UKCoRR meeting

I wasn’t able to attend the UKCoRR meeting held in Kingston on Friday, as much as I would have liked to.  It sounds like I missed out on a really good day with an excellent programme.

A thorough summary and all the presentations from the day are available from the UKCoRR website:

http://www.ukcorr.org/events/aug2009-event.php

In addition, there is a summary on the UKCoRR blog:

http://ukcorr.blogspot.com/2009/08/after-our-meeting.html

I was particularly interested in Theo Andrews’ presentation on Central Funds for Open Access and ensuing discussion around institutionally designated funds for OA – both Gold and Green routes.  I hope UKCoRR don’t mind me reproducing some of the issues discussed here:

1) Concern about the costs: these might escalate, and sometimes amount to “double dipping” (some publishers are paid by authors and subscribers because they charge authors for OA article publication but don’t reduce their subscription fees).
2) Publishers who are aware of funder mandates for OA within 6 months, might introduce 12 month embargoes on post-print availability in OA repositories, in order to force authors to pay for OA publishing of the final version or miss their funder’s mandate. (NB the point here is that funders are paying, as authors can claim such costs from funders. But we’re all struggling to set up mechanisms by which this can be done – see Theo’s presentation for a summary of the issues.)
3) An institutional response might be to set up an OA fund, or it might be to encourage authors to deposit post-prints into the OA repository, rather than paying such publishers’ fees. Some researchers object to the fees being charged.
4) The Wellcome Trust does seem to prefer that the authors pay for OA publication, and indeed it suits authors better than depositing themselves because a part of the Wellcome mandate is for PubMed deposit. By paying, authors can leave the PubMed deposit up to the publishers to do. Is the Wellcome Trust’s mandate skewing the OA landscape in the way publishers have responded to them, whilst other academic disciplines are no way near as well funded?

The inimitable @llordllama has also posted summaries of the day on the UoL Library blog:

http://uollibraryblog.wordpress.com/2009/08/18/ukcorr-summer-2009-meeting-pt-1/

http://uollibraryblog.wordpress.com/2009/08/18/ukcorr-summer-2009-meeting-pt-2/

On the strength of this I’m certainly looking forward to attending future UKCoRR events – maybe even oop North next time?!

Edinburgh repository fringe – links

I wasn’t able to attend the Edinburgh repository fringe but have been scouring the blogosphere for info – unlike the real Edinburgh fringe there doesn’t seem to be much mainstream media coverage, not even a late night slot on Channel 4.

I haven’t found masses beyond the main website and the event wiki – http://wiki.repositoryfringe.org/index.php/Main_Page – though may be I’m jumping the gun a little.

The best live blogging seems to be on the jisc-datashare blog

Posts are tagged #repofringe09:  http://jisc-datashare.blogspot.com/search/label/%23repofringe09

The only other posts I’ve found so far are:

Lorna’s JISC CETIS blog – http://blogs.cetis.ac.uk/lmc/2009/07/31/repository-fringe-2009/

And

The Open Knowledge Foundation Blog – http://blog.okfn.org/2009/07/31/open-data-session-at-repository-fringe-2009/

For pics there is also a flickr group at http://www.flickr.com/groups/repofringe09/

Open Educational Resources Programme start-up meeting: What I learned

I very much enjoyed the OER programme start-up meeting on Tuesday, in spite of the 05:30 alarm and having to hoof it across Manchester on account of ‘improvements’ to the Metrolink.  I recognised several colleagues from other JISC programmes and was socially disorientated once more by the 21st Century experience of finally  meeting f2f with real people with whom I’m already well acquainted in cyber-space – more so now than ever with fellow Twitterers.

Projects in the programme are divided into 3 discrete strands: subject; individual and institutional.   In the institutional strand, UniCycle will aim to build a prototype mechanism for the import and export of OERs using our intraLibrary repository and the new JorumOpen service.  Other projects in this strand are BERLiN, Open Exeter, OpenStaffs, Otter, Open Spires and Open Content Employability Project (link?).

The agenda for the day can be viewed at http://cloudworks.ac.uk/node/1725 along with aggregated tweets tagged #oerstartup ; Cloudworks is an environment that I haven’t encountered before but it looks very useful and I intend to explore it further – it was described to us as a way of making transient events more persistent and of bringing our fragmented online communications back together.

Like many on the day I was looking forward to the presentation from Jorum to learn exactly how that service is evolving to facilitate the OER programme.  I have a particular interest, of course, as we also use intraLibrary as our repository platform and Unicycle will aim to disseminate OERs via both our own and the national service.  The experience of Jorum and the problems they have had persuading folk to sign their institution up to their extensive licence agreement, become registered users and deposit their learning resources in intraLibrary – from where they can only be discovered and reused by other registered users – has been instructional for us and I am also aware, first hand, of the training required to use intraLibrary – an undeniably powerful system albeit where flexibility can perhaps translate to complexity for the user.  In short, I was keen to discover how they plan to tackle these issues with the introduction of their three licence model and by facilitating easy deposit and (where appropriate) open access to LOs.

Current Jorum model

In her presentation (available here), Nicola Siminson first gave an overview of Jorum and JorumOpen; how the current model (illustrated above), is developing and the technical and policy initiatives that will underpin this development.

The 3 new licensing regimes are key:

• JorumOpen – for content whose creators and owners are willing and able to share their materials for anyone to use via the web, under Creative Commons (CC) licences

• JorumEducationUK – for content sharing where creators and owners need to restrict the availability of resources to members of UK Further and Higher Education institutions, authenticated via the Access Management Federation (this is most similar to the current licence)

• JorumPlus – for sharing content with additional restrictions, for example where material licensed via JISC Collections or from third parties is involved; this will require institutional authorisation

Work on the platform is ongoing and we were promised that:

• access will be open to anyone

• materials will be more discoverable – e.g. Google – JorumOpen will be exposed to search engines

• users will be able to search the whole Jorum repository via the website – no logging on to download

These are all issues that we have also been exploring and I expect that Jorum will need to develop an interface based on SRU similar to that developed by IRISS and our own research interface.  It would be very useful too if we can compare notes on facilitating effective Google search/SEO.

Then came the demonstration of the OER deposit tool – http://deposit.jorum.ac.uk – which:

• allows the deposit of a simple item, or collection of items

• a link/URL to an open educational resource from a remote site

• authenticated access and a simple one-off registration

• UK Access Management Federation – single sign-on at home institution

• upload content, submit basic metadata and select a suitable Creative Commons licence

• with option to add more metadata, for greater discoverability…and will ultimately enable the sharing and finding of OER via JorumOpen!

It looks good.  Albeit in beta.  Jorum are keen for the community to test it over the coming months and submit any feedback from the website.

I asked whether the software/code will be made available so we may implement a similar tool as part of our repository infrastructure at Leeds Met; in addition, as Unicycle will use both our own repository and Jorum to disseminate OERs, I would also like to explore dual deposit from a web based interface so users may deposit into both repositories simultaneously.  As such I would also be interested in the workflow(s) and metadata templates that Jorum are using with the deposit tool. Will resources be published directly to the library, for example, or will they go into a user’s work area or into an administrative work area for metadata enrichment?

I was advised that the software will indeed be available to other projects though not in a neatly packaged format.

NB.  I had assumed that the deposit tool was based on SWORD which I know does facilitate deposit into multiple repositories – it appears, however, that it is actually based on MrCute which does not, in fact, use the SWORD protocol so this will need further exploration.

Finally delegates were urged to join the Jorum community – http://community.jorum.ac.uk/

Other useful presentations throughout the day included Project Management
Evaluation and Synthesis project, OU-supported communities and OER infokit

(links to all presentations in one place at http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/oer/startupmeeting090609.aspx)

And then, on the way back to Euston, I popped in the British museum and admired bits of the Parthenon and some Sarcophagi (Sarcophaguses?)

Repository week

From 1st – 5th June is repository week when colleagues can come together to learn more about the repository and how it will contribute to the information infrastructure of the institution.

Projects that are supported by the repository include an Open Access research archive and research administration; reusable learning objects/Open Educational Resources and Personal Curriculum Creation and provision of distance learning.

The final programme of events is yet to be finalised but will be a series of learning lunches at Headingley and Old Broadcasting House. For more information or to register your interest please contact Nick Sheppard or Kirsty Maw.

Repositories for research and teaching/learning material: The debate continues at #rpmeet

Last week I attended the JISC Repository and Preservation end of programme meeting in Birmingham. I recall being very nervous at my first JISC event in November 2007 but feel much more at ease now and enjoyed the event immensely; the programme has certainly been successful in fostering a sense of community though it’s an unusual social experience to meet people face to face, often for the very first time, when one feels you already know them from reading their blog and following them on Twitter.

During one of the breakout sessions on the first day I made a bee-line for a discussion about repositories for learning and teaching materials – as opposed to OA research repositories. I use the word “opposed” advisedly as there is certainly some strong sentiment around the issue, particularly with respect to using a common software platform. As a representative of a project that is adapting a learning object repository to also serve as an effective Open Access research repository I’m finding it a little difficult to understand the vehemence of some of this opposition, though I would be the first to acknowledge a steep learning curve and recognise that we have required extensive development, not of intraLibrary itself perhaps, but of an appropriate web infrastructure surrounding it. And yes, we would certainly have been able to implement a functioning OA research repository more quickly using EPrints or DSpace however, from the outset, it was vital that our repository had the the capacity to fulfil its broader potential – in the words of Clifford Lynch “[A] mature and fully realised institutional repository will contain the intellectual works of faculty and students – both research and teaching materials – and also documentation of the activities of the institution itself in the form of records of events and performance and of the ongoing intellectual life of the institution.”  [Lynch, Clifford. A “Institutional Repositories: Essential Infrastructure for Scholarship in the Digital Age” ARL Bimonthly Report 226 (2003).]

It’s also important to be pragmatic.  Historically, Leeds Metropolitan University is a polytechnic that gained chartered university status in 1992; its heritage is very much in teaching and learning rather than research with, arguably, a more vocational than academic flavour.  In recent years, the research profile has steadily increased, culminating in unprecedented success in the 2008 RAE and the university is naturally keen to capitalise on this success, enhance its research profile further whilst also continuing to emphasise its student focussed teaching and learning credentials. The implementation of an integrated repository to support both research outputs and learning objects reflects this dual focus.  Clifford Lynch’s article suggests that the concept of a central system to manage disparate resources in this way has been implicit within the sector for some years, however, the technology has tended to focus on Open Access to research, with the two most widely used software platforms being EPrints, developed at the University of Southampton in 2000, and DSpace, developed at MIT in 2002; early versions of both platforms were primarily designed to manage text based resources (though subsequent versions of EPrints and DSpace can manage a wide range of digital file formats.)  

NB.  In an extended discussion on this issue on JISC-REPOSITORIES (archive here) RepositoryMan Les Carr of EPrints refers to the fact that he still comes across the firmly held (and spurious) belief that because EPrints is used for Open Access it can’t be used for multimedia files or scientific data.

The session was chaired by Amber Thomas of JISC and I asked a somewhat blunt, perhaps naive, question about JISC’s perspectives on combined repositories of research and teaching materials.  Amber suggested that JISC have been deliberately neutral on the issue which is also perhaps emphasised by the diagramatic representation of the programme structure reproduced above.  

Some of the commentators last Wednesday were adamant that though it may well be possible to manage different types of resources with a single system it was far from desirable with one colleague making the pithy analogous observation that you can write letters in Excel but that doesn’t make it right.  Phil Barker of CETIS was also at the discussion and in a recent blog post on the “question of whether research outputs and learning materials should stored in the same repository” is “inclined to think the answer is no, the purpose of the repository is different, a learning material isn’t an output, sharing means something different for the two resource types.”  Phil goes on to say that ” If you think a repository is a database and a bit-store then you may come to a different conclusion, but I think a repository is a service offered to people and your choice of starting point in offering that service will affect how easy your journey is.”  (Full post here)

I’d certainly concede that our journey hasn’t been an easy one and I also agree that a repository is a service offered to people and with our repository start-up, and also Streamline and PERSoNA, that is certainly the approach we have tried to take; with intraLibrary and the SRU interface we now have an incipient infrastructure to manage both research material and learning objects; the discrete types of material can be managed entirely separately, however, there is also potential for the ongoing development of a holistic approach to the management of the full range of digital resources produced by a modern university and as we develop our infrastructure further I hope we can utilise appropriate web-technology around a central management system (intraLibrary) to achieve decentralised resource discovery – through appropriate interfaces, widgets and environments – the VLE for example.

Then of course there is the small matter of persuading academics to part with their resources, not to mention IPR, copyright and quality control issues…

Open Access to research is an evolving paradigm and represents a considerable shift in the established academic publishing process; Open Access to a broader range of educational resources still more so. Any paradigm shift is likely to take time to evolve and Open Access, to research and other materials, is no exception, especially given that academia, perhaps, tends to subscribe rather strongly to established tradition!

JISC’s current OER programme should go some way to addressing many of these issues but infrastructure is the foundation. The perfect system almost certainly doesn’t exist and it’s surely important to be pragmatic when implementing and developing appropriate system. Here’s to ongoing discussion, debate and development.

Intrallect conference 2009

The title of this year’s conference was Open Educational Resources: share, improve, reuse and Wendy and I were invited by Intrallect to talk about the work we have been doing to repurpose intraLibrary as an OA research repository. We travelled through the stunning Northumbrian countryside up to Edinburgh on Wednesday morning so unfortunately we missed the keynote from Amber Thomas of JISC.

The event was held in the cosily named Scottish storytelling centre – it’s a lovely space but the wireless router wasn’t up to the traffic that it was suddenly called upon to, er, route – presumably guests are generally Caledonian raconteurs who aren’t grafted to their laptops in quite the same way as this lot. So, no tweeting today. Which was a shame, as I’ve only recently come to appreciate that particular web phenomenon – I didn’t get it at all when I first tried it but as a “back channel” at a conference it really comes in to its own. On Thursday, Intrallect brought their own router so it was business as usual – noses in laptops.

The first speaker was a Dutch fellow called Henk who told us about recent activities in the Netherlands. It was good to get an international perspective. Henk is from an organisation called Kennisnet – who, as I understand it, aggregate LOM metadata from educational data-providers – including repositories of course – there was a flutter of excitement when Henk seemed to suggest that there really isn’t a problem getting teachers in Holland to describe their LOs with high quality LOM and he briefly described wizards that facilitate the process. Whether these were wizards of the software-pop up variety or actual warlocks I’m still not sure.

Next was Deepal Desai from NHS Education for Scotland who are using intraLibrary in a very similar – though not quite the same – way to the NHS National Library for Health project in England which I’ve already seen – I’ve been signed up as an evaluator/beta tester for a while (emphasis here should be placed on “signed up” rather than “evaluator”). Both projects use MyKnowledgeMap’s online suite of tools Compendle – Tom and Jonny from that company spoke later in the day so more on that in a minute. I was also really interested in the FAST technology that Deepal described which seemed able to aggregate metadata records from numerous sources, and, describing different types of resources into a single interface. It might be just the thing for an interface for our repository if we want to bring research materials and LOs together in one place and from a common search as has been suggested – definitely have to explore the technology further.

Peter Kilcoyne from Worcester College of Technology led us through MrCute 2 which, as with many of these things, I’m aware of but to no great depth. Very interesting in the context of developing a PowerLink for X-stream (Leeds Met’s VLE, Blackboard Vista). I’ve already played around with MrCute and posted about it back in December. When the code for MrCute 2 is released perhaps it can be adapted for Blackboard Vista (currently for Moodle only).  Peter also showed an informative video podcast from Moodleman, an Australian Moodle evangelist with an interesting pronunciation of “Worcester.”

ReJiG was presented by Nancy Graham and Rachel Wood from the University of Birmingham.  The project has been looking at issues around discovery and re-use from JORUM and I’ll be very interested to look at their outputs which might tie in with some of our investigations into workflow as part of PERSoNA. The general message seemed to be how difficult it is to get academics to engage with the service even though they might think it a good idea in principle – loads of reasons, not least JORUM’s now famously restrictive licensing which, of course, is evolving rapidly now in the form of their three licence model which includes an open licence.

Then it was time for lunch which I couldn’t really enjoy on account of a few nerves; we were up immediately afterwards though it was good to see the food appropriately tagged with metadata to aid discovery of an appropriate resource. Then back to the theatre where Wendy did an overview of institutional perspectives and why we chose intraLibrary before I demo’d the SRU, talked about some of the issues we’ve encountered along the way and development work still required. It went alright I think.  Slides here.

Keele University were out in force and their first presentation was about how they have been using intraLibrary as part of their CLA digitisation service. When stuff is digitised and stored in the repository (under its own taxonomy) it’s dead easy to email the public URL to a lecturer who can then just drop it into the VLE (also Blackboard). Not the most essential use for intraLibrary perhaps but it beats our system which uses Blackboard Vista’s built in “repository”. Keele’s system is safer in terms of long term preservation and the resources are surely more discoverable year on year (they are described by metadata though I don’t know what Application Profile they’re using). And it’s secure, though I was a bit worried about the use of the public URL; apparently it has been cleared by the CLA – there is a copyright notice that makes it clear what a user can or can’t do with that public URL.

Next up on stage was Sarah Currier, formerly of Intrallect but now working as an independent consultant talking about SWORD. Yet another technology I’ve played with but not had time to really get to grips with. Demos included desk-top batch upload using drag and drop – which I’ve tried to implement without success; the netvibes widget developed by ICO3 which I have on my iGoogle page and used to drop into a workflow but never figured out how to set up a workflow in intraLibrary to append an AP and publish. Feedforward looked ace and I’m not going to talk about that until I’ve played with it myself – drops RSS feeds into a repo via SWORD (and packages them I think). Then Compendle again which can retrieve from intraLibrary via SRU, repurpose and deposit back in via SWORD which brought us neatly to Charles Duncan talking about intraLibrary Connect.

NB. Also the FaceBook SWORD app which I’ve also played with though it didn’t pick up the title, instead replaced it with a string of gobbledegook.

Charles described the companies vision for using open standards to make it as easy as possible for users to interact with the repository –  we need to go out to the user rather than necessarily expecting them to log in to intraLibrary whenever they want to deposit or retrieve a resource – again echoes some of the thinking behind PERSoNA. Indeed, we’d already seen how services can be built from the various open standards that the platform supports – SRU, RSS, SWORD (based on ATOM). There was also a neat little demonstration of Yahoo Pipes to knock up a customised RSS feed. All these technologies, of course, are indicative of the direction that the web is taking in a more general sense, nevertheless, it’s reassuring that Intrallect aim to incorporate this type of stuff at a formal level.

Michael Debenham from Keele spoke next about “simplifying the process” and demo’d another desk-top SWORD tool for drag and drop batch deposit.  In essence the same as the one we’d already seen from Sarah but without the Command Line window to avoid scaring academic folk.  The idea is to make it oh so easy for those timorous teachers to get stuff into the repository by just dragging and dropping on their desktop; the resource is immediately published in intraLibrary and becomes available to search from the VLE (Blackboard) via a PowerLink and incorporate directly into a course.  The only problem is that the resources end up in intraLibrary with only very basic metadata – they are held in a secondary workflow so that, in theory, they can be reviewed by library staff and enriched with metadata.  In practice, of course, Keele don’t have the resources to do this.  Sounds familiar!

The final session of the day was a more in depth look at Compendle with David and Tom.  It is a web based system that, in my view, goes a long way to achieving a nice circular workflow that allows a user to create a full course, pull in all manner of digital resources from the local (or other?) repository, repurpose if necessary, package as IMS and push it back into the repository for dissemination to students via a VLE.  From my own limited exploration, it’s fairly intuitive to use, though, as you’d expect, David and Tom revealed all sorts of bells and whistles that I hadn’t figured out on my own.

Day two was every bit as interesting as the first (with added Twitter – though @sheilmcn did manage to Tweet throughout day one).  Given that there is a Twitter stream from Thursday (see previous post); it’s Friday afternoon AND I suspect this post is now is beyond optimum length and into the long-tail off I’ll very quickly summarise:

• Lou McGill began the day talking about Good Intentions: improving the evidence base in support of sharing learning materials (a JISC report)
• Keele’s third slot was Boyd Duffee – “Can Google see my stuff?” (Answer:  No it can’t, at least not MY stuff; not yet.)
• Next were parallel discussion slots on: Automatic Metadata Generation; Open Educational Resource; Making repository content discoverable – technologies (I went to this one)
• Then Peter Douglas introduced the New Repository Reporting Service which we’ve been waiting for!  Looks OK but will require a modest monthly surcharge
• Ian Watson of IRISS was promoting the IntraLibrary Customer user forum which many of us have already found very useful – hopefully engagement will  increase now
• Finally Charles introduced plans to run monthly workshops on various subjects via web CT which will be great

And that was that.

I really enjoyed both days – not to mention the conference dinner on Wednesday evening so thanks to all the folk at Intrallect and all present who shared their knowdedge and experience.  Hope to see you again next year.

Hash # from Intrallect conference in Edinburgh

WiFi problems on Wednesday but plenty of discussion off and on-line today:

http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23intraconf09

Show and TEL

Yesterday I spoke to colleagues at the monthly TEL network meeting which, technical problems notwithstanding, was an opportunity to engage, in particular, with learning technologists who should prove invaluable as intermediaries back to their respective faculties.

I wasn’t actually able to show them intraLibrary itself as the network seemed to have developed bahavioural problems but I did show the search interface, described how we had come to this point and what further development work there is still to do on the interface and the associated infrastructure that will surround intraLibrary – a lot of interest in the PowerLink to X-stream.

It was also a chance to plug The Repository Day which is taking place at Old Broadcasting House on November 10th when colleagues are invited to participate in one of 4 workshops that I will be running throughout the day. There will be a software demonstration (I hope!) and folk will have the opportunity to use the system and to inform ongoing development and to try out some new tools produced by our collaborating projects Streamline and PERSoNA. I also hope that people will bring their own material for upload to the repository which can be copies of published research papers or Learning Objects that they have created and would like to share with colleagues.

At the meeting we were also shown the new ALT wiki – I’ve got myself an account and started building a repository page – there’s not much there as yet!