Libraries, OA research and OER: towards symbiosis?

I’m at OER13 in Nottingham (see #oer13 on Twitter and http://oer13.wordpress.com/ for fuller blog coverage). I’m doing my lightning talk in an hour or so and wanted to edit my slides which I put together in a little bit of a rush…unfortunately I’ve used up the trial licence on PowerPoint so I can’t (proprietary software is not suitable for OER, discuss) so will have to leave them as they are. I did just want to point at Amber Thomas’ recent post however so it’s WordPress to the rescue!

This in particular from Amber’s post is relevant to my presentation:

(Identifying what OA and OER have in common):

“An ecosystem approach: small pieces loosely joined rather than silos, interoperating pieces of the jigsaw, jorum and humbox, figshare and PLOS, giving people choices in how to assemble their services without locking them in.”

And Amber’s summary:

“Open access and open education may have forked away from simple principles but at heart they both share a founding principle: the opening up of access to what goes on in universities. They are not the same, they are rife with nuance and sometimes even passionate internal disagreements. But the energy behind the activists, developers and reformers is immense and I’d love to see a little more talking across boundaries. Take a little trip over the bridge!”

Bridging the worlds of OER and Open Research – http://fragmentsofamber.wordpress.com/2013/03/22/bridging/

Libraries, OA research and OER: towards symbiosis? from Nick Sheppard

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RSP webinar – OER for research repositories managers

Next Tuesday I am delivering a webinar with Laura Skilton of Jorum entitled OER for research repositories managers

This is particularly timely as Jorum have just this week released a new iteration of the national OER repository in beta (see http://www.jorum.ac.uk/blog/post/56/jorum-just-got-a-whole-lot-beta) which I’ve had some minimum involvement in as I was invited to sit on the Jorum Steering Group so know just how much hard work has gone into it.

Laura will be up first talking about some of the exciting new features of Jorum and exploring how they may be relevant to repository managers who may wish to explore managing OER at their institution and I hope to examine some of the similarities and differences between OA research and OER and the different requirements of repository software that may be needed to effectively manage them.

In the interests of Open, my slides are below (subject to change):

Extending the CRIS model to a ukoer workflow?

One of the conclusions of the Repositories and Preservation Advisory Group (RPAG), which advised the JISC Repositories Programmes between 2005 and  2009,  was that teaching materials had not been well served by attempting to integrate them into institutional repositories as they had very different workflows and requirements to scholarly works and other research outputs (thanks to Lorna Campbell – citation needed.)

It is still the case, I think, that research management infrastructure is generally further developed than that for OER including Open Access repositories and CRIS (Current Research Information Systems) most often commercial software implementations of Atira Pure, Symplectic Elements and Avedas Converis. Typically these systems are dynamically populated with records from the institutional HR database and are designed to allow staff to manage their own research profile. Arguably this reflects the greater prestige, real or perceived, still implicit in research activity compared with teaching and learning. Associated to this, academic libraries are primarily focussed on access to research materials and historically have not been closely involved with the management of teaching materials which, where they are available digitally, are often in virtual learning environments (VLEs) to which the library may not have access (Robertson 2010) and may be poorly integrated into the users’ view of library resources (Hirst, 2009)

At Leeds Metropolitan University we have established a “blended” repository comprising both research and OER and have worked closely with Jorum (the national OER repository in the UK) to ensure both that openly licenced material from across the sector can be “harvested” into our local repository and that institutional OER can be automatically disseminated to the national service. In addition, the library has implemented the EBSCO Discovery Service which provides a mechanism to explore a wide range of library resources including the library catalogue, electronic databases and, crucially, the repository meaning we are able to configure the respective systems to enable library users to utilise the main library search facility to discover a wide range of openly licenced material from across the UK Higher Education sector (see previous post). Finally, in order to make it easier to maintain a constant, up-to-date picture of research activity across the University we have also recently implemented Symplectic Elements which automatically retrieves bibliographic data from citation databases and enables files to be uploaded directly to the repository. Records can also be imported (e.g. from EndNote) or manually entered; resource type and metadata can be easily configured for sub-sets of users and the system can pass any MIME type to the repository which means in principle it can be extended for use by teaching and learning staff (who may not be research active) to curate OER and offer an easy deposit mechanism to the local repository and subsequently to Jorum.

This approach could have several benefits, particularly for non-research intensive institutions in a difficult economic environment for Higher Education, providing an OER workflow that is closely related to that for research and deriving greater value for money from the investment in technical infrastructure which in turn will also have the potential to increase the esteem, recognition and reward associated with openly licenced teaching and learning resources.

An institutional tangram – musings on developing an integrated research management system

“The tangram (Chinese: 七巧板; pinyin: qī qiǎo bǎn; literally “seven boards of skill”) is a dissection puzzle consisting of seven flat shapes, called tans, which are put together to form shapes. The objective of the puzzle is to form a specific shape (given only an outline or silhouette) using all seven pieces, which may not overlap.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tangram

Having implemented an institutional repository at Leeds Metropolitan and learning by experience some of the difficulties associated with advocacy around the use of that repository (both for OA research and OER) I have become all too aware “that repositories are ‘lonely and isolated’; still very much under-used and not sufficiently linked to other university systems”. So said JISC’s Andy McGregor at an event called “Learning How to Play Nicely: Repositories and CRIS” in May 2010 at Leeds Metropolitan (see my report for Ariadne here). This quote is still relevant, though  perhaps a little less so than when I heard it nearly 2 years ago, thanks to the ongoing work of JISC and particularly the RSP. In any case, the event was a revelation for me and I have coveted a so called Current Research Information Management systems (or CRIS for short) ever since!

And now, in Symplectic Elements, I have one…or at least the components of one (click on image for full size.)

The finished tangram? (click on image for full size)

It’s a puzzle though. A tangram if you will…one with considerably more than seven pieces:

intraLibrary, Symplectic, institutional website, University Research Office (URO), faculty research administrators, The Research Excellence Framework (REF), academic staff, web-developers, bibliographic information, research outputs, Open Educational Resources (OER)…

In fact, this may well not be all the pieces…pretty sure a few have been pushed down the back of the settee. I’ll look for them later.

Anyway, tortured metaphors aside, I have become increasingly aware that working in a large institution, in a role that encompasses technology and institutional policy (though I’m not, by any means, a policy maker…or indeed a real techie) is largely about communication and getting the right people, with the right skills, in the right place at the right time! Absorb policy and technical requirements from senior stakeholders and communicate those requirements to the proper techies – while also trying to ensure any motivating passions of one’s own don’t get lost along the way – Open Access to research and Open Education in my case.

For various reasons, individual user accounts have never been implemented for our repository and historically it has been administered centrally from the Library. In Symplectic we now have a system that is populated with central HR data; all staff will have an account they can access with their standard user name and password from where they can manage their own research profile including uploading full-text outputs directly to the repository*. In addition, administration by the University Research Office and faculty research administrators will be more easily centralised (particularly for the REF).

* In actual fact this functionality is not yet available in lieu of development work from Intrallect to capture the Atom feed from Symplectic and transform with XSLT to a suitable format for intraLibrary. I think.

One of the clever bits of functionality used to sell the software is automatic retrieval of bibliographic data from online citation databases – we are currently running against various APIs, Web of Science (lite), PubMed and arXiv – but I think this may actually be a bit of a red-herring for an institution like Leeds Metropolitan – at least until more (preferably free) data sources are available (JournalToCs API please!); early testing has shown, at best, it will only retrieve a subset of (the types of) outputs that we will need to record and it will be necessary to manually import existing records (e.g. EndNote) as well as implementing other administrative procedures at faculty level to capture information at the point of publication, especially for book-items, monographs, conference material, reports and grey literature.

More important, I think, to ensure that academic staff actually engage with the software rather than just seeing it as a tool for administrators, is to re-use the data to generate a list of research outputs – a dynamic bibliography – on a personal web-profile which has the potential to dramatically increase the visibility of research including Open Access to full-text.

Developing staff profiles of this type has been something of an obsession of mine for a while; we explored doing so from the repository (using SRU and email address as a Unique Identifier) and did develop a working prototype. Symplectic, however, integrated with central HR data and with its more sophisticated API, should make it much easier, at least from a technical perspective, and we are currently liaising with the central web-team to develop something similar to this example from Keele University – http://www.keele.ac.uk/chemistry/staff/mormerod/ (like us, Keele run Symplectic alongside intraLibrary.)

N.B. From the Symplectic interface, a user is able to “favourite” a research record and a flag comes out in the xml from the API which I understand is used on this page to display “Selected Publications”. DOI is also available from the API to link to the published version and if a user uploads full-text to the repository from Symplectic, this link is also in the xml – the first two records on this page include links to the full-text in Keele’s intraLibrary repository.

Our own Library web-dev Mike Taylor has been looking at the Symplectic API in detail and has put together a couple of prototype pages on a development server and after a meeting this week with a representative of the central web-team I’m reasonably confident we can move forward with this work fairly quickly…though there’s still a bit of a chicken & egg situation in populating the Symplectic database to then be re-surfaced via the API in this way.

There is also the question of whether we might alter our repository policy to become full-text only; one limitation of repositories across UK HE from an original conception (in the arXiv mould) of holding, disseminating and preserving full-text research outputs, is that they have in effect become “diluted” by metadata records for which it has not (yet) been possible to procure full-text or copyright does not permit deposit and “hybrid” repositories like ours, of full-text and metadata typically contain more metadata records than full-text (see figures from the RSP survey here). As I have argued on the UKCoRR blog, I think is makes sense to separate a bibliographic database (in Symplectic) from full-text only in a repository.

N.B. As Symplectic does not have the same search functionality as the repository, this approach has the potential disadvantage that it makes it more difficult to search across the entire corpus of research records (though one potential solution may be along the lines of that implemented by City Research Online which, in my view is rapidly becoming an exemplar of a research management system (Symplectic) + full-text repository (EPrints). Another good example is  St Andrews (PURE + DSpace) who presented a case study at “Learning How to Play Nicely: Repositories and CRIS” (video here.)

And what of OER? Along with our EasyDeposit SWORD interface, using OER to resource the refocus the undergraduate curriculum and the soon to be released intraLibrary 3.5 that will enable us to harvest OER from other repositories…for now I think they may be the bits down the back of the settee…

Turning a Resource into an Open Educational Resource (OER)

As this is the inaugural Open Education Week (whaddya mean you didn’t know?!) here’s a great 5 minute animation from OER IPR support giving an overview of IPR and licensing issues you need to be aware of when creating and repurposing Open Educational Resources.

Uploaded to the Leeds Met repository under the terms of CC-BY-SA 😉

Turning a Resource into an Open Educational Resource (OER) – Leeds Met Repository Open Search.

Infrastructure schematic (1st draft)

There are several significant developments that will impact on our repository / research management / OER dissemination and discovery over the next 12 months or so…briefly these are:

• Redesigned institutional website
• Implementation of Symplectic Elements
• Implementation of EBSCO Discovery Tool (see http://leedsmetlibrary.wordpress.com/ for more info.)
• Implementation of Easydeposit SWORD client for OER (blogpost coming soon!)

This is a quick schematic of how the developing infrastructure might look (a bit big to fit in my WordPress theme so click on image for full size):

Plugged-in for OER

As mentioned in this recent post I’ve been experimenting with WordPress for presenting OER and have been testing a pre-release version of a WordPress plug-in, developed by the Triton project at the University of Oxford to facilitate a dynamic collection of OER in a WordPress blog.

Developer @patlockley describes the overall functionality of the plug-in here and also covers some of the limitations posed by the broader OER infrastructure here emphasising that “no standard API exists across repositories so as to facilitate a single approach to aggregation for an aggregation creator” – as well as a seperate post here considering limitations of the WordPress platform itself used in this context and associated technical considerations.

In summary the plug-in searches Xpert, Merlot and OER Commons (via their API) as well as Wikipedia, Wikibooks and Wikiversity for openly licensed material; Mendeley for journals and with options to add RSS feeds for blogs and podcasts.

Here I’ll briefly describe my experiences of using the plug-in – fairly candid in the hope that it will be useful feedback to Pat and Triton albeit with the initial caveat that any issues I’ve encountered are just as likely to be associated with my limited experience of WordPress and my shambrarian status (I simply haven’t had time to hone the search terms as carefully as I would like) as with the plug-in itself (which of course is pre-release.)

Once installed, famously straightforward in WordPress even prior to release (via FTP), you get a new “Dynamic Collection” tab in the dashboard where I can add a new collection…pretty much at random, I chose an undergraduate course from Leeds Met – Civil Engineering – around which to build my dynamic collection – it’s then just a matter of adding title and search terms, updating the feeds from the three source repositories and publishing:

This admittedly unsophisticated search returned 9 results:

Obviously the plug-in is only as effective as the keyword data / api / source repository(ies) that it is using and the fifth link here actually points at an entirely different resource (in Jorum) with no relevance to Civil Engineering, presumably due to an error at some point along it’s, er, conjugation – as the plug-in does not search Jorum directly this must have come via Xpert which does harvest Jorum. While experimenting with the plug-in I’ve also had instances where links have returned 404s or been otherwise broken so one requirement I think would be the option to remove links from the collection that are incorrect, broken…or simply less relevant; to allow the WordPress administrator fuller control of the collection.

In order to add a blog or podcast under the Settings tab, the plug-in has installed several new tabs (I don’t think the Feed management / Collection statistics / Collection tabs are yet fully functional in the version I am testing):

Under the Dynamic Collection Options there are fields to add rss feeds from blogs or podcasts:

I’ve experienced a few teething troubles adding blogs not least because I don’t know much about Civil Engineering! As I understand, it should search blog title and description for the dynamic collection keywords…I added a feed from http://www.civilengineering.co.uk/feed/ which returned this single (most recent) post – http://www.civilengineering.co.uk/2010/09/civil-engineering-issues/ (the blog, in fact, only appears to comprise 2 posts so presumably would update should any new posts be added?)

I’m very optimistic about the potential of this approach to allow WordPressing course leaders, perhaps with support from learning technologists, to quickly and easily assemble a dynamic collection of OER for their students and look forward to the formal release of the finished product* – in the meantime, in true Blue Peter stylee, here are a number of collections that Pat made earlier to give a sense of what should be possible:

http://politicsinspires.org/dynamic_collection/political-theory/

http://politicsinspires.org/dynamic_collection/comparative-government/

http://politicsinspires.org/dynamic_collection/international-relations/

http://politicsinspires.org/dynamic_collection/european-politics-and-society/

* The only caveat from my perspective is that my own institution does not formally support the use of WordPress, nevertheless, there is certainly a requirement, explicitly identified by senior stakeholders,  to develop tools to cross-search Open Educational Resources and, in this context, I think we can learn a lot from the Triton project.

N.B. Such a mechanism, however implemented via the proliferation of OER repositories and their APIs, also put me in mind of this post from Suzanne Hardy (@glittrgirl) of MEDEV and the PORSCHE project – Branding, repositories, OER and awareness raising: some thoughts on embedding OERs

See also: Delores OER – WordPress for hosting and describing learning resources (University of Bath and Heriot-Watt)

Closing the ukoer circle?

The titular Unicycle of our phase 1 ukoer project at Leeds Met referred to “a prototype mechanism for the export and import of open educational resources” that would seek to “share OER materials with…HE community via JORUM”.

To recap, under the ukoer programme, it was mandated that all resources released by an institutional project must also be made available from the national repository service Jorum. The method used by most phase 1 projects was harvest of metadata only by RSS, however, in our case, we were unable to produce an RSS feed in the necessary format and in lieu of OAI-PMH which was not supported by Jorum, the requirement was fulfilled by a full IMSCP transfer – I simply uploaded a zip file of all resources that the JORUM tech folk were able to ingest directly into DSpace. At the time this was seen as the ideal solution for Jorum which, as a “repository”, should seek to preserve actual files rather than just URIs pointing to resources elsewhere. However, it meant that our files were duplicated in both repositories and that our repository would inevitably be eclipsed by Jorum in search engine results. I’ve explored these implications elsewhere and they have also cropped up as part of the ACErep project and I have become convinced that a better solution for us would be for metadata only to be harvested (or possibly deposited by SWORD*) including a URI in our institutional repository.

(Our OAI-PMH is already harvested by the Xpert repository at Nottingham University)

As ukoer folk will be aware, the management of Jorum is currently undergoing substantive restructuring; hitherto a joint project between EDINA and MIMAS, from 1st August 2011, the service will be managed exclusively by MIMAS and will liaise more closely with the NDLR – http://www.ndlr.ie/ – in Ireland (also based on DSpace) and utilising a common, Open Source code-base.

One of the likely early developments from this is that Jorum will soon support OAI-PMH – the protocol is already supported by the NDLR running on a more current version of DSpace – allowing us, I hope, to revisit how our resources (metadata only) are ingested into Jorum. In addition, MIMAS will be putting further development efforts into enhancing the Jorum API which has already been identified as a pre-requisite for both our ACErep project and the PORSCHE project at Newcastle University.

* SWORD deposit (metadata only) into Jorum in tandem with file deposit into a local repository should be technically possible I think and would potentially have the benefit of records being available immediately from the API rather than the inevitable delay associated with harvest (Xpert harvests overnight).

This evolving national infrastructure is obviously essential to advocacy around Open Educational Resources; the development, release, use and reuse of OER at an institutional level and will necessarily underpin developing institutional infrastructures. For example, in conjunction with promotional activities here at Leeds Met and technical developments from Intrallect – notably a desktop SWORD client (beta) that can capture core ukoer metadata and deposit to our intraLibrary installation – I hope that we can close the ukoer circle such that teaching staff can source their own OER from Jorum, Xpert or other institutional or subject source – reuse and/or repurpose under the terms of Creative Commons and redeposit back into our local repository and thence automatically to Jorum / Xpert / other syndicated OER services (e.g. Learning Registry) via OAI-PMH and / or SWORD.

Linking from a research paper to associated OER and thoughts on extending the CRIS model to OER

With our “blended” repository comprising research and UKOER, I still feel very much like I have a foot in two camps. A feeling that, ironically, is reinforced, by my role as Technical Officer for UKCoRR – the UK Council of Research Repositories!

I think I’m right in saying that it’s still atypical to manage both types of resource with a single repository platform and there are certainly considerations why it may not necessarily be desirable – both from a technical and political perspective.

The main repositories that have been developed as part of the ukoer programme are modifications to DSpace (Jorum) and EPrints (HumBox, EdShare), the two main open source repository software platforms that were both initially developed to manage research. In contrast, we have worked with intraLibrary, a commercial learning object repository, to manage both OER and research and while this certainly hasn’t been without it’s problems, I’m naturally interested in potential benefits from this approach both in terms of “reward & recognition” for OER by something analogous to peer-review perhaps (a theme that was explored as part of the Unicycle project) and also in terms of work-flow, possibly mediated via a CRIS-type system such as Symplectic Elements or Atira Pure…

intraLibrary has a workflow to link related resources which I can easily use to link a research paper with associated OER, so in the example below I can link…

Coates, C., Smith, S. (2010) Promoting the concept of competency maps to enhance the student learning experience. Assessment, Teaching and Learning Journal (Leeds Met), 10 (Winter), pp.21-25.

…to the three ALPS Common Competency Maps in the OER collection (see Linked Resources at the bottom of the record):

ALPS Common Competency Map – Communication

ALPS Common Competency Map – Ethical Practice

ALPS Common Competency Map – Team Working

These records, in turn, comprise links back to the research paper (and associated conference paper):

With such an approach, is there perhaps an opportunity to tie research and OER more closely together at an institutional level (if this isn’t politically naive!) and contribute to research led teaching?

The next stage might be to develop a common workflow for research and OER…

Workflow, in fact, has long been a bug-bear of mine and, for both types of resource, essentially remains fully mediated by me and administrative colleagues. In all likelihood, however, as are many institutions, we will soon be implementing a CRIS that will make it easier to collate institutional research outputs by harvesting research data from external bibliometric sources, as well as allowing records to be added manually, and integrating with the repository such that academic staff are able to attach an appropriate full-text to a record and upload it along with metadata into the repository directly from a “user-friendly interface” (TM).

At a recent demo of one of these types of system I confirmed that it could transfer a range of file-types to a repository (utilising SWORD) as well as allowing various licences to be configured including (I think) Creative Commons so there seems no fundamental reason why such a system could not be used to support the workflow for both OA research and OER.

Of course I will need to get my hands on one of these systems before I can properly investigate exactly what is achievable…watch this space.

Interviewed at OER Hack Day

Nick Sheppard at DevCSI’s OER Hack Day from UKOLN on Vimeo.