libraries. Often built on common (and modern) technology stacks such as Apache solr/Lucene, Drupal, php/java, mysql/postgres etc.

In the last year or so a number of major Libraries have started to use one of these ‘Discovery Systems’ for example: the BL and Oxford using Primo, National Libraries of Scotland & Wales and Harvard have purchased Aquabrowser and the LSE is trying VuFind. At Sussex (where I work) we have purchased and implemented Aquabrowser. We’ve added data enrichments such as table of contents (searchable and visible on records), book covers and the ability to tag and review items (tag/reviewing has been removed for various reasons) .

It would be a mistake to put all of these in to one basket. Some focus on being a OPAC replacement, others on being a unified search tool, searching both local and online items. Some focus on social tools, tagging & reviewing. Some work out the box others are just a set of components which a Library can sow together, and some are ‘SaaS’.

It’s an area that is fast changing. Just recently an established Library web app Company announced a forthcoming product called ‘Summon’, which takes searching a library’s online content a step further.

So what do libraries go for, it’s not just potentially backing the wrong horse, but backing the wrong horse when everyone one else had moved on to dog racing!

And within all this it is important to remember ‘what do users actually want’. From the conversations and articles I’ve read, they want a Google search box, but one which returns results from trusted sources and academic content. Whether they are looking for a specific book, specific journal, a reference/citation, or one/many keywords. And not just one which searches the metadata, but one which brings back results based on the full text of items as well. There are some that worry that too many results are confusing. As Google proves, an intelligent ranking system makes the number of results irrelevant.

Setting up (and even reviewing) most of these systems take time, and if users start to add data (tags, reviews) to one system, then changing could cause problems (so should we be using third party tag/rating/review systems?).

You may be interested in some other articles I’ve written around this:

• Library catalogues, search systems and data – discusses the issues in putting online journal/item records on to the catalogue, and therefore why a ‘discovery systems’ can resolve these.
• Academic discovery and library catalogues – Discusses the eXtensible Catalogue, and also links to an Academics article about how they conduct research
• JISC Library Management System Review – Summarises a recent JISC report on Library Management systems
• Free e-books online via University of Pittsburgh Press – from a couple of days a go, talks about the issues of Discovery related to free academic items (books) on the web, and ensuring Library Discovery Tools include them.

There’s a lot talk about discovery tools, but what sort to go for, who to back? And many issues have yet to be resolved. I’m come on to those next…

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University of Pittsburgh Press Digital Editions - Open Access free ebooks

For years there has been a movement towards making Journal articles Open Access, i.e. publicly available. However some subjects (especially in the Humanities) publish much of their research in books, not journals. Letting the world gain from the (normally publicly funded) research contained within books is more complex, and it’s not an area I fully understand. The author normally receives royalties from book sales. However I understand this are normally very small 99% of the time, and normally tail down to tiny amounts after a few years. What if funders and Universities demanded that any book written with their money (or during their employment) must be made publicly available after x number of years (let’s say 10 years)? Academics and Publishers would not welcome the move, but would still allow a window where they can gain revenue, and if this became the norm it would be something they just have to accept. Meanwhile, once open access, the book becomes much easier to archive and preserve, and ensure the knowledge is available to all in the long term. Just a thought.

Back to the Pittsburgh Press website (created with the University Library), the Copyright remains with the Press and I note this somewhat restrictive quote at the bottom of their homepage: “This material is provided for scholarly, educational, and research use only.” In an ideal world they would be under a more liberal licence (creative commons for example), though I imagine this would lead to many legal complexities to resolve, and don’t want this to detract from the good work that has been done here. It’s a massive step to release these so that they are publicly available.

It occurs to me that this raises the question of ‘discovery’. Not as a criticism of this service, but as an example of the problems we face in fully utilising its existence.

How will our (a University Library) users find these books? I can think of two  situations: first, they are looking for a particular book (perhaps due a reference) and discovering the online version will be much quicker than trying to find any existing print copy in a Library around the world, second: when a book contained in this service will be relevant to their research – and they are searching (catalogues/Google) using keywords to find relevant material.

Should users find this when they search our catalogue, or when they search our online resources (using a federated search service)? With the next generation library search products appearing, should they be ‘discoverable’ within these systems, and if so, how?

The above focuses on how a library should add these items in to its systems, the other side of the coin is adding them to universal worldwide systems. I selected a particular book and searched Worldcat for the title, it shows the book twice in the search results, once for the paper version and once for the ebook at Pittsburgh, the latter linking to the free e-book. A Good start!

Searching Google for the same title, the Worldcat entry was the fifth link, so someone searching Google for this book would – if their attention span can extend to trying the fifth link – find the free online version via the Worldcat record. An even better situation would be for Google to link to the free book directly.

Some thoughts:

• While the above is promising it relies on a user searching for the title of the book, which doesn’t cater for those who don’t know it exists, yet it’s content would be useful for their research.
• Users are saying to us they want one place to search for sources of information and content useful for their work. They have to use many different systems and it can be confusing when to use which one, and each has their own interface and rules. The Library catalogue, VLE/e-learning platform, Web of Science, Wordcat, Scopus, Google, Federated (online resources) search, COPAC, etc. Which ones to use, and when? The ultimate aim of providing one search box is to highlight information (content) which could be useful – both that which the institution subscribes to, and that which is free. How will records of Open Access books such as these ‘get in to’ such a search index?  Each Library adding such content is not very efficient, better would be for it to be added in one place/database (along with similar items) which can be openly searched/harvested by other systems using an API. Libraries could then simply add such a service to their own search system to make the content available to users. DOAJ (a directory of Open Access Journals) answered a similar concern for Open Access Journals.

Content is useless unless people can discover it, and how will Libraries develop systems which help users to discover everything they can potentially access in such an easy way that it is intuitive and requires no specialist training?

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