How do I discover new things, new places and new ideas? An approach I take is the approach I’ve used ever since I was a child - I ask people and I eaves-drop on conversations.  And on the Social Web this approach can be even more useful as there are more people I can ask and more conversations I can listen to.

I’ve produced a slideshow with a 9 minute 25 second accompanying audio track which is available on Slideshare and is embedded below explaining why I feel that the social aspect of resource discovery is under-rated.

I should probably have added in the talk that when I publish peer-reviewed presentations the literature search and use of more formal resource discovery services does take place - however this tends to be done by one of the co-authors (David Sloan in the case of my accessibility papers).   Which I think illustrates another example of the social aspect of resource discovery - you have a co-author who is happy using traditional library-based resource discovery tools, while you another co-author focus on the social aspects to discovery.  Just as social Web tools need not be to every researcher’s taste, so the more formal approaches do not have to be used by every researcher.

I’m attending the Bridging Worlds 2008 conference  this week which will be held in Singapore on 16-17 October. I’ve been invited to present a paper on “Library 2.0: Balancing the Risks and Benefits to Maximise the Dividends“.

There are a number of interesting speakers at the conference. I’m particularly looking forward to meeting up with Jenny Levine again and hearing her talk on “Librarian 2.0 - New Breed or Just Another Day at the Office?“, meeting my former colleague Bernadette Daly Swanson and hearing what she has to say on “I am Library: Exploring the Library Experience in Second Life” and chatting to Peter Godwin, co-editor of a book on “Information Literacy meets Library 2.0” which I contributed a chapter to earlier this year.

As a blog post on the conference Web site describe, the conference will “try to give .. an insight into what for many is the unfamiliar world of Library 2.0 … [including] Second Life, Folksonomies and new approaches libraries, sharing and  community“. The blog post goes on to suggest that the Library 2.0 Meme Map available on Flickr with a Creative Commons licence, provides a useful insight into the topics which will be covered at the conference.

My paper will provide examples of ways in which Library 2.0 services are being deployed, with brief case studies provided by co-authors Paul Bevan, Jo Alcock and Richard Akerman on uses at the National Library of Wales, University of Wolverhampton and NRC-CISTI, Canada. The main focus of the paper, however focusses on ways of addressing the risks associated with use of externally-hosted services and user-generated content, with a section on the Childnet International and Digizen work being provided by Josie Fraser. 

And after the conference finishes I’m looking forward to taking a well-deserved holiday!

Use of Videos To Support Presentations

This year I’ve started to make use of video and audio technologies to support my work activities.  This has included giving a numbers of talks to remote audiences using the Elluminate software as part of the JISC Emerge project. There have also two occasions when I have been invited to give a talk at a conference but was unable to attend in person. The first on these was the UCISA 2008 Management Conference, where I had been invited to give a talk on “Digital Natives Run by Digital Immigrants“.   Unfortunately by the time the invitation had been confirmed (i.e. the speaker the organisers really wanted had let them know he couldn’t attend!) I had found that I was committed to attending another meeting.  Not a problem, I thought, as video technologies are now fairly mature. But as I was aware of (a) the risks of giving a live video presentation and (b) the dullness of a ‘talking head’ on a screen I decided to pre-record my presentation. And I agreed with the conference audiences that the talk would be a double act, with Andy Powell of the Eduserv Foundation, physically attending the conference and contributing to the talk.  And as neither Andy nor myself with keen on the proposed title, we jointly came up with the entitled “IT Services are Dead, Long Live IT Services 2.0!“.

The video of my talk is still available on Zentation which have been synchronised with the PowerPoint slides - unlike, of course,  the talks given by Andy and the other speakers at the conference. Conference participants will now only have faded memories of their talks, with (possibly) their PowerPoint slides being available on the UCISA Web sites, together with any conference reports which may have been published.

More recently I have purchased a Flip camera and used it to record presentations I have given, including presenting papers at the iPres2008 and ADDW08 conferences - and as I have suggested, this approach can potentially enhance the impact of such papers and the accessibility of the resources.

Should We Leave It To The Professionals?

However in a blog post published back in August entitled  What Web 2.0 teaches us… Andy Powell suggested that “Web 2.0 technology democratises production but creative talent and presentation skills remain rare commodities” (although to be fair to Andy, his post was prefixed with the remark that the post is “intended to be somewhat tongue-in-cheek and humorous but like most such things, from my perspective at least, I think it contains at least a grain or two of truth“).

Andy’s point was that “our desktop use of audio and video in particular tends to highlight an amateurish approach to production“. And as well as his doubts regarding the production values he also felt that “Some people’s voices simply become wooden when faced with a microphone and the ‘record’ light, to the point that listening to them is painful.”

And more recently in response to a post on “Videoing Talks As A Means Of Providing Equivalent Experiences” Andy suggested that for my video of a talk I gave at ADDW08 conference “Video is a nice gimmick (in this case) but no more.

Is Andy right? Should we leave the production of audio and video resources to the AV experts? Should we leave video presentation to those who have been received appropriate training in presentational skills? And is the use of video a nice gimmick?

Experiments At IWMW 2008

In addition to recording videos of talks at conferences, either in advance or at the event itself, I have been experimenting with the potential of video micro-blogging tools such as Seesmic.

Seesmic has been described as “the “Twitter of video” - you record a brief video giving your thoughts on a topic and people can respond, also using video.

Now people who don’t get Twitter are unlikely to what Seesmic could offer. But it seems that people who are happy to use Twitter and appreciate the benefits it can provide do not necessarily feel that Seesmic has much to offer.  And I myself was rather sceptical until I met with AJ Cann in Leicester a few months ago and he convinced me that it was a tool worthy of some experminatation.

My first Seesmic posts were made prior to the IWMW 2008 events, and I published video blog posts giving an Introduction to the IWMW 2008 Event, a summary of the Plenary Talks, the Social Aspect of the event and the Barcamp. And I was pleased that Mike McConnell and Mike Whymet also demonstrated their willingness to try out the service with their Welcome to Aberdeen. These experiments provided me with an opportunity to see how the service worked, how the content could be re-used - and to worry out the visual impression I may be giving.  I was particularly pleased at the ease with which the video posts can be embedded in Web pages.

Further Experiments

I will be unable to facilitate a blogging workshop at ILI this year, but my colleague Marieke Guy and Ann Chapman are able to take my place.  They will be reusing materials I developed for previous blog workshops, but it did occur to me that this workshop might provide an opportunity to experiment with Seesmic as a means of providing additional multimedia materials for use during a workshop.

I have created a number of Seesmic video posts on several topics related to blogging including:

1. Why do I blog? [link]
2. How do I find ideas to blog about? [link]
3. How do I find the time to blog? [link]
4. Is blogging rewarding? [link]
5. Do I comment on other people’s blogs?
6. Is blogging for everyone? [link]
7. How should you get started blogging? [link]
8. What’s best - a team blog or an individual’s blog? [link]
9. What are the pros and cons of externally-hosted blogs versus in-house blogs? [link]

These video blogs posts can be accessed on the Seesmic Web site, embedded in other Web pages or viewed using desktop client tools such as the Twhirl Twitter client, illustrated.

For me an advantage which Seesmic may provide is the ability to receive video responses.  This has already happened with the author of the TechTicker blog, in particular, having provided a number of useful responses, including one in which he describes why he feels that users who are happy to publish their reflections in a public space are likely to be more willing to engage in public blogging activities.

Now at an event, such as the blogging workshop, this might be particularly useful in providing access to a diversity of multimedia content. And I think this type of use addresses Andy’s concern that “the linear nature of audio and video tends to defy attempts at scanning the content“. I would suggest that most participants at events are familiar with the linear nature of presentations and are willing to accept that they can’t fast forward past the boring parts :-)

So if any readers of this blog post would be willing to give their thoughts on any of the topics I’ve mentioned feel free to leave a video response. Who knows, there might be an opportunity for your thoughts - and your service - to be featured at the event.

But should we leave video production to the experts? I don’t think so, but your view may differ.  But if you do feel that Seesmic may have something to offer, then there will be a need to identify best practices (e.g. stick to a single topic in a blog post and in subsequent responses) and to be aware of potential pitfalls, including the dangers of video content being locked within the service - this is a reason I create the video posts in a separate application and have explored uploading the video to Seesmic via YouTube, as can be seen from the image above.

As I recently posted, a paper by myself and Liddy Nevile was accepted by the ADDW08 conference. In the paper we argued that the conventional wisdom regarding Web accessibility (just follow the WCAG guidelines and the Web environment will be universally accessible to all) has been shown to be flawed.  We argued that in a world of mass creation of digital objects, the hand-crafted approach which underpins the WCAG model doesn’t scale. We argued the need to embrace a diversity of approaches, including an exploration of the potential for exploiting the links between related resources in order to find equivalent resources.

Our paper is available (in MS Word, PDF and HTML formats) and our slides are also available (in MS PowerPoint and in (dodgy) HTML formats).  But in addition a video of the talk (which I took using a Flip video camera) is available on Google Video (and is embedded below).

And I’ve synched the video with the PowerPoint slides to provide an even richer experience. This is available on Zentation and a screen image is illustrated below.

Now although the HTML version of the paper should comply with WCAG guidelines (although as a peer-reviewed paper the language and writing style may mean that is is not necessarily  understandable by all), the MS Word, PDF, MS PowerPoint, HTML version of the slides and the .AVI video files will not.  Now I could make the resources conform to WCAG guidelines if I removed all but the HTML version of the paper.  But I would argue that this would diminish the impact of and accessibility of the underlying ideas I wish to communicate.  And seeking to make the various versions of the resources conform to the various checklists would be very time-consuming and would not, I would argue, provide an effective return on the tax-payers money.  And such consideration are, I suspect, informing policy decisions related to the provision of institutional repositories - although perhaps without the provision of links to related resources.

Now as devices such as a Flip can be purchased for less than £100 pounds, and uploading videos on Google Video can be done for free a question I would ask is “if conference organisers fail to make such alternatives for papers presented at conferences, could this be regarded as a failure to take reasonable measures to provide access to services for people with disabilities?”  Isn’t it unreasonable to fail to invest £100 to enhance the effectiveness of conferences along the lines I’ve suggested and demonstrated? And, indeed, doesn’t the informality used in talks provide a valuable alternative to people who may be put off by the nature of the language which is found in research publications.

Tony Hirst’s post on eduTwitterin’ alerted me to “Jane’s list of “100+ (E-)Learning Professionals to follow on Twitter” which has subsequently been renamed “Directory of (E-)Learning Professionals on Twitter”. Tony mentioned the staff at the Open University of the list (Tony himself, Martin Weller and Grainne Conole). These are all people I know and follow on Twitter, so I thought I would see who else was on the list. I was surprised but pleased (I think) to see myself on the list.

I had wondered if something was going on with Twitter after receiving an recent influx of email messages announcing new people who were following me on Twitter. My first tweet after finding myself on this list was to acknowledge that people were probably following people (and others on the list) in the expectation of reading something special. So my first tweet was:

Pressure now on for insightful edu-tweet. Hmm. Thinking of going to Raven to see Joley Rowan http://bit.ly/yFyR7 Will that do?

It’s my space after all :-) And it was about 8pm on Monday night, when I was torn between going to watch music in The Bell and The Raven, two of the music venues in Bath I live to frequent. 

I have added a couple of the people who have started to follow me recently to the people I follow, but these were people I either knew or people whose blog seemed of interest to me.  And I may stop following people if I feel I don;t gain any benefits from their tweets.  I guess the point being that there will be a limit to the size of one’s personal twitterverse.  But as well as the size of the network and the number of posts, I think the effectiveness of Twitter is based on the nature of the communications within the community. Whether having a list of 100+ e-learning professionals to follow is a good way of building a community I’m unsure about.  Buit on the other hand, there is a need to start somewhere.  I’ll give some thought on how I feel one should start to engage with Twitter in a subsequent post.

Last week I received a tweet from Andy Powell announcing that he would be live-blogging at the Future of Technology in Education (FOTE) conference. On Friday, on the morning of the event, Andy sent another tweet saying that the live-blog was available on Eduserver’s new Livewire service. And so I went along (to the Web site, not to London for the event!) and read Andy’s comments on one or two of the presentations and the comments made by others.

We’re seeing increasing examples of ‘amplified conferences’ in which commentary on the talks is being made available to people who aren’t physically present.  This is even more effective if the event provides streaming video of the talks (which can, of course, be expensive) and if the slides used by the speakers are made available to the remote audience on services such as Slideshare.

I’m really pleased to see this happening and it’s good to see the approaches which are being taken by Eduserv. I think this is a good example of on-the-fly professional development. And it is particularly pleasing to see this example of openness - a participant at a conference who is happy to make notes on the talks and to share them with others. As Andy subsequently told me he has “have taken a decision to live blog most of the events that I attend“.

I’d like to make some suggestions for those who are involved in providing live blogging services at events:

• Provide a clear statement of the rights issues, such as “Please note that this live blog is open to everyone. Any comments you make on this service will have a Creative Commons licence“.
• Provide occasional statistics on the numbers of participants, if this isn’t provided by the software.
• Clarification of the status of the live-blog and ensure that any possible conflicts with other live-blogs are addressed (i.e. avoiding having multiple live blogs which fragment discussions).
• Clarification of whether the reporter is providing a neutral commentary on what the speakers are saying, or is giving personal comments on the talks.

I should add that Andy’s comments on the FOTE event did include his personal opinions including his final conclusions: “i think there have been some very good talks today and some very bad talks.  on balance, i think it has been a good and useful day.  as i mentioned, i think that suppliers (with the exception of huddle guy) have a tendency to talk down to the audience - we know the world is changing - what we want is help in thinking about how to respond“. In addition Andy’s also provided his opinions on the talks.  This was fine for me and, I suspect, those who know Andy, and helped to generate discussion and debate. But in other contexts I could envisage that this might cause problems. And

One final question. Do we have a clear understanding of what we mean by live-blogging? This to me seems more like a messaging environment.  How should we refer to a blog which is taken during a talk and published immediately afterwards, such as Chris Rusbridge’s report on sessions at the IPRES 2008 conference?

It strikes me that the recent set of comments made to my post on “Google’s G1 Phone: “Innovation For Tech Heads” have wider applicability to the networked development environment.

To summarise some of the issues which were highlighted in the original Guardian review which I cited and have been expanded on in John Naughton’s Google’s Android could smash iPhone’s locked gateway” article published in Sunday’s Observer (28 September 2008):

The Wow factor: Yes, the iPhone clearly wins with its ‘wow’ factor, As the Guardian review admitted the Android phone lacks the “wow factor of the Apple device“.

The usability: The iPhone, like many Apple devices, also has its strengths in its ease-of-use. As Paul Walk has commented “I want a device which ‘just works’“.

The openness of the application environment: As John Naugton describes in his Google’s Android could smash iPhone’s locked gateway article, a strength of the Android device there’s “a row brewing inside Apple’s cosily walled garden“. It seems that “developers are beginning to resent what they see as the company’s dictatorial attitude”. As one commentator puts it: ‘Trying to discern ahead of time [and of development expenditures] what Apple will or won’t accept has become close to impossible, not only because Apple isn’t talking about it, but also because it won’t let anyone else talk about it. All apps store dealings with developers are covered by a non-disclosure agreement“‘.

The potential for power users: Now the geeks will argue that the iPhone’s walled-garden is a non-issue as it’s possible to ‘jail-break’ the device to allow the installation of applications which may not be available via the Apple store. However this approach is clearly not one which the majority of users would be happy with, and conflicts with the need for a device which ‘just works’.

The hardware environment: The iPhone, like Macintosh hardware, is only manufactured by Apple. The Andoid phone, in comparison, can be made by any manufacturer. This competition should help to bring down prices, which will be beneficial to the consumer (as Stuart Smith pointed out to make use of a ‘free’ iPhone “you are still looking about £810 over 18 months“). So much for social inclusion and widening participation!

Now as Mike Ellis argues “most users couldn’t give a stuff about the closed nature of their devices, applications OR data. Facebook, iPods, iPhone, any gaming console - the list goes on. These all seem to be pretty popular, however much us IT types continue to shout about the dangers of closedness.” And I think he’s right - the IT development community tends to focus on the backend development processes and policies which are not necessarily of great concern to the majority of users. But even if we accept John Naughton’s premise that ‘Google’s Android could smash iPhone’s locked gateway’ we need to emphasise the importance of word ‘could‘. It was not so long ago when people argued that Google’s Open Social widget environment would blow away the closed development environment provided by Facebook. But that, I would argue, hasn’t happened (and, indeed, Scott Wilson wrote a blog post back in November 2007 in which he described why he was singularly unimpressed by Open Social).  Let’s be honest and recognise that both the iPhone and Facebook are very popular with large numbers of users - and let’s acknowledge that the development community can learn from the popularity of these closed environments.

And let’s remember the point Mike Ellis made when he said “I find it sad when developers seem to think that any real users actually *care* about what’s under the hood ;-)“.   But why do I think that Mike isn’t just referring to the mobile phone debate when he makes this point?

It was good to read the article in The Guardian Editorial page yesterday (1 October 2008) on the iPRES 2008 Conference on digital preservation which was held at The British Library on 29-30^th September. As the article states “If all goes well, we will have the capacity to preserve as many of our memories, personal and national, as we want“.

The issues of how and what we should be preserving on our Web sites happened to be the content of the paper I presented at the conference on Monday. The paper on “Preservation of Web Resources: The JISC PoWR Project” is available online and the slides of the talk (in which I focus primarily on preservation within a Web 2.0 environment) are also available and are embedded below.

There is also a video recording of the talk available (I haven’t yet been able to upload the video to Google Video, I’m afraid).

As well as this paper, which described the work of the JISC-funded PoWR project, I’m pleased to add that two of my colleagues (Alex Ball and Manjula Patel) also wrote papers which were presented at this conference.

I should also add that Chris Rusbridge provided a comprehensive report on the conference. I was pleased to read Chris’s comments on my talk which he described as “a very entertaining talk, and well worth looking up“. He went on to describe me as ”not a preservationist, but is a full-blown technogeek discussing the roles of the latest Web 2.0 technologies on his blog, in his role as UK Web Focus“. And this technogeek was particularly pleased to read that the JISC PoWR “project achieved a strong level of interaction through its several workshops“.

Guest Blog Post

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

There’s an interesting discussion taking place on the JISC-Repositories JISCMail list, following a post from Jenny Delasalle who asked:

Do any of you know how long it takes you to process a single item, before it is available as a live record in your repository? Please can you share that information with the list? 

Jenny provided details of her experiences:

Here at Warwick it takes at least 2 hours to process a single item. We are adding to our repository at a rate of about 15 items per week. I’m desperate to try to speed this up as we are receiving items faster than we can process them.

My colleague Pete Cliff somewhat tentatively suggested “why not put the items in the repository with minimal metadata“.

Pete and others seemed to feel that such compromises may be needed “in the current climate where quantity seems to have more impact than quality“. But this is where I would disagree.  This argument seems to be simply a cry for more resources in an area of interest to those making such a plea. But people will always be asking for more resources for their areas of interest - and, as there will always be limited resources, others will argue that their areas are more worthy of being allocated more resources.  And it strikes me as being somewhat disingenuous to have developed an approach which is known to be resource-intensive and then to make a plea for additional resources in order for the particular approach to be effective. A more honest approach would have been to develop a solution which was better suited for the available resources.

This was an argument I made last week in my talk on “Web Accessibility 3.0: Learning From The Past, Planning For The Future“. As I described in my talk (and note a 30 minute video of the talk is available). I pointed out that evidence suggests that Web accessibility policies based on conformance with WCAG AA have clearly failed, except in a small number of cases. And rather than calling for additional resources to be allocated to changing this we need to acknowledge that this won’t happen, and to explore alternative approaches.

And it is interesting to note that apprarent lack of interest on the JISC-Repositiories list in discussing the accessibility of resources in the repositories rather than the metadata requirements for aiding resource discover. Indeed when this topic was discussed a couple of year’s ago Les Carr, with a openness which I appreciated, argued that:

If accessibility is currently out of reach for journal articles, then it is another potential hindrance for OA. I think that if you go for OA first (get the literature online, change researchers’ working practices and expectations so that maximum dissemination is the normal state of affairs) THEN people will find they have a good reason to start to adapt their information dissemination behaviours towards better accessibility.

Here Les is arguing that the costs of providing accessibility resources in Institutional Repositories is too great, and can act as a barrier to maximising open access to institutional research activities. I would very much agree with Les that we need to argue priorities - as opposed to simply asking that someone (our institutions, the government - it’s never clear who) should give us more money to do the many good things we would like to do in our institutions.  

In the case of Institutional Repositories we then have competing pressures for resources for metadata creation and management and for enhancing the accessibility of the resources. In this context It should be noted that the WCAG 2.0 guidelines have reached the status of Candidate Recommendation, and that WAI Web site states quite clearly “We encourage you to start using WCAG 2.0 now“. And note that, unlike the WCAG 1.0 guidelines, WCAG 2.0 is format neutral. So you can provide resources on your Web site in a variety of formats, but such resources need to conform with the guidelines if it is your institutional policy to do so.

So shouldn’t institutions who have made public commitment to comply with WCAG guidelines ensure that this applies to content in their institutional repositories, even if this will require a redeployment of effort from other activities, such as metadata creation?

Or, alternatively, you may feel that complying with a set of rules, such as WCAG, without doing the cost-benefit analysis or exploring other approaches to achieving the intended goals is mis-guided. In which case perhaps Pete’s suggestion that you might wish to consider “put[ting] the items in the repository with minimal metadata” might actually be a sensible approach rather than an unfortunate compromise? And in response to Philip Hunter’s comment that “achieving interoperability through dumbing-down the metadata has a strange attractiveness in a world not overly crazy for quality” perhaps we should be arguing that “achieving interoperability and accessibility through labour-intensive manual efforts is a perverse solution in a public sector environment in which should be demonstrating that we can provide cost effective solutions“?

Resources For The Cultural Heritage Sector

I’m pleased to report that an area of the UKOLN Web site dedicated to the cultural heritage sector has now been launched.

Historical Context

UKOLN has had close links with the cultural heritage sector for many years - when I joined UKOLN back in 1996 UKOLN was funded by BLRIC (British Library Research and Innovation Centre) together with the JISC. Over time this funding body changed, initially to the LIC (Library and Information Commission) and then, as the library, museums and archives sectors moved more closely linked, by Resource which was subsequently renamed MLA (Museums, Libraries and Archives Council).

Engagement With The Sector

UKOLN is perhaps uniquely placed to exploit its close links with the higher and further education communities, libraries (both academic and public) and museums and archives. Over the past couple of years I have become very actively involved in supporting the museums sector, having been a program committee member, speaker, workshop facilitator and chair at the Museums and the Web conferences in 2007 and 2008 and a speaker at UK Museums on the Web conferences in 2004, 2005, 2006 and 2007.

But perhaps more significant to the broader cultural heritage sector are the workshops we have been running which have attracted participants from across a range of museums, libraries and archives. This has included workshops held on behalf of MLA London and MLA Yorkshire and CyMAL (the Welsh equivalent of MLA). We have also run workshops for the Society of Archives in 2007 and 2008, with a workshop for the Association of Scottish Visitor Attractions to be held in November.

Many of these workshops focus on ways in which Web 2.0 can provide benefits to the cultural heritage sector, although a rather wider perspective on the digital landscape is often provided, covering additional areas such as the preservation of digital resources.

Changing Political Context

The importance for UKOLN (which is a JISC Innovation Centre) to engage in this way with the cultural heritage sector was highlighted in Elspeth Hyams’ editorial in the CILIP Update magazine (June 2008, Vol. 7, No. 6) has the byline ”In This Climate, You Have To Innovate“.  As Elspeth described (and I commented upon recently) “The age of the quiescent library or information manager or service is dead“.

The editorial went on to describe the MLA’s action plan for public libraries and reports on the MLA’s Chief Executive, Roy Clare, calls for “radical action on structure, far-sighted leadership vision and more public Private Partnerships“. The editorial concludes with the warning that “It’s not just a challenge for the academic schools, but for all of us” but also suggests that “we should use tough times as a golden opportunity to focus on the strategy - and upgrade and refresh our skills“.

I think it is clear from these comments that significant changes will be needed within the cultural heritage sector. And indeed Roy Clare has commented on the failures of previous national initiatives to deliver compelling user-focussed services. As reported in a post on the MCG JISCmail list: “Roy Clare highlighted the NOF Digitise project as an example of where we went wrong in assuming that mass digitisation and online publishing of collections would be engaging“.

The political and funding changes (it seems public sector money is now being used to fund the 2012 Olympics) are taking place at a time in which Web 2.0 approaches are steadily gaining momentum, with smaller organisations (and indeed organisations) now being able provide services which previously would have required significant amounts of funding.

The need to ensure that “engaging” digital services are provided by cultural heritage organisations underpins the workshops we have been providing. It also reflects the strategic thinking of various national bodies, including the National Library of Wales which in its Shaping the future: The Library’s strategy 2008-2009 to 2010-201 document (PDF format) states that:

We propose … Taking advantage of new online technology, including the construction of Web 2.0 services, to develop progressive ways of interacting with users. It is expected that the Library itself will provide only some specific services on its website. Instead, the intention is to promote and facilitate the use of the collections by external users, in accordance with specific guidelines.

A review of the uses of Web 2.0 services by the National Library of Wales was given in a talk by Paul Bevan at the first Sharing Made Simple: An Introduction to the Social Web workshop  - and I’m pleased to say that Paul describes this work as a co-author of an invited 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 in Singapore in a few weeks time.

UKOLN is well-positioned to identify such examples of best practices, make the examples available to wider audiences, encourage debate and use such case studies in the development of more general models for the sector.  In this respect our links with the higher education sector is particularly valuable, as higher eductaional institutions seem to be better positioned to make early use of innoovative new technologies and has a healthy tradition of encouraging open debate on the merits of such innovation.

Resources For The Sector

The new area of the UKOLN Web site provides access to a variety of resources on a range of issues of particular relevance to the cultural heritage sector, and brings together information previously distributed across the UKOLN Web site.

As well as providing access to the events we’ll be running another important area of the Web site is the IntroBytes area, which provides access to a range of briefing document we have produced, sometimes in conjunction with practitioners from the cultural heritage sector. These documents are used at many of the event we run, which helps to ensure that we receive feedbackon the content of the documents. It should also be noted that the documents are available under a Creative Commons licence, which permits their reuse for non-commercial purposes. This licence was chosen in order to ensure that the resources can be embedded for use within organisation in the cultureal heritage sector (and beyond).

Sustainability

We have received positive feedback on our results, as can be seen from comments provided at the recent workshops for CyMAL (which was given a rating of 5.35 out of a maximum score of 6) and MLA Yorkshire.

In order to ensure the ongoing sustainability of our work for the cultural heritage sector we are now running workshops on a cost-recovery basis for the wider sector. This has included workshops for the voluntary sector and CyMAL with additional workshops already scheduled for CyMAL and ASVA.

If anyone would be interested in organising a workshop along the lines described, feel free to get in touch.

Yesterday’s Guardian (24 September 2008) contains an article on the release of the Google G1 phone. An accompanying review, entitled “Innovation For Tech Heads” describes how the technology is “as good if not in some cases better” than the iPhone, and mentions G1’s strengths in its camera and download speed. Most importantly, though, the article describes how “The real difference between the two devices … is likely to come from the openness of Google’s operating system, Android, which allows tech-heads to design ‘widgets’ for the phone.” The article does concede that the phone lacks the “wow factor of the Apple device“.

Now I’m sure that most readers of this blog will understand the benefits provided by openness and the dangers of being locked into a proprietary system - whether this is Facebook, Microsoft or Apple’s iPhone. Some readers with a pragmatic view of the world may have bought an iPhone as at the time there wasn’t an equivalent open system. But now that the G1 device is available, which provides, unlike the iPhone, an open environment for accessing widgets, that argument is no longer valid. So we’ll soon be seeing those iPhone users who have strong beliefs in open systems and have criticised the closed nature of various Web 2.0 services seeking to move their contract, won’t we?  And this should include many of the people I follow on Twitter who necame very excited when they purchsed their iPhone.

Is this a likely scenario? Isn’t it the case that IT professionals and policies makers can be impressed by the ‘wow’ factor  - this isn’t restricted young people who we sometimes accuse of being impressed by the latest ‘fad’.  And don’t we all have to make judgements about openness, cost, functionality and, indeed, personal preferences.  So if the iPhone, G1 or whatever other new device comes along and provides a valuable personal learning environment, personal research environment, personal work environment and personal social environment for the owner of the device, then shouldn’t we accept that?

And if we accept that argument for the device that we have in our hand, then doesn’t it also apply to the equivalent service which we have accept via our fingertips- whether this is our preferred social networking environment or aggregation tool? Or to put it another way, when should openness trump personal preferences?

(Disclaimer I’m the owner of a Nokia N95 with a short battery life!)

How should institutions response in their uses of Web 2.0 services at a time of a global recession?  In response to a recent post CodeGorilla pointed out that at a number of participants at the Repository Fringe event had felt that use of services such as Flickr and Google should be avoided because such companies were not as well-established as many Universities.

I feel the views that were reported were rather disingenuous, not so much because not all Universities have been in existence for several centuries (BCU is very new University) but because the services Universities provide will change and evolve over time (when I worked at the University of technology, Loughborough - as it was known at the time - the Computer Centre provided a data preparation service which was shut down many years ago). And as I pointed out last year, “Universities, Not Facebook, May Be Facing Collapse” - indeed when I attended a JISC CETIS conference a couple of years ago doubts were expressed by senior academics as to whether high educational institutions in their current form will exist in 20 years time.

This is, of course, just speculation, as was my post in which I pointed out that standards-making organisations, such as W3C, which are funded by memberships fees, with significant contributions being paid by commercial IT vendors and user organisations, may similarly be affected by the recession.

But what scenarios might we envisage happening? And what plans should our institutions be developing in case the worst case scenarios occur? Let me give my thoughts:

Externally-hosted Web 2.0 providers: What if the services provided by Google, Yahoo, etc. prove uneconomic and the services are shut down or the terms and conditions changed, with perhaps free-to-use services becoming subscription services?

Our institutions: What if the economic downturn affects the sustainability of the IT services provided within our institutions?

Our national services: What if the national services provided for our communities are similarly adversely affected, with users preferring the services provided by the global services?

Our information providers: What if the services provided by individuals within our institution, who use Slideshare, Flickr, del.icio.us, etc. aren’t sustainable because the individuals may face redundancy, early retirement, etc.?

Our funding organisations: What if our funding bodies have less funds available, and are forced to stop or reduce the level of funding provided to national or institutional services?

Our user communities: What if our users expectations or interests change?

How should we respond to such dangers, given that we can’t predict which dangers, if any, will materialise? My suggestion is that we should be embracing diversity, rather than searching for a single solution which we hope will be resilient to an economic downturn. So we should avoid any exclusive deals (some time ago I heard that one institution had signed an exclusive deal with a VoIP provider which seems to mean that the institution had to ban use of Skye).  And we should ensure that our data can be easily reused by other services. And we should ensure that we have data migration strategies - and that we test the data migration to ensure that it works in the way we might expect.  And finally we should ensure that we have new media literacy strategy in place so that members of our organisation, including senior managers and not just the users of our services, have an understanding of the risks associated with the services we may be using - with an understanding that the risks will also apply to the in-house and licensed services and applications and not just the services provided on the ‘cloud’.

Last week I gave an invited presentation on “What Can Web 2.0 Offer To The IAMIC Community?” at the annual IAMIC (International Association of Music Information Centres) conference. 

I gave my talk on Thursday 11^th September, immediately after Nick Poole, CEO of the Collections Trust gave the opening talk of the day on “Technology and the Future: the Crystal Ball“. In his talk Nick described how the Web of the future will be a world in which organisational Web sites are likely to be little used and will have a low profile - rather organisations will make their information available in the places users visit. This may be a tool used by the individual (similar to the PLEs - Personal Learning Environments - or PREs - Personal Research Environment - which are of such interest in the educational sector) or the popular services users visit (perhaps Flickr for photographs, YouTube for videos or the popular social networks).

Following Nick’s presentation my talk described how national Music Information Centres could make use of Web 2.0 and the Social Web to support their organisational aims and to support the IAMIC member organisations, located at over 40 countries worldwide.

When I prepared my talk I had come across a number of examples of use of Web 2.0 by the national centres. The CMC (Contemporary Music Centre, Ireland) were making use of YouTube to provide easy access to video clips of interviews with contemporary composers (as illustrated) and were also making use of iTunes in a similar fashion.  It was interesting to note that CMC managed the resources on their own organisational Web site in addition to providing access via popular video and music sharing sites.  It was pleasing to see this approach to the management of resources complemented by use of a diversity of access mechanisms. It seems that the vision of the future which Nick described has already arrived, in some places at least.

There were, however, some instances of failures within the IAMIC community; I was told over coffee of the problems with the international IAMIC Web site (which had been unavailable for quite some time) and of attempts to provide cross-searching across the European sites which seems to have been closed down after live up to its promises. 

But the conference participants did seem to be prepared to learn from such mistakes and there did appear to be a willingness to engage with new developments including  the social Web. I provided an example of the potential of Twitter by posting a tweet asking for “examples of Web 2.0 music services for talk I’m about to give to IAMIC members“. Responses I received a few minutes after my post included several from Pete Johnston on “Last.fm, rateyourmusic.com“, “For sharing own works, MySpace (obv), GarageBand.com, jamendo.com, kompoz.com + prob loads more“, “Internet Archive also has lots of “2.0″-ness” and “Plus zillions of music weblogs, many sharing mp3s, aggregators like Hype Machine” together with a note that we “Mustn’t forget MusicBrainz“.

I also received several other responses within a few minutes of my initial post from several other of my Twitter followers including suggestions from marydeeo, t1mmyb, MintyVanilla, MrJ1197, georgeroberts, ianibbo, gavinmitchel and egrommet, as illustrated.

Perhaps in response to my question “what can Web 2.0 offer to the IAMIC community?” one answer might be Twitter. Rather than the perhaps time-consuming process of evaluating social networking tools, maybe a simple approach would be for a group of professionals with a similar set of interests to simple write the occasional 140 character summary about what they’re doing and ask the occassional question.  This works for me, I’m pleased to say.

I previously mentioned a joint paper on “Redefining Accessibility for a Web 2.0 World” which has been accepted for the ADDW08 conference to be held at the University of York on 22-24^th September 2008. David Sloan, the lead author for the paper, will present this paper.

In addition to this paper Liddy Nevile and myself have had a paper on “Web Accessibility 3.0: Learning From The Past, Planning For The Future” also accepted at the ADDW08 conference. This paper describes three scenarios: it explores the limitations of a vision for Web accessibility based on use of the WAI approach to provide “universal accessibility” and then describes the limitations of the “holistic approach to Web accessibility” developed initially by myself, Lawrie Phipps and David Sloan. The paper describes how these approaches focus on, in the first scenario, on the accessibility of individual resources and, in the second scenario, on institutional approaches to enhancing the accessibility of the purposes of the Web services. However neither of these approaches seems to have much relevance to the accessibility of the globally popular Web 2.0 services. And if we are serious about Web accessibility we should be looking at the accessibility of the global World Wide Web, and not just individual resources or the resources managed within our institutions.

But how should be go about addressing such large-scale challenges? In the paper we suggest that we should be exploring how the relationships between resources might help to provide users with access to related resources and how personalisation approaches might provide users with access to resources which are accessible to the individual user, rather than being universally accessible. The vision, Liddy and I feel, can be regarded as an implementation of the W3C’s vision for the Semantic Web. But we also argue the need to have the scepticism which failed to be applied to WAI’s model for Web accessibility.  

The slides which will be presented at the conference are available on Slideshare and are embedded below.

And as we argued the need for a critical approach to proposals for Web accessibility (which we have taken in the past to the limitations of the WAI model and the WCAG guidelines) we invite your comments on our paper and this presentation.

“If this is the death of Wall Street as we know it, the tombstone will read: killed by complexity” it was suggested on the front page of the Guardian today (Tuesday 16 September 2008).  A similar question might be asked about the roadmap for a number of Web developments.  Is Tim Berners-Lee’s vision for the Semantic Web over-complex?  Are the metadata standards which are being developed too complex to be used by many software developers? The abstract for a panel session at WWW 2005 suggested that “It has been estimated that all of the Web Services specifications and proposals (“WS-*”) weigh in at several thousand pages by now”. And one of the many objections to ISO’s decision to standardise the OOXML file format was that, at 6,000 pages, it was too complex for developers in small organisations to implement.

So now’s the time for more lightweight approaches, it could be argued.

Not so, comes the counter-argument. We will need to have comprehensive, well-grounded and unambiguous standards and specifications in order to build robust services.

The current uncertainties in the financial markets of course provide more than just a analogy  - they are also giving rise to uncertainties in the IT sector.  This is often used as an argument to point out dangers of the dependencies on externally-hosted Web 2.0 services, as my colleague Paul Walk pointed out recently. But as I mentioned last year in a post entitled “Universities, Not Facebook, May Be Facing Collapse“, universities themselves are not immune to the financial difficulties which the banks and airline sectors are currently facing.   

But into such discussions we should also add the financial stability of the standards-making organisations. Organisations which have government backing may be able to weather the storm, but what about those member consortiums whose sustainability is dependent on the financial backing of the commercial sector. And as the W3C is one such organisation, can we be confident that the development and maintenance of complex standards will be sustainable in the long run.  In light of suggestion in a recent interview with Ian Hickson, editor of the HTML 5 standard, that the standard is unlikely to be a “Proposed Recommendation in 2022″, should we not now be asking the difficult questions regarding the sustainability of such standards which seem to have a long gestation period before they can be regarded as stable.  

Or am I being unduly pessimistic?  Might not any current financial uncertainties be a mere blip, and perhaps will not affect standardisation development processes along the lines I’ve hinted at? Or will a legacy of George W Bush’s economic mis-management (or Tony Blair’s if you are of a different political hue) be the failure of the HTML 5 standard to achieve its proposed recommendation status by 2022?

On Saturday (13 September 2008) I attended my first Barcamp - the Bathcamp08 event held at Invention Studios in Bath. I was present at the conception of this event, in a cafe in Montreal where Mike Ellis floated the idea and explored possible themes with myself, Mia Ridge and Frankie Roberto on the day after the end of the Museums and the Web 2008 conference.  It was initially suggested that the Barcamp should have a focus on the role of IT and the Web in cultural heritage organisations. However during the planning for the event is seems that this suggestion was dropped and the event didn’t have a particular single theme to it.  What it did have, though, was a lot of enthusiasm and friendly vibes across a more diverse set of participants than I normally encounter, with free-lance software developers, people working in small Web development companies and from Web design and marketing agencies, developers from large companies as well as a handful from the academic and cultural heritage sectors.

As the attendees were mostly very active users of various Web 2.0 technologies and services much of the discussions, comments and reflections of the event took place on Twitter using the ‘bathcamp08′ tag, with photos being uploaded to Flickr and slides to Slideshare using this tag and other resources, including blog posts about the event, should be available using this tag. There is also a Bathcamp08 Pageflakes page which aggregates the various RSS feeds associated with the event. And finally I should mention that there are a number of video recordings of the event available, including MIke Ellis’s introduction to Bathcamp08.

With so many other comments about the event likely to be published soon I’ll not attempt to summarise the event, except to thank Mike Ellis (in particular) and the other organisers of the event (including Tim Beadle, Frankie Roberto, Matt Jukes and Mike’s Eduserv colleagues) for ensuring the event was such a success.

The Barcamp rules expect first-timers to participate actively at the event, and not just be passive lurkers. I had floated the idea of a double-act with Dave Briggs (whom I’ve not met but have had a couple of Twitter conversations with) on the use of Web 2.0 in public sector organisations, with a focus on the barriers rather than the potential barriers. However Dave couldn’t make the event, which meant some last minute updating of my slides for my 40 minute session, which I decided to call “Web 2.0: Time For Serious Thinking!” - a reference to a talk Mike Ellis and myself gave at the Museums and the Web 2007 conference on “Web 2.0: How to Stop Thinking and Start Doing”.

My slides are available on Slideshare and are also embedded below.

As the Bathcamp was an informal and friendly event I had the opportunity to be sceptical about our previous paper, using the example of the enthusiastic Web 2.0 developer (which I called an ‘Ellis‘) who has a valuable role to play in the early stages of a new technology in getting the involvement of other developers and early adopters. However once the initial period of excitement has died down, there’s a need for the more serious thinking to take place.  This will include the need to address the various barriers to the use of Web 2.0 which I have encountered in recent workshop, including, most recently, the Sharing Made Simple: An Introduction to the Social Web workshop I facilitated for organisations in the cultural heritage sector in Wales. As documented on the event wikithe barriers for museums, libraries and archives include:

Corporate Depts (eg IT, Corporate Image etc)- need to get political partners on board to apply pressure via SMT

Need for Higher Level Education- fear of impacts of negative return from Web 2.0 - “it’s chaos”. Especially at SnrManager level. Need for realistic risk management.

Computer Literacy (public) - would we be excluding a generation who don’t use this tech but visual content can be more appealing to those with poor literacy.

Training/ Staff Knowledge - How do we get people’s knowledge and skills up to scratch?

Time - How do we resource this work? Who has the time?

Evaluation- how do you evaluate this work as being worthwhile? How do we get our paymasters to say that these are OK in terms of our KPIs?

Legislation & Procedures - DDA, DPA etc

Sustainability - of Software and activity. How do you work with services with which you have no SLA? How do you make sure this continues in the long term? Who might support us?

Choosing Software - how do we select the right product?

Duplication of Effort (eg. with Corporate Website) - is this a waste of time? Will it be contradictory?

Getting People to Use It - If we build it, will they come? What’s a ‘good’ level to judge ourselves against?

Abuse & Bad Publicity - How do we deal with this? What if it all goes wrong and gets in the papers? Could I lose my job?

Cost - Who pays? How?

Anyone have any suggestions as to how these barriers can be addressed? Or even comments as to whether these barriers are real?

On the The thoughts of a Code Gorilla blog a post on Videos from Repository Fringe 2008 provides a link to a number of videos of talks given at the Repository Fringe held recently in Edinburgh. The blog is written by a software developed who has been “identified as “a free thinker” by JISC“.

The post states that the videos “will be made available via a Streaming Server at some point, however this is a microsoft-specific platform, so non-windows/non-Internet Explorer users struggle to access the data“. In order to maximise the access to the videos Code Gorilla has “uploaded them to google video“.

As I mentioned in post on the