Google Street View inside Sheffield University Information Commons

Last month, Sheffield University became the first University to have Google Street View inside one of their buildings. So far, the ground and first floor of the university’s flagship learning space, the Information Commons has been mapped out, with more buildings on their way.

To see the imagery, just drag the little man into the building or you can go directly to it. Don’t forget to explore both floors by going up or down the stairs.

Once more buildings have been made live on Street View, each building will be embedded into the university’s website, along with integration into the University’s Facebook page.

Edward Photographing Street View inside Sheffield University Information Commons

Google started to roll out Google Street View inside buildings about a year and a half ago, initially just in the United States and now have a roster of “Google-Trusted photographers” across several countries who are able to photograph the Street View imagery.

In addition to photographing Street View imagery, photographers also take still photos around each venue for use in any offline and online marketing and are uploaded to your Google Place Page to help improve a building or businesses’ web presence and SEO.

After what began with a few streets in the States 5 years ago, Street View has now expanded to 5 million miles of road across 48 countries with 96% coverage of all roads in the UK. We can travel from the Rainforest to the Grand Canyon; from caves in Japan to a hut in the Antarctic in a matter of seconds. It allows us to visit places halfway across the globe that are inaccessible, either because of time, money or practicality.

For universities, this means prospective students who are unable to visit a university in person are able to gauge a feeling for the environment from the comfort of their homes on their computer or mobile device. For international students particularly, this could be an invaluable resource. In a world becoming increasingly digital, Street View allows universities to celebrate, promote and attract people to their physical home, online.

Edward Miller, a graduate from the University of Sheffield, started a business producing interactive photography in his third year of University whilst reading Philosophy and Psychology. He specializes in large scale ‘gigapixel’ photos that can be tagged through Facebook and is trusted by Google to produce Street View imagery. Since leaving university, he as built a client list including The Mail, ESPN, Press Association and Vogue.

Contact Details

Website: www.reaxive.com
Email: edward@reaxive.com
Telephone: +44 (0)20 3397 7989

View Twitter conversation from: [Topsy] | View Twitter statistics from: [TweetReach] – [Bit.ly]

I work a few offices away from Brian Kelly and Paul Walk and other colleagues in UKOLN. We chat often in the corridors and today I told Brian about last week’s trip to Delhi, India. Because of my enthusiasm about what we found in relation to e-learning, new technologies and connectivity for the public good, Brian asked me to blog and share some of the inspiration. For context, when I say ‘we’ I am not being royal, I am just also referring to Kyriaki Anagnostopoulou, our Head of e-Learning at Bath who has the kind of international reputation that got us invited to India in the first place.

The Indian government works with the HE sector on increasing access to HE for learners who cannot access HE at the moment. The HE system in India is highly regulated and it isn’t a market where entry is easily possible. Many UK universities are working to establish themselves there, but this is far from easy. Moreover, there isn’t enough Indian faculty to grow the existing universities or establish new ones and student places are very, very limited considering the interest in university study that there is. We heard that for one of the Institutes of Technology, there are over 40 students for each available place. So, a different approach is required. Against this background there is a bigger drive to educate India out of poverty. Experiencing New Delhi, you can see what is possible. But driving into old Delhi, we saw what still is to be achieved. It is a country of zest, opportunity, large numbers (1 Billion people) and great economic and social challenges…

The Ministry of Human Resources Development which oversees HE, is investing $1 billion into growing HE. Crucial to their plan is the National Mission on Education through ICT. Growth is going to come through reaching all corners of India with connectivity, and that is why there is an incredible project of taking glass fibre cable into the farthest ends of India. A huge development, and often combined with putting solar energy provision in place, where no electricity existed before. WiFi connections are going to become available through 40 rupees a year subscriptions. That’s about 50 pence. It shows some clear government financial commitment. And it’s all for learning, how inspiring is that?

Aakash tablet (image from Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aakash_(tablet))

The second step is to have the learning platforms that connect learners to the curriculum, teaching and assessment. This too is addressed in the most imaginative way. You may have heard of the Indian invention of a $30 tablet, the Aakash (illustrated). I understood that Aakash means ‘clouds’, or ‘sky’, and that shows again how India is reaching for the sky here. The Aakash 1 apparently didn’t get past the pilot, but I’ve held the Aakash 2, played with it (thanks Prof Kannan Moudgalya) and sat in amazement at what a smart little thing this is.  It’s less than half the size of an i-pad but large enough to work comfortably with. It has some good processing power and I saw some software on it that allows you to do programming –useful for Comp Sci students and e-developers. The current pilot means 100.000 learners are testing it out, and we understood from government officials that another 1.5 Million are to be piloted in early Spring next year.

With connectivity and the technology platform under way, the content needs to get out there, and this is where our discussions came in. At the moment universities are encouraged to make as much content available as possible. They all do it in different ways. In some cases it is curriculum, sometimes just content and in some cases there is a larger or smaller effort towards designing materials for learning. Designing content for learning is clearly a developing field and again, full of challenges in India, such as the need for various language versions, cultural context adjustment and then there are also issues about what text/ expression/ content may or may not be used for cultural, religious or property right sensitivities. (On that note, this entry is not a statement sanctioned or approved by the Indian government or any partners we have worked with. It’s just my own account!)

Interestingly, at the conference – courtesy of the British Council and Indira Gandhi National Open University – the Ministry’s Secretary told us that developments now in universities have to be about quality, not quantity. It isn’t good enough to just put content online, if ICT is not used effectively to actually improve learning. Excellent.

The three step approach is incredible considering the size of the country: 1 billion people, 17 million students, 500+ colleges and millions of eager learners wanting to get ahead. We were impressed by the university colleagues we met from all over India. They were genuinely driven by seeing universities as a public good: educating the country out of poverty and developing the technologies to do it. It explains where all these inspired e-ideas are coming from. Watch that space, I can’t help thinking there is more to come from the East.

Gwen van der Velden
Director
Learning and Teaching Enhancement
University of Bath.

Email: g.m.vandervelden@bath.ac.uk
Web page: http://www.bath.ac.uk/learningandteaching/about/staff/g.vandervelden.html
Twitter: @gwenvdv

Kyriaki Anagnostopoulou
Head of e-Learning
Learning and Teaching Enhancement
University of Bath.

Email: k.anagnostopoulou@bath.ac.uk
Web page: http://www.bath.ac.uk/learningandteaching/about/staff/k-anagnostopoulou.html

View Twitter conversation from: [Topsy]

As a follow-up to those posts, which were motivated by a commitment to openness and sharing which is prevalent in the repository community, this post by Catherine Dockerty (Web and Data Services Manager, Radcliffe Science Library) and Juliet Ralph (Bodleian Libraries Life Sciences Librarian) provides a summary of the activities behind the Open Access Week event at the University of Oxford.

Open Access Week at Oxford

Open Access Week 2012 saw a determined effort from the Bodleian Libraries of Oxford University to shine a light on developments in Open Access with a full week-long programme of events. This was prompted by the need to assess the state of play in Open Access (OA) which, for major research institutions such as Oxford, is particularly urgent in the wake of the publication of the Finch Report. It was the second year we have participated in Open Access Week – last year we held a single event and we wanted to do a lot more this time round.

What We Were Trying To Do

We had a number of specific things we wanted to achieve though our programme:

• Increasing the knowledge of library staff. All reader-facing staff will potentially deal with enquiries relating to Open Access.
• Assembling and showcasing the expertise of Bodleian Libraries staff in Open Access. Readers need to know what we can do for them.
• Raising awareness of publishing options to academic researchers.
• Promoting submission to Oxford’s institutional repository ORA (Oxford Research Archive). Oxford currently has mandatory deposit for doctoral theses, but not for research papers.
• Highlighting Oxford’s progress in the field of Open Data.

What We Did

We put together a programme of talks and other activities, most of which were lunchtime sessions and took place at the Radcliffe Science Library, one of the Bodleian Libraries and Oxford University’s main library for the sciences and engineering. The majority of speakers were library staff. The focus was on science, but events covering law and medicine were included and there were attendees from the humanities and social sciences.

An evening session, “Bodley’s ‘Republic of [Open] Letters” was hosted by the Oxford Open Science Group and highlighted the DaMaRO Project, which is developing a research data management policy and data archiving infrastructure for Oxford

The presentations are available online.

Wikipedia Editathon

Ada Lovelace by Margaret Carpenter, 1836

The final event of the Open Access Week programme was a Wikipedia “Editathon” on the theme Women in Science. The event was organised as a collaboration between the Bodleian Libraries and Oxford University’s IT Services, and was a follow-up to the Ada Lovelace Day event at the Royal Society the week earlier. This tied in neatly with Open Access Week as we were able to highlight open access sources for use in updating articles. Our event was publicised at the Royal Society one and on Ada Lovelace Day Wikipedia page.

Having an Oxford-based Wikipedia event was also an opportunity to encourage academics and students to get involved in editing Wikipedia, which is reliant on expert contributors to add high quality articles and improve existing ones. Wikipedia has a readership vastly exceeding that of any academic journal, and presents an opportunity for academics to have an impact on a wider audience.

Juliet Ralph (Bodleian Libraries Life Sciences Librarian) kicked off the proceedings with an introductory talk to introduce Wikipedia and outline the format of the session. Online resources for editing articles were suggested, focusing on open access. The fact that the Royal Society was providing free access to all its publications until 29^th November 2012 was highlighted. A collection of printed reference materials from the RSL’s collection was also provided.

A list of articles for adding/updating was provided as guidance to participants, but this was not intended to be prescriptive. The list was the same one as used at the Royal Society event, updated to reflect all the work done that day.

We were very pleased that Oxford-based Wikipedians James and Harry Burt were able to attend and assist the assembled editors. They also treated us to an impromptu presentation on their work as long-time Wikipedia editors.

Online participation via Twitter was encouraged using the hashtag #WomenSciWP (the same as for the Royal Society event). Note that a Twubs archive of the tweets is available. The event was also live-tweeted from the RSL’s Twitter feed (@radcliffescilib).

By the end of the session two new articles were created and 12 updated. Attendees were mainly research staff and postgraduate students from the fields of science and medicine. Also present were two archivists from the Saving Oxford Medicine project who posted a blog post about the work.

Special thanks to:

• James and Harry Burt for presenting and for help they gave to other participants.
• Izzie McMann and Karen Langdon (Radcliffe Science Library staff) for assisting participants on the day.
• Janet McKnight (IT Services) and Alison Prince (Bodleian Libraries Web Manager) for help in organising and publicising the event.
• Andrew Gray (British Library Wikipedian in Residence) and Daria Cybulska (Wikimedia UK) for publicising the Editathon and supplying learning materials for the session.

Reflections

We certainly achieved the aim of increasing the knowledge of OA issues in Library staff within the sciences, several of whom attended more than one event. In future we will aim to actively promote the staff development benefits from participating to all Bodleian Libraries staff, not just those in the sciences. Our collaborations with the Open Science Group and IT Services were successful, and we hope to work together with them on future events.

We fulfilled all our original intentions to some extent, but some events were not well attended in spite of being publicised widely although were positively received by those who did.

The timing of Open Access Week is a problem for Oxford as the start of the academic year is later than for most UK universities, which means the new term is just getting underway in earnest and there are many other events to compete with. Staff time in planning events is also in short supply as reader-facing staff will have been prioritising inductions for new students over the previous weeks.

The Wikipedia event was a success (well attended with positive feedback) and we would certainly hold a similar event in the future, although not necessarily as part of Open Access Week. The fact that it was a hands-on session went down well, and the Women in Science theme attracted interest.

Next Time

Holding events at lunchtime was evidently not popular and we may decide to move them to an afternoon slot (colleagues who run user education programmes had a higher take-up when they did this). We may also move the sessions out of the library into academic departments or colleges, and hold events at other times of year.

We will be making a concerted effort to involve well-known speakers, rather than relying heavily on library staff.

We will be looking to encourage other OA events in Oxford and elsewhere, and we will also think about using online chat as well as Twitter for online participation. The planning starts now!

View Twitter conversation from: [Topsy]

Catherine Dockerty is the Web and Data Services Manager at the Radcliffe Science Library at Oxford University where her role is managing online content, social media and communications, and to support colleagues in serving the University’s teaching and research in the sciences. She has spent 13 years working in various reader services roles at Oxford University, and has also worked in the civil engineering industry and the book trade.

Juliet Ralph is the Subject Librarian for Life Sciences and Medicine in the Bodleian Libraries at Oxford, where she has worked for over 15 years. She is one of many librarians involved in providing support for research at Oxford, including Open Access.

In this guest post Xavier Lasauca i Cisa reviews how institutions that are part of the Catalan R&D environment make use of social media and described the benefits of this approach. Xavier also discusses the metrics  used by the Catalan Administration to evaluate and measure the impact of the government’s presence in this area and their benefits for the public.

This guest blog post builds on previous posts on this blog which have described use of social media in the UK higher education sector, including posts on Social Analytics for Institutional Twitter Accounts Provided by the 24 Russell Group Universities, Use of Facebook by Russell Group Universities and Links to Social Media Sites on Russell Group University Home Pages.

The post has been published in the run-up to the Spot-On London (SOLO12) conference which includes sessions on Assessing social media impact (#solo12impact), Altmetrics beyond the Numbers (#solo12alt) and Using Twitter as a Means of Effective Science Engagement (#solo12Twitter). The post aims to provide a wider view on approaches to use of social media and evaluation of its impact beyond the UK.

Introduction

The Directorate General for Research is the unit of the Generalitat de Catalunya (Government of Catalonia) responsible for promoting science and technology research centres, planning training and career development of researchers, promoting Catalan participation in national, European and international research programs, and designing actions on science communication and dissemination in Catalonia, among other functions. This unit, along with the Directorate General of Universities, is part of the Secretariat for Universities and Research, which at the same time is part of the Ministry of Economy and Knowledge, headed by Minister Andreu Mas-Colell. The parallels with the British political system lie in the fact that the Directorate General for Research is the equivalent to the Government Office for Science within the Department for Business Innovation and Skills.

As the person responsible for Knowledge Management and ICT on R&D, I am in charge of the management of R&D computer applications at the Directorate General for Research, of the technical coordination of the research website of the Ministry of Economy and Knowledge, and of an electronic newsletter (RECERCAT). I am also the person responsible, in conjunction with the Communication department of the Secretariat, for  the administration of  the Directorate General for Research profiles on social media (Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, etc.). In addition, I maintain a personal blog (“L’ase quàntic” or “The quantum donkey“) where I write about innovation in Public Administration, the use of social media in universities and research, the Open Galaxy (Open Access, Open Science, Open Data, Open Courseware…) and the issue of women in science, among others.

This article focuses on the use of social media by the units within the departments of the Catalan Government (specifically the Secretariat for Universities and Research), research centres, large research support infrastructures and the reference networks in Catalonia. I would like to thank Professor Miquel Duran, from the University of Girona, for his support in the preparation of data on the number of Twitter, Klout and Kred followers of the organisations analyzed during the second week of October this year.

A General Overview of the Catalan R&D System

The Catalan public R&D system is primarily composed of universities, research centres, large research support infrastructures, hospitals, science and technology parks, networks of reference and research groups.

The central topics in science policies applied in Catalonia in recent years are, on the one hand, talent attraction and retention, with excellence and internationalization as their benchmarks (a good example of this line of action is ICREA, Catalan Institution for Research and Advanced Studies), and on the other hand, a sustained increase in research funding, with the bulk of the spending allocated to research structures, both research centres and large facilities (such as the Alba synchrotron light facility or the MareNostrum supercomputer).
A good sign of the health status of the Catalan scientific system is that, if we consider that the size of the population in Catalonia represents 1.5% of the EU-27, the system has managed to attract 2.2% of the financing available from the European Union Seventh  Framework Programme, and has obtained 3.4% of European Research Council (ERC) grants. Another relevant fact is that 2.9% of scientific publications in the EU-27 have been written by Catalan researchers. You can find these data and more information on the Catalan research system in the article by the Secretary for Universities and Research of the Catalan Government, Antoni Castellà, published in the issue 1 of the journal Global Scientia.

Institutional support

Three social media accounts are being managed from the Secretariat for Universities and Research: the Directorate General for Research account ((@recercat), the Directorate General of Universities (@universitatscat) and the Secretariat for Universities and Research (@coneixementcat).

The Twitter account of the Directorate General for Research is used to disseminate the scholarships and research grants funded by the unit, as well as the publications of the institution (for example, the most important news published in the newsletter RECERCAT). It is also used to post news and updates from the web, to promote the scientific dissemination activities from the unit and from the Recerca en acció (Research in action) website, as well as events, awards, scholarships, publications and other information from the system related agents. Apart from this public information service, the Twitter account also serves to promote government action (with links to press releases) and to share institutional statements from events or interviews of policymakers.

The institutional account management of the Secretariat for Universities and Research, as well as of other departments of the Catalan government, is based on the Style and usage guide of the Government of Catalonia’s social networks, produced by the General Directorate for Citizen Services and Publicity (GDCSP), at the Ministry of the Presidency of the Government of Catalonia. This publication establishes common guidelines for a consistent presence of the Government  of Catalonia on social networks and lists the different social media utilities, their various uses, the purpose of each network, recommendations for an appropriate and productive presence, and criteria for finding the best communicative style for each tool.

One of the most important chapters in the guide is dedicated to metrics, an essential tool to monitor the activity that is being done and to assess and measure the impact, in this case, of the presence of the Administration in this environment and the benefits it represents for citizens. Metric indicators are based on the following key concepts:

• Dialogue: measures the degree of dialogue that the Government of Catalonia maintains with citizens on different social networks.
• Reach: information on the distribution of the Government of Catalonia contents to the people who are part of the social network.
• Action: indicates whether the content shared on the networks promotes activity.
• Interaction: shows the global relationship between an account and its audience.
• Acceptance (Applause): quantifies the degree of satisfaction.

For each of these key concepts, the indicators shown in Table 1 (List of indicators for Twitter and Facebook) and Table 2 (List of indicators for YouTube, Flickr and Slideshare) are used:

Table 1: List of indicators for Twitter and Facebook

Table 2: List of indicators for Youtube, Flickr and Slideshare

In order to facilitate a better interpretation of the metrics, the GDCSP prepares a quarterly report that shows the evolution of these indicators graphically and sends it to each of the units responsible for corporate social media accounts. These reports help the units to evaluate the effectiveness of their activity on social media and to consider whether the previously defined objectives are being achieved. In addition, the information obtained can serve as a basis for predicting future actions and planning campaigns. After all, assessment in the Administration must serve to identify public policies that work, knowing the impact and to what extent it is attributable to the intervention of Public Administration. Table 3 shows the number of Twitter, Facebook and YouTube followers of the institutional accounts of the Universities and Research areas in the Catalan Government, as well as the Klout and Kred reputation indices:

Table 3: Social Analytics for Institutional Twitter Accounts of  Secretariat for Universities and Research of Catalan Government

The Twitter and Facebook accounts of the Universities area lead the classification ahead of the Research accounts, probably because their target audience is considerably larger. The Twitter account of the Knowledge area of the Ministry of Economy and Knowledge of the Government of Catalonia ranks third, whereas the account of the science dissemination website Research in action closes the classification.

Research Centres in Catalonia: Increasingly Intensive Use of the Social Web

As regards research centres in Catalonia, it has to be mentioned that the CERCA Institute  is the Government of Catalonia’s technical service and its means for supervising, supporting and facilitating the activities of the 47 research centres in the CERCA system. These research centres are independent entities with their own independent legal status, partially-financed by the Government of Catalonia (which provides them with stable funding through programme contracts) and their main aim is excellence in scientific research. They follow a private sector management model that is totally flexible and based on multi-year activity programmes within the framework of a strategic plan and ex-post supervision  that respects the autonomy of each centre.

The aim of this model is to encourage co-ordination and strategic co-operation between  centres, to improve the positioning, visibility and impact of the research carried out and to facilitate communication between public and private agents. To illustrate  the efficiency of the system, out of the 60 ERC Starting Grants awarded in Catalonia during the 2007-2012 period, 34 were awarded to researchers from the CERCA centres (56%), whereas in the case of the ERC Advanced Grants, the percentage rises to 63% (19 out of 30) for the 2008-2011 period.

Out of all the 47 CERCA centres, 25 use social media tools, primarily Twitter, as part of their communication strategy. Table 4 summarises the most important indicators of their presence on social media:

Table 4: Social Analytics for Institutional Twitter Accounts Provided by CERCA centres

As for the number of Twitter followers, the Josep Carreras Foundation, on which the Josep Carreras Leukaemia Research Institute depends, leads the account classification with 2.344 followers. At a certain distance, and above 1.000 followers, we find the i2CAT Foundation (Internet and Digital Innovation in Catalonia), the Forest Technology Centre of Catalonia and the Centre for Ecological Research and Forestry Applications.

Regarding the José Carreras Foundation, which also tops the rankings on Facebook (over 44.000 followers) and YouTube (with 245 subscribers), it should be noted that the Foundation probably generates a very significant number of emotional supporters, which may not occur in most other centres.

In the case of Facebook, 18 CERCA centres are present in this network. Apart from the aforementioned first position, the second one goes to the Catalan Institute of Palaeontology Miquel Crusafont, and the third is for the Catalan Institute for Human Palaeoecology and Social Evolution, both of them with over 1000 followers.

About YouTube, the top channels in number of subscribers correspond to the Josep Carreras Foundation, the Center for Genomic Regulation and the Vall d’Hebron Research Institute. As we can see, there is a wide variety of fields of knowledge regarding the top positions of the various social media.

As regards to reputation indices, the Bellvitge Biomedical Research Institute and the Barcelona Institute for Global Health (ISGlobal-CRESIB) lead the Klout ranking (Klout 52), and there are four centres over 50: the Centre for Ecological Research and Forestry Applications, the Center for Genomic Regulation, the Health Sciences Research Institute of the Germans Trias i Pujol Foundation, and the Josep Carreras Leukaemia Research Institute. Interestingly, when analyzing the Kred index substantial variations are not observed with respect to the centres that occupy the top six ranking positions of the Klout index, except for the entry of the Catalan Institute of Human Palaeoecology and Social Evolution into the Top 6, which moves the Health Sciences Research Institute of the Germans Trias i Pujol Foundation up to the seventh position.

Apart from the 47 CERCA centres, Catalonia has 21 centres from the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), which are public state-owned agencies. Among these research centres, we wish to highlight the Artificial Intelligence Research Institute (IIIA), with 369 followers on Twitter, the Institute of Materials Science of Barcelona (ICMAB), with 306 followers, and the Institute of Robotics and Industrial Computing (IRII), with 144 followers.

Large research support infrastructures

Large research support infrastructures require large investments for their construction and maintenance, with the aim to advance cutting-edge experimental science. Catalonia has basically two major infrastructures: the Alba synchrotron light facility at the CELLS Consortium and the MareNostrum supercomputer at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center – Centro Nacional de Supercomputación (BSC-CNS).

These major research support infrastructures in Catalan territory are mainly consortia participated by the Government of Catalonia, the Spanish State and other organizations that take a minority stake. Apart from the two major infrastructures mentioned above, there are up to 10 other major research support infrastructures. Only five out of these 12 structures are present on social media as shown in Table 5:

Table 5: Social Analytics for Institutional Twitter Accounts Provided by Catalan Large Infrastructures

The Barcelona Supercomputing Center – Centro Nacional de Supercomputación (BSC-CNS) ranks first in the number of Twitter followers, while the Montsec Astronomical Observatory leads the Facebook network.

Reference networks of R&D and innovation

Reference networks of R&D and innovation consist of a series of groups from different institutions that carry out research and innovation projects, and other activities collaboratively. These groups have common goals and the networks aim at promoting collaborative, interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary work, as well as the optimization of infrastructure and R&D and innovation facilities in Catalonia. Four out of the eight reference networks are present on Twitter, as shown in Table 6, with the Reference Network of R&D and innovation on Theoretical and Computational Chemistry leading the classification:

Table 6: Social Analytics for Institutional Twitter Accounts Provided by Catalan Reference Networks

How Can We Measure the Reputation of a Research Network?

Is the number of Twitter followers a good indicator of the presence of an institution on the net? In my blog, I regularly analyze the presence of research structures in Catalonia on social media, based on the number of followers. I realized that this indicator may not be a sufficiently complete indicator, so I decided to introduce also the Klout and Kred indicators, in line with the analysis of Professor Miquel Duran, an expert in analyzing metrics in universities of the Catalan-speaking territories, and Brian Kelly, UKOLN,  University of Bath, with his detailed analysis on the presence of the UK Russell Group universities (note the latter also includes indicators such as  Peerindex or Twitalyzer). Both Klout and Kred provide complementary and useful information in order to assess the impact of bidirectional communication.

Klout is a social networking service that measures influence using data points from Twitter, such as the size of a person’s network, the content created and how other people interact with that content. This analysis is also done on data taken from Facebook, Google+, Linkedin, and other sites. Klout creates profiles on individuals and assigns them scores ranging from 1 to 100. Despite being criticized because of its opacity, this service has become quite popular and I believe it is a good complement.

Another interesting measure of influence is Kred. Unlike Klout, Kred provides a fully transparent view of the actions that compose any user’s score and it is the only influence measure to openly publish its algorithm. Kred’s scoring system, which is based on Twitter profiles, is composed of two scores: Influence measures a user’s ability to inspire action from others like retweeting, replies or new follows and it is scored on a 1000 point scale.  Outreach reflects generosity in engaging with others and helping them spread their message and it is scored on a 10 point scale. Outreach score is cumulative and always increases, and it is measured on Twitter by your retweets, replies and mentions of others.

The Importance of Being Present on Social Media

In late May 2012, I gave a presentation at the University of Barcelona on dissemination using Web 2.0 (Com divulgar en el web 2.0). The workshop aimed to provide tools and strategies for scientific knowledge dissemination to researchers and other agents linked to R&D and innovation system, so that they could be in a better position to spread the object of their research.

Although my remarks focused on the importance of having a blog and a Twitter account to disseminate research, I finally mentioned other instruments that could contribute to it such as repositories (Slideshare, YouTube, Flickr) or social networking tools (ResearchGate, LinkedIn, Google+). During the talk it was mentioned that, while Facebook has been considered a very suitable network for personal rather than professional purposes, currently a trend has been detected among young people to use this network to disseminate research. Therefore, it should be considered in future studies.

Twitter and Facebook are the social networking tools where research structures in Catalonia are mostly present, although with slightly different communication strategies. The centres use these media mainly to disseminate research and, in some cases, to make dissemination activities organized by the centre more widely available and to engage with the public, even as a teaching support. Moreover, these tools are often used to post vacancies at the institution. According to Raül Toran, science writer at the Bellvitge Biomedical Research Institute (IDIBELL), “generally the topics that are forwarded mostly are the ones related to cutting-edge research and job vacancies at the institution“.

Social media at the research centres are basically managed by the Communication Departments at the same institution although in most centres, some researchers use social media mostly for personal rather than professional activity. Cinta S. Bellmunt, Head of Communication at the Catalan Institute of Human Paleoecology and Social Evolution (IPHES) states that the researchers in the centre “are aware of the value and visibility that social networks provide to research, because quite often I have to refer questions that arise in the group to them, so they realize there is movement, interrelation“. To follow up on the impact of the communication strategy of the centre, tools such as Hootsuite and Tweetdeck are used.

A good example of the impact of the dissemination activity of social media by the centres is to be found in the increasing traffic to their websites, as well as an increase in the number of job applications for possible vacancies. Inevitably, this communication activity results in a continuous increase in the number of Twitter and Facebook followers. As far as readers’ preferences is concerned, it is highly variable and it depends on the centres: in the case of the IDIBELL, there is more interaction via Twitter (direct messages, mentions, RT, etc.) than via Facebook (Likes or comments), while in the case of IPHES the situation is reversed.

As regards privacy, there is growing awareness that knowledge must flow, but with precaution in order not to affect the privacy of others, respecting authorship and quoting the source of what is being communicated.

Open social network tools such as Diaspora or identi.ca, are still little known in Catalonia. In contrast, a growing increase in Catalan researchers in the ResearchGate network has been detected.

In summary, we could say that research structures in Catalonia are consolidating and increasing their presence on social media, especially on Twitter and Facebook, which has become part of their communication strategy, increasing visibility. To disseminate the research that is being carried out and to approach society are the main goals. In addition, communication units are progressively incorporating metrics tracking tools designed to evaluate and measure the impact of the communication activity and its benefits to the target audience. And good news is that research, often funded with public money, engages with the whole of society.

About the Author

Xavier Lasauca i Cisa is the person in charge of Knowledge Management and Information Technologies on R&D (Directorate General for Research, Ministry of Economy and Knowledge, Government of Catalonia).

Twitter: @xavierlasauca

Image: Research.cat 2.0, by Maricel Saball (CC BY 3.0), adapted from My social networks

In the third and final guest post published during Open Access Week William Nixon, Head of Digital Library Team at the University of Glasgow Library and the Service Development Manager of Enlighten, the University of Glasgow’s institutional repository service, gives his findings on use of  the MajesticSEO tool to analyse the Enlighten repository.

SEO Analysis of Enlighten, University of Glasgow

This post takes an in-depth look at a search engine optimisation (SEO) analysis of Enlighten, the institutional repository of the University of Glasgow. This builds on an initial pilot survey of institutional repositories provided by Russell Group universities described in the post on MajesticSEO Analysis of Russell Group University Repositories.

Background

University of Glasgow

Founded in 1451, the University of Glasgow is the fourth oldest university in the English-speaking world. Today we are a broad-based, research intensive institution with a global reach. It’s ranked in the top 1% of the world’s universities. The University is a member of the Russell Group of leading UK research universities. Our annual research grants and contracts income totals more than £128m, which puts us in the UK’s top 10 earners for research. Glasgow has more than 23,000 undergraduate and postgraduate students and 6000 staff.

Enlighten

We have been working with repositories since 2001 (our first work was part of the JISC funded FAIR Programme) and we now have two main repositories, Enlighten for research papers (and the focus of this post) and a second for our Glasgow Theses.

Today we consider Enlighten to be an “embedded repository”, that is, one which has “been integrated with other institutional services and processes such as research management, library and learning services” [JISC Call, 10/2010]. We have done this in various ways including:

• Enabling sign-on with institutional ID (GUID)
• Managing author identities
• Linking publications to funder data from Research System
• Feeding institutional research profile pages

As an embedded repository Enlighten supports a range of activities including our original Open Access aims to provide as any of our research outputs freely available as possible but also to act as a publications database and to support the university’s submission to REF2014.

University Publications Policy

The University has a Publications Policy, introduced to Senate in June 2008, has two key objectives:

• to raise the profile of the university’s research
• to help us to manage research publications.

The policy (it is a mandate but we tend not to use that term) asks that staff:

• deposit a copy of their paper (where copyright permits)
• provide details of the publication
• ensure the University is in the address for correspondence (important for citation counts and database searches)

Enlighten: Size and Usage

Size and coverage

In mid-October 2012 Enlighten had 4,700 full text items covering a range of item types including journal articles, conference proceedings, book, reports and compositions. Enlighten has over 53,000 records and the Enlighten Team work with staff across all four Colleges to ensure our publications coverage is as comprehensive as possible.

Usage

We monitor Enlighten’s primarily via Google Analytics for overall access (including number of visitors, page views referrals and keywords) and EPrints IRStats package for downloads. Daily and monthly download statistics are provided in records for items with full text and we provide an overall listing of download stats for the last one and 12 month periods.

Looking at Google Analytics for the 1 Jan 12 – 30 Sep 12 (to tie in with this October snapshot) and the previous period we had 201,839 Unique Visitors up to 30 Sept 12 compared to 196,988 in 2011.

In the last year we have seen an increase in the number of referrals and our search traffic is now around 62%. In 2012 – 250,733 people visited this site, 62.82% was Search Traffic (94% of that is Google) with 157,503 Visits and 28.07% Referral Traffic with 70,392 visits.

In 2011 232,480 people visited this site, 69.97% of that was Search Traffic with 162,665 Visits and 18.98% came from referrals with 44,128 Visits.

Expectations

Our experience with Google Analytics has shown that much of our traffic still comes from search engines, predominantly Google but it has been interesting to note the increase in referral traffic, in particular from our local *.gla.ac.uk domain, this rise has coincided with the rollout of staff publication pages which are populated from Enlighten and provides links to the record held in Enlighten.

After *.gla.ac.uk domain referrals our most popular external referrals come from:

• Mendeley
• Wikipedia
• Google Scholar

We expected that these would feature most predominantly in the Majestic results, with Google itself.

Majestic SEO Survey Results

The data for this survey was generated on the 22nd October 2012 using the ‘fresh index’, current data can be found from the Majestic SEO site with a free account. We do own the eprints.gla.ac.uk domain but haven’t added the code to create a free report. The summary for the site is given below showing 632 referring domains and 5,099 external backlinks. Interestingly it seems our repository is sufficiently mature for Majestic to all provide details for the last five years too.

Since we were looking at eprints.gla.ac.uk rather than *.gla.ac.uk we anticipated that our local referrals wouldn’t feature in this report. As a sidebar a focus just on gla.ac.uk showed nearly 411,000 backlinks and over 42,000 referring domains.

Figure 1.  Majestic SEO Summary for eprints.gla.ac.uk

This includes 619 educational backlinks and 54 educational referring domains. This shows a drop in the number of referring domains since Brian’s original post in August which showed 680 and a breakdown of the Top Five Domains (and number of links) as:

• blogspot.com: 5,880
• wordpress.com: 5,087
• wikipedia.org: 322
• bbc.co.uk: 178
• cnn.com: 135

These demonstrate a very strong showing for blog sites, news and Wikipedia.

Figure 2. Top 5 Backlinks

Referring domains was a challenge! We couldn’t replicate the same Matched Links data which Warwick and the LSE have used. Our default Referring Domains report is ordered by Backlinks (other options including matches are available but none of our Site Explorer – Ref Domains options seemed to be able to replicate this. We didn’t use Create Report.

These Referring Domains ordered by Backlinks point us to full text content held in Enlighten from sites it’s unlikely we would have readily identified.

Figure 3a: Referring Domains by Backlinks

Figure 3b: Referring Domains by Matches (albeit by 1)

This report shows wikipedia.org at number one with the blog sites holding spots 2 and 3 and then Bibsonomy (social bookmark and publication sharing system) and Mendeley at 4 and 5.

An alternative view of the Referring Domains report by Referring Domain shows the major blog services and Wikipedia in the top 3, with two UK universities Southampton and Aberdeen (featuring again) in positions 4 and 5.

The final report is a ranked list of Pages, downloaded as CSV file and then re-ordered by ReferringExtBacklinks.

Table 1: Top 5 pages, sorted by Backlinks

These pages are:

• Enlighten home page
• PDF for “Arguments For Socialism”
• PDF for “Language in Pictland”
• A chronology of the Scythian antiquities of Eurasia based on new archaeological and C-14 data [Full text record]
• Some problems in the study of the chronology of the ancient nomadic cultures in Eurasia (9th – 3rd centuries BC) [Full text record]
• PDF for “87Sr/86Sr chemostratigraphy of Neoproterozoic Dalradian limestones of Scotland and Ireland: constraints on depositional ages and time scales” [Full text record]

Summary

Focusing in more detail on the results, in Figure 2, the top 5 backlinks, 4 out of the 5 are from Wikipedia, the first two are to the same paper but from different Wikipedia entries. It’s interesting to see that our third ranked backlink is the ROARmap registry.

Looking at the top 5 pages ranked by backlinks, none of the PDFs or the records which have PDFs currently appear in our IRStats generated list of most downloaded papers in the last 12 months. It is clear however, in this pilot sampling to draw a correlation between ranking and the availability of  full text and not merely a metadata record.

Discussion

While this initial work has focused on the Top 5, extending this to at least the Top 10 would be useful for further comparison, it was interesting to see that sites such as Mendeley appeared in variations of our Referring Domains which correlated with our Google Analytics reports which indicate that they are a growing source of referrals.

Looking at Figure 3a, a Google search, on the first referring domain (by backlinks) reveals that the number Ref Domain scientificcommons.org has 136,000 results on Google for “eprints.gla.ac.uk”, salero.info didn’t match at all and abdn.ac.uk had 5 results.

Social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter don’t appear in these initial results, it may be because the volume is insufficient to be ranked here or there may be breach of service issues. Google Analytics now provides some social media tools and we have been identifying our most popular papers from Facebook and Twitter.

This has been an interesting, challenging and thought-provoking exercise with the opportunity to look at the results and experiences of Warwick and the LSE who, like us reflect the use of Google Analytics to provide measures of traffic and usage.

The overall results from this work provide some interesting counterpoints and data to the results which we get from both Google Analytics and IRStats. These will need further analysis as we explore how Majestic SEO could be part of the repository altmetrics toolbox and how we can leverage its data to enhance access our research.

About the Author

William Nixon is the Head of Digital Library Team at the University of Glasgow Library. He is also the Service Development Manager of Enlighten, the University of Glasgow’s institutional repository service (http://eprints.gla.ac.uk). He been working with repositories over the last decade and was the Project Manager (Service Development) for the JISC funded DAEDALUS Project that set up repositories at Glasgow using both EPrints and DSpace. William is now involved with the ongoing development of services for Enlighten and support for Open Access at Glasgow. Through JISC funded projects including Enrich and Enquire he has worked to embed the repository into University systems. This work includes links to the research system for funder data and the re-use of publications data in the University’s web pages. He was part of the University’s team which provided publications data for the UK’s Research Excellence Framework (REF) Bibliometrics Pilot. William is now involved in supporting the University of Glasgow’s submission to the REF2014 national research assessment exercise. Enlighten is a key component of this exercise, enabling staff to select and provide further details on their research outputs.

The second in the series of guest blog posts which gives a summary of an SEO analysis of a repository hosted at a Russell Group university is provided by Natalia Madjarevic, the LSE Research Online Manager. As described in the initial post, the aim of this work is to enable repository managers to openly share their experiences in use of MajesticSEO, a freely-available SEO analysis tool to analyse their institutional repositories.

SEO Analysis of LSE Research Online

This post takes an in-depth look at a search engine optimisation (SEO) analysis of LSE Research Online, the institutional repository of LSE research outputs. This builds on Brian Kelly’s post published on this blog in August 2012 on MajesticSEO Analysis of Russell Group University Repositories.

The London School of Economics and Political Science

Background

LSE is a specialist university with an international intake and a global reach. Its research and teaching span the full breadth of the social sciences, from economics, politics and law to sociology, anthropology, accounting and finance. Founded in 1895 by Beatrice and Sidney Webb, the School has a reputation for academic excellence. The School has around 9,300 full time students from 145 countries and a staff of just under 3,000, with about 45 per cent drawn from countries outside the UK. In 2008, the RAE found that LSE has the highest percentage of world-leading research of any university in the country, topping or coming close to the top of a number of rankings of research excellence. LSE came top nationally by grade point average in Economics, Law, Social Policy and European Studies and 68% of the submitted research outputs were ranked 3* or 4*.

LSE Research Online – a short history

LSE Research Online (LSERO) was set up in 2005 as part of the SHERPA-LEAP project. The aim of the project was to create EPrints repositories for each of the seven partner institutions, of which LSE was one, and to populate those repositories with full-text research papers. In June 2008 the LSE Academic Board agreed that records for all LSE research outputs would be entered into LSE Research Online. We have no full-text mandate but authors are encouraged to provide full-text deposits of journal articles in pre-publication form, clearly labelled as such, alongside references to publications. Research outputs included in LSE Research Online appear in LSE Experts profiles automatically, thereby reusing data collected by LSE Research Online.

LSE Research Online is to be the main source of bibliographic information for the Research Excellence Framework (REF) in 2014. This has served to further increase the impetus for deposit and visibility of the repository in the School and we have various repository champions throughout the School across departments.

LSE Research Online size and a brief look at usage statistics

As of September 2012, LSE Research Online contains around 33,696 records, with 7,050 full-text items. We include a variety of item types such as articles, book chapters, working papers, data sets, blogs and conference proceedings. We most recently began collecting LSE blogs to create a permanent home for this important content. We began tracking LSERO site usage with Google Analytics in 2007 and the site has received 2,268,135 visits since this date. According to Google Analytics, 76.55% (1,748,725 total visits) of traffic to LSE Research Online comes from searches. Only 16.13% of traffic is from referrals and 7.14% from direct traffic. We also use analog server statistics to monitor downloads and total downloads May 2007-Sept 2012 was 5,266,871.

Expectations of the survey

Before running the Majestic SEO report, I expected we would see plenty of traffic from Google and backlinks (i.e. incoming links) from lse.ac.uk as, understandably, these are key sources of traffic to LSERO and are indicated as such on Google Analytics. Google Analytics also points to referrals from Wikipedia and Google Scholar, and most recently, our Summon implementation which includes LSERO content. However, I was intrigued as to how LSERO would fare in an SEO analysis.

Majestic SEO survey results

The data was generated from Majestic SEO using a free account on 24^th September 2012 using the ‘fresh’ index option. A summary of the results is shown below: there are 1,285 referring domains and 8,856 external backlinks. Note that the current findings can be viewed if you have a MajesticSEO account (which is free to obtain).

Figure 1: Majestic SEO analysis summary for eprints.lse.ac.uk

This includes 408 educational referring backlinks. If we look at backlinks in more detail, patterns begin to unravel:

Figure 2: Top 5 Backlinks

This illustrates a distinct majority of Wikipedia pages linking to LSERO content and yet this is only ranked as the sixth most popular source of traffic in Google Analytics.

Top referring domains, sorted by matched links, can be found in the table shown below:

Table 1: Top 5 Referring Domains

Flickr makes a surprise appearance, with WordPress and Blogger dominating the top of the table.

Top 5 items sorted by Majestic’s flow metrics can be found here:

Figure 3: Top 5 Resources in Repository (sorted by flow metrics)

Perhaps more indicative, the Top 5 linked resources sorted by number of backlinks can be found in the table shown below:

Table 2: Top 5 Linked Resources in Repository (sorted by no. of links)

These pages are:

1. The LSE Research Online homepage.
2. A PDF of a research paper on climate policy.
3. The record for a paper on teenager’s use of social networking sites.
4. The record for a paper on climate policy.
5. The record for a paper on open source software.

Summary

Looking in more detail at the top backlinks to the repository, as listed in Figure 2, we can see that Wikipedia represents four out of five top pages. This includes the Wikipedia page on Free Software, which links back to a Government report on the cost of ownership of open source software. The Wikipedia pages on the European Commission and Proportional Representation are ranked second and third respectively. The Proportional Representation page links back to the full-text of a 2010 workshop paper: Review of paradoxes afflicting various voting procedures where one out of m candidates (m ≥ 2) must be elected. The fifth and only backlink not be Wikipedia is avert.org, an AIDS Education site which links back to the record of an early LSERO paper: Peer education, gender and the development of critical consciousness : participatory HIV prevention by South African youth.

In Table 1, the Top 5 Referring Domains to LSE Research Online are WordPress, Blogspot, Wikipedia, Flickr and Google. We can see the dominance of international social platforms here with WordPress (14,502 links) and Blogspot (11239 links), followed by Wikipedia (349 links), Flickr (272 links) and, finally a search engine, google.com (225).

In Figure 3, Top 5 Resources in Repository (sorted by flow metrics), we can see several links to LSERO information pages including the home page and the feed of latest additions. There are, however, several direct links to full-text papers including an Economic History Working Paper on A dreadful heritage: interpreting epidemic disease at Eyam, 1666-2000. Sorting this data by number of backlinks, as shown in Table 2, the top item is the LSERO homepage with 501 backlinks. The second item is the PDF of one of our most downloaded papers of all time: The Hartwell Paper.

Discussion

So what can I draw from the results of the Majestic SEO report of LSE Research Online? Analysing the top referring domains according to the Majestic report, it seems reasonable to suggest that adding links to repository content on blogging platforms such as WordPress and Blogspot may result in an increased SEO ranking. We often link to LSERO content in various LSE Library blogs hosted on Blogspot, including New Research Selected by LSE Library. Flickr is also listed as a top referring domain according to the Majestic SEO but running a Google search for site:flickr.com “eprints.lse.ac.uk” retrieves zero results. It’s difficult to ascertain how MajesticSEO gets this result when Google does not confirm the findings – perhaps it uses very different algorithms to Google? The MajesticSEO top referring domains indicate that blogging platforms are the main referring domains to LSERO content. However, according to our Google Analytics stats, 76.55% of traffic to LSERO is from searches. Furthermore, the Majestic report indicates that there are 349 matched links to LSERO content on Wikipedia. “Running the search site:wikipedia.org “eprints.lse.ac.uk” in http://www.google.co.uk/ you get (on 11 October 2012) “About 92 results”. From the last page of the results, by repeating the search to include omitted results, Google ends up with 80 hits.” Searching for eprints.lse.ac.uk in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page retrieves 83 hits. How does MajesticSEO retrieve such varying results?

Looking at backlinks, it’s important to note that the majority of top backlinks refer to papers that have the full-text attached and often link directly to the full-text PDF, of course resulting in a direct download. In addition, the Top 5 Resources in Repository (sorted by external backlinks) as seen in Table 2 tallies with our consistently popular papers according to Google Analytics and our analog statistics.

It is apparent that the inclusion of repository links on domains such as Wikipedia and blogging platforms appears to have a positive impact in helping the relevancy ranking weighting for LSERO content in web pages. This is not to mention direct hits on the links themselves, adding directly to the site’s visitors, and thus the dissemination of LSE research outputs. However, whether we can draw firm conclusions from the Majestic report remains to be seen, particularly with such differing results to those found on Google.

Thanks to my colleague Peter Spring for his advice when writing this post.

About the Author

Natalia Madjarevic is the manager of LSE Research Online, LSE Theses Online and LSE Learning Resources Online, the repositories of The London School of Economics and Political Science.

Natalia is also the Academic Support Librarian for the Department of Economics and LSE Research Lab. Joining LSE in 2011, prior to that Natalia worked at libraries including UCL, The Guardian and Queen Mary, University of London. Her professional interests include Open Access, research support, REF, bibliometrics and digital developments in libraries.

A post published in August 2012 on an MajesticSEO Analysis of Russell Group University Repositories highlighted the importance of search engine optimisation (SEO) for enhancing access to research papers and is part of a series of articles on different repositories and provided summary statistics of the SEO rankings for 24 Russell Group University repositories.

This work adopted an open practice approach in which the initial findings were published at an early stage in order to solicit feedback on the value of such work and the methodology used. There was much interest in this initial work, especially on Twitter. Subsequent email discussions led to a number of repository managers at Russell group universities agreeing to publish more detailed findings for their repository, together with contextual information about the institutional and the repository which I, as a remote observer, would not be privy too.

We agreed to publish these findings on this blog during Open Access Week. I am very grateful to the contributors for finding time to carry out the analysis and publish the findings during the start of the academic year – a very busy period for those working in higher education.

The initial post was written by Yvonne Budden, the repository manager for WRAP, the Warwick Research Archives Project. It is appropriate that this selection of guest blog post begins with a contribution about the Warwick repository as Jenny Delasalle, a colleague of Yvonne’s at the University of Warwick and myself will be giving a talk on “What Does The Evidence Tell Us About Institutional Repositories?” at the ILI 2012 conference to be held in London next week.

SEO Analysis of the University of Warwick’s Research Repositories

The following summary of a MajesticSEO survey of the University of Warwick’s research repositories, together with background information about the university and the repository environment has been provided by Yvonne Budden.

A Little Background on Warwick

The University of Warwick is one of the UK’s leading universities with an acknowledged reputation for excellence in research and teaching, for innovation and for links with business and industry. Founded in 1965 with an initial intake of 450 undergraduates, Warwick now has in excess of 22,000 students and employs close to 5,000 staff. Of those staff just fewer than 1,400 are academic or research staff. Warwick is a research intensive institution and our departments cover a wide range of disciplines, including medicine and WMG, a specialist centre dedicated to innovation and business engagement. In the 2008 RAE nineteen of our departments were ranked in the top ten for their unit of assessment and 65% of the submitted research outputs were ranked 3* or 4*.

University of Warwick’s Research Repositories

Warwick’s research repositories began in the summer of 2008 with the Warwick Research Archives Project (WRAP), a JISC funded project that created a full text, open access archive for the University. WRAP funding was taken by the Library and in April 2011 we launched the University of Warwick Publications service, which was designed to ‘fill the gaps’ around the WRAP content with a comprehensive collection of work produced by Warwick researchers. The services work on the same technical infrastructure but WRAP remains distinct and exposes only the full text open access material held. The system runs on the most recent version of the EPrints repository software, using a number of plugins for export, statistics monitoring and most recently to assist in the management of the REF2014 submission. To date we do not have a full text mandate for WRAP and engagement with both WRAP and the Publications service varies across the departments. Deposit to the services is highly mediated through the repository team and so engagement is not necessarily reflected in the number of papers available per department, especially as some departments benefit more from the service’s policy of pro-active acquisition of new material where licenses allow. I would judge that our best engagement in terms of full text deposit comes from Social Science researchers but we also have some strong champions in the Medical School, History, Life Sciences and Psychology.

Size and Usage Statistics

At the end of August 2012 WRAP contained 6,554 full text items covering a range of item types, journal articles, theses, conference papers, working papers and more. The Publications service contained a further 40,753 records. In terms of usage since its launch the system has seen 900,997 visits according to Google Analytics, an average of just over 18,000 a month in the 50 months active. To track downloads we use the EPrints plugin, IR Stats, this counts file downloads either directly or through the repository interface. IR Stats will only count one download per twenty-four hours from each source, but will count multiple downloads if an item has multiple files attached. Over the life of WRAP the files held have been downloaded a grand total of 730,304 times with 49.08% of downloads coming from Google or Google Scholar.

Expectations of the Survey

Going into the survey using the MajesticSEO system wasn’t sure what to expect from the results, the majority of the work we’ve done so far with the statistics is with the Google Analytics and the IR Stats package. Looking at the referral sources in the our Google output I can indicate a number of sources I might expect to see back links into the system, including our Business School (wbs.ac.uk) and the Bielefeld Academic Search Engine(BASE) as well as a number of smaller sources. The Warwick Blogs service seems to have fallen out of favour over the past few years with the number of hits from there dropping as people move to other platforms. Above all I’m most curious to see if the SEO analysis can help with the work I am doing in promoting the use of WRAP and the material within it. If this work can assist me in creating the kinds of ‘interest stories’ that help to persuade researchers to deposit it could become another valuable source of information. We are also looking at expanding the range of metrics we have access to, looking at the IRUS project as well as the forthcoming updated version of IR Stats, recently demonstrated at Open Repositories 2012.

Our Survey Results

The data for this survey was generated on the 10^th September 2012 using the ‘fresh index’ option, although the images were captured on 19 October. The current results can be found if you have a MajesticSEO account (which is free to obtain). The summary for the site is given below showing 413 referring domains and 2,523 backlinks.

Figure 1: MajesticSEO analysis summary for wrap.warwick.ac.uk

On first glance this seems to be rather low in terms of backlinks, it also shows a fairly low number of educational domains linking to us. The top five backlinks in to the system can be seen below, ranked as standard by the system by a combination of citation and trust flow:

Figure 2: Top 5 Backlinks

Interestingly this lists some of the popular referrers we see in Google Analytics driving traffic to us, but not some others I might have expected to see. The top referring domains are shown below:

Figure 3: Top Referring Domains

This is the only place in the results where Google features at all. The top five pages, as ranked by the flow metrics show a fairly distinct anomaly, as two of the pages are not listing any flow metric information despite this supposedly being the method by which they are ranked:

Figure 4: Findings Ranked by Flow Metrics

The top five pages as sorted by number of backlinks can be seen in the table below:

Table 1: Top 5 Pages, Sorted By Number of Links

These five items are as follows:

1. A research paper on the impact of cotton in poor rural households in India.
2. The WRAP homepage.
3. A PDF of an economics working paper on currency area theory.
4. A PDF of an economics working paper on happiness and productivity.
5. The record for a PhD thesis on Women poets.

Summary

The top ten backlinks into the WRAP system include a range of sources, from this blog, two Wikipedia pages and two referrals from the PhilPapersrepository, which monitors journals, personal pages and repositories for Philosophy content. We also see a two of pages that collect literature on health topics who are linking back to us, a Maths blog and the newsletter of the British Centre of Science Education.

Interestingly in Figure 3 there is no mention of the University of Warwick or any of its related domains (wbs.ac.uk for the Business School, for instance). I assume this is because MajesticSEO are excluding ‘self’ links, so as WRAP is a Warwick subdomain they are excluding a lot of the links I am aware of. This may also take into account the lack of any backlinks from the Warwick Blogs service. Many of the domains listed here are blog platforms of one form or another, which may be because of the database driven architecture of these platforms and the way the MajesticSEO system are reading those links. For example, if a researcher puts a link to his most recent paper in WRAP on the frame of the blog and this propagates onto every post in the blog, does this count as a single link or as many? We are also seeing links from sources such as the BBC and Microsoft, where, again, it would be nice to be able to see who was linking to what and from where in these domains.

The top pages, as listed by number of backlinks in Table 1, show a trend for linking directly to the file of the full text material we hold in WRAP. This information would tie in nicely with the fact that item three is the most downloaded paper in WRAP over the lifetime of the repository, with 9,162 downloads to the end of August 2012. So in this case we can draw a tentative line between the number of downloads and the number of backlinks. However we can’t follow this theory through, especially as the top paper linked to externally, Paper 1 as listed in Table 1, has been downloaded only a fraction of the number of times compared to the currency working paper. When listed by the flow metrics, as in Figure 4 the pages largely follow the results as seen for the Opus repository at Bath and link to pages about the repository. This is apart from the two anomalous results where despite having no citation or trust flow scores they are ranked second and third, when ranked on flow metrics.

Discussion

I think when looking at metrics the most important thing for a repository manager to do is to be able to build stories around the metrics, as these help the researchers to engage with the figures. Was this spike in downloads because of featuring in a conference, or an author moving to a new institution, or for some other reason? What can I show my users that are going to help them to make the decision to use us over other options and to expend scare time resources maintain a blog or Twitter account? Here the issue, I have with the data we have discovered is that the number of backlinks into a repository will never conclusively prove that a paper will get more downloads, as ably illustrated by the example above. Many researchers are not interested in the fuzzy conclusions we can draw at this point; they want to see clear, conclusive proof that links = downloads = citations.

I also think that search engine performance is an increasingly difficult area to be really conclusive about, especially now users can ‘train’ their Google results to prefer the links they click on most often. This was recently a cause of concern for us as it was reported that our Department of Computer Science (DCS)’s EPrints repository was overtaking our Google ranking and that WRAP didn’t feature until page two of the results now. This wasn’t the case, but because the user reporting this to us was heavily involved in the area of computer science his Google rankings had preferred the DCS repository to the WRAP one as the results were more relevant to his interests. In the same was as when I search for ‘RSP’ my top result is now the Repositories Support Project and not, RSP the Engineering Company or the Peterborough Health and Safety firm as it was initially

We need to always be conscious of what the researcher want from metrics and whether it is possible for us to give it to them. As with any metrics we need to be aware that we have to be explicit in what it is that we are saying and what can be inferred by it. If we are users of metrics don’t understand how the metrics are being developed or how the search engines ranking algorithms work, we won’t be able to confidently predict what we can do to improve them. It may also come down to the way researchers are using these services and for what purpose, which may be why we are not seeing any evidence of the use of services like Academia.edu and LinkedIn. I would imagine if researchers are using services to showcase their work to prospective employers and other researchers they may prefer to link to the publisher’s version of their work rather than the repository versions. I suspect the interest story from the SEO data may be more about ‘who’ is linking to their work rather than where they are linking from, which is detail we cannot and possibly should not be able to provide.

About the Author

Yvonne Budden (@wrap_ed), the University of Warwick’s E-Repositories Manager is responsible for WRAP, the Warwick Research Archive Portal and is the current Chair of the UK Council for Research Repositories (UKCoRR).

Email: Y.C.Budden@warwick.ac.uk

Further Evidence of Use of Social Networks in the UK Higher Education Sector

A series of recent posts on the UK Web Focus blog have summarised use of social networking service such as Facebook and Twitter by the 20 Russell Group universities. In today’s guest post Craig Russell, a Web Systems Developer at the University of Leicester, provides a picture across the UK higher education sector. Craig’s work is particularly timely as it has been carried out shortly before UKOLN’s IWMW 2012 event. Craig will be attending the event and will welcome feedback and comments from fellow participants on the survey and, perhaps more importantly, the implications of the findings and how they should inform policy decisions.

These are lean times for UK universities. The second half of this year is going to be a challenging one for all of us. Purse strings are being pulled tight in response to post-September uncertainty and we are all finding ourselves spread thinner than before, having to find new ways to do more-for-less. Universities have a strong history of academic collaboration, a practice that we in the corporate and support services should seek to emulate. By way of an example, I’d like to share my experiences of sharing a project of my own with the university community and the great benefit that this has returned.

In recent weeks I’ve set out to compile a dataset of all UK university social media (SM) accounts. Initially I was working alone in compiling the data set, and I got a fair way with it, but it wasn’t until sharing my work with the university web community that it grew in to the comprehensive resource that it has become.

I began with a list of institutions taken from the Guardian League Tables, which turned out not to be the best source as it didn’t use the correct names for institutions nor did it list all HEIs in the UK. When I shared the dataset with members of the WEB-INFO-MGT mailing list I received a few responses from institutions who were disappointed to find they weren’t included in it. Wanting to make this resource as inclusive as possible, I later adapted it to use the institution list provided by HESA in their “2010/11 Students by Institution” dataset. In addition to being more complete and accurate, this allowed me to include the HESA Institution ID and UK Provider Reference Number, which will make it easier to join this dataset with others in the future.

Figure 1: Number of social media services used

Initially I only collected data for Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr and iTunesU accounts. My thinking at the time was that that the first four were the most popular (and therefore the only interesting ones – herp) and I had a general interest in iTunesU. While collecting the data I noticed that other networks were also fairly common among universities. This revelation was reinforced by the emails I received from web maintainers, which listed a variety of services. So in the revised version I included every service that universities identified themselves as using. The dataset now lists 16 different services that are currently being used by UK universities. A surprisingly broad spread.

Expanding the dataset in this dimension allows an important questions to be asked; what are the social network that UK universities are currently using, and how popular are they? The chart below answers this question. The data shows that my initial hunch about the top four was correct (but all the better with evidence), though I expected Flickr to be more popular than it is. In contrast, LinkedIn is better represented than I had thought. Also of note is the low position of Google+, echoing the general attitude towards the much-hyped service.

Figure 2: Distribution of accounts across institutions

Another question worth asking is; how many social networks are universities using? The histogram shown in Figure 2 the distribution of accounts across institutions. Most universities have a presence in 3 or 4 networks, with a significant minority above and below this range. The peak at 0 suggests missing data, therefore it’s likely that university presence in social media is in truth greater than this chart would suggest.

Though this is only a fairly superficial analysis of the data, these results raise many more questions than they answer. Why do most institutions have only 3/4 social media accounts? I suspect that the availability of resources in the university to manage an on-line social presence is the primary limiting factor, though the response to the popularity of these services in our target markets should also be considered. The combination of popular services is interesting too. Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and to a lesser extent Flickr, seem to provide a complimentary suite of tools – why?

I’m also interested to understand the strategy guiding the use of these services. Having glanced over a few accounts I see that some institutions use twitter primarily as a broadcast medium to share information about themselves, whereas others use it as a two-way channel to communicate and converse with their audience. On a related point, while most universities linked to their SM accounts from their homepage, those that did not, commonly linked to it from their news and events pages. This implies a ‘broadcast’ view of social media, though it may simply reflect where responsibility for managing these accounts lays within the organisation.

I originally compiled this dataset to answer a few questions of my own. But thanks to the involvement of the university web community it has grown and developed in to a resource that has been useful for me and (I hope) you too. If you use this dataset as a basis for your own work, or if you have data of your own that others may find useful, I’d encourage you to share it. Post a few links to the WEB-INFO-MGT mailing list or better yet attend an event such as IWMW12 to meet and discuss your work. The chances of you being the only person who finds your work interesting or useful is vanishingly small, find those other people and help one another.

The UK University Social Media Accounts dataset is up on Google Docs. Please do email me with any updates, corrections, comments or criticisms. I will be attending IWMW next month, so do come say hi if you’d like to chat about this – or anything else for that matter. Finally I’d like to thank everyone who has contributed to the dataset and sent messages of encouragement, I am very grateful.

Twitter conversation from Topsy: [View]

We may well have found ourselves shoe-horned in to the free-market, but I strongly believe that it is through our cooperation, not our competition, that UK universities will continue to thrive in a challenging future.

Steve’s post provides an useful introduction to Creative Commons and the benefits which Creative Commons can provide across the sector and concludes by suggesting that Creative Commons is “going to be very big news indeed for all web users in the near future“.

I agree, but how should one reuse resources published under a Creative Commons licence, as I’m doing here, and what are the associated risks?

The licence allows me to reuse the content for non-commercial purposes provided a give acknowledgements to the rights owner (as I have done) and I make my post available under the same licence conditions (and I have included the rights statement and Creative Commons logo from the source post).

Although I am under no legal obligation to inform Steve of my reuse of his post I have chosen to do so so that he is not surprised if he sees the republished post.

I did point out that replicated web content may (slightly) undermine the Google ranking for the resource, as Google can treat replicated content as an attempt to spam Google’s index. However, as Steve is aware and has commented in his post, the value of providing an additional access path for such content will outweigh this slight concern.

Reusing content provided under a Creative Commons licence can also lead to the question regarding what the content actually is. In this case I have chosen to reuse the words, images and links, although the underlying HTML representation may have changed since we use different blog platforms. Since Steve has not applied a No-derivative clause in the licence I could, however, have chosen to edit the content which might have included not including the image and links provided in the source material. It should also be noted that in a comment made to the blog post Joscelyn pointed out a minor error in the original post – the post stated that ”Much of the content on Wikipedia for example is licensed under Wikimedia Commons – a version of CC” but in fact “Wikipedia text is licensed with Creative Commons Attribution Sharealike (CC BY SA) licence not a version of a CC licence“]. I could have edited the original post but chose to include an editor’s note.

The final comment I would make is that the licence which applies by default to content published on this blog is CC-BY; a more liberal Creative Common licence which does not restrict reuse to non-commercial purposes or require reuse to apply the same licence. The blog now contains resources with a variety of licences which, ideally, would be described in a machine-understandable form through use of tools such as the WordPress Creative Commons License Manager or the Open Attribute plugins. The latter describes how:

OpenAttribute allows you to add licensing information to your WordPress site and individual blogs. It places information into posts and RSS feeds as well as other user friendly features. This plugin is an part of the OpenAttribute project which is part of Mozilla Drumbeat.

However these plugins are not available on the WordPress.com platform, so it does not seen currently to be possible to describe the rights for blog posts and embedded content in a machine-readable fashion. But since this is the case for many digital resources, this is not of great concern to me.

I am still in agreement with Steve that Creative Commons is “going to be very big news indeed for all web users in the near future” and we should all develop (and share) practices for consuming other people’s content which they have provided using such licences. I’d also welcome suggestions as to who should be described as the author of this post as, unlike other guest posts I’ve published this week, this contains significant intellectual content from me. I think this will have to be described as a post with joint authors.

The Commons Touch

Many people assume that because the web is open, any and all content is open for copying and reuse. It is not. Use some content and you could well be breaking copyright law. Many sites host copyrighted material, and many people are confused about what they can reuse or copy. My advice is this - assume that all content is copyrighted unless otherwise indicated. In the last few years, the introduction of Creative Commons licensing has ensured that a lot of web based content is now open for reuse, repurposing and even commercial use. The Stanford University law professor Lawrence Lessig is one of the prime movers behind this initiative. Essentially, Creative Commons has established a set of licences that enables content creators to waive their right to receive any royalties or other payment for their work. Many are sharing their content for free, in the hope that if others find it useful, they will feel free to take it and use it. Creative Commons is a significant part of the Copyleft movement, which seeks to use aspects of international copyright law to offer the right to distribute copies and modified versions of a work for free, as long as it is attributed to the creator. Any subsequent reiterations of the work must also be made available under identical conditions. In keeping with similar open access agreements, Copyleft promotes four freedoms:

Freedom 0 – the freedom to use the work,
Freedom 1 – the freedom to study the work,
Freedom 2 – the freedom to copy and share the work with others,
Freedom 3 – the freedom to modify the work, and the freedom to distribute modified and therefore derivative works.

Finding free for use images on the web is now fairly easy. Normal search will unearth lots of images. But these are not necessarily free images. Many will have copyright restrictions. To find the free stuff go to Google and click on the cog icon at the top right of the screen. Select the Advanced Search option. Next, scroll down the screen until you find the drop down box labelled ‘usage rights’. You will be presented with four options:

1. Free to use or share
2. Free to use or share, even commercially
3. Free to use, share or modify
4. Free to use, share or modify, even commercially

Whatever option you choose, you will be presented with a reduced collection of images that still meet the requirements of the search, but under the conditions of that specific licence. Now you have a collection of images you can use under the agreements of Creative Commons. Use them for free under these agreements and you are complying with international copyright law. Don’t forget the attribute the source!

So why would people wish to give away their content for nothing? I have previously written about my own personal and professional reasons for doing so in ‘Giving it all away‘, but just for the record, I will summarise:

Giving away your content for free under a CC licence ensures that anyone who is interested in your work does not have to pay for it or worry about whether they are licenced under copyright law to use your content. In today’s economic uncertain climate, it makes sense to be equitable and to give content away that others have a need to see and can make good use of. It also means that users will do some of your dissemination for you. Your ideas will be spread farther if you give them away for free, than they necessarily will if you ask people to pay a copyright fee or royalty. If you allow repurposing of your content, the rewards can be even greater. Some of my slideshows have been translated into other languages. Having your content translated into Spanish for example, opens up a huge new audience not only in Spain, but also most of the continent of South America. Many are now licensing their work under CC because they know it makes sense. Much of the content on Wikipedia for example is licensed under Wikimedia Commons – a version of CC [Note that in a comment on Steve Wheeler's post Joscelyn has pointed out that "Wikipedia text is licensed with Creative Commons Attribution Sharealike (CC BY SA) licence not a version of a CC licence"]. So look out for Creative Commons licensing – it’s going to be very big news indeed for all web users in the near future.

Image source

The Commons touch by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Openly Commercial

The Non-commercial component of the Creative Commons (CC) licences has occasionally given rise to some uncertainty and debate amongst those interested in copyright licensing. (See About the Licences for a reminder of the different CC licences.)

The CC licences which contain the NC component refers to commercial use, as used:

in any manner that is primarily intended for or directed toward commercial advantage or private monetary compensation.

So what does that cover exactly?

CC guidance below and from @mollyali is very useful, but as with many things of a legal nature, they do not provide absolute certainty, as there are usually a number of factors at play. As described in the FAQ which asks ‘Does my use violate the NonCommercial clause of the licenses?‘ on the Creative Commons wiki:

In CC’s experience, whether a use is permitted is usually pretty clear, and known conflicts are relatively few considering the popularity of the NC licenses. However, there will always be uses that are challenging to categorize as commercial or noncommercial. CC cannot advise you on what is and is not commercial use. If you are unsure, you should either contact the creator or rightsholder for clarification, or search for works that permit commercial uses. Please note that CC’s definition does not turn on the type of user: if you are a non profit or charitable organization, your use of an NC-licensed work could run afoul of the NC restriction; and if you are a for-profit entity, your use of an NC-licensed work does not necessarily mean you have violated the term.

A CC commissioned study on “how people understand ‘noncommercial use’” was published in 2009. @plagiarismtoday provides a good potted summary of the report. Notwithstanding the 2009 report and “known conflicts” relating to the NC licensed being “relatively few” the NC component of the CC licence still generates much deliberation and debate.

Some objections to the NC licences relate to a viewpoint that they are not truly ‘open’ as they block licence interoperability and frictionless remix and reuse of content. The NC licence remains popular, however, and some CC adopters may well experiment initially by using a NC licence before choosing more permissive licences in due course.

The CC BY NC SA licence is a popular choice of licence amongst Higher Educational Institutions (HEIs). The Open University’s OpenLearn, MIT Open Courseware (MITOCW) and Open Yale Courses (OYC) all use a Creative Commons (CC) BY NC SA licence for their open educational resources (OER).

The JORUM Final Report published in 2011, indicates that the majority of the resources deposited within the JORUM repository are from the Academy/JISC OER Programme and a high percentage is from HEIs and licensed with a CC BY NC SA licence.

Although OpenLearn, MITOCW & OYC, all use a CC BY NC SA licence, all three institutions provide additional ‘”guidelines intended to help users determine whether or not their use of OCW materials would be permitted”

There are differences between the guidelines provided by the three institutions in the degree of permissiveness. For example OpenLearn permits “educational institutions, commercial companies or individuals to use the CC licensed content” and permits use of the “content as part of a course for which you charge an admission fee” and permits the charging of “a fee for any value added services you add in producing or teaching based around the content providing that the content itself is not licensed to generate a separate, profitable income” This would therefore appear to permit a commercial training company to reuse OpenLearn CC BY NC SA licensed content as part of a fee paying training course as long as the licensed content itself is not monetised.

OYC, by contrast, does not permit sites, that “provides and/or promotes services for which the user will be charged a fee (e.g., tutor services)” to use the CC licensed content.

MITOCW, whilst stating that “A corporation may use OCW materials for internal professional development and training purposes“also states “A commercial education or training business may not offer courses based on OCW materials if students pay a fee for those courses and the business intends to profit as a result“. So a commercial organisation can carry out staff development using MITOCW CC BY NC SA licensed content but they may not provide chargeable external training.

Does it matter that even though MIT, Yale and the Open University all use the CC BY NC SA licence yet they intend and permit different uses of their licensed content?

Some of the benefits of CC licenses include the ease of use, and the familiarity of the symbols and the speed in understanding the human-readable Commons Deed. This enables the user of the licensed content to glean quite easily and quickly what their rights and obligations are in respect of the content. The provision of additional guidelines in the above examples may undermine some of these benefits and place an unnecessary burden on the user. It also contributes to uncertainty and detracts from any possibility of  consensus on the use and understanding of a NC licence.

The reason many institutions choose the NC licence may be to control the potential or perceived potential commercialisation of the licensed content. There is quite a compelling argument that content arising from state funded programme should be licensed with the most permissive terms. For example the US Department of Labour is funding $2 billion over four years to create OER materials for career training programs in community colleges. Where new learning materials are created using the grant funds, those materials must be made available under CC Attribution licence (CC BY).

I imagine it would not be easy in UK universities and colleges to demarcate “sate funded content” from the University’s “privately funded content” . Many HEIs and FEIs have a revenue generating ‘business arm’. What is state-funded and what is the commercial arm of the institution may be quite blurred.

To achieve the widest possible access and participation in global education the most appropriate CC licence for ‘open’ educational resources is the CC BY licence. But it doesn’t appear to be always such an easy procedural or cultural step for organisations to take.

If an institution decides that a CC licence with a NC component is the most appropriate licence for its needs, the CC+ Protocol may be worth exploring  for example by universities who may be making moves towards becoming private.

Creative Commons developed its free licences to enable people to share their works as they choose. Using the CC+ protocol permits copyright owners to easily accommodate acceptable non-commercial uses while directing commercial traffic to their own fee-based agreement.

What is CC+?

CC+ is a Creative Commons license plus another agreement, for example:

A copyright owner may pair a CC Attribution-Non-Commercial license [that is the CC] with a non-exclusive commercial agreement [that is the +] enabling a copyright owner to license the work commercially for a fee.

The [+] is a means to provide a simple click through to rights or opportunities beyond those offered in the CC licence. The creator is able to leverage the expanded exposure that results from otherwise freely distributed content.

CC+ is not another CC licence; rather it is a means to point users toward the copyright owner’s own “extension” of rights that may be additional to the existing CC license. The copyright owner is responsible for constructing the license that expresses those additional terms and conditions.

CC+ has many uses and advantages for both commercial and non-commercial users, for example:

• A copyright owner of content may choose to use a CC Attribution Non-Commercial (CC BY NC) Licence to make content available on the web so they can be shared easily and freely on a non-commercial basis providing attribution is given
• The copyright owner in this example may pair this CC BY NC licence with a + click-through to non-exclusive rights beyond those permitted under the CC licence such as allowing commercial use in return for a fee.

Other additional permissions beyond those provided in CC licences may include: permission to reuse without providing attribution (paired with any of the six CC licences); or permission to use without having to share alike (paired with CC BY SA or CC BY NC SA licences) or permission to create derivative works (paired with the CC BY ND or CC BY NC ND licences).

CC+ is another means by which copyright owners are able to exercise their copyright as they choose, on their own terms. Using the CC licence enables the free, easy and legal means of sharing on the web whilst the “extension” of permissions provided by the + has the benefit of clear “signposting” to commercial terms for additional uses of the copyrighted works.

This is a guest post by Joscelyn Upendran (@Joscelyn on Twitter). Any views expressed are personal views and not that of any organisation or employer, and not intended to be legal advice nor should they be relied upon as such.

Opening Up Events

Workshops, seminars, conferences: just some of the learning opportunities that are often closed, with any knowledge or resources contained therein accessible only to those who are able to physically attend a fixed point in time and space where the event takes place. Yet these are some of the key ways we can disseminate and share knowledge in a really interactive, practical way.

UKOLN has a well-established role at the forefront of what have become termed “amplified” or open events. These are events where the event materials and discussions are amplified out via the local audience to their own professional networks using online social networking tools. Such activities overlap neatly with the emergence of hybrid events, which are specially designed to allow a remote audience to participate in an event simultaneously with the local audience. Amplified events can often be used as a stepping stone for organisers who are consciously looking to move into hybrid events, or organisers who are just looking to increase their audience without substantially increasing the carbon impact of their event.

The JISC GEII Event Amplification Toolkit

Event amplification at IWMW 2012

I have been working with UKOLN in this area to help develop an Event Amplification Toolkit, as part of the JISC Greening Events II project. The toolkit is designed to help event organisers decide what type of event is most appropriate for their needs (a traditional, hybrid or a fully virtual event) and provides tools to help organisers approach the task of amplifying their event.

The toolkit has been developed using lessons drawn from a series case study events, including Institutional Web Management Workshop (IWMW 2011), UKOLN’s Metrics and Social Web Services workshop, and most recently the 7th International Digital Curation Conference (IDCC11). These lessons have been condensed into a number of simple templates and two-page best practice briefings, which can be mixed and matched according to the event organisers’ requirements. As new online services are emerging all the time, whilst others wane in popularity, these best practice briefings focus on general amplification activities, rather than specific third party tools. The toolkit covers approaches to live video streaming, live commentary, discussion, and curation tools, providing examples of existing services, business models, resourcing requirements and risks which need to be considered. The templates provide models for assessing risk and structuring an amplified event to achieve specific outcomes.

Open Approaches vs Open Tools

Whilst an event may be considered open by virtue of being amplified, many of the individual tools and services used to achieve this are third party commercial services, which may vary in their degree of openness and accessibility (depending how you define open, of course!). This means that organising an open event can become a pragmatic exercise – using open platforms where available and offering alternative options where necessary to help make the event accessible to the widest range of users.

A prime example of this is the most popular tool for use at amplified events: Twitter. Whilst Twitter is considered to be one of the more open social media platforms, participants must have an account with the service in order to take an active part in an event discussion. If you don’t have an account, you can only watch the discussion unfold, you cannot contribute. Opening up an event to the widest possible audience means you must consider those people who do not want to have a direct relationship with a service provider, like Twitter, by establishing an account with the service, no matter how little personal information is required in the process. Tools like CoverItLive and ScribbleLive can provide the option for remote participants to offer comments and questions publicly without a registered account and without having to part with any information about their identity. The role of an event amplifier would then involve integrating these comments into the wider discussion beyond in a sensitive manner, particularly if that discussion is taking place prominently on Twitter.

As this example demonstrates, an amplified event may need to provide a mix of access points to open up all aspects of the event. This means that, in many ways, openness in an events context is less about the specific technologies employed and more about the attitude of the organisers and the way they blend a selection of tools to provide open access. An open attitude when running an event could be summarised as:

• A commitment to the online audience as first class citizens, providing the same opportunities to access and interact within the live event as those physically in attendance.
• A commitment to sharing resources in multiple contexts as an aid to future discovery and reuse.
• A commitment to linking between resources so the audience has a clear path to guide them to other event resources or the same resources in alternative formats.
• A commitment to the use of creative commons licences, with respect to the speaker or copyright holder.

Looking Forward

We intend to amplify the toolkit itself according to these same principles and using the same techniques detailed in the report.  Our hope is that these resources will help others to approach the problem of opening up their events and reduce the carbon impact of their event by facilitating more people engaging from afar.

Kirsty Pitkin is a professional event amplifier. This is a newly emerging role, which involves working with conference organisers to help deliver an online dimension to traditional events by leveraging social media and other online tools to expand the audience for the event. She explores current research and best practice associated with amplified and hybrid events in her blog. Kirsty holds a Masters in Creative Writing and New Media from De Montfort University.

Email: kirsty.pitkin@tconsult-ltd.com
Blog: http://eventamplifier.wordpress.com/
Twitter: @eventamplifier

As described recently, a series of guest blog posts on open practices are being published this week on the UK Web Focus blog which build on ideas published in latest issue of JISC Inform. Having explored what openness may mean in the context of research, education and libraries, in today’s guest post my colleague Marieke Guy explores “Professional Development Using Open Content“.

As a home worker Marieke takes a pro-active approach to her professional development as can be seen from her posts on her Ramblings of a Remote worker blog. In this post Marieke describes her participation in a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC).

Professional Development

For me professional development has always been about being proactive. Patience is not one of my virtues. I’m not the sort of person who would sit and wait for my team leader to send me on a course, though I’m always open to suggestions.

Professional development according to Wikipedia refers to “skills and knowledge attained for both personal development and career advancement“. The way I see it, there are areas that I need to know more about to make me better at my job, and then there are areas that I want to know more about to give my job context and meaning. The goal is to balance the two and also to fit them alongside my day job.

I work from home (see my Ramblings of a Remote worker blog) and already travel a reasonable amount so any activities I can do from the comfort of my own swivel chair suit me fine. Over the last few years online professional development has really taken off, in a similar way to online learning. Although many courses cost there is now a plethora of open content out there that can be used in any way you chose.

MOOCs

Massive Open Online Course crib sheet. This crib sheet was created for a workshop being presented at ISTE 2011 on using a MOOC model for professional development by Jeannette Shaffer

One recent addition is the Massive Open Online Courses or MOOCs. The courses are free, open to all and comprise of open content. They tend to be hosted by Higher Education institutes and often students from that particular institution are encouraged to register. Often there is no credit for the course (though some use the Mozilla open badge systemor similar approaches) and no feedback for participants from the course leaders. The approach taken is a fluid one where participants are encouraged to blog about what they learn and interact with other participants by commenting on their posts.

As described in “7 things you should know about MOOCs” (PDF format):

“For the independent, lifelong learner, the MOOC presents a new opportunity to be part of a learning community, often led by key voices in education. It proves that learning happens beyond traditional school-age years and in a specific kind of room … Certainly as MOOCs develop, the scale on which these courses can be taught and the diversity of students they serve will offer institutions new territory to explore in opening their content to a wider audience and extending their reach into the community.“

The Massive Open Online Course crib sheet which is illustrated was created by Jeannette Shaffer and is available from Flickr.

Openness in Education

My first MOOC learning endeavour has been the Introduction to Openness in Education course (see the #ioe12 tweets) co-ordinated by David Wiley, associate professor of instructional psychology and technology at Brigham Young University, US. This was an open course about openness in education – a little postmodern?! I came across the course via a colleague’s Twitter feed and after registering discovered that a couple of other colleagues were also giving MOOCs a go. We ended up meeting for coffee (See my post on #ioe12 Coffee Breaks with a Little Open Licensing Thrown In) to discuss how things had gone so far. Always good to have some support.

I’ve found the course a challenge, mainly due to time constraints, but also because the concept of ‘open’ is complex one. What does being ‘open’ truly mean? Some of the more orthodox advocates of the open movement could offer up a checklist of criteria to help us decide if a license, piece of software, resource, data set, policy, … (add whatever takes your fancy) is strictly open. For them openness is an ideology and a goal. However much of what is out there falls into the spaces in-between and often for good reason.

I’d agree that the movement towards openness is a good thing, though I am still unsure on how I feel about many aspects of it. Openness is not always possible or desirable and it brings with it responsibilities. My current work activities take me into the area of Research Data Management where FOI has a big impact. Requests for data sets (such as the recent Philip Morris smoking research request) are becoming more frequent and are not always for just reasons. A colleague of mine recently pointed me in the direction of a paper written back in 2000 by Martin Strathern entitled The Tyranny of Transparency. To summarise: transparency measures often have paradoxical outcomes like eroding trust and turning knowledge into information rather than information into knowledge. Openness, like free speech, is a double edged sword and we’d do well to ensure that we use the tool appropriately.

Conclusions

All my posts relating to my experiences of MOOCs and learning from open content are available from my blog. There’s no doubt that use of online courses and open content will significantly contribute to my professional development in the future. Learning in this way gives me the flexibility that my job and lifestyle require, however I know that I need to be disciplined and keep motivated if I want to make the most of these opportunities. As Oscar Wilde, a man who held a fairly cynical view of formal education, once said: “Nothing that is worth knowing can be taught“. Maybe a pro-active approach using MOOCs would have been more up his street!

Twitter conversation from Topsy: [View]

It isn’t really news to say that the world libraries inhabit has changed almost beyond recognition in less than 20 years. Perhaps with the benefit of hindsight it will be possible to make sense of the rapid technological change and resulting shift in behaviours which combine to challenge the collections, services and perhaps the very existence of libraries. Whilst we continue to live through this information revolution, we seek to make educated guesses at the next trend, respond as we can to the very different expectations of our user communities, and develop strategies to ensure we remain relevant and sustainable in challenging times.

Several trends in particular seem to me to have made a marked contribution to the seismic landscape disruption which has followed the invention of the Web:

1. Transition to online from print – published content, particularly journals, being made available online and becoming, fairly quickly, the dominant delivery channel.
2. Challenges to traditional models of publishing – the rise of the open access agenda, and a general trend towards widespread support for openness, not just for published material but for underlying data, with a view to fostering sharing, reuse and linking.
3. The Social Web – interaction and conversation, sharing, tagging, developing personal networks for both social and business purposes. Publication is no longer primarily about dissemination, but about sharing, reuse and conversation.
4. The development of large scale global public and commercial content hubs which have grown to dominate the ways in which information is published, discovered, and shared.

These, of course, aren’t entirely independent developments, and can instead be seen as components of an evolutionary (if not revolutionary) process which has brought us to today’s information landscape. Equally, it is clear that change continues, and recent challenges to traditional scholarly publishing models serve to underline that.

The creation of one of these ‘hubs’ is the focus of this blog post. In just a few years we have seen the very rapid ascendency of Wikipedia as the preferred starting point for the sort of reference enquiry that would once have been directed to a traditionally published encyclopaedia, or a library reference desk. Despite scepticism, it has become a hugely popular resource, with evidence to support the reliability of crowd-sourced factual information, as a result of strict editing policies and zealous, perhaps over-zealous, editors.

In 2007, whilst Digital Library Manager at the National Library of Scotland I was interested to read of a project to use it to make library collections more widely known, and this encouraged me to initiate work at to do likewise. Unfortunately, the timing was not good, as concern about the credentials of editors, and allegations about attempts to influence Wikipedia entries had resulted in very careful vetting, and an aversion to anything which even hinted at advertising, even from the cultural sector. Some forays into relevant Wikipedia entries in fact resulted in my web developer’s account being shut down, almost immediately. Somewhat discouraged, we directed our effort at the more welcoming global networks, such as Flickr and YouTube.

Since then, Wikipedia seems to have adopted a more mature stance, still managing entries very carefully, but recognising that partnership with organisations with information which enriches its entries is to be welcomed rather than resisted (although a recent verbal exchange with a Wikipedia editor makes me think that this is still somewhat dependent on the outlook of individual editors). I was very interested to see the creation of the concept of the ‘Wikipedian in Residence’ at the British Museum, although my move from the National Library back into HE required a focus on other priorities.

Advertisements for the Wikipedia Lounge in the John Rylands University Library

An interior shot of the John Rylands Library in central Manchester

My move to The John Ryland University Library at the University of Manchester coincided with contact from Wikimedia UK, who were now actively seeking partnerships with education institutions, recognising the mutual benefit of working with students, academics and libraries to foster more effective use of Wikipedia as a resource, to encourage content creation and editing by experts, and to link entries to relevant resources. As a Library at a major research intensive institution, with the additional responsibility of steward of an internationally important special collections Library, we were identified as a particularly valuable pilot partner. For our part, influenced very much by the sort of strategic thinking coming from organisations like OCLC, which encouraged libraries to collaborate with large information hubs, we were very enthusiastic about a partnership which would help us connect to a global network level hub, and also address the digital literacy agenda.

We have begun the engagement process, which we hope will develop into a substantial project which includes a ‘Wikipedian in Residence’. To date, we have hosted a ‘Wikipedia Lounge’, which saw academics and students meet Wikipedians to learn more about getting involved and creating content. This event attracted academics, students and librarians, and we have plans to repeat it. We are now in discussions with Wikimedia UK about setting up a 12 month pilot project which would see a Wikipedian in Residence based at the John Rylands Library, working with our curators, students and academics to expose our collections, encourage further research and learning, develop a network of Wikipedians at Manchester (we already have some), and place Wikipedia within our digital literacy strategy as a powerful tool which when used effectively can play an important part in University teaching and research. There are already a number of references to our collections in Wikipedia entries, e.g.in biographical pages such as that of the author Alison Uttley, which serve to demonstrate the very great untapped potential. Perhaps the best entry which focuses on a specific item on our collections is for the Rylands Library Papyrus P52, also known as the St John’s fragment (illustrated) which ranks as the earliest known fragment of the New Testament in any language.

Fragment of St John’s Gospel: recto

Of course there are concerns about Wikipedia: it may not be reliable; it can be used as an easy substitute for comprehensive research and study; it can be difficult to change erroneous content, etc. But to ignore it or dissuade students from its use reminds me of the approach that was sometimes taken in the face of the rapid rise of Google in the late 1990s. It is a battle we are unlikely to win, and so much more could be achieved by working with, not against, the new information providers, especially when so much of what we are about has synergy: open access, collaboration, no profit motive, etc.

It is early days for us in this engagement at the moment, but I have high hopes. And I’m sure that when we introduce our Wikimedia UK contacts to the wonders of the John Rylands Library, they will find it impossible not to see the obvious potential!

Simon Bains is Head of Research and Learning Support and Deputy Librarian, The John Rylands University Library, University of Manchester. You can see his Library Website staff page or follow him on Twitter: @simonjbains

In this guest post James Burke (@deburca) explores what the term OER currently means to him, although he admits the “I’m sure that it will mean something different to me 12 months from now…“.

What is/are OER?

Even though OER has a new global logo it is one of those terms that appears to have no formally agreed definition and people’s use of and reference to the term OER changes over time.

“The term OER is broad and still under discussion” and over the past few years OER has been used as a “supply-side term” and remained “largely invisible in the academy”. Metaphors (“Open Education and OER is like…?”) have been used to take a light hearted look at potential issues and tensions such as those between “Big OER and Little OER” and all in-between. On the definition front Stephen Downes has written a useful “Half an Hour” essay: “Open Educational Resources: A Definition” and David Wiley (Open Content and the 4Rs) recently put forward: “2017: RIP for OER?” (or not…)

The FAQ page for Open Education Week (held on 5-10 March 2012) provides a useful, current overview of OER and Open Education.

One of the “core attributes” of OER is that access to the “content is liberally licensed for re-use in educational activities, favourably free from restrictions to modify, combine and repurpose the content; consequently, that the content should ideally be designed for easy re-use in that open content standards and formats are being employed”. So, now that I have re-used the new and “liberally licensed” OER global logo in this post I have a number of options and queries regarding adherence to the licence and provision of any requested attribution such as “how do I properly attribute a work offered under a Creative Commons license?” leading me to “what are the best practices for marking content with Creative Commons licenses?”.

I’ll settle with using: “OER Logo” © 2012 Jonathas Mello, used under a Creative Commons license: BY-ND

…but maybe I should have included this attribution directly beneath the image to be less ambiguous to the human reader?, or maybe I should have associated the licence and attribution more “semantically” and unambiguously with the image for the “machine reader”?, or maybe I should have just have made my life simple and just used “Kevin” to add attribution directly to the image to cater for both human and machine readers?, and what is this “machine” anyway…?

Machine readable, but what “machine”?

The Creative Commons license-choosing tool provides you with a snippet of RDFa that you can embed in your web-based content with the idea that this “machine readable” metadata can be automatically identified and extracted by “machines” such as search engines and made available via their search, e.g. Google Advanced Search. This “machine readable” licence can also be used to facilitate accurate attribution via browser and CMS plugin “machines” such as Open Attribute as well as being used for automated cataloguing, depositing etc..

Creative Commons is not the only “machine readable” licence, many countries have their own “interoperable” Public Sector Information/Open Government Licences such as the UK Government Licensing Framework , and many “vanity licenses” for content in both the public and private sectors have also emerged but Creative Commons remains the most widely used technically & legally interoperable licensing framework.

The Google Advanced search help refers to their usage rights filter but states that this filter is used to show “pages that are either labeled with a Creative Commons license or labeled as being in the public domain”. Bing does not have an equivalent usage rights filter but their “advanced operators” can be used to derive the similar results, e.g. inbody:http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by “search term” loc:gb can be used to find UK content that likely has a Creative Commons licence deed link in the metadata or in the HTML body.

The implementation of Creative Commons licences into content can be quite variable ranging from using a Creative Commons icon in a PDF file that contains no link to the license deed through to a complete snippet of RDFa containing the full works title together with attribution, source and more permissions URLs.

Mainstream Web Applications such as Flickr, Soundcloud, Vimeo, Scribd and SlideShare all allow the association of a Creative Commons licence with uploaded image, audio, video or “Office” document content that is then publicly visible and searchable via Google and Bing et al with the site: operator and a usage rights filter. Oddly, for most of these Web Applications Google and Bing provide the best search results and usage rights filters within the Web Applications can be a rare find.

So, to me, the “machine” that is “reading” OER is really any Web application that can consume openly licensed content accessible via the Web and for convenience the best way of me finding this “stuff” is via the mainstream search engines, even if I do have to use a usage rights filter…

Openly licensed resources and “stuff” is readily available on the Web

Arguably, the Internet and the Web would not be where it is today without being “open” and built upon a “stack” of standards and simplification that specifically lack patents and their associated licences that need to be paid for. The Web has significantly lowered the cost of software and content collaboration, creation and publishing and encouraged the embracing of serendipity.

“Most of the Internet is run by volunteers who do not get paid, most of the Internet is run by amateurs”. – (video: Innovation in Open Networks) Joi Ito, Thinking Digital May 2010 (@joi)

Joi Ito speaking at #TDC10 from Codeworks Ltd on Vimeo.

http://prezi.com/bin/preziloader.swf

One of “open’s” main advantages over proprietary digital content has been the lowering of cost and the cost of failure. The main source of friction in the production of digital content used to be primarily at the content layer in the stack (see prezi and video above) but as this eased the highest cost and restriction causing the most friction to be present whilst consuming and publishing content has shifted towards the legal domain. With the introduction of open licensing frameworks such as Creative Commons that offer worldwide legal interoperability this legal friction is being eased.

More and more educational content is going through a “rights clearance” process and being published by Institutions with more permissive open licenses “openly” to the Web and by “openly” I mean visible to search engines and not behind authentication “walls” such as learning platforms. Quite often this Web published content is a copy with attribution back to the Institution and Institutionally held source and copied to more than one location – if you have a PowerPoint presentation why not upload to Scribd and SlideShare?

This content can now be readily discovered and shared, promoted or “amplified” via Social Networks and usage via metrics, metadata and paradata from various sources is readily and, in a lot of cases, openly available. Properly attributed derivative works should contains links back to the source and if not there are various methods of monitoring and obtaining duplicate content “openly” via Web Applications such as Blekko. This content being consumed can also surface people that are consuming it that can subsequently be used to discover how the re-used work is being used whether that be in a different context to the original, different language etc.

Derivative works are often created by “consumers” who are individuals and not Institutions or organisations and attribution is made to them personally so why not include attribution to the “authors” within the original Creative Commons license?, e.g. Copyright is held by the Institution but why not add acknowledgement to the people (with links to their preferred Social Graph “node”) that created the works so that they get their “whuffie” and be “openly selfish”?

I tend to follow people rather than organisations and to me the attribution to a person tends to be more important than attribution to the copyright owner as it tends to be the person that provides the most context in how the content is being used and from them I tend to “serendipitously” discover new content. This is nothing new and fundamental to the emerging MOOCs.

“Being an expert is less & less about knowing everything but knowing how to find something.” Reid Hoffman @ #TED chi.me/yUQort

— Bill Gross (@Bill_Gross) February 29, 2012

What OER means to me at the moment

For me, at the moment, the most important aspect of OER is the availability of openly licensed content accessible via the Web, that has a clear provenance of all assets used with attribution to the people that created it as well as to the copyright owner, kind of “OeR”.

This “OeR” includes all “non academic institution” content such as that from Khan Academy, Peer 2 Peer University and Flat World Knowledge and ideally this “OeR” has more permissive Creative Commons licenses and avoids the NoDerivs and NonCommercial conditions that restrict my usage rights as per the “4Rs Framework”.

..but is this OER and can this type of OER use that new global logo?

Twitter conversation from Topsy: [View]

Before the internet, there were non-trivial costs associated with disseminating paper-based research publications – each and every page of every article of every journal cost the publisher money to produce. Every single paper copy of those journals needed to be physically sent by post to all institutions, libraries and individuals that wanted those journals. This was both a costly and complex process, so it was sensibly outsourced to full-time professional publishers to deal with, some of whom were commercial for-profit enterprises – at first this didn’t cause any problems.

But now the internet allows unlimited copies of research publications to be created for zero cost and these can be advertised and disseminated at relatively insignificant costs – just the cost of bandwidth, keeping servers up and running, maintaining a user-friendly website that search engines can crawl, and providing an RSS feed to notify interested parties of new journal articles. Indeed, when Tim Berners-Lee created the Web in 1991, it was with the aim of better facilitating scientific communication and the dissemination of scientific research.

Note that for the sake of clarity we’ll ignore the role of manuscript-submission, organising peer-review, and the peer review process itself here – I contend these are only of minor administrative cost. Peer-review is provided for free by other academics and manuscript-submission is a largely automated process often requiring little editorial input. Only organising peer review is an administrative task that might conceivably have a significant and real time cost. Furthermore these processes need not necessarily be performed by the same organisation that acts to distribute the publications (decoupled scholarly publication), a nice idea as popularised by Jason Priem.

Yet, the models of payment for publication of, and distribution of research works are still largely centred on paying-for-access, rather than paying-to-publish. In the digital age this is inefficient and illogical. Why try and charge millions of separate customers (institutions, libraries, academics, and other interested persons) for a resource – a complex undertaking to organise in itself, when you can simply ask for a sustainably priced one-off charge to the funder/authors of the content to be published. The latter author-pays model is clearly the simpler, easier to implement option. Yet, I contend that the reader-pays model is currently dominant, especially with commercial for-profit publishers because it can generate excessive profits through its opaqueness and inefficiency (relative to the ultimate goal of providing free, Open Access to scientific knowledge for everyone).

The interests of shareholders, and board members of for-profit publishing companies are now hugely conflicting with that of research funders, institutions and academics. By definition, the primary goal of a for-profit publishing company is profit. In that respect, some academic publishers make Murdoch look like a socialist, with their unscrupulous profiteering as gatekeepers denying access to scientific knowledge. Whereas the goal of STM researchers & funders is surely for knowledge to be created and shared with the world. To myself and thousands of other academics it is clear without further explanation that these two goals cannot be simultaneously be maximised. One strategy works to maximise profit by proactively denying access to vital materials, and punishing those caught sharing materials, whilst the other works to maximise dissemination potential, so that all (who have access to a computer – unfortunately not everyone has access to one of these, but this problem is out of scope) can if they wish read the material, whilst forfeiting maximum profit-potential.

Of course, if research is entirely privately funded, it need not be openly-published – one cannot force private companies to disclose all research and development they do (although efforts by certain privates to share to cure malaria and other humanitarian problems are certainly very welcome!). But as I understand it, the majority of scientific research is publicly-funded and thus there is a clear moral duty to share results with everyone e.g. taxpayers. To paraphrase James Harvey: if you want to keep your research private, fund it yourself. That’s the privilege of private funding.

The tension between librarians (who have to negotiate to buy subscription-access to journals) and academics united on one side, and for-profit publishing companies on the other is particularly noticeable at the moment, hence The Economist’s labelling of this as a potential Academic Spring, analogous to the recent revolutions overthrowing malevolent incumbent powers – the Arab Spring.  Note that a cartoon representation of this debate can be seen on YouTube and is embedded below.

Indeed it is not just academics who benefit from access to scientific literature – as is being documented by a new initiative called Who Needs Access? There are a huge number and variety of people that would benefit from legally unrestricted, free, Open Access to scientific publications e.g. patients, translators, artists, journalists, teachers and retired academics. When one hits a paywall asking for 51USD for just 24 hours access to a single article on palliative care – it’s no wonder people are often put-off reading scientific literature. Thus everyone with even the slightest bit of curiosity about scientific research would stand to benefit from Open Access to scholarly publications, as achieved by the author-pays model.

So where would all these publications go, if not on servers owned and controlled by for-profit publishers? The ideal, natural home as Björn Brembs argues are libraries and university presses as institutional repositories for research publications, code and data. Currently IRs are used as Green OA archives which achieve only limited success in providing free full-text access. But as Networked Repositories for Digital Open Access Publications perhaps they might enable Open Access for all, as well as reducing the overall cost of publishing research.

In areas of science that have already shifted to this model e.g. some of Physics and related subjects with ArXiv (which is arguably analogous to a subject-specific Cornell University IR); Science is distributed pre-review with remarkable ease and cost effectiveness at <$7 per article submitted.

Some final thoughts:

• “We the public pay 10 billion USD annually in journal subscription fees and 200 billion USD for research; what value do we get? And what value do we lose by closed access?”
• Can We Justify The Involvement Of Corporate Publishers In Scholarly Communication?

We lose so many legal freedoms with closed access publishing, and its tendency to assign all copyright to publishers (not just mere access, but also text-mining rights, and the right to re-use information in even vaguely commercial contexts) that we cannot and should not allow this continue any longer, as it is causing irreparable damage to the future usability of scientific literature.

Ross Mounce, a PhD Candidate at the University of Bath is an active member of the Open Science community, pushing for beneficial reforms in scholarly publishing. Having had trouble in the past getting research data from publications, he is very proactive in blogging and giving talks on how scientific publishing can improve utility and dissemination by making greater and better use of digital technologies.

Contact details

Email: ross.mounce@gmail.com
Blog: http://www.science3point0.com/palphy/
Twitter: @rmounce

The Environmental Cost of using Computers

At every step of the PCs product life-cycle carbon footprints are left behind, during the initial extraction of minerals from the environment; the processing of raw materials; production of sub-components; PC assembly and manufacture; global distribution; and power consumption in usage.

The production of every PC requires 10 times its own weight in fossil fuels. According to empirical research published by Williams and Kerr from the UN University in Tokyo, the average PC requires 240kg of fossil fuels, 22kg of chemicals and 1,500kg of water. That’s over 1.7 metric tonnes of materials consumed to produce each and every PC. PCs require so much energy and materials because of the complex internal structure of microchips.

Why it is better to reuse rather than recycle

Given the substantial environmental cost of production it important we recover the full productive value of every PC through reuse before eventually recycling it to recover parts and materials at its true end-of-life. A refurbished computer can provide at least another three years productive life.

How does the WEEE directive affect UK Universities?

Since July 2007 the Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) Directive has been in force. The WEEE directive is an EU initiative which aims to minimise the impact of electrical and electronic goods on the environment, by increasing reuse and recycling and reducing the amount of WEEE going to landfill.

The WEEE directive affects every organisation and business that uses electrical equipment in the workplace. The regulations cover all types of electrical and electronic equipment including the obvious computers, printers, fax machines and photocopiers, as well as fridges, kettles and electronic pencil sharpeners. The regulations state that business users are responsible, along with producers, for ensuring their WEEE is correctly treated and reprocessed. The regulations encourage the reuse of whole appliances over recycling. When you are disposing of your IT equipment you must ensure that it is sent to an organisation that has been approved by the Environment Agency to take in WEEE who will provide you with Waste Transfer Notes for your equipment.

Do I need to worry about data security?

Under the Data Protection Act 1998 it is your responsibility to destroy any data that may be stored on the machines. Just hitting the delete button is not enough to wipe the data. To ensure you are protected make sure any organisation you use to dispose of your IT equipment uses a professional data wiping solution that has been approved by CESG or similar.

An environmentally friendly and socially responsible solution to your unwanted IT equipment

Donating your unwanted IT equipment to a charity such as Computer Aid International is both environmentally friendly and socially responsible. You will be fully complying with the WEEE directive and benefiting from a professional low cost PC decommissioning service, which includes free UK Secret Services approved Ontrack Eraser data wiping.

Computer Aid is the world’s largest provider of professionally refurbished PCs to the not-for-profit sector in the developing world. It has been in the business of IT refurbishing for over 14 years. The charities aim is to reduce poverty through practical ICT solutions.

To date Computer Aid has provided just under 200,000 fully refurbished PCs and laptops – donated by UK universities and businesses – to where they are most needed in schools, hospitals and not-for-profit organisations in over 100 countries, predominantly in Africa and Latin America. In order for Computer Aid to continue with its work it relies on universities and companies donating their unwanted computers to them.

Schools and universities in the developing world using a PC professionally refurbished by Computer Aid will enjoy at least 3 years more productive PC use. This effectively doubles the life of a PC halving its environmental footprint whilst enabling some of the poorest and most marginalised people in the world to have access to computers.

Anja ffrench

Director of Marketing and Communications
Computer Aid International
10 Brunswick Industrial Park
Brunswick Way, London, N11 1JL
Registered Charity no. 1069256

Tel: +44 (0) 208 361 5540
Fax: +44 (0) 208 361 7051

Email: anja@computeraid.org
Website: www.computeraid.org
Twitter: www.twitter.com/anjaffrench and www.twitter.com/computer_aid

_____________________________________________________________

Computer Aid International is the world’s largest and most experienced not-for-profit provider of professionally refurbished PCs to developing countries. We have provided over 185,000 computers to educational institutions and not-for-profit organisations in over 100 different countries since 1998. Our aim is to reduce poverty through practical ICT solutions.

Web archives: more useful than just a ‘historical snapshot’

The importance of the internet for research is well-known. As a constantly growing and evolving information source, the web contains vast amounts of information not available or published elsewhere. It is also a unique record of life and society in this technological age. Rarely these days do scholars carry out their research without going online, and the research value of the web is undeniable.

Web archives seek to capture this value and uniqueness by harvesting websites so that they may be re-used in the future even when they are no longer available on the live web. Over the past decade, numerous web archives have been established and grown, including the UK Web Archive. At almost 10 terabytes, over 9,300 web sites and 38,000 instances of archived sites, the UK Web Archive is a unique selective web archive that reflects the collection policies of the participating institutions.

Use of the web archive is steady. However, as recent reports have identified, there remains a gap between the potential community of researchers who could exploit the content, and those who actually do so. To address this, we are collaborating with researchers to explore different ways in which they may use the web archive and exploit the data contained within. We have developed and released a number of visualisation tools as an early first step:

• the 3D Visualisation Wall, (shown below) which provides a high-level, more dynamic presentation of search results and special collections;
• the N-Gram search, which encourages users to consider the web archives as data as well as websites, enabling visualisation and comparisons of term frequency;
• the General Election 2005 Tag Cloud, which visualises the most frequently used (single and pairs of) words in the websites related to key political parties during the 2005 election campaign.

Analysis shows that our single most popular site is the One & Other site, otherwise known as the Fourth Plinth, the website of a 2009 public arts project by artist Anthony Gormley. The site is no longer available on the live web. This type of usage, where users browse websites in order to access content that was available at a given point of time but is no longer accessible, is a widely accepted, original user scenario. It is based largely on original user experiences and early interactions with the live web. But there are other ways in which a web archive may be used, aside from visiting sites as they were captured at a given date and time. For example:

1. Resource citation. Researchers typically use the live web for research and cite live web resources with the date last visited. Why? Because content changes over time and they want to indicate when the content was available on the website. But if the content changes – and web pages are frequently updated or refreshed without archiving old versions – then there is no proof that the content cited actually existed. The web archive provides a more reliable and persistent citation than the live web.
2. Data exploitation. Web archives enable automatic identification of social trends over time (automated temporal trend research). The tools available will impact on the type of research that can be undertaken. This is a chicken & egg scenario: we rely to an extent on users to tell us what tools they want, but users need some direction on what might be possible with the data available. We need to work together to further develop the archive and support the emerging research needs of our users.
3. Intelligent querying, of the Q&A sort. Given the amount of data available in the web archive, it’s not inconceivable that future users will expect a more intelligent query mechanism than simple search and result presentation. More complex questions, for example, ‘tell me about the competing interests of oil companies in the late twentieth century’ are the stuff of sci-fi but rely upon an extensive historical database – such as a web archive.

Of course the characteristics of a web archive inevitably impact on how viable these different scenarios may be. For example, a selective web archive with limited scope but rich resource description will support research differently to a broad domain or international archive, with minimal accompanying metadata. The age of the web archive may be another factor. These factors must be recognised when developing tools and functionality.

Increasing usage and responding to researcher needs is an important element of our growth strategy for the UK Web Archive over the next five years. If you use the web archive for research and/or have ideas about tools or functionality to support specific types of research, we’d really like to hear from you. You can get in touch with us either by email, on Twitter, or by leaving a comment below.

Contact Details

Maureen Pennnock
Web Archive Engagement & Liaison Manager
The British Library (Yorkshire)

Email: maureen.pennock@bl.uk
Twitter: @mopennock

Lend Me Your Ears Dear University Web Managers!

JISC is considering future opportunities for innovation funding in collaboration with University Web Service departments who have responsibility for managing the .ac.uk pages of their institutional website. We’d like to make sure that what we are proposing would be of value to the sector and is interesting enough for several of you to consider bidding. Please make your opinion known using the #lncneu  hashtag on Twitter or by adding a comment to this post.

The ‘Linking You’ Project

The University of Lincoln undertook a four month project for JISC called “Linking You“, which surveyed 40 different websites across the .ac.uk domain (ten from each university group) and compared the similarities between the URLs of those websites.  The project found there was a lot of inconsistency in the representation of information for graduates and undergraduates.  However, there were also good conventions that have emerged across the sector and out of all this, the ‘Linking You’ project proposed a common set of URL syntaxes that could be used in principle across multiple corporate institutional websites. Before you get upset and think that we are suggesting you change your current URL structures, you should know that we are not suggesting anything of the sort!  Rather we are suggesting that via a transparent mapping exercise (using 303 or 301 redirects) you can mint all the suggested URLs that the ‘Linking You’ project proposes and then link them to the actual URLs that have grown up as part of your organic system. For example if you use:

You could follow the ‘linking you’ recommendations and mint a new URL that points to the above URL using HTTP code 303 or 301 to:

Ten Benefits to Institutions

Why should you mint the suggested set of ‘linking you’ URLs for your institution?  We recognise this work of minting and maintaining the redirects would be ‘yet another thing to deal with’ across your complex and growing .ac.uk websites, however we think there is potential value (both in time savings and value add) we could all communally benefit from in considering these URL conventions. Below we list reasons why we think will result if we can get multiple institutions to start adopting this syntax and vocabulary and some simply suggestions for ways of achieving these benefits:

1. Better SEO: As a sector we can go to Google and say, “Hi we are the University sector and we think you should give priority to these URLs when people are searching for things like courses.”
2. Management of robot.txt files: If a group of Universities started adopting these URL syntaxes, we could save time and money by generating a common robot.txt for all of us so to use so we don’t have to each write a robot.tx file, this would also make doing analytics across the sector enhanced as we could understand patters of clicking across all .ac.uk websites.
3. A simple mapping tool: An apache mod_rewrite (or IIS, nginx, etc. equivalent) tool that will do most of this work for you that could be written once and support many!
4. Improve discovery: Clear human-readable URLs are now integral to browser search and lookup technology and becoming essential if you want to enable ease by a student experiencing your website.
5. Predictable, consistent, aggregations: It will be easier to build tools on behalf of the entire sector because people will know where to go for the data. See the below reasons (nos. 6, 7 and 8) for immediate experimentation JISC is already undertaking and just think what else could be leveraged if we could bring our data together:
6. Provision  of  a course catalogue: As many of you know JISC is actively encouraging universities to create XCRI feeds for their courses.  If everyone producing an XCRI feed put it at the following URL http://www.foo.ac.uk/courses/xcri/ we’d lay the groundwork for persistent, structured course data that developers (many of them students) could use to build new and engaging apps and websites that we could all benefit from.
7. Provision of news feed aggregators: If we all knew where all the corporate news feeds were e.g. http://foo.ac.uk/news/rss we could create a UK University News Aggregation Service where the sector could have their news published on demand, let alone text mining goodness and other filters for highlight key news developments across all higher and further education institutions.
8. A sector wide directory: Common information such as institutional policies, contact information, news, about, events, etc. could be aggregated into a searchable directory; useful to both the public and HEI data geeks.
9. Managing your assets: Your .ac.uk addresses can be understood as your ‘virtual real estate’. Adopting a well-formed, widely understood and persistent ‘portfolio’ of core web addresses will help University Web Managers manage these increasingly valuable assets.
10. Use ‘Cool URLs’: Simple, stable, manageable URLs make sense. They are recommended by the WC3, to make Web Managers’ lives easier and keep users happy, too.

Those are some of the reasons we can think of and we think there are many more if even a little imagination is implied. We’re convinced that if we all worked together as University Web Managers across the UK sector we could achieve more than the sum of our parts by producing this URL structure for each institution.

Feedback

What kind of idea do you think you could achieve by adopting the ‘Linking You’ toolkit?  We’re thinking of funding several short projects to review and standardise the toolkit, put it into practice and then write up the case studies for the sector on how it worked for you and what value you see in doing this work. Are you interested? What are your thoughts on all of this?

Introduction

In introducing the event, Brian Kelly emphasised that the aims were to explore ways of gathering evidence that can demonstrate the impact of services and to devise appropriate metrics to support the needs of the higher and further eduction sector.

Many people argue that you cannot reduce education to mere numbers, as it is really about the quality of the experience. However, Kelly argued that numbers do matter, citing the recent JISC-funded Impact Report, which found that the public and the media are influenced by metrics. As we have to engage with this wider community, metrics are going to become more relevant.

View the introduction in full on Vimeo

The slides to accompany this talk are available on Slideshare

Why Impact, ROI and Marketing are No Longer Dirty Words

Amber Thomas, JISC

Thomas mapped out the current landscape, drawing on her own experiences and those of colleagues working in other areas at JISC. She observed a dominant culture of resistance to measurement within education for a number of reasons, including the concern that caring about metrics will mean that only highly cited people or resources will be valued. She noted that the search for an effective impact model is taking place on shifting sands, as issues associated with the value, ownership and control of media channels are being contested, as is the fundamental role of the university within British society.

In discussing impact, Thomas noted that it would be tempting to use the language of markets – with education as a “product” – but stressed that this not how we see ourselves in the education sector. One of the challenges we face is how to represent the accepted narrative of the sector as a nurturer and broker of knowledge, through the use of metrics.

Thomas went on to describe some of the dirty words in this space and the measurements that are associated with them. However, she noted that these measurements can be used for good, as they can help to instigate change. To support this, she provided a model for the role of metrics in decision making, with metrics being one form of evidence, and evidence being only one form of influence on the decision maker.

She concluded by outlining our options for responding to the impact debate: we could deny the impact agenda is important, or we could deepen our understanding and improve our metrics so they work for us and are fit for purpose. The possible directions we could take include developing business intelligence approaches, improving data visualisation techniques and looking for better tools to give us deeper understanding of the metrics. She also stressed that we need to look more closely at the use and expectations of social media in the commercial sector, as we might find we are expecting too much of ourselves.

“I don’t think we can ignore the debate on impact and metrics… what we need to do is engage with the impact debate and use the sort of language that is expected of us to defend the values of the sector a we wish to defend them.”

View the presentation in full at Vimeo

The slides to accompany this talk are available on Slideshare

Surveying our Landscape from Top to Bottom

Brian Kelly, UKOLN

Kelly provided an overview of the surveys he has been carrying out using a variety of analytics tools.

He began with a personal view: discussing the picture of his own Twitter usage provided by the Tweetstats tool, and how this differs from his own memory. He noted that the data did not always correspond with other evidence, emphasising that we cannot always trust the data associated with such tools.

“You need to be a bit skeptical when looking at this data… you can’t always trust all the data that you have.”

From an institutional perspective, he asked: “What can commercial analytics tools tell us about institutional use of Twitter?” He compared the Klout scores of Oxford and Cambridge Universities’ Twitter accounts, showing how visualisations of the numbers can give a much better understanding of what those numbers really mean than the numbers themselves do in isolation.

He continued in this vein by demonstrating Peer Index, which he used to analyse participants of the workshop. He noted that the top seven people are all people he knows and has had a drink with, so asked whether this shows that the gathering is really a self-referential circle? Kelly also noted how easy it can be to gain extra points and questioned whether it is ethical to boost your score in this way. However, he observed that research funding is determined by flawed metrics, and gaming the system is nothing new. So will universities head hunt researchers with valuable social media scores?

Next he looked at Slideshare statistics, using a presentation by Steve Wheeler as a case study. Wheeler made a presentation to 15 people, but his slides were viewed by over 15,000 people on Slideshare. Kelly asked us to consider the relationship between the number of views and the value of this resource. He also examined statistics from the collection of IWMW slides, observing that the commercial speakers had higher view rates, and that the most popular slides were not in corporate look and feel. This evidence could be used to challenge standard marketing perspectives.

Finally, Kelly compared Technorati and Wikio results to demonstrate that four people in the room were in the top 67 English language technology blogs. He pondered whether they should they share their success strategies, or how we could tell the story of this data in different ways.

To conclude, Brian emphasised that he believes this kind of analysis can inform decision making, so it is important to gather the data. However, the data can be flawed, so it is important to question it thoroughly.

View the presentation in full on Vimeo

The slides to accompany this talk are available on Slideshare

Learning From Institutional Approaches

Ranjit Sidhu, SiD

Sidhu focussed primarily on the role of pound signs in communicating particular messages and connecting social media metrics to reality in a powerful way.

He began by observing that the data is often vague. The analytics institutions receive look exactly the same as the analytics used by commercial organisations, despite the fact that their needs and objectives differ widely. He attributed this to the dominance of the technology, which has taken control over the information that gets delivered, thus ensuring everyone gets data that is easy to deliver, rather than data that is meaningful to them. Sidhu also observed that universities often fail to break down their data into relevant slices, instead viewing it at such a high level that it cannot usefully be interpreted in financial terms.

In a self-confessed rant, Sidhu emphasised that you have a chance to tell the narrative of your data. Most social media data is openly available, so if you don’t, someone else will and you will no longer have control over that narrative.

“You need to be proactive with your data. If you’re proactive, people don’t sack you.”

Sidhu went on to demonstrate the type of analytics dashboard he creates for universities, discussing the importance design as well as the analysis itself. His dashboard features nine groups of data and only three key themes, which fit onto one A4 sheet and are arranged in an attractive way. He also discussed his methodology when creating these dashboards, which involves finding out what people want to know first, then finding the data to match those requirements. This is the reverse of common practice, where people take the data that is readily available and try to fit that to their requirements.

He explained the need to match up offline experience with online experience to help to generate projections and quantify the savings produced by online tools and social media. He exemplified this by talking us through one of the most powerful statistics he creates: a calculation demonstrating the amount saved by online downloads of prospectuses compared to sending printed versions. This is usually around £500 per month. This takes the online data, combines it with existing data from the comparable offline process, and creates a tangible value.

He extended this to show other types of story we could tell with such data, including the potential value of a website visit from a specific country. Once you have this, you can more effectively demonstrate the monetary value of social media by using referrer strings to show how a visitor from that country reached your site, and therefore make better decisions about how you attract those visitors.

“You have to justify your spend. Your justification has to be based on what you are trying to do at that particular time.”

View the presentation in full at Vimeo

The slides to accompany this talk are available on Slideshare

Identity, Scholarship and Metrics

Martin Weller, The Open University

Weller posed many questions and points to ponder, focussing on how academic identity is changing now we are online.

He observed that identity is now distributed across different tools, with a greater tendency to intersect with the personal. There are more layers to consider: where once you had your discipline norms and your institutional norms, now there are more social media norms to observe to create cultural stickiness. You end up with a set of alternative representations of yourself, so your business card is now a much messier thing.

Weller went on to define impact as a change in behaviour, but emphasised that telling the story of impact online is actually very difficult. Your impact may be more about long term presence than an individual post. The metrics we currently use do not necessarily correspond to our traditional notions of academic impact: after all, what do views mean? What do links mean? What do embeds mean? How do they compare to citations?

He put forward the accepted view that blogging and tweeting provide you with an online identity, which drives attention to more traditional outputs. He placed this in the context of a digital academic footprint, which helps tell the story of the impact you are having within your community. Whilst metrics can be useful for this, he warned that they could also be dangerous, with official recognition leading to a gameable system.

He concluded by illustrating a sandwich model explaining why metrics will be increasingly important to what academics do: with top-down pressure from above to demonstrate impact when applying for funding, and bottom-up pressure from individuals asking why their impact via social media doesn’t count. Once you’ve got those two pressures, you have an inevitable situation.

View the presentation in full on Vimeo

The slides to accompany this talk are available on Slideshare

Impact of Open Media at the OU

Andrew Law, The Open University

Law discussed the activities of the Open University when monitoring the various media channels used to disseminate content and how these metrics have led to real, significant funding decisions.

He observed that several of their online media channels did not necessarily have a very clear strategic remit. However, they found that the data was increasingly asking the question: “What is the purpose of all this activity?” Deeper analysis of this data led to the development of clearer stategies for these channels, based on their core institutional aims.

Law emphasised the importance of having all of the information about the different channels in one place to help dispel the myths that can grow up around particular tools. He used the example of iTunes U, which gets huge amounts of internal PR on campus, whilst channels like OpenLearn and YouTube sit very quietly in the background. However, the reality is very different and he observed that one of the challenges they face is ensuring that the broad story about the performance of all of these channels is well understood by the main stakeholders.

Law expanded on this, noting that whilst the iTunes U download statistics provide a positive story, it does not actually perform well against their KPIs compared to other channels, despite little or no investment in those other channels. He observed that their pedagogical approach to iTunes U – which includes offering multiple, small downloads, with transcripts and audio downloaded separately – can inflate the numbers. He compared this to their YouTube channel, which has received very little investment, but is performing very effectively. He also discussed the OpenLearn story, which has been quietly outstripping other channels against their KPIs – particularly in terms of conversions, because it has a lot of discoverable content. He emphasised that this is a very positive story for the university, which needs to be told and built upon.

By demonstrating these realities, the data has demanded of management a much clearer sense of purpose and strategy. This has led to real investment. The OU has massively increased the amount of money spent on YouTube and OpenLearn, representing a significant change in strategy.

In conclusion, Law did note that, so far, the data has only helped the university, not the end user, so their next steps include mapping journeys between these channels to identify the traffic blockages and better tune the service delivered across the board.

View the presentation in full on Vimeo

The Script Kiddie’s Perspective

Tony Hirst, The Open University

Hirst provided a set of observations and reflections, which ranged from ethical issues about the use of statistics through to practical demonstrations of visualised data.

He began by observing that social media are co-opting channels that were private and making them public, so there is nothing inherently new going on. He quoted Goodhart’s Law, emphasising that, whilst measuring things can be good, once measures are adopted as targets they distort what you are measuring and create systems open to corruption.

Hirst went on to discuss the perils of summary statistics and sampling bias. He emphasised that the way you frame your expectations about the data and the information that can be lost in the processing of that data are both vital considerations if you are to accurately tell the story of that data.

Hirst discussed the role of citations as a traditional measure of scholarly impact and the ways your content can be discovered, and thereby influence through citation. He highlighted three layers of discovery: the media layer, the social layer and the search engine layer, each of which enables your material to be discovered and therefore influence behaviour. He noted that if links come through to your own domain, you can already track how they are reaching your content. What is difficult to track is when there is lots of social media activity, but none of it is coming back to your domain.

Hirst demonstrated some approaches to tracking this type of activity, including the Open University’s Course Profiles Facebook app; Google search results, which are including more personalisation; and social media statistics gleaned through APIs, many of which can be accessed via an authentication route using OAuth.

Hirst concluded by discussing some visualisations of Twitter communities to show how these can provide insight into external perspectives and how we are defined by others in our community.

View the presentation in full on Vimeo

The slides to accompany this talk are available on Slideshare

Conclusions

The workshop brought forward a number of concerns, that were often less about the tools and technologies involved, but more about the ethics and pitfalls of formalising the measurement of social media activity. The main concern seemed to be the potential for creating a gameable system, or metrics do not reflect reality in a useful way. Ensuring that the metrics we use are fit for purpose will not be an easy challenge, but the discussions held within this workshop helped to identify some potential routes to improving the value and integrity of social media data.

Brian Kelly recently asked What are UK Universities doing with iTunes U?As an early adopter Brian invited me try to answer that question and to pick up on some of the comments which his post generated.

Let’s be clear on one thing – no one is fooling themselves. Apple is a hardware vendor intent on sales and iTunes U is just one of many ways in which it drives custom to its devices. Some have a philosophical objection to engaging with “trade” in this way, but for me the post-CSR university world demands that we use of the best that the commercial sector can make available to us. Have I sold my soul for the Yankee dollar? Maybe – but I’d kind of like a job next year. Strangely those that argue otherwise seem to accept Microsoft, Google and the rest.

Having dispensed with that argument let me examine why I believe that Apple has a positive contribution to make to higher education. I can think of no other major hardware vendor which has had such a clear policy over many years of engagement with education. And I’m not talking discount here – I mean services and assistance.

During 2004, Duke University bravely decided to issue iPods to its intake and to populate the devices with course material, timetables etc. Since there was no easy way to update the content en masse, Duke approached Apple to see what could be done. “Project Indigo” was born and iTunes U was the result. What’s important here is that Apple reacted to the requirement of a university and worked with Duke to deliver something that met its need.

It’s worthy of note too that many of the iTunes U team have backgrounds in education rather than software engineering or sales. Indeed Jason Ediger, who has a typical corporate title but for the purpose of this article heads up iTunes U, is a former teacher and educational technologist in the public sector.

Anyway, here are some of my views on “popular” opinions.

iTunes U is a closed ecosystem

Yes it is but the arguments for not using it are thin. In a comment on Brian’s post Andy Powell worried that:

… the overarching emphasis of sites who have bought into iTunesU is that they have bought into iTunesU – the other routes to content are presented as secondary to that. To me, that implies that users and lecturers who choose to use that route are somehow second class citizens of the institution.

I can only speak for UCL, but I would worry about any institution which bought into iTunes U as the only or primary means of distribution. Apple positively discourage use in this way – their take is “we provide the tool as one channel of communication“. UCL’s engagement with iTunes U came out of our desire to develop podcasting and other means of multimedia distribution as part of our mission to increase reach as London’s Global University. We were developing in that direction before iTunes U came to Europe. As far as primary teaching materials are concerned the Moodle course page remains the focus – the podcasts (whether taken from iTunes U or via feeds) are a value-added service to students. This is important for a metropolitan institution where students spend time offline on trains and buses getting about.

It is expensive to run

It depends. If you buy in to iTunes U without a background in multimedia distribution it could be, but I would argue that if you have not worked out a content or media distribution strategy taking into account a range of channels you shouldn’t be looking at iTunes U anyway. I have a department of around 30 souls of which a part (0.25 – 0.5 fte) of one post is a direct result of iTunes U, and that came a year after we joined. We have a multimedia unit who have been producing video since before U-matic was the format of the future. Over time the unit has moved with technology and now concentrates on streamed output and download formats – the staff complement hasn’t varied, they just do things differently. And we’d be doing all that to support a variety of distribution channels anyway.

It is PR fluff

For some reason this view is quite prevalent among those who don’t use the system and in my opinion misses the point of iTunes U completely. Sure, there is publicity to be had and, in UCL’s case as a launch partner, was valuable. Of course general PR shorts can be provided. But the real assets should be educational and examples of your institution’s scholarship. How you choose to do this and what material you provide is down to you. We increasingly provide course materials via the internal authenticated part of iTunes U to complement other teaching materials – others would argue that the provision of OER of high quality is the best PR there is for a university.

What wider and innovative uses could be made of the system in future?

Brian asks what the future holds in terms of innovative use of the system. Some of the most interesting uses we heard about at the iTunes U Conference in Munich involved the provision of primary sources for research. Duke University Libraries showed AdViews, a collection of 16mm movie film which had been digitized and which included thousands of TV commercials from the 1950′s through to the 1980′s. At Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich over 10,000 PDFs are available as LMU has chosen to provide all dissertations stored in its library back to 2002 as downloads. I’ll admit that at UCL we have yet to fulfill one of our original goals which was to open the system up to students as a collaborative environment and to submit work for assessment but that’s a matter of resource priority internally rather than a limitation of the system. Julie Usher has posted some other thoughts on innovations discussed at the conference.

Will institutional users regret lack of flexibility if Apple move in a different direction?

The lack of future-proofing is to my mind another non-argument because of the way iTunes U is architected. Apple maintain the framework and the serving of links via the iTunes Store mechanism while the feeds and media files themselves are hosted at the institution. This used not to be the case but all new sites since mid-2008, including all UK institutions, are split-hosted. This means that even if Apple pull the plug tomorrow all of your feeds and content remain yours and intact, and deliverable via whatever other channels you have in place.

Those who don’t buy into the ecosystem are 2nd class citizens

Again, if you are only providing iTunes U content this could be seen as an issue but not if you’re adopting the multi-channel model. I accept that at UCL we do sometimes plug iTunes U over other channels and that it’s something we should address. The content is nonetheless available for pretty much any modern device.

The content has poor discoverability

Because the iTunes software is a proprietary browser it does not afford discoverability to search engines. Apple fully accept that this has been an issue and have recently been including iTunes U in their iTunes Preview service. This is a conventional Web-based service which lists and includes metadata for all content in the system. Although it is early days and usage has not pumped too much to the top of Google rankings yet, search for a specific item by title and Google will return a top result. Audio content can be played directly in the page though it is still necessary to link out to iTunes to play video at present. Try searching for “Why species are fuzzy“ for an example. We also provide links to the preview service for the most popular items from our iTunes U launch page.

So…

… is there a cost-saving to adopting iTunes U as opposed to creating custom portals? Certainly the development grunt is removed and the system offers students who come to us with their own devices (another saving as I argued at the recent FOTE10 event) having bought into the ecosystem access to our content. For those of us committed to the distribution of media content whatever the channel the issue remains that the content has to be created and managed and therein lies the cost. I believe therefore that our efforts should lie in keeping the creation process efficient and demonstrating the value of the content to our users and paymasters. Content is, after all, still king – but as noted at the Munich Conference:

@thStamm: RT @jeremyspeller … content is king or there’s no point … I agree but we all want king arthur not king richard II #itunesuconf2010

Jeremy Speller has been involved with the UCL Web presence since 1995. Having headed UCL Web Servicesfor a number of years, Jeremy is now Director of Learning & Media Services which, along with the Web, covers AV, design, learning technology, multimedia and photography. Prior to full-time involvement with the Web, Jeremy’s background was in planning and statistics at UCL and previously at the University of Birmingham. Way back when he ran the Overseas Research Students Awards Scheme at what was then CVCP.

Some of Jeremy’s presentations are on SlideShare. You can also follow Jeremy on Twitter: @jeremyspeller

Twitter conversation from Topsy: [View]

About Imperial

Imperial College London is a science-focussed institution with a reputation for excellence in teaching and research with approximately 12,000 full time students.  The Library comprises the Central Library and the Mathematics Department Library, located on our South Kensington campus, as well as campus libraries at Charing Cross Hospital, St Mary’s Hospital, Chelsea and Westminster Hospital, Brompton Hospital, Hammersmith Hospital and Silwood Park.

Background

Our first two blogs were created by liaison librarians, Ruth Harrison and myself, in March 2006. There were three main reasons we considered using a blog.

Firstly, we had tried sending out emails and newsletters to departments informing them of relevant developments.  Problems with this method included academics wanting different formats, or complaining about email overload.  From our perspective, as a newsletter tended to be produced only once a term, information we wanted to get out to them quickly was often out of date by the time it was sent.

There was the option of adding pages to the library website, however this relied on us getting information to another library staff member, and then waiting for them to put the page up.  Which if you needed to get information out to staff/students quickly was not the ideal solution.

Finally, the library Web site doesn’t provide detailed subject specific information pages, which academics had complained about to us, so we wanted to address this issue – the blogs were a way in which we could provide very specific information and only to those people who wanted it.

As such, we felt a blog would be an ideal way to be able to communicate quickly, effectively and directly with our respective departments about information that was relevant to them. Blogs would enable us to post content as we needed to, they would be easy to set up and maintain, and we could delegate responsibility to staff where appropriate.  It also meant academics could set up an RSS feed to the pages so they could control how they viewed the information.

WordPress software

We decided to start the blogs using the free blogging software from WordPress.  It was a fairly new option at the time, but it was getting good reviews, seemed to be flexible, offered some useful features and was free.

Getting agreement from management

Working on the assumption that it is much easier to sell an idea that you can demonstrate we created a working prototype and began posting content to the blogs before presenting them to our respective managers.  They then took them to the relevant management meetings.  Although there was some unease about the lack of branding, and the idea that at the time not all liaison librarians would have a blog, it was agreed that as this was a form of communication, specific to a liaison librarian and their department (not unlike email) that we could continue.

Over the past 3 1/2 years, other liaison librarians have seen the success of our blogs and have created their own.  We now have thirteen blogs covering a variety of subject areas.  There is currently no specific ‘library style’ for the blogs, although some look more ‘Imperial-like’ than others.

Blog authors

Our blog authors are a mix of library staff – though all work in Library’s Faculty Support Services for Teaching and Research Directorate – as the blogs are aimed staff and students in specific departments/subject areas.  As such, the relevant library liaison team are responsible for the blog.  This could be a single person or more than one member of the same team.  Our medicine blog is aimed at all medical staff and students and as such members of staff from all of the medical campuses contribute to this blog.

Target audience

Each of our blogs has a different target audience, depending on what is thought appropriate for that subject area.  This can include:

• Academic/research staff
• Postgraduate research students
• Postgraduate taught course students
• Undergraduate students

For example the maths and physics blog that I am responsible for (as I’m no longer responsible for chemistry) is aimed at academic and research staff, and research post-graduate students, although some content is relevant to post-graduate taught course students and I do make them aware of its existence.  It is not so relevant to the undergraduate students, however I do have a maths projects blog I have created to support the projects they work on in the first and second year of their course.

Content

This is also something that relies on the particular person or group of people responsible for each blog.

Examples of what people include in their blogs:

• New resources including new book purchases and journal subscriptions
• News
• Custom search engines
• Journal citation reports/bibliometrics information
• Help/advice pages
• Support for teaching sessions
• Identifying key resources such as e-books
• Highlighting relevant parts of the library website
• Highlighting the physical location of relevant collections
• Overview of relevant key database and referencing information

Generally, we would try not to duplicate information found on the library Web site, but do highlight relevant content.

How long we spend maintaining our blogs

As you can imagine, this differs depending on who is working on the blog.  I did a quick survey of fellow bloggers as to how often they post on their blogs and this ranges from a couple of times a week to once a month.  Personally, I must confess I don’t spend as much time on mine as I used to, though my team member Katie does most of the posting these days.

Publicity/Marketing

You can find a link to our blogs on our library homepage and there is also a link from the College blogs page.  I’ve also got links on the Physics department website and the Maths Library web page.

For my blog, I email department staff, PhD students and MSc students at least once a term, reminding them the blog is there and highlighting any current news. Some bloggers use Feedburner which enables them to give people the option to receive updates by email.

Our Life Sciences team introduce their blogs to students in induction sessions and point out useful features.

This is possibly something we could market better than we do so at the moment. Suggestions from fellow bloggers include giving them a higher profile, making them more visually appealing, perhaps giving them a similar style/layout.

Success?

As a whole our blogs have been very successful – they are all getting used.  They enable us to raise our profile as liaison librarians within the departments we work with, and provide our users with a resource that is specific to their areas of expertise.

In the words of one of our Life Sciences bloggers:

“Subject blogs are an ideal way to gather relevant subject specific material together in one place for your staff and students, they can be tailored and expanded to meet the need and are much more flexible than having to coordinate an official webpage update. We introduce our students to them in inductions and point out useful areas such as ‘Finding Books’ (which is a well-used page) and Academic Writing Skills (another well-used page which lists academic writing skills books in the library with links to the catalogue – this really picked up over the summer when Masters students were focussing on writing up).“

The statistics available via WordPress do enable you to see details about how many people are viewing your blog, who is referring to your blog, what the top posts and pages are, search terms people are using to find you, and what people are clicking on and incoming links.  However, this doesn’t include RSS feeds (unless you are using Feedburner).  And these statistics do demonstrate that our blogs are being used.

Personally, I didn’t expect loads of comments on my blog – I use it more as a means of getting relevant information out to my departments (maths and physics) – however I do encourage people to get in contact via the comments mechanism of the blog. I have installed a MeeboMe widget on my blog which hasn’t had a great deal of use (though the widget I installed on the blog I created for my maths undergraduate students has had a few enquiries). My humanities colleague has also tried MeeboMe with limited success.

Our Life Sciences team has noticed that the more time they have invested in “developing, populating and marketing (not to mention regularly updating) the blog has seen a continued growth in usage figures”.

Another unexpected outcome has been the interest from third parties such as Victor Hemming from Mendeley who had seen “posts we had put up about referencing and networking for researchers. This initial contact led to Mendeley coming to Imperial to give a personal introduction. It was good to know that our blog was attracting the attention of useful people and sending them in our direction”.

Sustainability

Our blogs have been running for 3 and half years now and show no signs of slowing down. The bloggers I have been in touch with all feel that it is worth the time they spend maintaining and updating them.

Jenny Evans,
Liaison Librarian: Maths and Physics
Imperial College
London
Email: j.evans@imperial.ac.uk
Blog: http://physmaths.wordpress.com/

This month’s guest blog post has been written by another co-author of the paper. Below Paul Bevan, National Library of Wales describes how a national library is engaging with the opportunities provided by Web 2.0. Paul has recently been appointed to the post of Senior Research Officer (Web 2.0) and, as he describes is “very keen to work with libraries and librarians to explore all areas of emerging Web approaches“.  If you have an interest in the issues described in this post, feel free to respond to Paul, either on this blog or directly with Paul.

The National Library of Wales is one of the great libraries of the world and has a remit to:

“collect, preserve and give access to all kinds and forms of recorded knowledge, especially relating to Wales and the other Celtic countries, for the benefit of the public, including those engaged in research and learning“

As a result our readers represent a extremely varied demographic, reflecting the diversity of our published material, archival and other collections.

The Web and the online delivery of resources has been integral to the Library’s service portfolio for many years, providing a access to its resources in a way which helps to overcome distance and availability issues. To this end, the Library has an extensive digitization programme which has provided virtual access to some of the greatest treasures in the collections through a ‘Digital Mirror‘ using innovative access methods to deliver an enhanced user experience for remote readers.

Looking to the Future: Web 2.0

We’re constantly building on this solid foundation by seeking new ways of providing access to our resources and ‘Web 2.0′ and the Social Web are key to realising the goal of enhancing our remote provision. The use of Web 2.0 approaches to achieve Library 2.0 delivery is ingrained in the new Library strategy ‘Shaping the Future’ [pdf] which outlines the Library’s desire to explore collaborative and diverse models using external resources. This will allow the Library to leverage Web platforms which are heavily focused on user engagement in order to deliver future services. Leading up to this shift in emphasis for Web developments the Library conducted a review of how a National Library might understand the concept of ‘Web 2.0′ and how we might best make use of our existing digital resources in a Web 2.0 environment.

Of course, the we’re not just looking at the way in which we can enhance our collections through new technologies and platforms – the current Web content represents a proportion of the information produced by the Library and there is a ‘hidden’ silo of professional, training and development information (some of which is exposed through the Digital Asset Management Development Wiki, as well as a range of “lost opportunities” (such as guest talks which could in the future be streamed via the Web). Beyond this there are clear examples from other organisations of best practice in using the Web to communicate internally and to share procedures and information through wikis and other technologies.

The Library has begun to increase the level of Web 2.0 services available by creating presences in online environments (including presences on Facebook and YouTube) as well as by beginning to allow reuse of its data – initially through a pilot Wikipedia project. The Library is also developing an XML feed of its events (including exhibitions and talks) through the Typo3-based content management system underlying the Library’s main website.

Third-party Web environments will be key to the future delivery of library services and we’re also actively looking to explore how the exposure of data in open formats can allow the use of leading edge user interfaces and Web front-ends. One concern for the Library is that the ‘spreading out’ of services onto commercial and external sites might conflict with existing policies around accessibility, sustainability, and the commitment to bilingual access.

The Library is also host to a Welsh Assembly Government funded project to provide an innovative and flexible service delivery platform for all types of libraries in Wales. The library.wales.org Web site employs Web 2.0 technologies including social bookmarking and RSS to provide an alternative environment engaging with the public. This project explicitly includes the development of new services and the support of those services, allowing libraries to explore Web 2.0 technologies in a ‘safe’ environment where best practice can be easily shared.

The Library is also home to the not-for-profit company Culturent Cymru, which has taken great steps in bringing new levels of interaction to objects from cultural repositories from all accross Wales. Culturenet Cymru projects include Community Archives Wales – where users can upload their images via Flickr – and Gathering the Jewels- which has recently launched an enhanced GIS interface.

What Next for the National Library of Wales?

The Web’s ever-changing nature provides an exciting and challenging environment for any library service and the National Library of Wales has sought to directly engage with the opportunities that Web 2.0 will offer. In order to best do this the library has recently committed to a six-month review of the possibilities of Web 2.0 and emerging Web Technologies.

In my role as Senior Research Officer (Web 2.0) I will be exploring best practice from knowledge organisations around the world as well as possible technological approaches and content partnerships. The resulting Web 2.0 Strategy will provide the Library with a chance to build upon and mainstream the work detailed above and to explore new ways of working with Library users in a networked environment. I’m very keen to work with libraries and librarians to explore all areas of emerging Web approaches, so feel free to get in touch with me at paul.bevan@llgc.org.uk.

The guest blog slot provides an opportunity to include some different voices and views on the UK Web Focus, which can provide a fresh insight in the various topics covered in this blog.

I’m therefore pleased to welcome this guest blog post from Jo Alcock, Academic Information Assistant for the Harrison Learning Centre at the University of Wolverhampton – although perhaps better known in some circles as Joeyanne Libraryanne for her Joeyanne Libraryanne blog. In her post Jo describes a variety of ways in which Web 2.0 services are being used and goes on to highlight some of the challenges which this approach entails. I should also add that Jo is a contributor to the paper on Library 2.0: Balancing the Risks and Benefits to Maximise the Dividends which I’ll be presenting at the Bridging Worlds 2008 Conference.

Setting the Scene

I work at the University of Wolverhampton which has a large proportion of part-time students (some schools are up to 70% part-time). The University is also geographically spread across the region with five campuses in total. This means students do not always come into Learning Centres and often use the closest geographical centre rather than their subject specific centre. We have recently adopted a University-wide Blended Learning strategy to support the changing nature of our students, and the Learning and Information Services department are developing ways to support students from wherever they choose to study. This includes obvious things like e-journals and e-books, as well as virtual reference support and Web 2.0/Library 2.0 initiatives to support students online.

Current Initiatives

Blogs

We currently have five subject blogs (the School of Computing and IT Blog, School of Applied Sciences Blog,  School of Engineering and the Built Environment Blog, School of Humanities, Social Sciences and Languages Blog and the Wolverhampton Business School Blog to support students and staff of particular academic schools, along with an University of Wolverhampton Electronic Resources Blog for updates to services. We also have a number of project related blogs and internal communication blogs.

Social Networking

The Learning Centres have a Facebook Page which was established at the end of last year. The page includes links to relevant parts of our Web site, our aggregated RSS feeds (from our blogs) and search applications. One of the most useful features of the page are sending updates to “fans” – another way of letting users know about our services and reaching them where they already are (a quick scan of any communal PCs show numerous Facebook users!).

Wikis

We have started exploring wikis and although we do not currently have a departmental wiki we have a number of small scale wikis for sharing information.

Online calendars

I’ve included this as although it’s not usually included in general “Library 2.0″ initiatives, it’s something that we’ve found really useful. We have been using Google Calendar (see the University of Wolverhampton InfoBites Calendar) to manage our events for a few months now and it’s so much easier than updating numerous places when the timetable changes or a new event is added. Now we just update the calendar on Google and the changes are reflected wherever the calendar is embedded. Users can also subscribe to the calendar or add single events to their own calendar. We’ve also recently used it as a shared calendar for scheduling purposes for our busy induction weeks.

Barriers

There have been a number of barriers to the Library 2.0 developments, some which may have been exclusive to us but many that I imagine are shared with other libraries.

External Hosting and Software

Many of the Web 2.0 products we use are external products, often hosted externally. This has immediate issues when it comes to reliability and stability. Services change over time, which is often a positive thing but may mean that your service no longer functions in the same way you wanted it to. You may find that it suffers “downtime” whilst the software is being upgraded or simply because the servers are not reliable. You may even find that the service ends completely without warning.

This can be a big issue for institutions, and understandably so. An alternative option whilst still utilising the technologies is to use open source software but host it internally therefore passing control back to the institution. Examples of this are using the WordPress.org blogging software (rather than their hosted service at WordPress.com) and the MediaWiki software for wikis. This way, the institution can update when it wants to (and also therefore not when it doesn’t want to!) and also has greater flexibility with the functionality and style of the software.

Staff Awareness

Another issue has been lack of awareness and uncertainty about the technologies utilised. Quite often, I have found that people are pleasantly surprised when they realise how easy it actually is to use. I understand that some of the software is bewildering at first experience though, and getting over that stage if you are uncertain about the fundamentals of the technology (for example, what on earth is a wiki or a blog?!) can be a big hurdle. Something that I think is now being recognised by the profession is that more time needs to be allocated for keeping staff up-to-date and providing training or even just time during work to explore the technologies.

Culture Change

This is something I am particularly aware of, probably because I am part of the so-called “net generation”. I like to share experiences and work collaboratively, but I know this can be quite a culture change to many who are used to working in isolation and keeping their work to themselves. When you have a shared calendar for example, or a shared blog, it can take some getting used to. Clear definition of roles and expectations from the beginning can help alleviate this.

User Needs and Experience

This is one of the main issues for me – although I am a keen user of many new technologies and use a lot in my own life, I only want to adopt them at work if they make sense from a user point of view – whether this is other staff when we are thinking about a shared resource like a wiki, or our community when it is a development for users.

Over the summer we have thought a lot about the future of the blogs; whether to merge the subject blogs or keep them separate, and what the actual purpose of each blog is. There are many issues around merging the blogs – such as whether to include all subjects (not all currently have a blog) and the logistics of subscribing to your subject only. The main issue for me was to look at it from a user point of view. With many subjects all on one blog, you can use categories to create separate RSS feeds for each subject. This initially seemed like a feasible way of merging the blogs whilst still allowing users to subscribe to only their subject. However, from examining our blog stats, most of our users subscribe by e-mail, suggesting that many of them do not currently use RSS feeds. I considered having a guide on the blog and holding training sessions, but in the end decided it was too much to expect of our users and would likely put them off subscribing if it was too confusing.

Ultimately, we are here for our users and if something doesn’t make sense or isn’t of use to them, there is little point us investing time in it. For example, if Facebook fell dramatically in popularity, it would make no sense to continue to develop our Facebook page and we should instead concentrate our efforts on whatever else our users are familiar with.

This is a fundamental part of the Web 2.0 philosophy for me; have a go – if it works, great, if it doesn’t, there’s no big loss. I like to invest a small amount of time trying something and assess whether or not it is worth pursuing after you’ve given it a chance. If it isn’t or the barriers are too great, just scrap it or try something else.

How about you?  What barriers have you experienced with Library 2.0 Initiatives and how do you overcome them? Please share your thoughts in the comments.

Jo Alcock, University of Wolverhampton

Hannah Hiles has been Media & PR Officer for Keele University in Staffordshire since August 2006. Previously she was Keele’s Alumni Officer and before joining the University she was a journalist at The Sentinel newspaper in Stoke-on-Trent. Her views are her own and not necessarily those of Keele University.

In just 16 months of using Facebook as a corporate tool we have developed a thriving community with links spanning the globe; it has revolutionised the way we run some events, reconnected us with dozens of “lost” alumni and provided a platform where we can interact with prospective students in their own domain.

The Keele University alumni LinkedIn group in particular provides networking opportunities for our professional graduates while at the same time allowing us to learn more about their careers and tailor our services to their needs.

And all this for just the cost of my time – we have no fancy paid-for online community platforms here.

We first started using Facebook in January 2007. One of our graduates had created a group called Keele Alumni and we thought we should get in there with our own official group, so Keele Society (http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2224498996) was born. We didn’t go through any committees or get approval from anyone; we just recognised the potential and seized the opportunity, little knowing how quickly Facebook would grow within just a few months.

We soon added our official Keele University Page (http://www.facebook.com/pages/Keele-United-Kingdom/Keele-University/19097243336), as well as the Keele-network only Love:Keele group (http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=9189098385&ref=ts to help me find student case studies.

One of the most exciting uses of Facebook for me has been the creation of groups aimed at prospective students. Keele 2008 (http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=7459213335) and Keele University 2009 (http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=17727959813&ref=ts) have proved a lifeline for applicants wanting to get the lowdown on Keele from the people who know and love it best – the current students.

A team of volunteers from among our Student Academic Representatives (StARs) check the group regularly and answer any questions. Other keen students, including Students’ Union sabbatical officers, also participate. I monitor what is being said and give an official University response when necessary but usually allow the students to take the lead.

A major part of Keele University’s appeal is its friendly atmosphere, so I try to reflect that through my communication style. Our Twitter updates (http://twitter.com/KeeleUniversity are a mixture of news stories with web-links and general observations about what is happening on campus spoken in the “voice” of the University. I’m still very new to Twitter and I don’t think I have fully grasped the possibilities of its use, but it’s another opportunity for communication with prospective students, current staff and students and alumni to be explored.

The University recognises Web 2.0 as an important area for growth, so much so that developing Keele’s e-communications strategy has now been formally built into my job description.

Eddie Byrne is Senior Librarian with Dublin City Public Libraries with responsibility for Web Services. A graduate of University College Dublin School of Library and Information Studies, he has worked for many years in the public library sector. From 2000-2002 he served as Metadata Project Co-ordinator for the Irish public service.

Eddie’s review of the workshop, in which he describes the promotional video for the event, the structure of the workshop and the workshop materials, may be of particular interest to those who work in public libraries, museums and archives, as UKOLN is in the process of developing a series of events and briefing documents to support this community. It is particularly pleasing to receive this evidence of the success of the event.

The first thing I must say is that the class had an agreeable format, with Kara and Brian interchanging in order to keep us attentive and on our toes (or rather the edge of our seats, seats were provided)! I also welcomed the multiple handouts distributed during the class – it saved one having to take copious notes, thereby freeing one up to do some ‘active’ listening and actually participate. Simple but invaluable. Kara also introduced a little technological gizmo that allowed her to poll participants to get their input at various points, fun and functional at the same time.

We involved ourselves in a number of exercises; one to identify possible blog uses and the benefits to be accrued, another to identify potential barriers, those we thought could be easily addressed, and those that presented greater challenges. The fruits of our labour were posted to the class wiki (in real time!), so I won’t reproduce them here, they can be seen over on the WetPaint wiki. Also, in this context, Kara’s presentation entitled “Why Have a Blog?” was particularly good in covering all the angles.

It is worth saying at this point that what I found of particular value was Kara’s and Brian’s use of the Web as a delivery platform and as a means of networking with potential participants prior to the conference. The social network platfom ‘Ning’ was used in this context in order to illicit user experiences that would contribute to the substance of the class. Some of the presentations were available on ‘Slideshare’ prior to the conference and others on ‘Google Presents’ immediately afterwards; making presentations available in this manner can be of great advantage to participants preparing in advance or reviewing material afterwards.

Many other topics were of course covered in the masterclass: blog basics; the technical issues in setting up and maintaining a blog (hosting, software, look and feel); launching and monitoring your blog (marketing, statistics); evaluation (role, policies, feedback); and more besides. What is of particular value in a workshop or masterclass such as this is that you are required to do some critical thinking, and you also get the invaluable perspective of others, those working in different areas, and therefore bringing a different perspective, as well as those who have tried something, been there, done that. I found it interesting to note that, despite the participants working in diverse areas and coming from different backgrounds, there was a commonality in terms of issues, concerns, perceived opportunities, and most of all a shared enthusiasm for using a tool that facilitates communication, user participation, user engagement, collaboration, and resource building.

If I can refer to that word ‘practical’ again, this class was that. From forcing us to ask ourselves the ‘why’ of doing it, the ‘how’ to doing it, to the ‘watch out’ while doing it. I particularly liked Brian’s suggestion of having a documented blog policy – I think it becomes so much easier for you, your organisation and your users if you have it down on paper (remember paper?). It clarifies so much. Stating the purpose and scope of your organisation’s blog, the intended audience, policy on comments and third party use. I also welcomed the focus on demonstrating value, using evidence to justify the setting up of a blog in the first place: analysing your blog statistics and seeking feedback, asking the user for their views on the blog and how it may better serve them. Brian recently involved himself in such an exercise on his blog, and the results make interesting reading. He provided a handout with those too!

The suggestion was put forward during the class that one should experiment with blogs for particular events or occasions. That to do so gave a taste of the strengths and opportunities of blogs. I would go further. They are more than just experimental, a one-off event of note, or a particular programme with a short-term lifespan, are ideal candidates of themselves for blogs in my estimation; they are relatively easy and quick to set up, involve little in the way of overheads, and are as easily de-activated should you want to when the event is over (I favour leaving the blog visible as a testament to the event and as a permanent record). And there is always a high profile event around the corner that merits its own blog. I indeed make widespread use of them in my library service. And whereas they do help inform and guide you in implementing other blogs in your organisation, their existence is no less important than that permanent presence you desire with your ‘lead’ blog. Is it contradictory to say that the temporary blog is here to stay?

The guest blog spot for November provides an opportunity to hear from participants at an event I have participated at recently. We start with Pernille Helholm‘s reflections on the half day Blogging Masterclass facilitated by myself and Kara Jones.

About Me

I work at a large company within the medical device industry in Copenhagen, Denmark. I am a (solo) librarian, information specialist and furthermore I attend The Master of Library and Information Science programme at The Danish School of librarianship.

At work my tasks are providing competitor surveillance, scientific searches, patent searches, supplying our users with all kind of information in the form of journal, books, web pages, etc. and to guide them through the various systems.

Furthermore (and very important!) I have to develop the library services all the time. I also have a blog at pnille.wordpress.com

The Guest Blog Post

Last year at Internet Librarian International 2006 I discovered a new world of social software, new and easy ways of communicating, the concept of sharing and some great new aspects of librarianship. So this year I signed up for the ILI2007 conference without hesitation. It was obvious to me, that I should attend the pre-conference Masterclass on Using Blogs Effectively within Your Organisation facilitated by Brian Kelly and Kara Jones.

During the past year I had explored many of the new social software tools and with the help of blogs, RSS, and online friends I constantly discovered new possibilities! And from all those tools I really find that blogging can be a very useful tool in an organisation like the one I work for.

I can see that it would be an excellent way for people within the organisation to share ideas, look for solutions to old and new problems, generate and administrate new ideas that lead to innovation.

Therefore, I decided that my goals for this masterclass were to bring home ideas and inspiration about blogging and share it with my organisation.

But how, where and when do I begin? Brian and Kara’s masterclass was right on target for finding answers to my questions. And I am happy to say, it was an absolute highlight at the conference for me. I have made a list of things that I particularly liked:

• The practical angle and down to earth approach.
• Our hosts talked about their personal experiences with blogging, which made it easy to relate to.
• They managed to involve the attendants with “voting” and group assignments.
• The handouts! Very practical and condensed format. Not just copies of the slides! Useful!
• The laughs and the relaxed, personal attitude of the speakers.
• The many good points they had to convince management and co-workers.
• The wiki that Kara updated with our input.
• That sometimes, it’s better to ask for forgiveness than to beg for permission.

I can find very few points for improvement, other than that it was much too short. I think that a full day with hands-on training would be very suitable. And for the next time I think it would be better to sit in an U-shape to improve interaction between the participants. I went back to my hotel with many thoughts in mind and I found that this Masterclass did give me answers to my questions of how, where and when to begin, plus a lot more! What I learned at the Masterclass has given me inspiration to start as soon as I get back to work

As I already described, I believe that blogging will be great for the company. But now I can put words and action to my thoughts. And I think the right way to start will be to get rid of my old one-way-information-intranet-web page and replace it with a blog. I decided, not to wait for permission from our IT department.

Practically, I will install a WordPress blog on an in-house server, so that I can keep the – often confidential – information between the walls of the company. I can use the features of a blog to share news otherwise distributed by mail and I can make additional pages for other content. After the initial launch of the blog, this will provide a great opportunity to start teaching my users about RSS in order to receive the library news on their desktop!

In a way you could call it a pilot project for internal blogging. It is going to be a great showcase for my users, and I am so sure that it will make a lot of people interested in blogging as a tool for the company!

And if anyone from the management or other sceptics will ask “What’s the big deal about blogging?” or “Why do we need one?” or “What’s wrong with e-mail?”, I will know what to answer!

I’ve attended ILI the past few years, serving on the advisory committee as well as presenting and teaching workshops, including on dedicated to blogging in 2005. I was happy to see Brian Kelly and Kara Jones are carrying that discussion forward with two sessions:

• Using Blogs Effectively Within Your Library and
• The Blogging Librarian: Avoiding Institutional Inertia

I look forward to reading blog coverage of their presentations.

Thinking about these presentations causes me to reflect on the history of the tool. In 2004, Merriam Webster online announced the most-searched word of the year was blog and noted that one of the most talked about online innovations of Web 2.0 was the use of blog software to create easily updated, content-rich Web sites.

The early definition the site provided offers insight into blogs’ genesis as a personal journaling tool:

Blog noun [short for Weblog] (1999) : a Web site that contains an online personal journal with reflections, comments and often hyperlinks provided by the writer.

From personal journaling onward, we can trace the evolution of blogging from “what I had for lunch” blogs to the adoption of the tool for businesses, organizations, and of course, librarians and libraries. In 2007, the thriving biblioblogosphere includes multiple library blogs as well as hundreds of individuals sharing their voices via personal, professionally focused blogs.

This summer, I completed my doctoral dissertation looking at those personal, professionally focused blogs. The research question centered around the motivations for librarians to write blogs. Based on the works of some library philosophers, I created and sought to prove my “Pragmatic Biblioblogger Model.” The model describes librarians who author a professionally focused blog beyond the scope of their job to find, share, and offer advice to others in the LIS profession. Constantly scanning via the tools of continuous computing, the pragmatic biblioblogger seeks to redesign library services in an era of enhanced technology. These librarians open comments and engage with other librarian bloggers to discuss and examine events, new technologies, and the LIS profession within a community they have created with a common goal: improving libraries.

I was pleased that my study yielded support for the model. As a participant, observer and examiner of the bibliobogosphere, I’ve seen a lot of changes, discourse and dissension – all of which add to the evolving nature of the medium within our profession.

When librarians blog for their institutions, it may seem that the mission is different, but it many ways it is most similar. Library weblogs, in all shapes and sizes from Ann Arbor District Library’s multiple blog presence to the smallest of the small “one person library” blog hosted at Blogger.com, sharing news and information is usually the number one goal. Pair this with what blogs do so well – enable conversation via commenting, librarians can now connect with their users online the way we have done across the desk for years.

These connections are playing out in some interesting ways in 2007: I’ve noticed the advent of administrator’s blogs, the extension of the blogging platform in some new and innovative ways, and the use of the tool as an educational vehicle for library staff to experience social software.

What was once the realm of the techie librarian in the basement of the library has moved to cadres of blogging librarians for individual libraries (such as my former library, the St. Joseph County Public Library in South Bend, Indiana, USA) on up to the actual involvement of administrators and directors. Look no further than Darien Library in Darien, Connecticut, USA for an example of a director’s blog.

There are definitely benefits to administrative blogging. It might be the library is about to launch a new initiative or fund raising campaign. The use of a blog as a communication mechanism to deliver transparent news and plans seems like a good fit. Properly marketed and utilized – key for an such project – the blog can be a visible means to connect users to library policy-makers. It would also set a good example for others in the library who may not want to participate. Top-down buy-in is so important for technology projects and organizational shifts to occur – and the voice of the director, shared openly and honestly, is a step in a good direction. Human discourse from the top might be very welcome in many libraries, internally and externally. Open comments would allow discussion. This also makes the library and staff visible on the Web.

Other library use blogs and more blog-like social tools as a clearinghouse of all manner of online content and links to multimedia offerings as well. Check out Allen County Public Library’s 2.0 clearinghouse to see this in action or take a look at Pierce County’s round up of their 2.0 tools with this post at Flickr.

Finally, no project has added more blogs to the Biblioblogosphere than Helene Blower’s Learning 2.0 course, used by libraries all over the world. As a means to acclimate staff to what blogs and other tools can do, there’s nothing better than actually doing it. Librarians and staff explore, play and report on their experiences via their blogs. Who knows how many may continue after the course is done – and how many may become vibrant voices within the Biblioblogosphere.

Are you curious? If you’re attending ILI be sure to check out the blog presentations – there’s still so much to discuss about this transformative tool. And please have a cup of tea for me as you enjoy the sessions, networking breaks and evening meals. ! If you’re reading from afar, explore on your own what’s happening online with blogs and other social tools. we truly are in the middle of an ongoing shift in libraries, where anyone can participate.

I am also very interested to hear what UK and other countries are doing with administrative blogs, 2.0 portals and Learning 2.0. Please share your comments here or email me.

Michael Stephens

Google’s famous for it, Flickr’s moved to Gamma, Moo are on an eternal 1.0 – yet still in institutions we plod on with a tired, slow-moving and opaque process for developing and enhancing applications. From our closed support lines to official notices on unread websites and applications mysteriously changing in front of a user’s very eyes we look staid and tedious. But it doesn’t have to be like that, we could be fast faced and interactive – but at what cost? Continuity? Uptime?

• you take too long rolling out software
• you don’t do enough unit testing or user testing

One of the leading ideas of eternal beta is small improvements all the time. It’s the preferred model for developing Web 2.0 applications (just look at Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and about a billion Silicon Valley startups). The essence is that if you’ve changed something small and you’re waiting for the next milestone before you release, you’re crazy – just deliver it. If it turns out to be wrong or broken in some way, you can just change it again.

There are a couple of things people typically reply with:

One of the big fears that it hasn’t been user-tested enough. Well, in institutions we’ve got thousands of technically-minded members – staff and students alike; what do you think the odds are on being able to make, say, twenty of them beta testers? (It’s critical to get testers from outside your team; your team are effectively the alpha testers) I mean, you’ve probably got bloggers, Facebook group founders and tech contacts everywhere. See who you can find to test your apps – it doesn’t have to be the same people for all of them, and make it worth their while either by delivering a better application to them than everyone else, or maybe some mark of kudos inside the application that everyone else can see.

This does rely on being able to get good feedback from your testers – hey, you’d hope that if your software is good enough they’ll be telling you anyway, but you can use incentives or whatever floats their feedback-giving boat. The important part is exposing the feedback communication channel; maybe it’s a forum, maybe it’s blog where you post the new features and they add comments, maybe it’s a weekly meetup in the bar. Whatever you do, talking to those people and making sure that they can see that there are other active testers, whom you’re listening to and actually replying to is A1 critical. No trust == no good feedback.

The other big fear is that this basically throws traditional software development and delivery out of the window (farewell, cruel Gantt chart). When a team suddenly has deliverable dates measured in the days rather than the months you suddenly discover that the priorities change and you start getting people-focussed software rather than something focussed on year-old requirements. This is where agile techniques start kicking in. Things like pair-programming, continuous integration, automated deployment are all your friends. Techniques like PRINCE2 and Scrum are there to pick up the rest of the slack.

In the real world, although my team isn’t quite there yet (notably with the feedback), we’re trying hard and it’s paying dividends in terms of delivered software and happier users.

Phil Wilson
Web Services
University of Bath

Phil’s blog: http://philwilson.org/blog/

• reliability
• reputation
• scale of the provider
• significance of us as a customer
• data ownership and openness
• fashion
• community
• flexibility

The full list was far too long to detail in this post, but a few were clearly more important than others. This became particularly evident when we proceeded to evaluate a number of well known Web services against the defined criteria.

For example, data access was critical in most Web services. Was the data available in an open standard that made it interoperable with other services? Having put data into the service, could you get it out again? Flexibility was another major concern for the API approach. Did the API allow us to achieve what we want to achieve?

I would argue, like Mark Pilgrim, that this should not be an issue, we should have access to our data, and all derived data, as a matter of course – it’s our data after all. Mark observes that “praising companies for providing APIs to get your own data out is like praising auto companies for not filling your airbags with gravel.“

Workshop participants also noted that there is no guarantee that a service will be provided in the future. A topic that Brian Kelly discussed here in this blog when Splashblog closed its doors. Brian suggested that such closures could be considered by some to be a clear justification for not making use of such external Web 2.0 services – a point made by a number of our session participants. Indeed, many services were marked down quite heavily since they are largely unproven beta services with no clear business model. Despite this healthy concern over the longevity of service offerings, workshop attendees felt that some services, such as Shibboleth, are more sustainable because they have public money behind them. However, as Brian goes on to observe, even public sector services are not guaranteed to be there forever. To support his point Brian cites a BBC news article describing the closure of 551 government Web sites and wonders what happens to data held by the AHDS when funding ceases.

The overall conclusion of our workshop attendees was that Web services should only be relied upon for non-critical functions in your institution. Over time we may become more comfortable with relying on third party services, but for now we need to be careful. I liken it to the development of voice communications technologies. We don’t worry about having a dial tone the next time we pick up the phone, but the recent Skype outage shows we can’t rely on the newer voice communications services. The result is that Skype is not suitable for emergency calls.

Reaching Sustainability Through Openness

In my opinion one way of moving towards more sustainable services at a sensible pace is through openness in the development of those services. That is, if a service uses open data standards, provides fully open access to all its data and its APIs and encourages users to participate in the ongoing development of the service, I, as a user, am more likely to stick with it past my initial, experimental, use. For example, I love the idea of Dopplr, but I haven’t gone past exploration because it fails to provide the data in format that is useful to my objectives (Editor’s Note: Phil Wilson pointed out that a Doppler API has recently been announced at http://dopplr.pbwiki.com/. This comment was added at the request of  Ross Gardler on 6 Septmeber 2007). Conversely, just 10 hours after the announcement of a beta API for OhLoh I had integrated OhLoh data into Simal, the OSS Watch project cataloguing tool. As soon as OhLoh produces an API for submitting data I’ll ensure the flow is two way, making both projects more likely to survive.

However, openness should not stop at the data and the APIs. I need to ensure that the service remains aligned with my strategic objectives. I want to be able to contribute directly to the flexibility and sustainability of the service in ways that suit my needs. This is where Oh Loh falls down, it is not open source and so my contribution options are limited.

Open source enables us, as users, to choose how to invest our resources in sustainable solutions. We can purchase related products such as support and hosting, or we can fund strategic development, or we can ensure our own staff help support and sustain the product through direct contribution of use cases, documentation, feature requests, bug fixes and even new feature implementations. All of these actions help ensure the product survives and continues to be available to our own organisation.

Web service companies will gladly accept similar contributions from us. The big difference between the two approaches is that with open source we have the freedom to decide where our resources are invested. We can maximise the impact our investment has on our individual utilisation of the service, thus making the service more useful. We are even free to take the software and create our own version should our objectives diverge considerably from the originating service provider (although this can usually be avoided if the project is well managed and cultivates a healthy community).

Most of us want the convenience of a service provider, but such convenience comes with the risk of potential lock-in and, even worse, the loss of a critical service. Having access to the source code means that we increase competition and consequently increase innovation in the code base. It does not prevent companies from differentiating themselves through the provision a more reliable and usable service within their chosen market niche.

Given the choice, I will always use a Web service that makes its source code available under an open source licence, even if that service is less developed than closed competitors. In most cases I will still purchase the service from a provider, but I want to keep my options open in order to ensure my own offerings are sustainable.

Our workshop participants largely agreed with this view, they too were more concerned about having control over their own organisations future in the long term than they were about the short term gains of adopting closed service models.

Ross Gardler
OSS Watch
OUCS
13 Banbury Road
University of Oxford
Oxford
OX2 6NN

OSS Watch Web site: http://www.oss-watch.ac.uk/
OSS Watch blog: http://involve.jisc.ac.uk/wpmu/oss-watch/

Debbie writes about the Institutional Web Management Workshop and the discussion group session she attended on “The Web Community” and the implications for the Web community.

From past experience, the discussion groups can be either really good or really bad. This year was no exception. I know of a few people who didn’t go back to their second discussion group session as they just didn’t think it was worth it. I know of one group where the chair turned up, said he wasn’t sure what they were supposed to be talking about, but that he wouldn’t be there the second day anyway… I think we actually had more people at our second session than the first. Word had obviously travelled that we were having a good discussion and really trying to come up with some answers … either that or someone had heard Mike mention beer.

We went into our session and did the usual … little eye contact, talk to no one. I suggested moving the chairs from classroom style rows, into a more discussion friendly circle-ish shape … and all of a sudden people started smiling and talking, and making eye contact! Mike soon put a stop to that with the regulation and totally hateful ’5 minutes to introduce yourselves to someone you don’t know’. Now this one is a little tricky… I’ve been going to IWMW for 6 years now. There are lots of people I don’t *really* know, but so many people I’ve seen around. So many names I’ve seen on documents and mailing lists, but like I say, I don’t really know them … but I almost feel as though I do.

Once we started the discussion it quickly transpired that we had quite a bit to say on the subject … 11 pages of notes in fact. And that only included the stuff that I was quick enough to write down. I also discovered that it’s actually quite difficult to be part of the discussion and write the notes. I wanted to jump in so many times, however, by the time I’d written up what was being said, someone else had got in first – and I had to write up their comments (repeat as necessary)!

After the conference I got the train back to London with Mike, his parting words were “thanks for writing the notes babe, just erm, type hem up and post them to me”. I sat at my desk about a week later looking at 11 pages of scrawl … Note to self: this just has to be easier if you do it straight away. Meaningless lines joining up one half a sentence with a whole load of words I couldn’t read, and some I clearly couldn’t spell… Only one thing for it… put the coffee on! I’m such a bugger for vacuuming the cat when there’s a rubbish job to be done.

Some time later, the notes started to emerge. What was really lovely about doing this job, apart from finishing it obviously, was the enthusiasm of the session really came back to me. The fact that we actually came up with action points. Things that we wanted to achieve … nothing that could be classed as rocket science, just practical things hat we want to put in place to take the ‘Web Management Community’ from being an idea, to a reality. Maintain the Facebook for IWMW, either year by year or a general IWMW group that we can all subscribe to. Try to encourage as many people as possible to sign up and become a part of it, and to think how we can make it bigger (can we incorporate any of the ideas from the Innovation competition…?). Like I said, not rocket science, but at least doable, something we can put our hands on … unlike the beer I was promised!!!

The mailing lists serve a purpose, they’ve worked well for many years to provide information, solutions, a point of contact … can we really call that a community though? When we go to the conference, we are only ever one drink in the bar away from making a fab new contact or a bloody good friend. With Facebook (or something similar) we can put a face to all the names we’ve seen around, or indeed a name to the face (how many people do we see year in year out and just can’t remember what they are called…?), we can post a comment, or make contact with someone we’ve wanted to speak to but don’t feel we know them well enough, we can invite people to gigs that are half way across the country … they might not be able to go – but god it’s nice to be asked (thanks Claire) … In short, we can create a community.

IWMW was the reason I joined Facebook. I wanted to know who else was going to the conference, all the details and any gossip … It’s turned into so much more than that for me though, and clearly that is the case for others too. People are using it, posting work related questions, joining groups that will provide us with more information and more contacts. I’ve managed to get back in touch with people I haven’t spoken to in years, made some really useful contacts, and made some lovely new friends too.

It’s scary to contact someone you don’t know for advice – how much easier is it to just get in touch and say “Thanks for  turning me into a vampire, by the way, do you know anything about…?“

Discussion notes are available on the IWMW 2007 wiki at http://iwmw2007.wetpaint.com/page/Discussion_F

Debbie Nicholson
Web Support Unit
University of Essex

Debbie’s contact details are also available on Facebook.

In this month’s opening guest blog post Anthony Leonard, who coordinated the live streaming of the plenary talks at IWMW 2007, shares his favourite moments and invites readers of the blog to suggest their preferences.

1. Satisficing
2. PLEs digested
3. Caught on camera

I’ve focused on the lighter side to get things going, but you might want to highlight something that made you think, learn, worry or recoil as much as smile or laugh – anything really that stuck in your mind and is worth a second look.

So go on, if you’d like to, why not find your favourite moments from the IWMW 2007 videos, click on the “Link to Now” button and post the URLs back as comments to this blog post.

Technorati Tags: IWMW2007