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.

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Discovering ukoer at Leeds Metropolitan

Recently I blogged over at http://leedsmetlibrary.wordpress.com/2012/04/27/discovering-the-leeds-metropolitan-university-repository/ about integrating the repository with the EBSCO Discovery Service and I just wanted to expand a little, specifically in the context of OER and the (perpetually) developing infrastructure that I hope will ultimately result in OER from across the sector being discoverable from EDS…

…a long term objective is also to ensure that the repository is well embedded in the institutional infrastructure and that relevant resources are easily discoverable, both within and without, by our own students and staff as well as scholars in the wider world, whatever discovery tools they may use and whatever their level of information literacy.

The EBSCO Discovery Service provides a mechanism, a one-stop-shop or library search engine, to explore a wide range of Library resources including the Library catalogue and electronic databases and we have been able to liaise with EBSCO to add the repository as a searchable target.

Currently the repository includes just ukoer released by staff at Leeds Metropolitan; the most recent version of intraLibrary, however, developed as part of the PORSCHE project, and due by the end of the month, includes the facility to harvest metadata from other OER repositories, particularly Jorum, so that we can search from our local search interface and from EDS:

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)

Musings on the developing OER infrastructure

I had an interesting conversation last week with two colleagues from the Faculty of Business and Law, both of whom are intimately involved with the delivery of Technology Enhanced learning. In a nutshell they were concerned that neither our institutional nor the national infrastructure currently comes close to meeting their requirements in terms of (subject specific) OER, especially in view of strategic drivers at Leeds Met around the use of OER in curriculum development.

One of the issues that arose and that has certainly been mentioned elsewhere, was that they would want additional metadata, about module and level for example. I emphasised that Unicycle – indeed all of the first phase of ukoer – were pilot projects and, as discussed on this blog during the project, a lightweight Application Profile in line with CETIS guidelines for the ukoer programme was used to ensure interoperability with Jorum. From an institutional or faculty perspective, I don’t think it would be technically difficult to, say, have a separate collection for FBL with any additional metadata that could be presented through a faculty specific portal; the resources could go in two collections so they would also sit in the main OER collection with a cut-down application profile from where they would be harvested by Jorum / Xpert etc. Workflows notwithstanding…I’ll get to that…

At risk of stating the bleeding obvious, I’m becoming increasingly determined that local, institutional OER infrastructures need to develop much more closely with the national infrastructure which needs to be able to manage whatever metadata we throw at it. My ideal scenario is pretty straightforward really, at least in principle, if not practice:

• We can manage OER in our repository with whatever metadata our users require; this would include everything currently in the Application Profile but may also include, for example, module/level or additional subject specific taxonomies
• The national service will harvest (all) metadata from our repository by OAI-PMH and ensure that it is *all* searchable from an open API allowing the development of bespoke / subject specific web-sites
• This approach will have the benefit of digital assets being preserved in one location (our own institutional repository) while providing several points of access (our repository interface, Jorum interface/widget, Xpert, multiple APIs)
• Our institutional repository and bespoke web-sites (using either our own API or that of the national service) will “piggyback” on Jorum’s Google pagerank thereby improving discoverability

I am aware that this particular scenario is perhaps oriented around my own requirements, nevertheless, it is based on well established repository technology and would be extensible to other institutional (OER) repositories.

Exposing OER content from @LeedsMetRepo to be reliably harvested by Jorum or Xpert is only part of the picture, however.  My workflows, to be frank, are somewhat esoteric, mediated by me and one or two colleagues, not scalable and unlikely to pass the repository-manager-hit-by-a-bus test. There are several tools that I am interested in exploring in this context outlined below:

MEDEV open educational resources good practice risk assessment toolkit (development version)

This is a hybrid of several tools that began life as part of the OOER project under phase 1 of ukoer and allows you to upload a resource, add metadata via a web-form, apply an appropriate licence, run your resource through the MEDEV open educational resources risk assessment toolkit (beta) and (this is the good though yet to be implemented bit)  syndicate the metadata (only?) to several locations including Jorum / Xpert (and a local repository?)

Sign up to have a go and help with testing at www.medev.ac.uk/oer/signup

SWORD / EasyDeposit

I must confess I have a minor obsession with SWORD and there is no doubt that it offers enormous potential for simplifying repository workflow. As part of the development work on ACErep and with a little help from its developer @stuartlewis, we have now tested EasyDeposit – http://easydeposit.swordapp.org/ – and successfully posted a METS package to the Jorum development server. We should also be able to configure the client to deposit to @LeedsMetRepo (though this will require us to write an IMS content packager for EasyDeposit – see here for more info)

Of course, I’m inclined to think that the best solution for us is to have the digital asset in @LeedsMetRepo with just a metadata record in Jorum…as outlined above, harvest may be the way to go but may it also be worth exploring a SWORD client that simultaneously pushes the full content package into @LeedsMetRepo and metadata only into Jorum?

Xerte

Another issue, I think, is the difficulty folk have actually creating high-quality interactive OERs and the need for an institutionally-supported easy-to-use authoring tool which is where Xerte – http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/xerte/ – might come in – “a server-based suite of tools for content authors. Elearning materials can be authored quickly and easily using browser-based tools, with no programming required. Xerte Online Toolkits is aimed at content authors, who will assemble content using simple wizards. Content authors can easily collaborate on projects. Xerte Online Toolkits can be extended by developers using Xerte.”

I’ve already approached our Info Technology service to enquire about having Xerte installed at Leeds Met and I hope to have a test implementation at some point in the not-too-distant future.

VLE integration

Would more sophisticated VLE integration help OER really take off? We currently have a “PowerLink” in BlackBoard which just comprises a simple search box for keyword or simple-string searching i.e. it’s not terribly useful unless you already know what it there. As well as much more sophisticated search of local and national repositories it would be great to be able to deposit back into a repository from a VLE as explored by the MrCute for Moodle projects (1 and 2) – http://www.learningobjectivity.com/mrcute/.  I don’t know of any comparable work with BlackBoard…or whether the MrCute code could be implemented in that (commercial) environment.

The developmental overheads for all of these tools are considerable – there are no quick fixes I’m afraid. I was quite interested in some discussion at the JISC conference last week – session recording here – that there is evidence that open release acts to improve the quality of institutional teaching resources and ultimately what we should be aiming for is to promote institutional release via our repository and associated tools alongside discovery using aggregations like Jorum/Xpert

A febrile vision of the future

Unfortunately I am not around for day two of intraconf10 but this is a quick (and slightly tongue in cheek!) contribution for the Forward to the Future Discussion Panel that will close the conference on Thursday afternoon.

The panel:

Ian Watson, IRISS
Lorna Campbell, JISC-CETIS
Charles Duncan, Intrallect
Neil Livesey, Learning and Teaching Scotland

The brief:

During the final discussion panel we will discuss visions of the future. Rather than consider what you think might actually occur we would prefer you to envision what you think the future of sharing digital resources should be like.

Twitter tag:

#intraconf10

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Well…

A few over-riding issues come to mind:

• IPR/licencing – pain in the proverbial; will the law be rewritten one precedent at a time?
• Revenue streams – business models will have to change
• Metadata – will we still need formal metadata at all?
• Cultural change/zeitgeist – it’s already changing and will continue to do so as the Google generation comes of age.

And perhaps to separate out from these, there are also interesting questions of how the infrastructure and indeed the web itself will continue to develop:

• The semantic web – will it ever be fully realised?
• Google – will it actually take over the world or be sued out of existence (unlikely)?
• The Cloud – likely to have an increasing impact on (institutional) IT infrastructure

I don’t know if it’s this blasted cold but, as I steam through the Scottish countryside on a Virgin train, I’m finding it difficult to take the mental leap implied by the brief to what *should* rather than what might actually happen. Maybe thinking about the rail infrastructure as a metaphor will help…

In the future the railways will be so cheap to build and maintain that people will expect to travel for next to nothing; they will be fast and efficient (mostly using super-conductors to glide on a cushion of air) and you will be able to get anywhere in the country within half an hour. In actual fact, “railway” is a bit of an anachronism and fairly soon you will be able to take a train to the moon (run by Richard Branson and Google, obviously). This will take a bit longer and there will be a variety of “value added services” to keep the punters entertained for the 12 hour round trip (which will be an important revenue stream to supplement the nominal moon-train fare).

Okay, may be that didn’t help after all but the point, if I have one, is that Universities, if they are to compete in the future, will simply have to share their digital resources for free (whatever precedents of IPR are breached along the way); they will need to create new revenue streams and develop new business models, perhaps based on value added services because their customers (the Google generation) will be used to accessing everything for next to nothing. They will still be using Google, (who still won’t be supporting OAI-PMH) and whose kidult engineers will have cracked the semantic web thereby rendering formal metadata irrelevant. Moreover, Universities will have to get used to storing their data in the cloud and handing over control of that data to a variety of third parties.

What part will repositories play in this brave new world? Well, they won’t need to support LOM or any other metadata standard (except may be user tagging for pictures and stuff) and instead, the emphasis will be on disaggregated instances of a super-portal that uses a secret, post Pagerank algorithm to return the best possible resources from the Cloud to an information illiterate user!

The Digital Economy Bill notwithstanding.

What would you like to search for – research or OER?

Leeds Met Open Search – http://repository.leedsmet.ac.uk/main/index.php – now incorporates a “splash screen” that allows the user to choose which collection they wish to search with links that provide access to separate interfaces that are tailored to each type of material:

Each tabbed interface provides an appropriate Advanced search form as well as relevant browse options; by LCSH or faculty for research and by HEA Subject Centres or JACS code for OERs:

Once again, massive thanks to Mike for his rapid response to the the myriad requests I make of him on a daily basis!

Resource discovery at Leeds Met Library

Just a quick plug for a new Leeds Met blog investigating Resource Discovery and Federated Searching systems for Leeds Met Library:

http://leedsmetlibrary.wordpress.com/

It is, er, blogged by my colleague @DebbieMN but will also include contributions from other library staff and recently, for example, our graduate trainee has posted about his first impressions of Serial Solution’s Summon which is billed as a “web-scale discovery service” that “allows the researcher to quickly search, discover and access reliable and credible library content.” (http://www.serialssolutions.com/summon/)

I also attended the Summon demo last week and was pretty impressed by the Google style simplicity of the search interface – which I suspect will be very popular with students – though some of my librarian colleagues did express reservations about the potential impact on information literacy and were keen to see the advanced search functionality; it is still important to teach more sophisticated information retrieval skills even if students are likely just to head to the simple search box of Google (or Summon)!

One aspect I was particularly interested in was the apparent ease with which Summon can be configured to search an institutional repository – functionality that the University of Huddersfield, who are now running Summon, have already implemented to search their EPrints repository – Huddersfield’s @daveyp tweeted this example using the name of their repository manager @graham_stone – http://hud.summon.serialssolutions.com/search?s.q=graham+stone

End of a pipe dream?

I’ve been enjoying exploring Yahoo Pipes and have now managed to generate a feed for OER that also incorporates the author vCard; I’m sure it must also be possible to extract other data including rights information (though I’m not quite sure how!):

http://pipes.yahoo.com/mrnick/build_rss_from_xml

(vCard not visible in the Pipe but is displayed if the Pipe is rendered as RSS)

It also occurred to me that it may be possible to use a similar method to extract the abstract for research RSS feeds (which is in the second description field) and I’ve been grappling with Pipes to this end but am struggling at the moment – tantalisingly I am able to construct a “Path to item list” that returns an individual abstract but for the life of me, can’t figure out how to return abstracts for all records – SRW:records.SRW:record.1.SRW:recordData.lom:lom.lom:general.lom:description.1.lom:string.
content

I’ll certainly continue to use Pipes as it’s a very powerful tool, especially for a non-programmer like me, however, for the time being this mini-project is postponed. Nothing is ever wasted though and I’m sure what I’ve learned will come in useful somewhere down the line….

Pipe dream

This afternoon I’ve been grappling with Yahoo Pipes, trying to generate a feed that incorporates metadata from an SRU query.  I’ve made a modicum of progress and, as I’m now a bit stuck, this is just a quick post to document that modicum before it all leaks away over the weekend.

The Pipe module that seems most appropriate is “Fetch Data”: “This module retrieves any XML, JSON, iCal or KML file and tries to extract a list of elements using the provided path parameter.”

I input an appropriate URL to query “ukoer” which will return all OERs uploaded as part of UniCycle:

http://repository-intralibrary.leedsmet.ac.uk/IntraLibrary-SRU?recordSchema=lom&maximumRecords=50&operation=searchRetrieve&version=1.1&query=ukoer&SearchSubmit.x=18&SearchSubmit.y=24&x-info-2-auth1.0-authenticationToken=oer

And read the instructions here which describe how to use the “Path to item list” field in order to extract just a portion of the data by listing the nested XML elements, separating each with a dot (“.”)

After a bit of trial and error I was able to zero in on the “Description” field for the first record by entering SRW:records.SRW:record.0.SRW:recordData.lom:lom.lom:general.lom:description.lom:string.content into “path to item list”

However, when I attempt to run the pipe, nothing is returned  – though the correct field IS displayed correctly in the debugger panel:

Also, what I would like to do of course, is to return the “Description” field for ALL records but I have no idea how to achieve this…I’ll have another look when I’m nice and fresh on Monday morning!