Technology and learning day

Appealing to peoples’ acquisitive natures, Dawn and I offered a small incentive to encourage people to complete our questionnaire at the TEL day on 3rd June (the lucky winner has been informed so I’m afraid if you haven’t heard then it wasn’t you!)

We ended up with 20 respondents and, from my perspective, some interesting preliminary data; reassuring in that it suggests there is already a good awareness about the yet to be implemented Leeds Met repository and also a reasonable general knowledge about Open Access with only 4 of the 20 respondents professing ignorance about the project and 14 saying they have “some” (12) or “good” (2) awareness of OA.

I realise this is a small sample and that attendees at this event may well be better informed about new technological initiatives within the university than the academic population at large but is is nevertheless encouraging to know that there is a kernal of folk for whom these ideas aren’t entirely new with almost half (9) of people also being familiar with publisher self-archiving policies.

Just one of our respondents had actually submitted an article to an Open Access repository; hopefully this number will increase dramatically once they have an institutional repository of their own!

The penultimate question in the OA section of the questionnaire focussed on 6 potential benefits of Open Access and asked people to rank them each from 1 (not important) to 5 (important). For the purposes of summary here I am regarding ranks 1 and 2 (not important); rank 3 (of medium importance); 4 and 5 (important). The full spreadsheet is available here.

a. Public have access to research they have helped fund through taxation

15 respondents considered this important; 4 respondents considered it of medium importance; 1 did not respond

b. Teachers/students have access to key resources without subscription barriers

18 respondents considered this important; 1 respondent considered it of medium importance; 1 respondent did not consider it important

c. Maximise research impact/increase citation of your work

12 respondents considered this important; 5 respondents considered it of medium importance; 3 respondents did not consider it important

d. Increased return on investment for funding bodies

10 respondents considered this important; 8 respondents considered it of medium importance; 2 respondents did not consider it important

e. Scholars in economically disadvantaged areas of the world (eg. developing countries) have greater access to published research

17 respondents considered this important; 2 respondents considered it of medium importance; 1 respondent did not consider it important

f. Reduced economic constraints on institutional libraries that can currently afford to subscribe to a relatively small sub-set of published research

17 respondents considered this important; 2 respondents considered it of medium importance; 1 respondent did not consider it important

The final question in the OA section asked:

“In the course of your online research, how frequently do you encounter resources that you are unable to access (eg. LeedsMet does not subscribe to the resource)?”

For half of respondents (10) this is a problem “occasionally” with 7 encountering it more frequently; only 3 respondents said this was “hardly ever” a problem for them.

This brief questionnaire is just a staging post on the advocacy journey but it has certainly been a useful exercise; aside from the data itself, both Dawn and I need volunteers from the university community to become actively involved in our respective development and evaluation processes and many of our respondents indicated their willingness to do just that. I hope that from this small but interested kernal we can begin to reach out to others, spreading knowledge and enthusiasm for Open Access and the Leeds Met repository as we go.

For a summary of the PERSoNA section of the questionnaire see PERSoNA NEWS

University challenge

Dawn and I are currently putting together a questionnaire to use as a tool for gathering preliminary user information for our respective repository projects and as a new-comer to questionnaire building I’m finding it a tricky business. And this is the easy bit. Getting people to fill the thing in will present the real challenge!

Your starter for ten: Are you aware of the LeedsMet repository project?

Come on! I need an answer!

I’m still formulating the bonus questions but they will test the team’s knowledge of Open Access while subtly provoking interest amongst those who didn’t quite understand the question (Surely I’m not the only one who resorts to Google to follow up some of Paxman’s arcane interrogations. Am I?)

Ok. Relax and take a sip of water.

Early advocacy at several Faculty Research Award Sub Committee meetings and at the CRI Seminar suggest that knowledge amongst academic staff is, in fact, very limited and this is borne out by the experience of the wider repository community. I hope that our questionnaire will generate interest and preliminary data for us to move forward with our overlapping projects; Dawn is working on a section of the questionnaire pertaining to Streamline and I also need to generate some tightly focused questions for PERSoNA. And that project is rather more abstract, partly due to not yet having a functioning repository to hang the project on but also, I think, because of the inherent abstraction and rapid (r)evolutions of Web 2.0. Dawn and I had a lively discussion around some of the issues that I have tried to capture in a post at PERSoNA News – always difficult after the fact.

JISC Event

My first attempt at a live blog post from a beautiful setting on the banks of the river Severn in Worcester. Not sure if I’ll end up with anything more interesting than a few random records/thoughts and a bunch of links to follow…

I’m at a JISC event hosted by the University of Worcester: “Using Repositories for Teaching and Learning: Can we find a Recipe for Success?”

This is a crucial question for the LeedsMet Repository and now that the software for the repository has been selected (more on that VERY soon) our three discrete projects (LeedsMet Repository; Streamline and PERSoNA) are beginning to adopt a more integrated approach that should go some way to identifying some of the necessary ingredients.

We’ve had quick fire presentations from Julian Beckton from the University of Lincoln’s LIROLEM project and Steve Burholt from Oxford Brookes University’s CIRCLE project – which I have a particular interest in for reasons that should become apparent over the next week or so. Also from Sarah Hayes and Andrew Rothery from the projects of our hosts, the University of Worcester (DRAW and WRaP)

Helen Westmancoat from Yorks St John has just delivered 10 minutes on their DigiRep project which it is good to hear is experiencing a steady uptake – this in contrast to some of the other stories we’ve heard about the relatively low uptake of this type of repository.

Now Phil Barker from CETIS – Metadata and Repository Coordinator – is here to ask us:

1. What is the Model?

(What are repositories for?) Sharing/Dissemination; Gathering; Managing

(Architecture: how do they fit in with…) …other institutional systems?/…other similar repositories?/What is exchanged: metadata or object.

2. How do you know you’ve found a reliable resource?

(Quality assurance: peer review etc)

One of the main issues that has been flagged up throughout this morning as one of the crucial differences between an Open Access research archive and a repository of other Learning and Teaching objects and that needs to be borne in mind when developing a common platform (as we are) for both types of object is the lack of formal quality control of learning and teaching objects in comparison with the well established traditions associated with published research outputs (peer review etc); this was emphasised in the first presentation of the morning by Andrew Rothery (along with a raft of the other main differences as he sees them).

Currently listening to David Millard from the faroes project – not gonna try and take notes here as it’s really hard to concentrate (!) but some very interesting stuff that may be relevant to PERSoNA N.B. PuffinShare – a novel approach to a repository – rebranded as PuffinShare (pdf) – with the emphasis on using and sharing resources rather than just storing them in a “dusty old repository”: research repositories archive things/do teachers want to archive teaching materials (as such)?

pm (after lunch!): EdShare at the University of Southampton.

Summary: Andrew Rothery is asking what you would tell someone just starting to develop their learning and teaching repository! (That’s us!) We split into 3 groups to brainstorm before coming back together for a final discussion.

For the record our group came up with 6 bullet points:

• What is it for? Identify the needs of the people actually using the system – not those that have commissioned it!
• Look at successful implementations.
• Support existing workflows.
• Search engine optimisation (possible trade off; static/dynamic content?)
• Quality control of LOs? (Don’t obsess about the peer review model as applied to academic publications)
• Seed the repository with high quality material.

Random items from the other groups:

• Third party issues; policies/procedures.
• Audit of academic staff – what do they already do?
• IPR – clear procedures.
• Audience – know who they are.
• Access decisions (OA/federated)
• Start with a small, manageable collection
• Solve problems for the user community – use case scenarios
• Make sure it works – first time use
• Interface and integration; VLE/library catalogue/portal/intranets/open web

STARS – Staff Training Awareness Refreshing Skills

Thanks to Lou for arranging for me to speak to library staff as part of the STARS programme this week. And thanks to everyone that came along. On Monday I spoke to 27 people at Civic and today there were about 25 so that’s around 50 staff who now (hopefully!) have a greater awareness about the repository project and Open Access.

As at last week’s CRI seminar, some very interesting perspectives were raised and there are a number of issues that crop up again and again.

Very briefly and from memory some of the recurrent themes are:

• Software testing/usability of interface
• Versioning in the repository
• Repository content – will content be limited to peer-reviewed output? What about book chapters (monographs)?

I intend to start compiling a list of FAQs and with this in mind it would be very useful if people could contact me with any specific questions they may have (or think others may ask) either in person, through this blog or by email.

Download the slides from the presentation.

CRI Seminar

Well, I have finally delivered my first formal presentation to members of the university research community. I am grateful to Sam Armitage for inviting me to speak as part of the Carnegie Research Institute seminar series yesterday; as I mentioned at the event, one of the difficulties for me is to identify suitable forums (or fora?) at which to engage with colleagues across the university and yesterday’s seminar was an ideal environment in which to begin a dialogue with the CRI (and one or two delegates from other faculties and departments.)

When one has been living on the web, immersed in all things Open Access and Institutional Repositories, it is difficult to anticipate exactly how (often complex) issues will be perceived by those whose support I need most – the academic and research staff at Leeds Met. All in all, however, I felt that it went well; perhaps I tried to cover too much material – you can’t tell the full tale in the first chapter, especially as the story of Open Access is still very much being written!

Here are one or two (Ok four!) specific issues I recall being raised; I shall ask those present to remind me of any others they would like to discuss further that either cropped up during the seminar or have occurred to them since:

• Publisher copyright policies and self-archiving

I referred to the SHERPA RoMEO web-site which can be used to find a summary of permissions that are normally given as part of each publisher’s copyright transfer agreement and is maintained by Nottingham University; there was some discussion as to what proportion of publishers actually allow self-archiving; I believe it is the majority but discovering a more definitive answer is on my ‘to do’ list!

• User testing of potential solutions for our repository

Concern was expressed that adequate user-testing of software is sometimes neglected on a project such as this.

All of the products we are reviewing (commercial and Open Source) have well established user-groups at other institutions and all are fully customisable meaning that it should be possible to conduct user testing once the software has been selected and adapt the user-interface etc to our specific requirements. Also, I do intend to do some testing of my own with a student who is visually impaired and has kindly offered to check accessibility to screen reading software.

I will also make the point that the system specification that we developed in the course of our market analysis of potential solutions was comprehensive – if you are interested it is available to download from the project website.

• Referencing from Open Access material

The version of a self-archived paper (either pre-print or post-print) may (almost certainly will) differ from the published version which raises potential problems when referencing from such material; different pagination, for example. This is something I have seen discussed elsewhere; also on my ‘to do’ list – find relevant discussion of this and related issues!

• What will happen to an individual’s self-archived research when they leave Leeds Met?

Academic staff, of course, are liable to work at several institutions in the course of their career and we will obviously need some sort of formal policy to describe what will happen in this circumstance. Again, this is an issue I have seen discussed elsewhere and I shall endeavour to report back in more detail.

So that’s four more or less arbitrary recollections from my first seminar – as I say, I’m sure those present will remember more and I would very much like to encourage people to use this blog as a discussion forum. You can post comments or, if you would like to become a more formal contributor this can be arranged – please contact me to discuss this further.

I would also ask people to bear in mind any other fora (or forums!) that would be appropriate for further discussion of Leeds Met’s repository project. And very soon we should actually have a repository to show you!

Finally, in the spirit of Open Access I shall make the slides from the presentation available to download (full .ppt as WordPress won’t allow me to upload slides only as .pps) – it is very much a work in progress and any comments/feedback gratefully received.

Which repository: Learning Objects vs Open Access research

As previously referred to, there has been an amount of cross-project work with Streamline through which it has become apparent that the requirements of a Learning Object repository are potentially very different from those of a repository dedicated to Open Access to research (primarily due to the way in which the respective types of repository are searched) and that the software that has been reviewed (both Open Source and proprietary) tends to be specialised to one specific type of content (although the respective software developers themselves may disagree).

The issue (heavily informed by the work being undertaken by the Streamline team) has necessarily delayed the choice of software that will be used and the ideal is to choose the platform that is best suited to both projects as well as being extensible to an ever wider range of digital objects in the future.

I’m sure my colleagues from Streamline will correct me if necessary – bear with me, I’m still getting to grips with that project and am able to follow more of the discussion at each subsequent meeting (!) – but my understanding is that two of the aims of Streamline are to:

• develop a tool that will auto-generate standard metadata based on the documentation associated with multi-media LOs
• develop a repository search-interface that then uses that auto-generated metadata in a controlled way to provide targeted resource-discovery but that will also facilitate serendipitous discovery of resources in a way analogous to spotting an adjacent book on a library shelf.

The consensus from the Streamline team seems to be that the majority of the software we have looked at does not make adequate use of metadata (often painstakingly entered) using it only as a filter to refine a search after a brute-force Google type trawl through repository content and perhaps the metadata side of repositories dedicated to OA has been neglected as (as noted in a previous post) traffic tends to come in via the mighty Google (or similar) anyway; this is obviously not conducive to an LO repository that will be searched in a very different way – often from within an individual institution or small subset of institutions.

Which brings us to Google itself. I confess to not knowing a great deal about how Google actually works but it is my understanding that it does not pay much heed to metadata and just indexes everything – how this is then ranked is something of a mystery to me and I have heard it suggested that the success of the interface is actually based on it’s perceived efficacy at discovering pertinent resources in the top 10 or 20 hits rather than its actual ability to identify the most relevant resource all (or even some) of the time.

NB. I assume the OAI-PMH (Open Access Initiative on Metadata Harvesting) with which all OA archives are compliant has some beneficial effects on hit ranking than would be achieved through brute indexing of repository content in the normal course of things (note to self: must look again at the OAI-PMH tutorial.)

I am a very long way from being a metadata expert but I believe there are those who think that metadata as we traditionally understand it has had its day and that Web 2.0 technologies (social bookmarking, tagging et al) coupled with Google’s bulldozer approach will usher in a brave new world of resource discovery – there may indeed be some truth in that though the librarian in me, and a little historical perspective, suggest that they will rather complement the existing models.

And anyway, at this stage, the burning issue is STILL “Which repository?” – IR day (as I call it) is now scheduled for April 16th!

What’s in a name?

The project is currently going under the rather cumbersome title “Implementing An Institutional Repository for Leeds Metropolitan University”. While not quite as pressing as deciding upon what software platform to utilise we could do with something a little more…memorable. Suggestions on a postcard…

First post

Well we finally have our project website on-line: http://www.leedsmet.ac.uk/inn/repository/

The site gives a brief overview of Institutional Repositories, Open Access and Self Archiving along with general background information specific to our project at Leeds Metropolitan University. It’s also the first port of call if you would like to contact us.

It’s still very early days for us; over the next couple of weeks we hope to have decided upon our software partner who will implement the repository platform for us. We are having presentations from Digital Commons, EPrints, Open Repository, Digitool, IntraLibrary and Harvest Road. Phew!

Digital Commons, in fact, have already impressed us with a remote demonstration from California – the wonders of modern technology! Though a web-conference isn’t plain sailing with lots of “Hello, can you hear me!” and people talking over one another.

We will have spoken to everyone by the 23rd of January and they’ll all go into a hat for the big decision.

Metaphorically speaking. The decision making process will, of course, be rigorous and based on empirical data.

Then we can get down to the serious business of customising the software and, most serious of all, populating the repository with “a representative body of content”. The most important work thereafter will be the ongoing advocacy campaign to the University research community and over the coming months I hope to develop contacts with faculty research committees and with individuals.

So, if you are already convinced of the benefits of self-archiving into an Institutional Repository please contact me and help me spread the word…

Nick