IWMW 2008 Now Open For Bookings

This year’s Institutional Web Management Workshop (IWMW 2008 ) will be held at the University of Aberdeen on 22-24^th July. The theme of this year’s event is “The Great Debate” and during the 3 days participants will have the opportunity to listen to a number of plenary talks which describe various examples of innovation and best practices which are taking place across the community. But more importantly the participants will be encouraged to contribute to a debate on the future of the institutional Web services - active participation in the parallel workshop sessions, discussion groups and during the social activities will be encouraged!

The event opens with a session on A Vision For The Future which features a talk by Cameron Neylon on “Science in the You Tube Age: How Web Based Tools are Enabling Open Research Practice” followed by one on “Web 2.0 and Brand: Theory and Practice” by Helen Aspell. And this year, for the first time, as well as opening with two high profile talks, the event will conclude with a talk on “Unleashing the Tribe” by Ewan McIntosh, a speaker of international renown who will be known to many through his edu.blogs blog.

The timetable for the event is available, together with details of the plenary talk and the 16 parallel sessions. The Web site is now open for bookings - and we encourage early bookings as the places on the parallel sessions will be allocated on a first come first served basis. Regular updates on the event will be provided on an RSS feed. This information will also be available on the IWMW 2008 news page.

How Blogs Can Help Museums To Engage With Their Users

In a recent blog post on the Cultural Interpretation & Creative Education blog Bridget McKenzie summarised the MLA and HLF views on 21st C Curation which were presented at a seminar given at UCL on 30^th April 2008.

Carole Souter, CEO of the HLF informed the audience that “‘We’re getting tough with people” and went on to say that “If you tell us that 200,000 more people are going to look at your website because of it, well, so what? How do you know they have really been engaged?“. The importance of user engagement was echoed by Roy Clare, CEO of MLA. In a comment on a project funded by the NOF-digitise programme he asked: “How they [the users] would engage with it?“.

I am really pleased that such views are being expressed so clearly by senior managers of public sector bodies. In the past I’ve been concerned an an emphasis on blunt usage statistics. But now the emphasis in the museums sector is on the quality of the user experience and user engagement. And, as Bridget observed, Carole Souter’s “suggestion was that if you are going to include digitisation into an HLF bid, it would have to involve people in specific thematic projects of local interest“.

If funding will only be available for digitisation projects which enable users to actively engage with the digitised content, then this, to me, seems to be sending strong signals that a Web 2.0 approach should be taken.

And one approach to enable users to be able to engage with the content is through the provision of blogs as, in a UK context, Ingrid Beazley demonstrated at the Museums and the Web 2008 conference with a session entitled “Reach new audiences, increase numbers of visitors, and become a major part of the local community by using online social networking sites and blogs“. As described in her abstract Dulwich Picture Gallery has “experienced marked successes with our user driven, dialogue friendly Facebook and Flickr sites” and “there is considerable buzz around our plans for 2008, including the launch of our online magazine blog with which we are building a Gallery associated community“.

But how should museums go about establishing and sustaining their blogs - and also exploiting the potential of social networking services? Well I’m pleased to say that this is a topic I will be talking about at the Museum Heritage 2008 show at London Olympia on Wednesday 7^th May 2008. If any readers of this blog from the museus sector are planning to attend this event, I’d love to chat with you. But if you can’t attend, then my slides are available on Slideshare - and are also embedded in this blog post.

Your feedback is welcome.

Facebook Or Twitter - Or Facebook And Twitter

In the opening planary talk on Hands On The Internet at the Museums and the Web 2008 conference Michael Geist mentioned the popularity of Facebook in Canada - apparently Canada has the highigest per capita Facebook usage in the world. And, as described in a blog post on the talk by arkrausehardie Michael described the “enormous pressure a sort of flash-mob FaceBook group can bring to bare (sic!) on public policy such as the recent group started by Geist on copyright issues in Canada, now with more than 40,000 members“.

The interest in the potential of Facebook for engaging with a museum’s user community was described in a number of papers at the conference. For example Shelley Bernstein’s paper on “Where Do We Go From Here? Continuting with Web 2.0 at Brooklyn Museum” dscribed the ArtShare Facebook application they had developed to “share works of art from Museums around the world“. And a paper by Brian Kelly and colleagues at the Canada Science and Technology Museum on “Social Presence: New Value For Museums And Networked Audiences“  described “specific experiments with social media, including a detailed analysis of a Facebook group used by the Canada Science and Technology Museum Corporation’s Membership Program“. In addition the paper described “two theoretical models – the “Innovation Radar” and genre analysis – to help analyze the nature of the opportunities for innovation, and to develop a better understanding of the distinctive characteristics of alternate communication channels“.

And yet in some circle such use of Facebook is being derided with comments such as “It’s a closed garden“, “Its popularity is on the wane” or “Twitter is a better development environment” being made. I have to say that I foind that such comments tend to miss the point.  A recent post on “The Becoming Uninteresting Complex - Facebook versus Twitter” commented on the “pretty irrational questionings like “is Twitter replacing Facebook?“, Twitter doesn’t allow socialization. It simply allow instant interactions“.

And as can be seen from a SIteanalytics snapshot which compares usage of Facebook and Twitter,  it you want to make inappropriate comparisons, it’s Twitter which fares badly.

Making these points, I should add that we shouldn’t explore the potential of Facebook uncritically. But the early adopters do acknowledge some of the concerns which need to be recogonised. Dawson et al have commented that “There are, however, a variety of potential pitfalls with social networking sites. One concern is whether such sites are a fad or flash in the pan“. The paper goes on to add “Issues of privacy are another important factor. Users of social networking sites appear to be willing to live with great compromises in their privacy. However, even these broad boundaries have been tested a number of times. Facebook, for example, has risked alienating its users in controversies such as the introduction of the news feed in 2006 (boyd, 2006a), and the more recent introduction of the “Beacon” in 2007 (Hirsh, 2007).“

So let’s be realistic and continue the experoimentation and debate. But let’s also be critical of our preferred environments.  And although I’m a happy user of Twitter and participated in its use at MW2008, looking at the hashtag data for the mw2008 tag I would acknolwsdge that it was used primarily by a small group who knew each other - and indeed went out drinking together.  Twitter can be useful for some - but it’s not neccessarily the killer application for everybody.

The Search Session At MW 2008

On the final day of the Museums and the Web 2008 conference (Saturday !) I chaired a session on Search. There were only two papers presented at this session - and as the session was scheduled to last from 11.00-12.30 both of the speakers were happy for the session to provide an opportunity for general discussions after the papers had been presented.

Terry Makewell ’s paper was entitled “The National Museums Online Learning Project Federated Collections Search: Searching Across Museum And Gallery Collections In An Integrated Fashion“. As described in a blog post by Nate Solas, the paper described the approaches to federated search being taken by 9 partner organisations in the UK. The two search technologies described were  OAI/PMH and Opensearch - and a decision was made to use Opensearch, due to its simplicity, the short timescales and the limited technical expertise and resources available by some of the partners.

Following Terry’s talk Johan Møhlenfeldt Jensen, Museum of Copenhagen, Denmark presented a paper on “Approaches To Presentation Of Cultural Heritage Information In The ALM-Area In Denmark And Scandinavia“. This paper complemented Terry’s paper nicely, and highlighted some of the challenges posed by federated search including the differing cultures across the archives, libraries and museums domains and the differing cultures across the Scandinavian countries.

The discussions afterwards focussed on whether a simple approach to federated search would be sufficient. Mike Ellis asked Terry whether used of Google search technologies, such as Google Coop, had been considered. It seems it had, but ruled out due to the complexities posed  by use of session IDs on some of the collections. In a subsequent tweet on the Twitter back-channel Mike pointed out his experimentation with Google Coop across a number of museums - and this was briefly tested by the two speakers after the session had concluded (as an aside I should note that this was the only relevant Tweet received during the session - however Terry and I were also interested in the football scores which I receive on  my Twitter account, including the flurry of goals conceded by Derby County!) .

The discussion on simplicity versus sophistication led to discussions on the user experience. Following a question on evidence of use of advanced search capabilities, data from an Australian example showed that a very low percentage of users (1%, I think) accessed an advance serach capability - and, indeed, most users submitted only a single search term!  I pointed out that the importance of simple interfaces was likely to grow as use of mobile devices became more popular - a comment that was particularly pertinent to the MW 2008 conference, as the WiFi access problems conference delegates had experienced the presviopus day were apparently due to the large numbers of network users who were using an iPhone or Nokia N95.

There was a feeling, I think, that federated search may, in the future, be provided by mainstream commodity products - and, indeed, as collections management tools evolve and start to provide static URIs, the benefits of solutions such as Google Coop may become even more apparent.

Will there, I wonder, be a session on federated search at future MW conferences or will this area be, like institutional search, be addressed by mainstream solutions?

 

Micro-blogging At Events

Background

I can recall attending the UCISA 2004 conference and listening to a speaker describing the problems caused by providing free laser printing services to student. It seems students made heavy use of the service and this caused particular problems at the end of term: the print queues would be full, so students would resubmit jobs, compounding the problems.

But this is nothing new, I felt. I wanted to chat with my former manager at Loughborough University and ask him if we hadn’t addressed this problem back in the late 1980s. But he was near the front of the lecture theatre and I was near the back. Wouldn’t it be great, I thought, if we could exploit the WiFi networks which were starting to appear, and have such discussions during a talk - this could help to improve the quality of the questions I felt.

Since then I have explored various ways of providing chat channels at events. At the Institutional Web Management Workshop 2005 held at the University of Manchester we made use of an IRC channel - on which the small numbers of IRC users heard about the 7/7 London bombings prior to the rest of the audience: the logs of the IRC chat makes interesting reading from a historical perspective:

Jul 07 11:09:30 <SebastianRahtz>scary stuff with bombs. not impossible mchester next? …
Jul 07 11:19:54 <AndrewSavory>Sebastian: Swindon and Brighton rail stations shut
Jul 07 11:19:59 <EmTonkin>oh
Jul 07 11:20:00 <AndrewSavory>all central london bus services stopped

Various chat tools were used at subsequent events, including Jabber and the Gabbly service. But since last year the term ‘micro-blogging’ has come into vogue and I’ve an interest in exploring the potential of Twitter in a conference setting, especially as I’ve been making regular use of Twitter for some time now.

Recent Experiments

My initial experiments took place when I attended the NDAP 2008 conference in Taiwan. However my use of Twitter (sometimes summarising individual slides) caused problems for my Twitter ‘followers’, some of whom commented that their Twitter client was full of my photos of my portrait when they logged on in the morning and others found that having my Tweets being delivered on their mobile phone resulted in a continual stream of SMS alerts.

Following a suggestion from James Clay, I then tried the Jaiku service. I’d tried this before, but this time I installed a dedicated Jaiku client and, with some help from James, set up the #ndap2008 channel which was dedicated to the conference. However, despite its richness as a micro-blogging and aggregation tool, Jaiku hasn’t really taken off - and as the most important aspect of a social networking tool is the social network, I reluctantly decided that Jaiku wouldn’t be the tool to use.

The Social Dimension Of Micro-Blogging At Events

The fact that the numbers of posts (tweets) I sent on the first day of he NDAP 2008 conference irritated a couple of my Twitter followers is a good indicator of the social aspect of micro-blogging. And although I’ve concluded that it’s not the best tool for summarising individual points for a series of talks I have found that it can provide social benefits. After the conference had finished and on my last night in Taipei I tweeted that I was about to head off for a meal. A few minutes later I received a phone call from Casey Bisson, a fellow speaker at the conference. He’d spotted my tweet and suggested we go out for a meal. Which we did, and found a German restaurant where we found sausages and dark German beer made a refreshing change from the Chinese meals we’d been eating.

And then arriving at Montreal I tweeted a few minutes after arriving at the hotel that I was about to go out for a meal. A few minutes later I received a series of suggestions for how I should spend my time in Montreal:

And a few minutes later another Twitterer pointed out a post on the conference forum aimed at “Beer Geeks in Montreal“:

From this I’ve learnt about the serendipitous benefits Twitter can provide. If I say where I am and what I’d like to do, people are willing to help :-) And this, of course, fits in nicely with the social aspect of conferences - it’s not all about listening to talks.

Micro-Blogs At The Museums and The Web Conference

These reflections are very relevant to the Museums and the Web 2008 conference I am currently attending. Mike Ellis (with whom I am running two sessions at the conference) is providing the technical infrastructure for aggregating blog posts, Flickr feeds, etc. related to the conference. Mike is currently finalising these technologies, which includes an aggregation of posts on the conference.archimuse.com home page and, something I’ve not seen before, a timeline of Twitter posts with the #mw2008 tag.

It is really interesting to see how the use of networked technologies at events is evolving. Initially we were using self-containing instant messaging tools, but we’re now using tools, such as Twitter, which, when used in conjunction with RSS feeds and agreed tags (#mw2008 in this case) allows the content to be reused in a variety of different ways. I’m looking forward to seeing how this experiment works.

UKOLN 30th Anniversary Celebrations

I’ve just written a post about my participation at the Museums and the Web 2008 conference. Although I’m pleased to be so actively involved in this conference, I do regret the fact that the conference coincides with the UKOLN 30th Anniversary celebrations which will be taking place at the British Library Conference Centre on Thursday 10th April 2008.

As my colleague Paul Walk has written, the event features talks from senior figures in the Library, Higher Education and Cultural Heritage sectors.  I will be sorry to miss the opportunity to meet up with the speakers and participants at the event.  I would particularly have liked to chat to Lorcan Dempsey, who appointed me to the post of UK Web Focus back in 1996. And I should acknowledge Cliff Lynch’s dedication - Cliff will be giving a talk on Reflections on Museums and the Web 2008 here in Montreal on Saturday 12 April, just two days after speaking at the UKOLN event.  Unfortunately as I am running sessions on Wednesday, Friday and Saturday it hasn’t been possible for me to participate at both events - although I hope that a short video clip giving my reflections of my time at UKOLN will be played at the event.

My best wishes to everyone at the anniversary event, and all those others I’ve met during my eleven years at UKOLN who have helped to make my role at UKOLN so stimulating and enjoyable.

 

 

 

 

Museums and the Web 2008 Conference

It was over 19 months ago when Jennifer Trant invited me to join the programme committee for the Museums and the Web 2007 Conference. As myself and colleagues at UKOLN were looking to engage more with the museums sector, I welcomed this opportunity. And as I like to engage fully with such activities, I found myself at last year’s conference presenting one paper (on Addressing The Limitations Of Open Standards), running a professional forum with Professor Stephen Brown on Accessibility 2.0: A holistic and user-centred approach to Web accessibility) and contributing to a paper by Mike Ellis on Web 2.0: How to stop thinking and start doing: Addressing organisational barriers. In addition I chaired a session at the conference. And while I was at the event I blogged about the conference.

Jennifer, together with David Bearman, have succeeded in getting their money’s worth out of me again this year :-) I’m in Montreal this week for the this year’s Museums and the Web 2008 Conference. And this year I’ll be running a half-day Blogging workshop, with Mike Ellis (the workshop, I’ve just noticed, is fully subscribed), running a professional forum, again with Mike Ellis, on What Does Openness Mean To The Museum Community? and again chairing a session, this year on Search - which is being held on Saturday morning!

It’s going to be a busy week, I can tell. And as I seem to have left the snow behind in England, and am enjoying the sunshine here in Montreal :-)

NDAP 2008 Conference

I’m pleased to report that this week I am participating in the NDAP 2008 conference which is being held in Taipei, Taiwan.

NDAP (National Digital Archives Program) was launched in 2002 with the objective of promoting and coordinating content digitization and preservation at leading museums, archives, universities, research institutes, and other content holders in Taiwan. The NDAP International Conference aims t0 provide a forum to encourage and facilitate interaction, collaboration, and dialogue among specialists in digital archives from different countries.

There’s a good programme which starts today with an opening talk on “Digital Preservation: Where are we now? Where are we going?” by Deanna B. Marcum, Library of Congress, USA. I’m also looking forward to this afternoon’s Creative Commons/IPR Session. Tomorrow sees sessions on Digital Preservation, Biodiversity and Archives. The Museum 2.0 session on Thursday morning will give me an opportunity to catch up with Jennifer Trant and Sebastian Chan and in the afternoon I’ll be speaking in the Library 2.0 session.

I’m not sure what the network access will be like at the conference but I’ll try and publish reports on the sessions.

My Talk At The UCISA 2008 Conference

I mentioned previously my talk on “Digital Natives Run by Digital Immigrants: IT Services Are Dead – Long Live IT Services 2.0!” which I’ve been invited to present at the UCISA 2008 Management Conference. In my post I described the background to this talk and invited feedback on the slides which, together with an audio track, is available on Slideshare.

I was particularly struck by the comments made by Martin Weller:

Hi Brian - I have finally shed all institutional services - it’s marvellously liberating. And this is just the basic stuff - I have also evolved a PLE/PWE (for want of a better term). IT services simply can’t compete - just look at the email - my mailbox was full at the OU. With GMail I am using 1%. That’s an order of magnitude difference. And the same applies with every tool you care to mention in lots of different ways - design, usability, robustness (the idea that IT services hosted tools are less robust doesn’t stand up). 

Martin provide further information on how he sold his soul to Google on his own blog. The suggestion that I’ve made previously that IT Services need to transform themselves to take into account the Web 2.0 environment is clearly demonstrated by Martin’s actions.

As I have another meeting which clashes with the UCISA conference I won’t be able to give my talk in person. However a video presentation of the talk is available in various formats, including this one which is hosted on the Zentation service.

IT Services Are Dead – Long Live IT Services 2.0! 19:43 Talk on IT Services Are Dead – Long Live IT Services 2.0!

Andy Powell will be co-presenting at the UCISA Conference - and Andy will be physically present :-)  Andy has already posted some of his thoughts on what he’ll be saying. In his post, entitled P vs. P in a user-centric world, Andy focusses on the “move towards user-centricity … and in particular the use of the word ‘personal’ in both Personal Learning Environment (PLE) and Personal Research Environment (PRE)“.

Martin Weller provides a good example on how individuals are beginning to select their own preferred set of IT tools, and no longer feel constrained by the tools provided by the institution.  But is this the start of an inevitable trend or will it be limited to small numbers who are highly skilled in use of IT?  What about the pitfalls? And how should IT Services respond?

Time permitting, Andy Powell with address comments made on this blog and on his eFoundations blog at the UCISA conference. Here’s an opportunity to make your voice heard.    

IT Services Are Dead – Long Live IT Services 2.0!

Back in March 2004 I was pleased to be invited to give a talk at the UCISA Mangament Conference on “What Can Internet Technologies Offer?“ in which I introduced a raft of collaborative and communications technologies which are now referred to as Web 2.0 to about 350 senior managers in IT Service departments. Two years later I was invited back and I gave a talk on “IT Services: Help Or Hindrance? ” in which I argued that IT Services needed to actively engage in providing access to services such as blogs and wikis, otherwise there would be a danger that central services would be marginalised.

I’m pleased to say that IT Service directors seem to like my talks as I’ve been invited back again this year to speak at the UCISA 2008 Management Conference. The title of this year’s talk is Digital Natives Run by Digital Immigrants: IT Services are Dead, Long Live IT Services 2.0!” and the talk will be given on 13 March 2008. Unfortunately I have another meeting already arranged  for that date - but rather than this being a problem I regard it as a useful opportunity to make use of another set of technologies and approaches to presenting. So I have prepared the initial draft of my slides, and have made it available as a Slidecast (i.e. with an accompanying audio track) on Slideshare.

This 15 minute presentation only provides a high-level view of my thoughts on why IT Service departments need to engage with use of third party services. But I’m pleased to say that Andy Powell will be a co-presenter and will be attending in person. Andy will be giving his views on the implications of Web 2.0 on IT Service departments,  and will be able to respond to questions form the audience.

But rather than my talk simply being presented on the day, in the spirit of openness which I write about recently in the context of open science, I would like to invite comments on my talk in advance of the conference, which Andy may be able to integrate in his presentation. And, as an article on Technology Populism: Risks & Rewards points out, there can be risks to the organisation when users circumvent IT Service departments.

 

IT Service Blogs

In a post last month entitled UCISA Award for UK Web Focus Blog I mentioned that I’ll be giving a talk on blogging at a UCISA workshop an Innovation and Communication which will take place on Thursday 14^th February 2008.

I’m currently finalising my slides - which, incidentally, are available on the event’s Wetpaint wiki. On a discussion on the wiki Sue Cunningham asked: “One of the reasons people in our dept don’t want to start blogging is that they don’t think they would keep it up. Do you find it takes a lot of your time - is it difficult to post on a regular basis?“

I would suggest that (a) blogs can be used to replace or complement existing communications channels and provide greater functionality (b) IT Services need to give greater priority to engaging with their users, otherwise the users will stop using their services and (c) we don’t have to work in isolation and sharing experiences and resources, such as blog policies, scripts, etc. and discussing best practices will benefit the wider community and is something that UCISA is good at.

My questions then:

• What IT Services blogs are available (I’m aware of the Tech Services blog at Edge Hill University, Michael Webb’s at Newport and John Dale’s at Warwick) ?
• What experiences and best practices can be shared. Have any IT Service departments produced guidelines on the scope of their blogs, avoiding problems, dealing with spam comments, etc.?

The current version of my slides is available below (although this may be updated).

IWMW 2007 - Call For Proposals

This year’s Institutional Web Management Workshop (IWMW 2008) will be held at the University of Aberdeen on 22-24^th July 2008.

The theme of this year’s event is “The Great Debate“. The event will provide an opportunity for members of the institutional Web management community to engage in discussions regarding the future of institutional Web services, particularly in a Web 2.0 environment. Can externally hosted services, as some suggest, replace some of the services currently provided in-house or is such out-sourcing dangerous for institutions, placing a reliance on unproven technologies and unsustainable business models?

As well as the lively debates on the role of Web 2.0, the IWMW 2008 event will also provide an opportunity to reflect on the formative years of the institutional Web management community and to discuss how the community sees itself developing during its teenage years.

The call for speakers and workshop facilitators for IWMW 2008 is now open. We encourage submissions which will contribute to the debates of the future of our Web services, including plenary talks (perhaps providing institutional case studies which describe changing approaches to the provision of Web services) and workshop sessions which provide an opportunity for more interactive and participative activities. And, as always, we also welcome proposals on other topics which may be of interest to or relevant to members of institutional Web management teams and facilitate sharing of best practices.

Details of the call are available on the IWMW 2008 Web site. Note that the deadline for submissions is 29^th February 2008.

UCISA Award for UK Web Focus Blog

I’m pleased to report that the UK Web Focus blog was awarded a prize by UCISA (Universities and Colleges Information Systems Association). This blog will feature as a case study which will appear in a forthcoming UCISA Innovation and Communication best practice guide to be published by the Communications, Liaison and Information Working Group of TLIG (the UCISA Teaching Learning and Information Group).

As well as the publication, UCISA is also organising an Innovation and Communication event which will feature the selected case studies. The event, which will be held on 14 February 2008 at the Coventry TechnoCentre, will also include presentations on A Blended Communication Approach (Nici Cooper, University of Wolverhampton), Hi Applicant Community website(Alison Wildish, Edge Hill University - but now based at Bath University), IT Communications (Derek Norris, University of the West of England) and The Teaching and Learning Network (Phil Riding, UCL) .

I am particularly interested in the potential of blogs for staff in IT Service departments to both engage with their user communities and for communicating with their peers in IT Service departments in other institutions. The early adopters in IT Service departments include blogs from several senior managers (Michael Webb, University of Wales, Newport, John Dale, University of Warwick and, more recently, Chris Sexton, Sheffield University) with Mark Sammons (whose In-Cider Knowledge blog was established in 2004, and has migrated to WordPress recently) providing the perspective from a member of IT Services support staff.

Last May I published a post on The First IT Services Blog? which suggested that the Core Services departtment at Edge Hill Univrersity might be the best IT Service department to have launched a blogging service. But are there now more IT Service departments who are making use of blogs to reach out to their users? And have blog policies and Web practices been established? I’d welcome feedback which I can make use of when I give my talk at the UCISA event.

OCLC Symposium At Online Information 2007

On the second day of the Online Information 2007 conference I attended the OCLC Symposium on Who’s Watching Your Space? The symposium provided OCLC an opportunity for OCLC to unveil their report on Sharing, Privacy and Trust in Our Networked World which I’ve commented upon recently.

The session began with a talk by John Naughton, journalist and academic at the Open University. I enjoy reading John’s regular column in the Observer and many years ago I read his book on A Brief History of The Future. So I was looking forward to hearing him speak for the first time, but was very disappointed by what I felt were his cynical views on social networks. It’s over-hyped and journalists always love to joy in with the over-hyping of popular trends, John argued, and there are no sustainable business model. His comments reminded me of the various comments people were making about the Web in 1993 and 1994, and the scepticism people such as Jon Maber (original software developer of the Bodington VLE at Leeds University) faced when the idea of delivering teaching and learning services on the Web. It struck me that if journalists are guilty of over-hyping trends they also enjoy following this up with the doubts (”you build ‘em up, you known ‘em down”). I did raise this in the questions, but, as Tom Roper reported, John didn’t really answer me questions. But possibly, as Tony Hirst suggested to me during the drinks reception, I read too much into John’s critical remarks and as Tom described in his report on the symposium “He (John) thought there might be possibilities for harnessing social networking in education, in corporate organisations and in libraries“. (I suspect I was slightly annoyed that the explorations of the potential and best practices for making use of social networks in education context, which is being carried out by pioneers such as Tony Hirst and David White, and addressed in the recent UKOLN workshop on Exploiting The Potential Of Blogs and Social Networks seem to be invisible to John).

The second speaker was given by Matt Brown of Nature Network. Matt described the various services which Nature have developed, such as Connotea. Now I’d be the first to congratulate Nature on the pioneering work on such tools and their early commitment to RSS - but this talk provided nothing new for me, and I was beginning to wonder whether I should have stayed at the Online Information Conference, possibly attending the session on Folksonomies vs Ontologies or Service Innovation - Tools and Resources for Library Users.

However Cathy de Rosa’s highlights from the Sharing, Privacy and Trust in our online world report did make the session worth while, by providing much-needed evidence on the changing online environment, together with some surprises. The statistics that use of a wide range of online services (e.g. Web sites, social networks, instant messaging) has gown since their last survey was expected, but the decline in visits to library Web sites will, perhaps, have surprised people in the audience who might have expected a report commissioned by a library organisation to describe successes in the library domain. However if that statistic may have surprise some, the discrepancy between the (US) librarians’ views of their strengths and the users’ perceptions was probably shocking - librarians, it seems, place a high regard on their approaches to protecting the privacy of library users; the users, however, don’t feel that this is the case and also don’t feel that privacy is such an important issue.

As Tom Roper commented “There’s lots in the report” for people to digest. And there will be a need to explore the validity of the findings (Tom pointed out that “the samples used seem a little small“) and the relevance in a UK context (I suggested to Rosa that she should make use of the SCONUL organisation next time to try to get a representative sample from the UK academic library sector). But at least we now have data and interpretations of the data to forward the debate.

Online Information 2007 Gets Web 2.0

Last week I attended the Online Information 2007 conference. I’ve participated in the conference previously - in 1998 when I participated in a panel on Enabling The User In the Quest For Quality and in 2002 when I gave a talk on Approaches to the Preservation of Web Sites. However I always felt that, as the conference had such a strong emphasis on areas such as knowledge management, Intranets and commercial solutions, the event did not reflect my main areas of interests and so wasn’t the most effective dissemination channel for me.

This year, however, I was invited to moderate a session on Library 2.0: Fact or Fiction. And as the conference theme this year was Applying Web 2.0: Innovation, Impact and Implementation. I thought it would provide a useful opportunity to see how this particular conference and its target audience, which includes many from the commercial sector as well as librarians and information professionals in the higher education community, were responding to the opportunities and challenges posed by Web 2.0.

What I discovered was a conference which is now embracing Web 2.0. I should have been alerted to this change when I was information that an Online Information 2007 Facebook group had been set up in advance of the conference and significant numbers joined this group (474 at present). The Facebook group seemed to provide the main forum for discussion prior to the event, in particular people who couldn’t attend the event asking for details of the conference bloggers (the tag OnlineInfo2007 was used as the official tag and a number of bloggers gave details of their blog on the Facebook discussion forum during the conference.)

Opening Plenary Talk By Jimmy Wales

Jimmy Wales, chairman of Wikipedia, opened the conference with a talk on Web 2.0 in action:free culture and community on the move. I’d not heard Jimmy speak before, but I have to admit that I found his talk inspiring and very closely aligned with my views on openness and user engagement. And it seems I was not the only one, with a number of delegates raising their hands when asked if they had edited content in Wikipedia. Jimmy began his talk with a quotation from the Britannica editor Charles van Doren, who argued that the ‘encyclopaedia should be radical‘. This vision, Jimmy Wales suggested, has until recently, been lost. The success of Wikipedia has been due to a return to the radicalism, with Wikipedia being based on the notion of openness in the GNU sense: it is free to copy, modify and distribute.

Jimmy’s new passion is Wikia, a free Wiki hosting service which aims to support the development of communities with shared interests. The example he gave was for communities built about shared interested in The Muppets! A trivial example, perhaps, but the Muppets Wikia site is found in Google’s first page of results and currently has 15,749 articles. How should we respond to such apparent indications of success, I wonder? I did look for information on Rapper Sword dancing in Wikia - no significant results, but I did discover the Morris Dancing Wiki, which was created in April 2007. Should the morris dancing community in the UK, where the morris dancing tradition originated, engage with this open community or leave it to morris dancers in the new world to appropriate our cultural traditions? Or, on the other hand, is Wikia just a fad which is unlikely to gain the sustainability that online services provided in a more traditional way (e.g. through funding from cultural heritage funding bodies)? We don’t know the answer to that question - but Wiki is definitely a service I’ll be paying closer attention to in the future.

Jimmy’s final comment, as described in the IWR blog, related to the notion of trust and wikis, with a comparison with a real world example: when building a restaurant you don’t worry that the steak knives customers will be using are potentially dangerous, and such customers need to be in a walled garden to minimise potential risks to others.

Library 2.0: Fact or Fiction?

Library 2.0: Fact or Fiction? was the title of the session I chaired, immediately following the opening plenary talk. Stephen Abram gave the opening plenary talk in this slot on Web 2.0, Library 2.0 and Librarian 2.0: Preparing for the 2.0 World. This talk was pretty much a repeat of his opening plenary talk at the ILI 2007 conference, although, unfortunately, he only had 30 minutes for this talk, rather than the 45 minutes he had at ILI 2007 (and even then he had to race through his presentation at a rate of knots). Stephen argued that the world has changed and the library community needs to embrace such changes (or get out, and stop trying to prevent the inevitable). Although the content of his talk was very familiar to me I was pleased that he mentioned the human aspect: “Librarian 2.0 is the guru of the information age” Stephen wrote in the accompanying paper. He concluded “It is essential that we start preparing to become Librarian 2.0 now. The Web 2.0 movement is laying the groundwork for exponential business growth and another major shift in the way our users live, work and play. We have the ability, insight and knowledge to influence the creation of this new dynamic - and to guarantee the future of our profession - Librarian 2.0 - now.”

The two other talks in this session (Lars Eriksson on Mina bibliotek.se - a library web site of the future and Philippa Levy on Web 2.0 and the Information Commons: a learning and teaching perspective) then provided examples of how the library and education professions is engaging with Stephen Abram’s vision: Lars’s talk described a Library 2.0 service which is being developed in Sweden and Philippa stepped outside the online world to describe the Information Commons, a “brand new, innovative building that combines IT resources, library facilities and a variety of study spaces to support a wide range of independent and collaborative learning experiences in a 24/7 environment.” This focus on the physical environment complemented Lars’s talk nicely, I felt.

Library 2.0: Fact or Fiction? The feeling from this session was most definitely that it was a fact.

Other Sessions

I was pleased to discover a similar positive approach to Web 2.0 in several of the other sessions I attended. After lunch I attended a session on Tools, Technologies and Costs of Web 2.0, with talks by Karen Blakeman and and Andre Bonvanie. Karen’s talk was familiar to me, as we have both spoken at a number of events recently. If you are interested in the contents of her talk I suggest you read the post on How Do You Start Your Day? on the InfoToday blog. Andre’s talk on RSS: The Glue for Enterprise 2.0 gave a more business-oriented presentation in which he described how RSS was the key technical component for Enterprise 2.0.

The 2.0 meme continued in the final session of the first day on Web 2.0 In Action. I was particularly interested to hear that the promised benefits of Knowledge Management (KM) had failed to deliver, and that the Knowledge Management community is now exploring the potential of Web 2.0 within the organisation - and we heard that KM 1.0 is dead; long live KM 2.0!

These ideas were discussed further in the first two talk on Calling all social media doubters:wiki@Vodafone keeps employees on the same page (use of Web 2.0 technologies by Vodafone) and It’s more than technology: how ERM (Environmental Resources Management) has embraced Web 2.0 to address environmental issues (whose content is described in the title). Jane Dysart has described these talks, together with the final talk in the session which provided top 5 tips for finding time for Web 2.0.

Conclusions

Big business seems to be finally getting Web 2.0 - and this is a couple of years after the higher education community started to discuss these issues. There were a number of interesting talks on the human side of Web 2.0 and much discussion on these issues during the conference. The most interesting comment I heard was that well-qualified final year students and recent graduates are now expecting to make use of Web 2.0 technologies such as social networks in their first job, arguing that these technologies have helped them in their degrees and they would expect to be able to exploit these technologies and the social networks they have developed, in their professional lives.

Now does this mean that graduates who have not had the opportunity to develop their social networks and to develop their skills in using such technologies will be at a disadvantage?

Transliteracy And Amplified Events

In Matt Matchel’s report on the Eclectic Dreams blog entitled “Liveblogging : Exploiting the Potential of Blogs and Social Networks” he described the event as providing:

A day of talks on the use of blogging in education, with live Second Life feed, web-cam and blog chatter… How very trans-literate!

“Very transliterate!” What does Matt mean?

Wikipedia cites the PART research group in its definition of transliteracy as

The ability to read, write and interact across a range of platforms, tools and media from signing and orality through handwriting, print, TV, radio and film, to digital social networks.

At the event the plenary speakers were happy for their talks to be streamed live on the Internet and for the talks to also be made available in Second Life; several of the participants used the event wiki to keep notes during the session; a number of people took photographs and video clips during the event, which were uploaded to various photographic sharing services and there were a number of live bloggers at the event, some of whom also updated their Facebook status to inform their Facebook contacts that they were blogging.

And as well as being comfortable in making use of the digital technologies, the participants took part in the discussions and socialising.

It’s good to see that the ‘transliterates’ can include the digital migrants :-)

Exploiting The Potential Of Blogs and Social Networks

The Event

The UKOLN workshop on “Exploiting The Potential Of Blogs and Social Networks” took place yesterday at Austin Court, Birmingham.

This event was initially meant to be held in March 2007, with the title “Exploiting The Potential Of Blogs“. However as we discovered a clash with the UCISA annual conference, we decided to postpone the event until November. And by the time we got around to selecting the talks it had become clear that it was the area of social networks which was exciting (and terrifying) many people. Providing a wider focus for the event proved popular with the event being fully-subscribed with 100 participants, rather than the 60-70 we had originally planned for.

The Talks

The talks at the event provided a narrative which outlined the variety of approaches which institutions are taking in provision of and/or use of blogs and social network services. After my initial introduction to the workshop Stephen Clarke (University of Birmingham) gave the opening plenary talk on Blogging In A Managed Environment in which he described the benefits which can be gained by supporting student learning though use of a managed application environment (which, at the University of Birmingham, is Web CT). Melissa Highton (University of Leeds) focussed on supporting the teachers in her talk on Leedsfeed: a Blogging Service based on the Open Source Elgg Application, again through use of an in-house application.

In contrast Alison Wildish (Edge Hill University) suggested that institutions need to Put Yourself Out There- and at her institution this means recognising that students (and potential students) will use services such as Facebook, and so the institution needs to respond to this by making its information available in such places.

It was appropriate that Alison’s talk was followed by Tom Milburn, Vice-President, Education at the University of Bath Students Union. In his talk on The Student Perspective. Tom gave a valuable insight into ways in which students at the University of Bath are setting up Facebook groups which can “provide students with the support of their cohort in a structured environment, … provide constant support that is not bound by office hours and … ease pressure on staff with older students helping to ‘teach’ younger students.” Tom also described the pro-active approach being taken by the students Union in advising students of the potential dangers which may be posed by social networks. In particular he described the Facebook flyers (adverts displayed in Facebook) which were made available to students in the University of Bath Facebook network. Interestingly Tom concluded that effective use of social networks “will depend on how much effort staff put in and the culture of students on various courses“. At the University of Bath it would seem that students may welcome staff supporting their use of Facebook.

After lunch there were two talks given the institutional IT Services perspective. Stuart Lee (University of Oxford) described The Hidden Dangers of Social Networks: You can log-on but you cannot hide. Interestingly the slides (which I had uploaded to Slideshare prior to the event) had been commented upon by Grainne Conole and AJCann, with the suggestion that IT services were scared of these dangers - although Stuart’s intentions (which he described in his responses to these comments) was to discharge the responsibility of a service department “to point out hidden pitfalls in some systems that users need to be aware of“.

In the final talk David Harrison (University of Cardiff) described how the University of Cardiff is seeking to respond to Disruptive Technology and its Implications for University Information Services. David described how his work in this area began as “a response to a presentation from Brian Kelly and John Heaps at an earlier UKOLN Workshop” (Initiatives & Innovation: Managing Disruptive Technologies, a joint UKOLN/CETIS/UCISA workshop held in February 2006). An initial draft of a briefing paper was written in early 2007 for comment within UCISA Executive, and part 1 of the briefing paper is now available. David’s concluding remarks included:

• Users need protecting against their own foolishness - thus EDUCATION is the most important thing
• Institutions should begin to trust their staff and students more but be also prepared to use existing disciplinary codes where the trust is betrayed
• Must embrace and engage – to do otherwise would be counter-productive and make us look foolish – consider the concept of enablement
• Should consider a partnership rather than service provider role and be customer-centric

The Participants’ Perspectives

As with many of UKOLN’s recent events we encouraged participants to make use of the WiFi network to enhance their learning at the event, to make use of a wiki for keeping notes of the discussion groups and to share their blog posts, photographs, etc. related to the event.

Chris Sexton, who kindly helped out in in the final summing up session, was very productive during the day, with posts of the morning session (part 1) , morning session (part 2) and afternoon session. Matt Machell, on his Eclectic Dreams Blog also provided useful summaries of the morning and afternoon sessions. If there are any further blog posts about the event which I’ve missed, please let me know and I’ll include details here (note I came across reports on the Digital Narratives blog, the DMU PatherFinder blog and Helen Newham’s blog after publishing this report).

I should also add that a Wetpaint wiki site was used to support the event. The notes from the discussion groups may be of particular interest, both to the workshop participants and to those who could attend.

The Remote Participants

UKOLN has been evaluating a variety of tools recently which can be use to ‘amplify’ the discussions and outputs of the events we run. Plenary talks at the IWMW 2007 event were streamed. At this event we went one step further, providing not only a video stream but also streaming the video into Second Life. I would like to thank Andy Powell, Eduserv Foundation for managing these video streams, and Veodia for making their streaming service available for us to evaluate during the event. We did have some hiccups with the service - due, we think, to the limited bandwidth for streaming out of the venue. However this was a valuable experiment, I feel. Andy has also provided some slides which review his experiences (and, after this post was initially published, gave his Reflections on a DIY streaming experience).

What Next?

In a recent post on When Two Tribes Go To War I described the tensions between two communities of developers: those who believe that The VLE/LMS is dead and those who are engaged in providing a secure managed VLE environment. At this event we came across two communities in a slightly different guise: the IT service providers who feel that their institution should be managing its IT provision and those who feel that institutions cannot compete with the popularity of many commercially provided solutions. The good news, is there was very much a willingness to discuss the pros and cons of both positions, and an awareness that each side has its own weaknesses. There’s still a lot of mileage in this debate, I feel.

Open Development And Amplified Events

Open Development

Ross Gardler, Manager of the JISC  OSS Watch service, visited UKOLN yesterday to give a seminar on open development. Although OSS Watch’s main interest is in the application of this methodology within open source software development, as Ross made clear open development can also be applied in other contexts, including the development of content and in learning contexts. Ross has recently commented on the application of an open development approach by the JISC-funed WepPA project.

I am very much in favour of the approaches which Ross described, and personally have been making much of the materials I have developed available with a Creative Commons licence for a couple of years.  I have also participated in Wikipedia, creating a number of entries and helping to improve the quality of content created by others. This very much fits in with Ross’s views on open development, I think.

Open Development and Amplified Events

UKOLN has been taking a similar approach to the exploitation of networked technologies at events over the past few years. Lorcan Dempsey coined the term “Amplified Conference” to describe events in which the content and the discussions aren’t restricted to the closed community of participants who are physically present at the event, but can be freely accessed by all. A paper on “Using Networked Technologies To Support Conferences“ presented at the EUNIS 2005 conference described our initial work in this area, which was subsequently followed up by a series of briefing papers which provide advice on best practices for doing this.

Open Development and UKOLN’s “Exploiting The Potential Of Blogs and Social Networks” Workshop

The UKOLN workshop on “Exploiting The Potential Of Blogs and Social Networks” will take place in Birmingham on Monday 26^th November 2007. Although the workshop is fully subscribed, with about 100 participants, we intend to allow remote participants to access the workshop materials and, we hope, either view a live video stream of the plenary talks or event view the video stream within Second Life.

The live video stream and use of Second Life service will be provided by Andy Powell, Eduserv Foundation (sponsors of the workshop). Andy has described the plans for the technological infrastructure which will be used to make the talks available to a remote audience, so I won’t repeat this here. What is worth commenting upon from Andy’s post is the openness about the potential problems we may experience: “Sounds complex?  Probably.  Do-able?  I think/hope so.  It’ll be interesting to see how things work out.” But rather than having a low profile experiment with a closed group of friends, the approach Andy and myself are taking is to be open about this experiment (on both our blogs and on a number of mailing lists), which we hope will maximise the learning of the potential benefits of this approach, but perhaps also more useful, the problems we may encounter and the things we might do differently things next time.

As well as the technical challenges which Andy will be addressing, there are also various non-technical issues which I have been focussing on.  I have been in contact with all of the speakers informing them of our plans and getting their agreement to be streamed to a live audience (additional pressure on them, but I’m pleased to say that they are all willing). We have produced an Acceptable Use Policy document for the event, intended for participants who plan to make use of their laptop (or other networked device) during the workshop.  And Andy and myself and currently discussing the best ways of providing real time chat during the talks. This can be used to support the remote audience, for example to inform them of the slide which is being displayed. But should we have separate channels for the various media - would the video streaming audience be interested in the Second Life discussions “nice avatar“)?

And, of course, as well as the work which Andy and I (and my colleagues in UKOLN’s events team) are involved in, this open approach encourages input from potential participants and others who may have taken part in similar amplified events. Such open development also involves shared responsibilities (for example, we would expect remote participants to try out the various tools in advance of the event and to take responsibility for fixing any local configuration problems) and sharing the risks (being supportive if not everything works as planned).  But the open source development approach of ‘release early, release often’ in order to maximise the feedback can also be provide benefits in many other areas. 

We welcome your thoughts.

Using Facebook To Promote Events

UKOLN organises many workshops, conferences and other types of events. We also speak at and support events organised by others, including our funders (JISC and MLA) and fellow services, such as CETIS, MIMAS, EDINA and OSS Watch.

How should we most effectively promote our events, so that we maximise the audiences at the events and attract new audiences, whilst minimising the aggravation caused by event spamming. Organisers acknowledge this problem and try to defuse criticisms with the prefix “Apologies for multiple postings” - but there is still a need to ensure that people don’t complain that they never knew an event of interest to them was being held.

I seemed to have erred on the over-cautious side by failing to announce the one-day workshop on “Exploiting The Potential Of Blogs And Social Networks” as widely as I should have done, with at least one speaker informing me that he hadn’t seen the event announced anywhere. I’ve tried to remedy this by some further announcements to email lists, and have kept a record on the event’s news page.

But what can be done beyond email announcements, in a Web 2.0 world? In this case, I have created an event in Facebook which provides details about the workshop (as illustrated below). I have send an invitation to a small group of my Facebook contacts (avoiding the temptation to spam my Facebook friends who will have no interest in the event). The intention being that my Facebook contacts who I’ve not notified will see that I’ve created this event and, if it’s of interest to them or their colleagues, will then register.

Viral marketing, without the intrusiveness of email, I hope. Anyway, that’s the purpose of this experiment - and your comments are welcome.

And for those of you who have read this far, the one-day workshop will be held at Austin Court, Birmingham on 26^th October 2007. The workshop will provide a number of case studies which will describe a variety of ways in which institutions are providing blogs and making use of social networking services, including use of WebCT, Elgg and Facebook. The vent will also provide an insight into the student’s perspective of such tools and then review the challenges institutions will face in providing such services.

Further details, including access to the online booking form is available at

http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/blogs-social-networks-2007/

The cost of this 1-day workshop is £85 which includes lunch, coffee, workshop materials and access to the WiFi network.

We’re The Young Generation

On Wednesday 10^th October 2007 I attended the “Inspiring the iGeneration Web 2.0, teenagers and libraries” event which was held at the Wolverhampton Science Park.

My Opening Talk

I gave the opening talk entitled ” We’re The Young Generation, And We’ve Got Something To Say” which provided an overview of Web 2.0 and outlined why social networking software, such as Facebook, are providing so popular, and the challenges which such popularity is posing. (The title of the talk referring, of course, to the popular hit by The Monkeys in the 1960s, which aims to provide an alternative cultural reference to social networks to “Dedicated Follower Of Fashion” which was picked up by Wikipedia).

It was pleasing to receive an email after the conference saying:

“I very much enjoyed the conference yesterday. The first session from Brian Kelly was exceptionally good. It was thought provoking. A much better start to the day than cornflakes!!.“

although of course the subtext could have been “better than cornflakes - but not as good as a full English breakfast” :-)

Other Talks

The other talks at the events described a variety of approaches which are being taken by public libraries and related organisations in making use of Web 2.0 services to engage with young people. Interestingly, a Web 2.0 service which was mentioned by a number of the speakers was WetPaint - a wiki service I’ve been using for a year of so (including using it to support the Masterclass on ‘Using Blogs Effectively Within Your Library’ at ILI 2007).

A common problem which was raised throughout the day was how to manage inappropriate content for young people. This ranged from obvious problematic content (pornography, Viagra spam, happy slappy videos, etc.) to more contentious areas, such as mainstream advertisements. There were clear differences in opinions expressed, from those who argue that happy-slapping is a problem that society needs to address, and it is a mistake to overprotect children to those who feel that public sector Web sites must ensure that they provide appropriate materials. This debate will continue …

The final comment I would make about the event is to applaud Paul Mayes, Teesside University for being willing to experiment with innovative Web 2.0 services at the event. Paul could not attend the event, so he videoed his talk ahead of the meeting. After this was shown, Paul and I made use of the TokBox video chat service (which I’ve commented on recently). Although there were some technical glitches, I felt the event benefits from Paul’s willingness to experiment, which was clearly appropriate for this particular event, with its focus on the willingness to experiment which many young people will have.

And thanks to Dave Pattern for the photographs he took of the event, including one which shows me (on stage) having a video chat with Paul using ToxBox. Now what is the metadata for this photo? Which is the real me and which is just fantasy?

And if only I had produced a video of my talk at the ILI 2007 conference I would have avoided passing on my cold to Dave Pattern, Kara Jones and others - which Dave not only blogged about but also informed the world via his Facebook status:

The Techshare 2007 Conference (2)

I mentioned previously my talk on “Beyond Compliance - A Holistic Approach to Web Accessibility” which I gave at the Techshare 2007 conference.

My talk was in complete contrast to the preceding talk on “EuraCERT“. This talk described the development of a European certification scheme for Web accessibility, which is based on the development of automated software which checks the compliance of a Web site with WCAG 1.0 guidelines.

This approach seems to be based on the “Unified Web Evaluation Methodology”. This is available in HTML and as a PDF document (152 pages). The document contains hundreds of descriptions of tests of HTML pages; passing such tests, it would seem, will ensure the Web site can be certified as complying with the accessibility guidelines. An example is:

5.11.3.2.15 Test 12.3_HTML_15

This test is targeted to check whether the table rows need grouping.

 

• Applicability criteria: Select the following combination of elements/attributes:

table[not(thead) or not(tfoot) or not(tbody)]

• Test procedure: Do the table rows need grouping?
• Confidence level: Medium.
• User testing procedures: Not Available.

The speaker described the WCAG 1.0 guidelines as “the bible”. During the questions I said that if this is the case, I must be a heretic :-) It seems that a European certificate is being developed based on a set of guidelines which are known to be flawed and are being replaced. And this is to say nothing of the issue of the purpose of the Web site which I described previously.

I have to say that I feel that accessibility is primarily about people, and that the emphasis being placed by techies on just the resource is counter-productive.

What do others things?

The Techshare 2007 Conference (1)

Last week I attended the first day of the Techshare 2007 conference.

I gave a talk on Beyond Compliance - A Holistic Approach to Web Accessibility, which reviewed the work on Web accessibility policies which has been published at the W4A 2005, W4A 2006 and W4A 2007 conferences. This work has described the limitations of the WAI approach to Web accessibility, with the flaws in the WCAG 1.0 guidelines becoming increasingly apparent over the years. In addition we (my co-authors have included Professors Helen Petrie and Stephen Brown, Lawrie Phipps, David Sloan, Patrick Lauke and Simon Ball) have argued that there’s a need to address the context of use - and that the approaches taken to ensure accessibility of informational resources are not necessarily relevant in cases in which the Web is used to deliver learning, provide access to a cultural experience, enable a user to assert their identity or simply, to have fun. Examples I’ve used to illustrate this include include surrealist paintings (how do you make a Salvador Dali painting understandable, for example) and my favourite sports headline “Super Cali Go Ballistic, Celtic were Atrocious