Would you like UKOER with that?

Yesterday I had a chat with the learning technologist from Innovation North (faculty) about all things repository and, more specifically, UniCycle – he also brought along a faculty colleague who is exploring the best way of disseminating laboratory training videos to students via the VLE.

intraLibrary can’t stream video and I candidly pointed out that if the only requirement was to make these video tutorials available to students through the VLE then the planet eStream server would be by far the simplest solution – just upload the video to eStream and drop the URL into an X-stream module.  Job done.  However, there is no reason we can’t also catalogue the URL in intraLibrary and there are several potential benefits to doing so not least for ukoer – depending on IPR and licencing considerations of course, more on that in a minute.

The only question that gives me slight pause for thought is the wisdom of effectively double-cataloguing the same resource in two systems – when I was initially exploring planet eStream some time ago, it was pointed out that eStream is already a fully searchable resource and there was some resistance to double-cataloguing in this way as being inelegant.  The issues are perhaps similar to the question I raised in a previous post about making ukoer available both via a local repository and JorumOpen. However, as far as I can tell, metadata attached to resources in eStream is extremely limited so why not add standardised ukoer metadata and link out to them from intralibrary – is there any practical reason why this is a bad idea?

Inelegance notwithstanding, other potential benefits of this approach are being able to search for eStream video via the VLE PowerLink and the concommitant advantage that resources catalogued in the repository aren’t restricted to an individual X-stream module.  In theory, of course, there is nothing to stop a tech-savvy tutor linking out to eStream – or YouTube for that matter – to their hearts content, from the VLE, via email or from anywhere else that takes their fancy – in practice, however, they need to be able to search for a wide range of resources from a single, simple interface that is well established in the institutional infrastructure and that clearly identifies ownership and licensing – that isn’t the eStream server, or likely to be (nor is it currently the repository.  Yet.  But I’m working on it!)

I asked my “guest” (hostage?) what limitations, if any, faculty would like to place on access – would they wish to ensure that it was, in fact, only available to students within a specific module of X-stream or would they consider wider dissemination across the institution/sector?  As I rattled on it became clear, and quite understandably, that my hostage hadn’t thought about this in any great depth and indicated that they were questions to be discussed at faculty level…

Would they consider licensing for reuse under Creative Commons?  Er…what’s Creative Commons?

So, apologies to the hapless soul who just wanted to disseminate some video and found himself in my office being harangued about repositories, PowerLinks, OER, IPR and Creative Commons but this is exactly the type of interaction we need to be having with colleagues across the institution who have their own specific requirements for disseminating digital teaching and learning materials and from where we can start building cultural change for ukoer from the ground up.

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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?!

Link or file in JorumOpen?

At the OER startup meeting back in June there was some discussion around including a link to a resource in JorumOpen rather than the file itself – this obviously makes sense, for example, if the resource is already out there on the web and adding the relevant URL to Jorum will certainly aid appropriate discovery in the context of #ukoer.  I’m not certain, however, if this can apply directly to the Unicycle project which requires us to make resources available via JorumOpen as well as the Leeds Met repository.  I can’t immediately see why not but I’ll have to discuss it further with Simon.

As I mentioned last week I’ve begun uploading learning objects to intraLibrary that have been specifically designated as an OER for the Unicycle project and this morning I’ve also used the Jorum OER Deposit tool – http://deposit.jorum.ac.uk/ – to submit the same resource to JorumOpen (currently in beta and for testing only).  Rather than uploading the file again, it seemed to make sense to submit the public URL generated by intraLibrary instead – this will also, to some extent, account for version control issues as there will only be a single locus at which the original resides rather than two (though of course folk could still modify and resubmit to either JorumOpen or our local repository – or indeed somewhere else).

The only other thing that immediately occurs is that we will also be linking out to URLs from intraLibrary which means there would effectively be a chain of URLs from JorumOpen to the Leeds Met repository, to the resource on the web – I’m not sure whether this would create a problem though.

UNESCO releases new publication on Open Educational Resources

Open Educational Resources: Conversations in Cyberspace

Download available free at:

http://oerwiki.iiep-unesco.org/index.php?title=Open_Educational_Resources:_Conversations_in_Cyberspace

Musing about metadata for OER

(Disclaimer: I am not a qualified librarian or cataloguer.)

Thus far I’ve only really considered, in detail,  the minutiae of research specific metadata (a consequence of the ongoing project to repurpose an LO repository as an OA archive of research).  However, this morning I uploaded my first learning object to intraLibrary that has been specifically designated as an OER for the Unicycle project.  The resource itself isn’t terribly exciting in that it is just a Word.doc but it makes sense to start with a relatively simple object than a more exotic file type or package.

The metadata template I’m using is taken directly from JORUM without any modification and is consequently (currently at least) based on IEEE LOM though it’s worth restating that we’ve recently learned that JORUM will be using DSpace to serve OER rather than intraLibrary so that service’s template is almost certain to change considerably in the very near future.

Mandatory fields:

Title
Description(s)
Keyword(s)
Contributor(s): Author(s)
Contribution Date
Payment Required (yes/no)
Subject to Copyright (yes/no)
Statement of Copyright and Restriction

Recommended Fields:

Version
Status
IMS LRM Metadata Identifier
Role of Metadata Contributor
Metadata Contributor(s)
Date of Metadata Contribution
Language of Metadata Record
Technical Format
Location of Resource
Language of Intended User
Type of Resource
Intended for Use In
Level of Difficulty

Optional Fields:

Description of Contribution Date
Module Code
Module Title
IMS LRM Metadata Identifier
Catalogue
Description of Metadata Contribution Date
Format of Metadata Record
Size Resource in Bytes
Type of Delivery System
Name of Delivery System
Minimum Version of Delivery System
Maximum Version of Delivery System
How to Install This Resource
Special Requirements for Use
Duration of Media Resource: Playing Time
Type of Interactivity
Educational Purpose Description
Language of Intended User
Level of Interactivity
Semantic Density
Intended for Use By
Completion Time
CLA Reporting Data

In addition, the resource is classified against JACS (Joint Academic Coding System) – again emulating the current (intraLibrary) JORUM configuration and can be ascribed one of the six Creative Commons attribution licences.

So off I went.

Title is straightforward, and Description – though this field does require some thought to make it useful – but what about Keyword(s)? My first thought is that we need some sort of controlled vocabulary – for research material I am using Library of Congress Authorities which is well established practice for this type of material but perhaps less appropriate for learning objects; one could rely on author produced keywords but these are perhaps not easily generated as formal metadata and will tend to lack consistency (social tagging is perhaps a slightly different issue and intraLibrary does have a facility for ascribing user-generated tags after the resource has been published.)

I posted my idle musings to Twitter and was immediately called to account by @philbarker and @LornaMCampbell who both asked what specific aspects of the learning object the controlled vocab would need to describe. @ambrouk acknowledged it was a big question and suggested two separate criteria: a) subject classification b) everything else author might tell you about / user says they want?

Input also came from @lynncorrigan and @KavuBob who pointed me to the HILT (High Level Thesaurus) project at Strathclyde – http://hilt.cdlr.strath.ac.uk/hilt4/demonstrators.html

I haven’t yet looked closely at this project but from the Twitter response it’s clearly an area that needs further research so this is a quick post to further the discussion…I’ll come back when I’ve explored the issue in more detail and all perspectives in the meantime gratefully received.

Some final unstructured thoughts at this stage:

• The need for a lightweight metadata template – which I guess the mandatory subset is though even this requires Keyword(s) AND classification against JACS…AND social tags can also be applied.  To what extent the recommended/optional fields need to be completed depends to some extent on the type of resource though I suspect that some of these fields will actually need to be mandatory for certain resource types – Duration of Media Resource: Playing time for example
• How the metadata relates to resource discovery on the modern web – metadata is ultimately to aid resource discovery (and nail down copyright and licencing).  Where will our OERs be primarily discovered from?  A Leeds Met interface/a JORUM interface/Google/All of the above/somewhere else?
• Workflows – who uploads resources and applies metadata?  The creator/repository administrator?  Does there perhaps need to be a multiple stage workflow utilising something like the recently released JORUM quick deposit tool (ideally based on SWORD) whereby metadata is subsequently enriched by trained staff?

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/