Jisc Report on Sustaining Our Digital Future: Institutional Strategies for Digital Content

Earlier today the Jisc announced the launch of a report on Sustaining Our Digital Future: Institutional Strategies for Digital Content.

This report, which provides a close look at three institutions (UCL, Imperial War Museums and the National Library of Wales) in the United Kingdom confirms:

• How fragmented the digital landscape is at universities and within other organisations.
• How there are examples of good practice within and outside higher education that all can learn from but that greater co-ordination is required to deliver this at a UK level.
• How little the topic of post-build sustainability comes up at the higher levels of administration.
• How risk is present within the current system, concerning the sustainability of digital content.

The report (which is available in PDF format) is substantial, containing 88 pages. In addition to this main report a second document (also available in PDF format) provides a “Sustainability Health Check Tool for Digital Content Projects“.

This report is very timely arriving at a time in which we are seeing reductions in the levels of funding available across public sector organisations in the UK, which will lead to questions regarding the sustainability of existing online services and digital resources.

The report is based on a study conducted by Ithaka S+R, with funding from the Jisc-led Strategic Content Alliance, which reported on findings of earlier studies showing that both funders and project leaders rely heavily on their host institutions to support and sustain digital content, beyond the end of the grant. But what will happen when the host institutions have significantly reduced levels of funding to continue to maintain and develop such content?

The report describes the need for an “early and honest appraisal of which projects are likely to require .. support post-launch“:

• Digital content, requiring just “maintenance”: These may not require ongoing growth, but certainly do require a clear exit plan to ensure that the content will be smoothly deposited and integrated into some other site, database, or repository. The issue of ongoing investment does not disappear; it just becomes the concern of the larger platform on which this piece of content now lives.
• Digital resources, requiring ongoing growth and investment: These require early sustainability planning, including identifying institutional or other partners and careful consideration of the full range of costs and activities needed to keep the resource vibrant.

The Sustainability Health Check Tool provides a paper-based checklist for those with responsibilities for managing digital content. The tool covers a number of areas including ongoing support; audience, usage and impact assessment together with preservation issues.

A series of video clips have been produced to accompany the launch of this report. It was particularly interesting to hear the comment from Prof David Price, Vice-Provost (Research) at UCL:

“We’re not just worried about things disappearing but about things never appearing! They are hosted all over the place, and not all the projects have a sustainable plan.”

This video clip is available on YouTube and embedded below.

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Why I’m Now Embedding ORCID Metadata in PDFs

“Every PDF needs a title”

The day after announcing a post on Reflections on the Discussion on the Quality of Embedded Metadata in PDFs I received a tweet from @community which alerted me to a blog post on SEO Action for PDF files on the Adobe blog. The post describes an extension for use in Acrobat X Pro which automates the settings of the properties of the PDF file in accordance with guidelines which can enhance the discoverability of PDF files by Google. The guidelines, which had been published way back in August 2009, were based on experiments which demonstrated improvements in Google’s indexing of PDF files. The article’s main conclusion was that “Every PDF needs a title“:

In terms of PDF files, the blue underlined text in Google’s search results comes from one of two places. First, Google looks in the “Title” document information field. If it finds nothing, Google’s indexer tries to guess the document’s title by scanning the text on the first few pages. This usually doesn’t work, producing incorrect and improperly formatted results.

In addition to this advice, the article also suggested use of other metadata fields including author, subjects and keywords.

Metadata For Peer-Reviewed Papers

Although I ensure that I provide the correct title for my peer-reviewed papers when I create them in MS Word I was unsure whether I included the names of the co-authors or made use of other metadata fields.

On Friday 25 January 2013 I decided to update the metadata for one of my papers, ”Developing A Holistic Approach For E-Learning Accessibility” which was the first paper myself, Lawrie Phipps and Elaine Swift wrote back in 2004

I added a number of tags to the paper and used the Comments field to provide the abstract. In addition the publication details were added to the Status field.

Whilst updating the metadata it occurred to me that it would be useful to include the ORCID ID for the authors as this will be less volatile than the author’s email address (one of the co-authors was based at the University of Bath when the paper was published but subsequently moved to Nottingham Trent University).

In addition to the resource discovery metadata for the paper I also remembered that I should ensure that images in the paper contained appropriate alt text so that image descriptions are available to those who may make use of a screen reader. Fortunately we had done this for the paper, but I have to admit that this isn’t necessarily done for all of my research papers.

Having updated the metadata for the paper and embedded images I then created the PDF from MS Word. I noticed that the Save As PDF option in MS Word enabled a number of options to be specified, including Save As ISO-19005 (PDF/A).

As described in Wikipedia PDF/A is “an ISO-standardized version of the Portable Document Format (PDF) specialized for the digital preservation of electronic documents“. The articles goes on to explain that “PDF/A differs from PDF by omitting features ill-suited to long-term archiving, such as font linking (as opposed to font embedding)“.

Since the digital preservation of peer-reviewed publications is important I ensured that I saved the paper in PDF/A format, using the Save As option illustrated.

Approaches to Embedded Metadata Embedded in PDFs

What practices should be used in providing the metadata to be created in the original authoring tool (MS Word, in my case) which will then be available in the PDF version of the paper? Here’s a summary of the approaches I have used:

Title: The title of the paper

Tags: My preferred tags about the content and my organisation.

Comments: The abstract of the paper, normally taken from the abstract provided in the paper.

Author: First Name Surname (ORCID: ORCID ID) e.g. Brian Kelly (ORCID: 0000-0001-5875-8744)

The title field will be obvious. The tags will reflect keywords which I feel will enhance access to the document (and I choose less than five). I am using the comments field to host the abstract for the paper. Finally the author field contains the full name followed by ORCID: ORCID ID (in brackets). I feel that this is a pragmatic approach to ensuring that the significant information which will be indexed by Google is found in the metadata fields which are available through my authoring tool (MS Word).

But could this cause problems? Might Google think my name is Mr Orcid or Mr 0000-0001-5875-8744? Might other indexing and aggregation tools have problems as I am misusing the semantics of these metadata tools? My feeling is that Google will be capable of understanding the content and it is better to have such quality metadata (which I have chosen) rather than no metadata. But are other researchers embedding ORCID IDs in PDFs? In order to answer this question I have using Google’s advanced search capability to search for “ORCID” in PDF resources across a number of domains, as summarised below.

Domain	Results	Date	Current Results
All	3,840	28 Jan 2013	Try it
.ac.uk	109	28 Jan 2013	Try it
bath.ac.uk	0	28 Jan 2013	Try it

These numbers are low – and when you realise that the results include PDFs which contain the string “ORCID” in the text of the pages (as illustrated) it seems clear that there is little evidence that ORCID IDs are being embedded in PDFs yet.

So before I embed ORCID IDs in my other papers I would welcome feedback on this proposal. Is it desirable to include the ORCID IDs of authors in the PDF versions of papers? If so, is the approach I have taken to be recommended to others? Or might it be desirable to provided richer structured metadata in PDF files, using the XMP (Extensible Metadata Platform) standard? But if this is felt to be desirable, how would it fit into the workflow, given that it appears difficult to persuade authors to provide metadata for their papers in any case?

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Twitter Announces Vine. But How Could Higher Education Use 6-second long Videos?

Sharing Brief Video Clips on Twitter

Yesterday Twitter announced Vine: A new way to share video. As described in a TechCrunch article “[Vine] integrates with Twitter in the same way that Instagram does, except that Vine never turned off permissions randomly, meaning that Vine videos can be embedded directly in tweets, showing up in followers’ streams“. An article in the Guardian explains how “Vine clips automatically play when embedded in tweets, although their sound is turned off by default. The clips also play within Twitter’s official mobile app. Users can add locations to their clips – the app draws on Foursquare’s places database for that – with three options for sharing: Vine, Twitter and/or Facebook.” The Guardian article instantly attracted comments on how Vine might be (mis-used):

• Sexting app
• Advert app
• oh no it’s the video equivalent of gifs, twitter is gonna become as annoying as tumblr is with these.

although others provided more thoughtful responses:

As with everything, it’s all about how you leverage the technology. 
Yes, for the most part, this app will feature videos of no importance whatsoever, but there will, as always, be some gems in the dirt.

Leaving that aside, you have to remember that with Twitter, many people end up forming a close circle of people they meet physically in the real world – so Twitter augments that. 
I don’t give a damn about someone I’ve never mets photo of their dog on twitter, but I do care if a friend of mine posts a picture of their dog.

The same applies to tweeting – to most people, the “Did xyz run in xyz area this morning, totally knackered” is completely meaningless and banal. But to this persons friends, it’s likely to promote conversation when they next meet. “Saw your tweet Dave, how was the run down at xyz? Did a run there recently” …

So, before you instantly dismiss tech such as this, perhaps give it a *little* more thought?

I would agree that we should give a little more thought to the implications of new technologies, especially their potential in higher education.

Initial Experiments

Earlier today I installed the Vine app on by iPod Touch and recorded a number of video clips. I asked what could be said in 6 seconds (partly to get a feel for what could be said in such a brief period. In my second video clip I said “E=MC² and the DNA is a double helix” to illustrate how important scientific concepts could be described using the Vine app. By then I had gained some familiarity with the app. In my third post I described what I liked about the app: being able to stop and start reshooting by simply removed my finger for the screen. My four post described what I didn’t like – the lack of support for the iPod Touch’s forward-facing camera.

I then started to write this post – and discovered that I couldn’t find the URL for the video clips I had created and uploaded to Vine. I can view the videos using the Vine app and people who follow me on Vine will see the videos in their Vine timeline but it seems as though they are not available via a Web interface; this was confirmed by Giles Turnbull, one of my Twitter followers who is also experimenting with Vine: “only way to find out the URL of your Vine post is to share it somewhere. if you choose not to share, or forget, you can’t find it on the web“.

I therefore created another clip which is available online. However there does not appear to be a Web interface to my Vine profile, so I can’t access my clips via a Web browser in order to change access rights, delete videos, manage Vine followers, etc.

Perhaps it is unfair to be too critical of the limitations of the initial release of the app: these short=-comings may be remedied in a subsequent release. However I thought I would summarise my initial experiments for others who may wish to evaluate the app. And rather than describe possible use cases for 6-second long video clips in higher education I’d welcome suggestions. If you’d rather not describe possible uses, perhaps you may wish to complete the poll on whether you think Vine has a role to play in higher education.

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Don’t Leave Instagram (or Facebook, Google Drive, …) Until You’ve Considered the Implications

New Year: An Opportunity to Delete Social Media Accounts!

A few days ago I received the following email from Instagram:

As we announced in December, we have updated our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. These policies also now take into account the feedback we received from the Instagram Community. We’re emailing you to remind you that, as we announced last month, these updated policies will be in effect as of January 19th, 2013. 

That’s right, as of Saturday 19^th January 2013, the new terms and conditions come into operation.

Did you delete your Instragram account before Christmas, once you saw the tweets and the blog posts about how Instagram intended to sell the photos you have taken of your loved ones? Perhaps you made a new year’s resolution to cancel subscriptions to services for which you don’t pay a subscription, so that “you’re the product“. Or maybe you have taken the opportunity to delete accounts which you simply don’t use perhaps Google+ appeared promising when it was launched but it hasn’t found a place in your regular workflow.

Are You Making An Informed Decision?

Is your decision based on a correct understanding of the appropriate policies? Are you aware of the possible risks in deleting social media account?

Back in April 2012 a post which asked Have You Got Your Free Google Drive, Skydrive & Dropbox Accounts? was written in response to a tweet from @sydlawrence which said:

Holy crap. Google owns everything on google drive. Tell me a business that will use it… cl.ly/1W2h1A163p0W2A … 

which linked to the following screenshot of the Google Drive terms and conditions:

The screenshot quite clearly states that “You retain ownership of any intellectual property that you hold in that content. In short, what belongs to you stays yours“. It’s therefore not surprising that the image was subsequently deleting – but not before the post was retweeted 1,109 times and favourited by 115 Twitter users!

This provides a good example of how an incorrect summary (whether through a mistake or malicious intent) of the terms and conditions of a service can be easily repeated and, through Twitter’s power in viral communications, lead to such misinformation being widely accepted as the truth.

The situation with Instragram is not as clear-cut since the company have admitted their failings:

it became clear that we failed to fulfill what I consider one of our most important responsibilities – to communicate our intentions clearly 

and explained how, in the light of user feedback (emphasis provided in original):

we are reverting … to the original version that has been in effect since we launched the service in October 2010

Instragram now echo Google in providing an unambiguous statement regarding ownership of content uploaded to the service:

Instagram has no intention of selling your photos, and we never did. We don’t own your photos – you do.

So if you deleted your Instagram account because you had been led to believe that you were losing ownership of your content or your content could be sold without your permission then your made this decision based on incorrect assumptions!

Further Thoughts on Deletion of Social Media Accounts

“If you’re not paying for something, you’re not the customer; you’re the product”

Back in November 2010 a post on the LifeHacker blog gave the background to the statement If You’re Not Paying for It; You’re the Product:

This particular quote comes from a discussion on MetaFilter, regarding the massive changes at the social aggregation news site Digg earlier this year. MetaFilter user blue_beetle accurately observed that “if you’re not paying for something, you’re not the customer; you’re the product being sold”. This sentiment doesn’t just apply to unhappy Digg users but to a significant portion of the online experience and many real life interactions.

I’ve commented previously on the flaws in this argument: I didn’t pay for my education as a child – does this mean that I’m simply a product of the capitalist system which will seek to exploit me as a worker and provide free health care so my productivity is maximised? Similarly I don’t pay to watch ITV; in this case the adverts are the TV companies’ key services which I am encouraged to consume, with the TV programmes filling the gaps between the advertising breaks.

In reality many of the social media service seek to monetise the ‘attention data’ in order to make a profit, as well as cover the costs of providing the services. Like many people, although by no means everyone, I am prepared to accept this environment and have not chosen to purchase a premium account which many social media companies provide for those who wish to avoid seeing advertising materials.

I am not alone in my views on the phrase. The Powazek blog contained a post entitled I’m Not The Product, But I Play One On The Internet which was published in December 2012 which described how:

But the more the line is repeated, the more it gets on my nerves. It has a stoner-like quality to it (“Have you ever looked at your hands? I mean really looked at your hands?”). It reminds me of McLuhan’s “the medium is the message,” a phrase that is seemingly deep but collapses into pointlessness the moment you think about using it in any practical way. 

The post concludes:

we should all stop saying, “if you’re not paying for the product, you are the product,” because it doesn’t really mean anything

There will be legitimate reasons why you may chose not to use a service because you are unhappy with their terms and conditions – but such decisions should be made because of an informed decision and not just because you aren’t paying for the service.

Social Media Accounts Which Aren’t Being Used

But beyond the issue of the terms and conditions, should you delete an account because it is little used? Although this would appear to be a sensible decision there is a need to consider the associated risks.

Back in January 2011 a post on Evidence of Personal Usage Of Social Web Services described the long gestation period for services such as Twitter. As I concluded “in the case of Twitter it was only after two years of first using the service that it became embedded in my working practices” – there was a need to have (a) have a critical mass of Twitter followers with whom I could engage with; (b) have more effective tools than the Twitter Web client I used initially and (c) have a compelling use case which convinced me of the value of the service (this turned out to be use of Twitter at a conference when I was away from the office for a period and meeting new people).

I would admit that I have not yet found a compelling use case for Google+. But I will keep the account, partly because the account is used to authenticate myself with other Google services. But in addition I would not wish to miss out on the occasional use I do make of Google+ or to have to rebuild a Google+ community if I delete the account and subsequently find uses for the service.

Similarly my Facebook account provide an address book for friends and colleagues and a means of keeping in touch beyond annual Christmas cards. But in addition, as I suggested in a post which asked What Could Facebook’s New Search System Offer Researchers? recent Facebook developments, such as the Facebook Graph Search, may provide new opportunities which could be of value to me. Stephen Downes on the OLDaily blog has commented that:

A graph search makes sense, and would eventually provide better results than Google, but it really depends on people being engaged enough with Facebook to generate useful data, and that is far from clear. More from E-Commerce Times, Social Media Today, BBC News, Mashable, Brian Kelly, ClickZ, Technology Review, Ben Werdmuller, Wired News..

I agree that it is unclear whether Facebook will have sufficient momentum to provide a useful service; for me, this is also true of Google+. However I have judged the risks of continuing to use the services as low, with the loss of my networks on such services meaning that it would be difficult and time-consuming to regenerate such networks if the services did turn out to be useful.

I have summarised the decisions I have made and the rationale behind the decisions. Have you chosen to delete any social media accounts? Or have you considered deleting accounts and decided not to? I’d welcome your thoughts.

PS: A tweet from @digisim reminded me that I had intended to also add that one reason for subscribing to social media services which aren’t used is to claim your username. I have claimed briankelly on the identi.ca service in case that service (touted as an open alternative to Twitter) ever takes off. However as I have only posted four times since July 2008 and only have 12 followers it seems unlikely that the service will take off.

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What Could Facebook’s New Search System Offer Researchers?

Facebook’s Graph Search Beta Targets Google

Yesterday my Twitter stream was full of tweets about Facebook’s announcement that they were Introducing Graph Search Beta - and this morning the headline Facebook’s Search for Supremacy featured on the front page of the Metro newspaper.

The significance of this announcement can be gauged by the BBC news headline: Facebook’s Graph targets Google in which Rory Cellan-Jones, the BBC’s technology correspondent, describes how his initial scepticism may have been misplaced: “If [Facebook's] Graph Search more closely resembles what Bing describes, then users will be able to stay on Facebook, earning the company huge advertising revenues as they search for goods and services“.

A TechCrunch article which asks “What Can You Search For On Facebook Graph Search?” has focussed on the social aspects of this development (dating, finding places to eat and drink, etc.). But what could Facebook’s new search system offer researchers?

What Does The Evidence Tell Us?

Importance of Evidence

Although people may be tempted to be instinctively dismissive of any developments to Facebook, as described in a paper on “What Next for Libraries? Making Sense of the Future” (available in PDF and MS Word formats)” involvement with work of the Jisc Obervatory has led to a greater emphasis on evidence-gathering. In addition the Jisc Inform article which announced “A Bright Future for Independent Jisc in 2013” described how a greater emphasis for development work will be based on the needs of the institutions. There will therefore be a need to gather evidence on how Facebook is being used across UK higher and further educational institutions in order to understand whether Facebook developments can enhance uses of made of Facebook to support institutional activities.

Institutional Use of Facebook

Facebook ‘Likes’ Across Russell Group Universities

Back in November 2007 a post on UK Universities On Facebook provided early evidence of use of Facebook by early adopters, when there were only about 76 universities with a Facebook presence. A year later a post on Revisiting UK University Pages On Facebook started to keep a record of Facebook usage by the early institutional adopters. More recently a post on Over One Million ‘Likes’ of Facebook Pages for the 24 Russell Group Universities provided an indication of the scale of use of Facebook across a selection of UK universities.

This might suggest that the enhanced searching techniques announced yesterday may be relevant for those involved in university marketing activities, although there may be some interesting privacy issues to be addressed.

But beyond use of Facebook by students, what about its potential to support researchers?

Use of Facebook by Researchers

As described in a post of The Sixth Anniversary of the UK Web Focus Blog Facebook is “in third place behind Search Engines and Twitter in referring traffic to this blog” (as illustrated). This suggests that Facebook may have a role to play in supporting dissemination activities for bloggers. But does Facebook have any relevance for enhancing the dissemination of research papers, beyond the indirect dissemination which research blogs may provide?

A year ago a post entitled Facebook and Twitter as Infrastructure for Dissemination of Research Papers (and More) described the SpringerLink mobile app.

Earlier today I used the app to search for papers on ‘Web Accessibility. As illustrated a relevant paper can be shared across my professional networks using Twitter or Facebook as well as sharing with selected individuals using email.

As I described in the blog post “the Springlink app suggests that Facebook and Twitter may be becoming part of the dissemination infrastructure for research papers, especially on mobile devices“. But is there any evidence that researchers are using Facebook, in particular, to facilitate access to research papers?

Back in October 2012 a series of guest blog posts were published during Open Access Week 2012 in order to share the experiences of a number of institutional repository managers. In the posts on SEO Analysis of WRAP, the Warwick University Repository by Yvonne Budden, University of Warwick and on SEO Analysis of LSE Research Online by Natalia Madjarevic, LSE there was no evidence that Facebook was a significant driver of traffic to the two repositories, according to the MajesticSEO tool used to carry out the analyses. This was echoed by William Nixon in his post on SEO Analysis of Enlighten, the University of Glasgow Institutional Repository. William described how:

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

Reading William’s post on the Enlighten blog it seems:

Looking at the data for the past year the following papers have had significant numbers of referrals from Facebook:

van Dommelen, P., Gómez Bellard, C., and Pérez Jordà, G. (2010)Produzione agraria nella Sardegna punica fra cereali e vino. In: Milanese, M., Ruggeri, P., Vismara, C. and Zucca, R. (eds.) L’Africa Romana. I Luoghi e le Forme dei Mestieri e della Produzione nelle Province Africane (Atti del XVIII Convegno di Studio, Olbia, 11-14 Dicembre 2008). Series: L’Africa Romana (18). Carocci, Rome, Italy, pp. 1187-1202. ISBN 9788843054916. http://eprints.gla.ac.uk/48143/

Cockshott, W.P., and Zachriah, D. (2012) Arguments for Socialism.Amazon. ISBN B006S2LW6U. http://eprints.gla.ac.uk/58987/

So at this stage it would appear that this is little evidence that Facebook has a significant role to play in enhancing access to papers hosted in institutional repositories. But are the experiences from these three institutional repositories typical across the sector? Might the early adopters, such as P van Dommelen and W. P. Cockshot and their co-authors be gaining advantages in enhancing access to their papers? And, finally, might the announcement of Facebook’s Graph Search prove of relevance to those with an interest in enhancing the discoverability of research papers?

I’ve asked questions, rather than suggested answers in this post. In part that is because the potential relevance of Facebook’s Graph Search will be based on the use of Facebook, rather than advocacy or critique of use of Facebook in a scholarly context. I’d therefore welcome comments from repository managers, in particular, on evidence of Facebook as a driver of traffic (whether large or small) to institutional repositories. For those who may not wish to leave a comment I’ve created two polls: one of the amount of traffic provided by Facebook and the other on interest in understanding the potential of use of Facebook’s Graph Search in a repository context.

Finally, if you’d like to know more about Facebook’s Graph Search, the following links may be of interest:

• Background:www.facebook.com/graphsearch
• To learn about Graph Search and privacy: www.facebook.com/about/graphsearch/privacy
• How Graph Search was built: click here.
• A behind the scenes video, click here.
• A collection of screen shots, click here.
• How Graph Search can help people discover your business, visit Facebook Studio

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A Tribute to Aaron Swartz: Lets Make #pdftribute Trend

I’m sure many readers of this blog will have heard the news of the untimely death of Aaron Swartz. As described on the BBC News Web site:

Aaron Swartz, a celebrated internet freedom activist and early developer of the website Reddit, has died at 26.

The activist and programmer took his life in his New York apartment, a relative and the state medical examiner said. His body was found on Friday.

A sad day, especially for those who share Aaron Swartz’s commitment to openness and admire his commitment to the development of tools, services and standards, such as RSS, which have helped to make open access to resources accessible on a global basis.

Earlier today I came across a tweet which encouraged academics to show their support for Aaron’s work:

Please share: Academics posting their papers online in tribute to Aaron Swartz using hashtag #pdftribute.

I would like to endorse this proposal. I have created a Storify summary of the #pdftribute tweets, which contains over 500 posts since the call was made just over 3 hours ago.

Although we have see that initial tweet being widely retweets, as @neuroconscience (Micah Allen) has suggested:

Folks as exciting as #pdftribute is we need less links talking about it and more actual paper posting.

But what could be said in 140 characters?

Within my Twitter stream I have already seen tweets from those involved in supporting their institutional repository including @SarahNicholas:

Cardiff academics! Post your articles to @CardiffOrca. #openaccess#pdftribute

and @glamlaflib (Sue House):

Glamorgan academics can deposit their articles & papers here (if you retained the copyright) http://dspace1.isd.glam.ac.uk/dspace/ #pdftribute

I have also seen @openscience endorsing @jambina’s reminder of the role which can be played by librarians:

Librarians: always friends in #openaccess, #openscience MT @jambina: librarians can help you free your work. we are on your side #pdftribute

Meanwhile @MrGunn describes services which can be used:

@opendna @venturejessica @Aine Mendeley can push into to local repository via Symplectics Elements, other routes can be made with Open API.

Of course many researchers are demonstrating their commitment to providing open access to their research papers:

• All my 2012 papers in @PLOS ONE + on arXiv #pdftribute http://proteinsandwavefunctions.blogspot.dk/2012/12/my-year-in-open-science.html …
• Of course all my papers are online! #pdftribute #openaccess@aaronsw http://www.gris.informatik.tu-darmstadt.de/~aandriye/
• #pdftribute all my papers online & free in institutional repository @ozyeginuni @Ozyeginlib and @EprintsELIS. If yours r not, time to do so

Others, such as @mlterpstra (ML Terpstra) make the case for open data policies:

#public funded #academia should have a #opendata policy for their scientific papers #Aaron #pdftribute. Lets call it #AaronsLaw?@birgittaj

whilst others provide a more political view:

@MarietjeD66 @mikebutcher Let this be the start of the end of the ridiculous copyright laws. #pdftribute #AaronSwarz

Would you like to join in by giving your views or ensuring that your Twitter community is aware of how you have made your research papers openly available?

Note archives of the #pdftribute tweets are available at http://pdftribute.net and http://twubs.com/pdftribute

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Reflections on the Discussion on the Quality of Embedded Metadata in PDFs

The Quality of Metadata Embedded in PDFs

The recent post on Embedded Metadata in PDFs Hosted in Institutional Repositories: An Inside-Out & Outside-In View generated a fair amount of discussion, with ~17 comments on the post itself but perhaps more significantly, a more interactive discussion on Twitter, with relevant contributions being made by @mrnick, @neilstewart, @rmounce, @carusb, @pj_webster, @emmatonkin, @MikeTaylor and @wrap_ed, with other Twitter users sharing links to the posts to their communities.

Whilst some people may still feel that discussions should take place on one centralised system (e.g. a mailing list) in reality this is an unrealistic expectation. In the real world discussions based on ideas which may have originated online will be dispersed across office and common rooms in institutions around the world, to say nothing of other discussions which may take place in pubs and coffee rooms as well as whilst travelling. Conversations about interesting ideas will be distributed; we have to accept that. However it can be helpful to aggregate valuable comments which may be fragmented across a variety of communication channels. Since I felt that the Twitter discussions about the post were particularly interesting I have created a Storify summary entitled The Quality of Embedded Metadata in PDFs (Jan 2013). Note that this complements the Topsy summary which gives the tweets which contains links to the blog post.

Note that in the comments on the blog post Nick Sheppard suggested that a forthcoming UK RepNet event might provide an opportunity to discuss the issues which were raised in more depth::

I wonder if some of these issues might be relevant within the context of the UK RepNet project which is holding a meeting in London on 21st Jan –http://www.rsp.ac.uk/events/supporting-and-enhancing-your-repository/

I will therefore provide a summary of the main issues which were discussed on the blog and on Twitter.

The Context

The initial post was written in response to a post by Ross Mounce in which he asked PDF metadata – why so poor? and a follow-up post a week late on PDF metadata: different tool, same story. Ross’s post was based on an analysis of the metadata embedded in PDFs hosted by scholarly publishers. Ross’s second post succinctly summarised his work:

So a week ago, I investigated publisher-produced Version of Record PDFs with pdfinfo and the results were very disappointing. Lots of missing metadata was found and one could not reliably identify most of these PDFs from metadata alone, let alone extract particular fields of interest.

I wondered whether PDFs hosted in institutional repositories also suffered from poor quality or missing embedded metadata. I examined some papers I had deposited in the University of Bath repository and found that metadata which was contained in the original PDF file I uploaded to the repository was missing from the PDF which users can download. I surmised that the metadata had been lost in the workflow when a cover sheet was added to the paper.

My post referenced a post by Lorcan Dempsey entitled Discovery vs discoverability … in which he explored the idea of the “inside-out and outside-in library“. This seemed very relevant to this scenario as both Ross and myself were concerned primarily by the implications is missing metadata for systems which may be used outside of the repository context: in Ross’s case this related to text mining of large collections of PDFs whereas my interest focussed on reuse of PDFs in other repositories.

The Discussion

The initial comment on the blog post by Ingmar Koch illustrated how embedded PDF metadata can be (mis-)used by external systems. Ingmar descried how “the company that designed the document templates for most of the government agencies added a title and author in the template-file. The result is that thousands of online government documents (.pdf and .doc) are titled “at opinio facillime sumitur” and are written bij M. Hes.” This example provides a vivid illustration of how metadata embedded in PDFs is being used by Google. However this example might also be used to demonstrate the poor quality of embedded metadata.

In light of such examples Neil Stewart therefore asked “does it matter if the rare and patchy instances of author-created metadata gets over-written or otherwise distorted?” since “the structured metadata provided at Eprint/DSpace/other repository software record level does the job here (as opposed to metadata embedded within the PDF itself).“

But surely we cannot argue that since some resources may contain poor quality metadata we should delete all metadata! I would argue that there is a need to educate authors on the importance of appropriate metadata, which includes showing how such metadata can be used by services outside of the host institution. Neil recognises the validity of this point when he acknowledged that “not every service will use OAI-PMH or web crawling, some might parse the objects themselves“.

The discussion then moved on Twitter and initially addressed the relevance of cover sheets, since these appear to cause problems in work flows which take place outside of the institutional repository.

Ross Mounce asked:

why do IRs need 2 slap on cover page anyway? Perhaps they should just embed additional provenance metadata @briankelly @mrnick @neilstewart

Neil Stewart provided one use case for cover sheets:

@rmounce @briankelly @mrnick viewed as a way of advertising provenance (proper citation), branding as from home inst but agreed!

However Ross re-iterated his criticisms of cover sheets:

Cover-pages from a user-POV r just plain annoying. If provenance must be visibly embedded why not overlay? @neilstewart @briankelly @mrnick

Others, such as Chris Rusbridge, agreed with this view:

@mrnick @ukcorr @rmounce @briankelly @stevehit I agree with Ross that it’s BAD practice, from my POV

The discussion then moved on to problems which may occur if a paper is to be downloaded, with Nick Sheppard provided a good example of how PDFs may end up containing multiple cover sheets if they are taken from one repository and deposited (by, for example, a co-author) in another repository:

@neilstewart Um, can also lead to cover page disasters like this (scroll down) eprints.port.ac.uk/2278/1/A…@rmounce @briankelly

I then highlighted a paper by my colleague Emma Tonkin which showed that that problems with poor quality metadata went beyond the individual examples provided on Twitter:

@carusb @mrnick @rmounce My colleague @emmatonkin analysed PDF metadata a few years ago: opus.bath.ac.uk/24958/

The paper (PDF format) described how:

Many repositories … have developed or identified a means of adding a cover sheet to each document within the repository. This has potential for positive impact, for example, as a means of clearly indicating the provenance of an item (Puplett, 2008). As can be seen in Fig. 7, Google Scholar does not necessarily recognise the cover sheet for what it is, and this has negative implications for effective indexing and retrieval.

and went on to conclude:

However, the addition of a cover sheet has caused a number of issues beyond those that are usually encountered with the PDF format (ie. font problems, file corruption, etc). This limits the ability for automated processes to make use of this information, and could therefore be said on the level of automated indexing and other software access (such as conversion) to be a retrograde step. If this becomes common practice it may be necessary to review both the assumptions under which automated systems are developed, and perhaps the rationale that lead us to make use of cover sheets in this context.

Conclusions

The paper on Supporting PDF accessibility evaluation: early results from the FixRep project was written in 2010 by my colleagues Emma Tonkin and Andy Hewitt and presented at the 2nd Qualitative and Quantitative Methods in Libraries International Conference (QQML2010).The concluding sentence in the paper highlighted work which needs to be addressed:

it may be necessary to review both the assumptions under which automated systems are developed, and perhaps the rationale that lead us to make use of cover sheets in this context

The paper identified the benefits of cover sheets but also the problems they can cause for automated activities which may take place outside of the institutional repository environment.

But should repository managers and developers necessarily devote resources to addressing potential problems which may arise downstream of the repository environment? In a comment on Ross Mounce’s blog the point was made that publishers will need there to be a sound business case to be made:

“Why would publishers add metadata? Because their customers – libraries, governments, research funders (in the case of Open Access PDFs ) should demand it.” I’m not seeing a compelling business case here. High-quality metadata would be nice, but can anybody argue that their research is being hampered by a lack of such metadata? Could someone working in publishing make a case to their boss that adding such metadata would generate more revenue, web traffic, manuscript submissions (insert whatever metric matters)?

In the context of institutional repositories perhaps the approach to be taken would be to ensure that embedded metadata is preserved and that the training and advice provided by repository support staff ensures that authors are made aware of the ways in why embedded metadata can be used, even if such reuse takes place outside of the institutional repository.

The discussion also highlighted the need for enhanced workflow practices for merging cover pages with the original content and also for enabling users (and automated tools) to be able to access the original source paper in addition to the version contained provenance information designed for consumption by users.

Do any institutional repositories currently provide solutions to these requirements? In addition, I am interested in how many institutional repositories provide cover pages and whether those that do use a repository plugin technology to do this, some other automated technologies or by manual processes. Two polls on these questions are embedded in this post but if the situation is more complex than can be summarised in the poll, feel free to add a comment.

Footnote (added 12 January 2012): A tweet from @community alerted me to the blog post on SEO Action for PDF files on the Adobe blog. This describes an “Action” for use in Acrobat X Pro that will automate setting the properties of the PDF file in accordance with guidelines which can enhance the discoverability of PDF files by Google.

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Why Every Researcher Should Sign Up For Their ORCID ID

I was pleased to see the news item published by the Jisc earlier today which announced UK specialists welcome launch of ORCID as tool to identify researchers.

The news item describes how:

Jisc joins organisations from across the UK higher education network to welcome the launch of the Open Researcher and Contributor Identifier (ORCID).

and goes on to describe the benefits which ORCID can provide:

There are more academic articles being published than ever before and more authors working together. In order to be able to identify an author correctly a unique identifier is needed that can then link to each author’s publications. ORCID provides this link and if widely used would:

• Ensure researchers get credit for their own work
• Ensure researchers and learners looking for information will be able to find academic papers more accurately
• Enable better management of researcher publication records, making it easier for them to create CVs, reduce form filling and improve reporting to funders
• Create a means of linking information between institutions and systems internationally
• Enable researchers to keep track of their own work with funders, publishers and institutions around the world.

It also provides researchers with their own ORCID. Researchers are able to control how much information it holds about them and who that is shared with. The adoption of ORCID is a solution to the current challenges of being able to search for work accurately. By researchers volunteering to adopt its usage it could improve discoverability and accurate referencing.

As described in a post which explained Why You Should Do More Than Simply Claiming Your ORCID ID I feel it is important that researchers claim their ORCID ID (I will use two words as I suspect that this will less ambiguous than ‘claiming an ORCID‘). The post gave the reasons why I feel that researchers should do more than simply claim their ORCID ID and go on to include their ORCID IDs together with the ORCID IDs of their co-authors in references to their papers. The reason I gave for doing this was to minimise the risks of losing connections with co-authors, who may have changed their affiliation and thus no longer have their original email address and institutional Web presence.

In light of the recent Announcement: UKOLN – Looking Ahead which described how the Jisc “will only provide core funding to the UKOLN Innovation Support Centre, up to July 2013 but not beyond” there will clearly be a need for myself and my colleagues to minimise the risks of losing the connections with our research outputs. Since the first bullet point of the benefits which ORCID can provide is to:

Ensure researchers get credit for their own work

it would appear that claiming an ORCID ID should be a priority for researchers whose position in their host institution is uncertain. But doesn’t this apply to everyone? From one perspective this might be relevant in light of funding uncertainties in the sector which are compounded by last month’s announcement of the “Huge Drop in Students Starting University“. But beyond the current economic situation, every researcher will, at some stage, leave their host institution (whether to take up a new post elsewhere, retirement, redundancy or death in service).

It would appear that every researcher who wishes to ensure that they get credit for their own work, and can ensure that such credit can be managed when they leave their current institution should benefit from claiming an ORCID ID. As described in the post claiming an ORCID ID “is a painless exercise, taking about 30 seconds to complete” so this is something which all researchers should be able to do.

In the Jisc news item Neil Jacobs, programme director, Jisc commented: “We recognise that this is only the start and that work needs to be done to implement ORCID in the UK. However, we have a solid beginning and we look forward to working with our partners across the sector to build on it.“

As is clear from the ORCID Knowledge base many suggestions have been made on ways in which the service can be enhanced. But the simplest action lies in the hands of the individual researchers: sign up for an ORCID ID!

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Embedded Metadata in PDFs Hosted in Institutional Repositories: An Inside-Out & Outside-In View

PDF Metadata – Why Is it So Poor?

PDF metadata – why so poor? asked Ross Mounce in a blog post published on New Year’s eve.

In the post Ross expressed surprise that although ”with published MP3 files of audio you get rather good metadata … the results from a little preliminary survey of academic publisher PDF metadata” were poor: “Out of the 70 PDFs I’ve published (meta)data on over at Figshare, only 8 of them had Keywords metadata embedded in them“.

This made we wonder about the quality of the metadata for papers I have uploaded to Opus, the University of Bath repository.

I looked at a paper on A Challenge to Web Accessibility Metrics and Guidelines: Putting People and Processes First which is available in Opus in PDF and MS Word formats.

I first used Adobe Acrobat in order to display the metadata for the original source PDF file, prior to uploading to the repository. As can be seen from the accompanying screen shot the metadata included the title, the author details (with the email address for one of the authors) and two keywords.

However looking at the display for the PDF downloaded form the repository we find that no metadata is available!

This PDF differs from the original source in that a cover page is added dynamically by the repository in order to provide appropriate institutional branding. It would appear that in the creation of the new PDF resource, the original metadata is lost.

Looking at the metadata created in the original source document – an MS Word file – we can see how the authors’ names which were subsequently concatenated into a single field. We can also see that although the title of the paper was given correctly, poor keywords had been included, which did not reflect the keywords which were included in the paper itself (Web accessibility, disabled people, policy, user experience, social inclusion, guidelines, development lifecycle, procurement).

I suspect that I am not alone in not spending much time in ensuring that appropriate metadata is embedded in the master source of a peer-reviewed paper. I have also previously not considered how such metadata might be lost in the workflow processes when uploading to an institutional repository: after all, surely the important metadata is added when the paper is deposited into the repository?

Ross’s blog post made me check the embedded metadata – and I discovered that the correct metadata is still included in the MS Word file which was uploaded to the repository along with the PDF copy.

Does the loss of the metadata embedded in the PDF matter? After all, surely people will use the search facilities provided in the repository in order to find papers of interest?

But people will not necessarily visit a repository to find papers of interest. A post which described A Survey of Use of Researcher Profiling Services Across the 24 Russell Group Universities showed that on 1 August 2012 there were over 18,000 users of ResearchGate in the 24 Russell Group universities and judging by the messages along the lines of “28 of your colleagues from University of Bath have joined ResearchGate in the last month. Why not follow them today?” which I am currently receiving, use of this service is growing.

As can be seen from the screenshot of my ResearchGate profile, the service provides access to PDF copies of my papers. I normally simply provide a link to the PDF hosted in the repository but the example illustrated contains a copy of original PDF which was uploaded to the service by one of the co-authors.

In the case of most of my papers it is clear from the thumbnail of the PDF that the paper contains the coversheet provided by the repository.

Discussion

We can see that the PDF copy of a paper hosted in a repository should not be regarded as a final destination; rather the PDF may be surfaced in other environments.

It will therefore be important to ensure that workflow processes do not degrade the quality of the PDF. It will also be important to ensure that authors are made aware of how embedded metadata may be used by services beyond the institutional repository. But to what extend do repository managers feel they have a responsibility to advise on practices which will enhance the discoverability of content on services hosted outside the institution?

In a paper which asked “Can LinkedIn and Academia.edu Enhance Access to Open Repositories?” myself and Jenny Delasalle commented on how “commercial publishers are encouraging authors to use social media to drive traffic to papers hosted on publishers’ web sites” and provided examples of such approaches from Taylor and Francis, Springer, Sage and Oxford Journals. As an example, Taylor and Francis describe how they are “committed to promoting and increasing the visibility of your article and would like to work with you to promote your paper to potential readers” and go on to document services which can help achieve this goal.

In a blog post which discussed the ideas describe din the paper I described how we had failed to find significant evidence of similar approaches being employed by repository managers:

It was interesting that in Jenny’s research she found that a number of commercial publishers encourage their authors to use services such as LinkedIn and Academia.edu to link to their papers hosted behind the publishers paywalls – and yet we are not seeing institutional views of the benefits of coordinated use of such services by their researchers. Institutional repository managers, research support staff and librarians could be prompting their institutions to make the most of these externally provided services, to enhance the visibility of their researchers’ work in institutional repositories.

But that paper was limited to use of third-party services to provide access routes to research papers. What of the bigger picture in which institutional work flow processes should be designed to enhance discoverability?

The ‘inside-out and outside-in library’

On Wednesday in a post entitled Discovery vs discoverability … Lorcan Dempsey explored the idea of the “inside-out and outside-in library“. In the post Lorcan described how:

Throughout much of their existence, libraries have managed an outside-in range of resources: they have acquired books, journals, databases, and other materials from external sources and provided discovery systems for their local constituency over what they own or license.

However in a digital and network world, there have been two major changes, which shift the focus towards inside-out:

First access and discovery have now scaled to the level of the network: they are web scale. If I want to know if a particular book exists I may look in Google Book Search or in Amazon, or in a social reading site, in a library aggregation like Worldcat, and so on. … Secondly the institution is also a producer of a range of information resources: digitized images or special collections, learning and research materials, research data, administrative records (website, prospectuses, etc.), faculty expertise and profile data, and so on.

Lorcan goes on to describe the challenge facing libraries:

How effectively to disclose this material is of growing interest across libraries or across the institutions of which the library is a part. This presents an inside-out challenge, as here the library wants the material to be discovered by their own constituency but usually also by a general web population.

I would suggest that institutional repositories could usefully adopt the approach taken by Taylor and Francis:

 ”[The institution is] committed to promoting and increasing the visibility of your article and would like to work with you to promote your paper to potential readers“

But rather than simply encourage researchers to simply add links to papers deposited in the repository from popular services such as LinkedIn and ResearchGate might the institutional goal be enhanced by encouraging researchers to make the content of their papers available in such third party services (subject to copyright considerations) – with the institutional repository providing both a destination and a component in a workflow, with papers being surfaced in services such as ResearchGate, as I have illustrated above.

If such an approach were to be embraced there would be a need to ensure that embedded metadata was not corrupted through repository workflow processes. If, however, the repository is regarded as the sole access point, there would be little motivation to address such limitations in the work flow.

Or to put it another way, repository managers will have a need to manage content hosted within the institution, including management to support the use of the content by services they have no control over.

To a certain extent, this has already been accepted: repositories were designed to have “cool URIs” which can help resources to be discovered by Google. I am suggesting that there is a need to observe usage patterns which indicate emerging ways in which users are finding content. The growing numbers of email alerts from ResearchGate suggest that it may be a service to monitor – with Ross Mounce’s recent post of on the quality of metadata embedded in PDFs suggesting one area in which there will be a need to revisit existing workflow processes.

PS. Ross Mounce described “a little preliminary survey of academic publisher PDF metadata” and has published the data on Figshare. Has anyone harvested the metadata embedded in PDFs hosted on repositories and published the findings?

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Using Social Media to Publish/Share Ideas/Opinions Which Have Not Been Peer Reviewed

In The Bell, Listening to Fat Man Swings

Fat Man Swings at The Bell (I responded to a tweet during the break)

Last night I was in The Bell in Bath listening to Fat Man Swings when I noticed someone had mentioned me in a tweet:

@NSRiazat no but briankelly may be able to help

The message related to a discussion on the #phdchat Tweetchat during which Nasima Riazat (@NSRiazat) asked:

Has anyone used social media to publish/share ideas/opinions which have not been peer reviewed prior to sharing? #phdchat

According to her Twitter biography Nasima Riazat is “#PhDchat moderator. PhD research expertise in capacity building, distributed leadership, leadership sciences, developing middle leaders – Open University UK“. Her question was therefore very relevant for those who participate in the #phdchat discussions, which I have commented on previously.

The question, and its timing, may well horrify those who do not ‘get’ Twitter and are worried about being inundated with tweets during every hour of the day and having to respond during out-of-work hours. However established Twitter users will understand that Twitter provides a steady stream of content which you can dip into when it suits you and @ messages can often be ignored. On this occasion I felt the question was of interest and so I responded during the break to say I would address the question. The interaction, incidentally, including taking and posting a photo of the band probably took less than a minute.

Publishing and Sharing Ideas Which Have Not Been Peer Reviewed

Back in October, during Open Access Week I gave a series of talks on Open Practices for the Connected Researcher at the universities of Exeter, Salford and Bath in which I described the benefits which social media could provide for researchers. The talk was based on personal experiences of use of social media to support my peer-reviewed papers, especially in the area of Web accessibility. I described how social media could be used to develop one’s professional network (with the example of how I met Sarah Lewthwaite (@slewth) on Twitter and subsequently collaborated on a paper which won an award at an international conference). I also described how use of services such as Twitter and Slideshare could be used by one’s co-authors during a conference presentation in order to maximise the numbers of views of the paper and accompanying slides by those who have a particular interest in the conference – those who may subsequently cite the paper in their own research publications or take actions based on the ideas described in the paper.

But although social media has proven value in developing one’s professional network and enhancing access to research publications, the question which was raised addressed a different scenario: Has anyone used social media to publish/share ideas/opinions which have not been peer reviewed prior to sharing?

I suspect the answer to this question will be influenced by the area of research together with personal approaches towards openness and the culture within one’s research group or host institution.

In my case my areas of research are based on the Web (Web accessibility, Social Web, Web preservation, Web standards and institutional repositories). My organisation (and our funders) has always been supportive of open access for the research outputs. In addition I have sought to embrace open practices in my work. I should add that I do not feel that others should adopt similar approaches; as I described in a post on The Social Web and the Belbin Model my preferred roles as a ‘plant’ and ‘resource investigator’ in the Belbin model are well-aligned with use of social media services such as blogs. I am therefore comfortable with the notion of exposing one’s ideas to public view at early stages, with the intention that flaws in the ideas will be identified at an early stage and the value of the ideas will be enhanced by contributions from others.

For me the ideas published in a blog post (or even a tweet) can be subsequently developed and used in a peer-reviewed paper. As an example, in September 2012 I wrote a brief post which asked “John hit the ball”: Should Simple Language Be Mandatory for Web Accessibility? After the post had been published I came across a tweet from @techczech (Dominik Lukes) which commented:

Should Simple Language Be Mandatory for Web Accessibility? http://ow.ly/dOV4T < Bad idea for #a11y - ignorant of basic #linguistic facts

I looked at Dominik’s Twitter biography (“Education and technology specialist, linguist, feminist, enemy of prescriptivism, metaphor hacker, educator, (ex)podcaster, Drupal/Wordpress web builder, Czech.“) and followed the link to his blog and read his post on “Why didn’t anyone tell me about this?”: What every learning technologist should know about accessible documents #ALTC2012. I realised that we had similar interest so I decided to follow him on Twitter and then had an interesting phone conversation on Web accessibility and language issues.

I subsequently submitted a brief paper on this topic with Alastair McNaught, JISC TechDis, to the W3C WAI’s online symposium on “Easy to Read” (e2r) language in Web Pages/Applications. As described in a post on ‘Does He Take Sugar?’: The Risks of Standardising Easy-to-read Language the paper was not accepted. However since we were not restricted to the 1.00 word limit imposed by the organisers of the online symposium Alastair and I expanded on our original which were further developed through the contribution provided by Dominik. Our article entitled ‘Does He Take Sugar?’: The Risks of Standardising Easy-to-read Language was published in the Ariadne ejournal just before Christmas.

Although the article was not peer-reviewed we have subsequently realised that the ideas described in the article could provide a new insight into our previous work in developing a framework for making use of accessibility guidelines such as WCAG. We are currently discussing how we can build on these new insights.

To summarise, a brief blog post was commented on in a tweet. This led to an exchange of tweets, a phone call, a joint Skype call and a joint article – with an understanding that we will look for opportunities for further collaboration. Without the blog post and without the tweet, this would not have happened!

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Signals from Institutions: The University of Edinburgh’s Strategic Goals, Targets and KPIs

The University of Edinburgh Strategic Plan 2012-2016

As described in a paper on What Next for Libraries? Making Sense of the Future the JISC Observatory “provides horizon-scanning of technological developments which may be of relevance to the UK’s higher and further education sectors“. The paper, available in MS Word and PDF formats, describes the systematic processes for the scanning, sense-making and synthesis activities to support this work. The paper focuses on the processes for observing technical developments. However there is also a need to observe signals of institutional interests in IT developments, especially in light of the recent announcement of Jisc’s objective to “address a number of specific priorities for universities and colleges through the development of resources, tools and supported infrastructure“.

Strategic plans published by institutions can provide a valuable starting point to help identifying areas of institutional interests. For example, Lorcan Dempsey recently drew attention to the strategic goals which have been identified by the University of Edinburgh:

mm.. U Edinburgh strategy targets include improving citation score in the THE World Uni Rankings. docs.sasg.ed.ac.uk/ gasp/strategic…

The document, The University of Edinburgh Strategic Plan 2012-2016, (which is available in PDF format) is interesting not so much for the way it identifies strategic goals and the key enablers who will be needed to ensure the goals are attained, but the list of specific KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) and the associated targets.

Of particular interest is the strategic goal of excellence in research for which the KPI is listed as “Russell Group market share of research income (spend)“. The corresponding targets are:

• Increase our average number of PhD students per member of academic staff to at least 2.5
• Increase our score (relative to the highest scoring institution) for the citations-based measure in the THE World University Rankings to at least 94/100

The strategic goal of excellence in innovation states that the KPIs are “Knowledge exchange metrics: number of disclosures, patents, licences and new company formation“. The targets for this goal are:

• Achieve at least 200 public policy impacts per annum
• Increase our economic impact, measured by GVA, by at least 8%

The Importance of Metrics

It is interesting to see how the University of Edinburgh has clearly targets which are based on measurable criteria: “Increase our average number of PhD students per member of academic staff to at least 2.5“; “Increase our score … for the citations-based measure in the THE World university rankings to at least 94/100“; “Achieve at least 200 public policy impacts per annum“; “Increase our economic impact, measured by GVA, by at least 8%“; “Increase the proportion of our building condition at grades A and B on a year-on-year basis, aiming for at least 90% by 2020“; “Increase our total income per staff FTE year-on-year, aiming for an increase of at least 10% in real terms“; ”Increase the level of overall satisfaction expressed in responses to the NSS, PTES and PRES student surveys to at least 88%“; “Increase the number of our students who have achieved the Edinburgh Award to at least 500“; “Create at least 800 new opportunities for our students to gain an international experience as part of their Edinburgh degree“; “Increase our headcount of non-EU international students by at least 2,000“; “Increase our research grant income from EU and other overseas sources so that we enter the Russell Group upper quartile“; “Increase our number of masters students on programmes established through our Global Academies by at least 500“; “reduce absolute CO2 emissions by 29% by 2020, against a 2007 baseline (interim target of 20% savings by 2015)” and “Increase our number of PhD students on programmes jointly awarded with international partners by at least 50%” (emphasis added).

The importance of metrics in the context of learning is being addressed by CETIS, with the CETIS Analytics Series being announced by Sheila MacNeill on 23 November 2012 with a follow-up post the next week addressing Legal, Risk and Ethical Aspects of Analytics in Education, The following week Sheila provided a broader perspective in a post on Analytics for Understanding Research, with the series of posts concluding with one on Institutional Readiness for Analytics – practice and policy.

Prior to CETI’s work in this area the importance of metrics had been identified by the JISC in 2010 when they asked UKOLN to facilitate the Evidence, Impact, Metrics activity. A series of reports on this work were published just over a year ago. As described in the document on Why the Need for this Work?:

There is a need for publicly-funded organisations, such as higher education institutions, to provide evidence of the value of the services they provide. Such accountability has always been required, but at a time of economic concerns the need to gather, analyse and publicise evidence of such value is even more pressing.

Unlike commercial organisations it is not normally possible to make use of financial evidence (e.g. profits, turnover, etc) in public sector organisations. There is therefore a need to develop other approaches which can support evidence-based accounts of the value of our services.

A series of three workshops were held between November 2010 and July 2011. It was interesting to reflect on how, at the initial workshop, there was a feeling that an emphasis metrics could be counter-productive in failing to appreciate the complexities of the work being carried out in the higher education sector. However the feedback from the second workshop included an awareness of the need for “More strategic consideration of gathering evidence) both for our own purposes and those of projects we work with/evaluate)“. The work concluded by highlighting the importance of metric-based approaches for projects:

Which should I bother with metrics?
Metrics can provide quantitative evidence of the value of aspects of project work. Metrics which indicate the success of a project can be useful in promoting the value of the work. Metrics can also be useful in helping to identify failures and limitations which may help to inform decisions on continued work in the area addressed by the metrics.

What are the benefits for funders?
In addition to providing supporting evidence of the benefits of successful projects funders can also benefit by obtaining quantitative evidence from a range of projects which can be used to help identify emerging patterns of usage.

What are the benefits for projects?
Metrics can inform project development work by helping to identify deviations from expected behaviours of usage patterns and inform decision-making processes.

What are the risks in using metrics?
Metrics only give a partial understand and need to be interpreted careful. Metrics could lead to the publication of league tables, with risks that projects seek to maximise their metrics rather than treating metrics as a proxy indicator of value.

It will be interesting to see if other institutions emulate the University of Edinburgh in stating specific targets for their institutional strategic plans – and how pressures on staff within the institutions to achieve the targets affects operational practices.

Is anyone aware of other institutions which are taking similar approaches?

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Wishing You A Peaceful 2013

My colleague Marieke Guy recently reminded me of Tagexo – an online service which “lets you create shaped tag clouds from Twitter IDs, Delicious accounts, RSS feeds, Web sites and searches“.

As it’s New Year’s Eve I thought I’d provide this visualisation of the content of recent posts on the UK Web Focus blog.

Here’s looking forward to a peaceful 2013.

2012 in review

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2012 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

19,000 people fit into the new Barclays Center to see Jay-Z perform. This blog was viewed about 90,000 times in 2012. If it were a concert at the Barclays Center, it would take about 5 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

Importance of Social Media for Finding New Opportunities

The recent post which summarised the Announcement: UKOLN – Looking Ahead was based on the news of the cessation of UKOLN’s core funding from 31 July 2013. The announcement concluded:

From August 2013, we will continue to build on this reputation and we very much look forward to working with you again in the future.

In order to support UKOLN staff in exploiting new opportunities I recently gave a training session on “Managing Your Digital Profile“. In the talk I described the value of social media in developing relationships with potential new partners, co-authors and funders which can be of value in one’s current job as well as in finding new jobs and opportunities.

During the session I was asked if there was one key service to make use of. I highlighted the importance of LinkedIn and provided examples of effective uses of LinkedIn. Just before Christmas @suebecks alerted me to a post entitled For job recruiters, Monster out, LinkedIn in. This post provided evidence of the ways in which LinkedIn is being used:

LinkedIn, the biggest professional-network​ing website, got into the field early with the introduction of Recruiter in 2008. The service lets headhunters search its more than 187 million profiles and contact potential candidates.

Since last year, Adobe has found more than half its new hires through LinkedIn. Adobe, the biggest graphic-design software company, uses job boards to fill only about 5% of openings.

In the session I went on to describe how I felt it was a mistake to think there was a single key service to use. I argued that there were a range of services which provided different functions and were used by different communities. I went on to describe how researchers could find value in claiming a Google Scholar profile and providing access to their research publications using services such as Academia.edu and ResearchGate, as well as claiming an ORCID ID.

I was asked if Facebook had a role to play. I described how this would relate to the personal ways in which one uses the service – but mentioned that Facebook is the third most important referrer of traffic to this blog. In addition I suggested that Facebook may have a role to play in finding new opportunities, and illustrated this by showing how a Google search for “Facebook Bath jobs“ found a Facebook page for jobs at Future Publishing. The potential relevance of Facebook for job-seekers was highlighted in the article For job recruiters, Monster out, LinkedIn in:

Two-thirds of companies already use Facebook, the world’s largest social-networking service, to find recruits using the site’s friend-finding search function, according to a June survey of more than 1,000 human resources professionals by recruiting software maker Jobvite. Fifty-four percent use micro-blogging service Twitter to learn about potential candidates’ views and interests, the survey found.

The article then went on to suggest new developments we may see for people looking for new opportunities:

The next challenge is to develop advanced tools that find greater detail on candidates from more social networks, says Brian O’Malley, a general partner at Battery Ventures. His firm has invested in social job-search startup Entelo, which trawls Twitter, Google’s Google+ and other sites, using proprietary algorithms to find candidates for specific positions and predict who among them may be open to offers.

Can you afford not to make use of social media if you are looking for new business opportunities in the future?

Note as mentioned above the slides on “Managing Your Digital Profile” are available on Slideshare and embedded below:

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Christmas Future: “Current monopoly of HE will be lost & just [a] few universities will survive”

The Ghosts of Christmas Past

A year ago, on 29 December 2011, I gave My Predictions for 2012. The post began “How will the technology environment develop during 2012? I’m willing to set myself up for a fall my outlining my predictions for 2012 :-)” To be honest the predictions were fairly predictable:

Tablet Computers …

After a couple of years in which use of smart phones, whether based on Apple’s iOS or Goole’s Android operating system), became mainstream for many when away from the office, 2012 will see use of Tablets becoming mainstream, with the competition provided by vendors of Android continue to bring the prices for those reluctant to pay a premium for an iPad.

Once the new term starts we’ll see increased numbers of students who received a Tablet PC for Christmas making use of them, not only for watching videos and listening to music in their accommodation, but also in lectures. As well as note-taking the devices, together with smart phones, will be used for recording lectures. In some cases this will lead to concerns regarding ownership and privacy infringements but students will argue that they are paying for their education and they should be entitled to time-shift their lecturers. Since it will be difficult to prevent students from making such recordings lecturers will start to encourage such practices and will seek to develop an understanding of when comments made during lecturers and tutorials should be treated as ‘off-the-record’.

Open Practices …

Such lecturers will be providing one example of an ‘open practice’. Such encouragement of recording or broadcasting lecturers will become the norm in several research areas, with organisers of research conferences acknowledging that they will need to provide an event amplification infrastructure (including free WiFi for participants, an event hashtag, live streaming or recording of key talks) in order to satisfy the expectations of those who are active in participation in research events.

Such open practices will complement more well-established examples of openness including open access and open content, such as open educational resources. We’ll see much greater use of Creative Commons licences, especially licence which minimise barriers to reuse.

Social Applications …

Social applications will become ubiquitous, although the term may be rebranded in order to avoid the barrier to use faced by those who regard the term ‘social’ as meaning ‘personal’ or ‘trivial’. Just as Web 2.0 became rebranded as the Social Web and the Semantic Web as Linked Data, we shall see such applications being marked as collaborative or interactive services.

Social networking services will continue to grow in importance across the higher education sector. However the view that the popularity of such services will be dependent on conformance with a particular set of development (open source and distributed) or ownership criteria (must not be owned by a successful multi-national company) will be seen to be of little significance. Rather than a growth in services such as identi.ca or Diaspora, we will see Facebook continue to develop (with its use by organisations helped by mandatory legal requirements regarding conformance with EU privacy legislation described in a post on 45 Privacy Changes Facebook Will Make To Comply With Data Protection Law). In addition to Facebook, Twitter and Google+ will continue to be of importance across the sector.

Learning and Knowledge Analytics ….

The ubiquity of mobile devices coupled with greater use of social applications as part of a developing cultural of open practices will lead to an awareness of the importance of learning and knowledge analytics. Just as in the sporting arena we have seen huge developments in using analytic tools to understand and maximise sporting performances, we will see similar approaches being taken to understand and maximise intellectual performance, in both teaching and learning and research areas.

With just one of the predictions being more speculative:

Collective Intelligence

Just as the combination of developments will help us to have a better understanding of intellectual performance, so too will these development help to in the growth of Collective Intelligence, described in Wikipedia as the “shared or group intelligence that emerges from the collaboration and competition of many individuals and appears in consensus decision making in bacteria, animals, humans and computer networks“. The driving forces behind Collective Intelligence will be the global players which have access to large volumes of data and the computational resources (processing power and storage) to analyse the data.

However rather than simply presenting a list of predictions the post went on to describe how “a greater challenge is being able to demonstrate that such predictions have come true. How might we go about deciding, in December 2012, whether these predictions reflect reality?“.

The methodology used to support the predictions of technological developments was one used to support the JISC Observatory and described in more detail in a paper on “What Next for Libraries? Making Sense of the Future” which was presented at EMTACL12, an international conference on Emerging Technologies in Academic Libraries held in Trondheim, Norway on 1-3 October 2012.

The Ghosts of Christmas Present

In this post I will not go into details on the validity of the predictions. The importance of tablet computers and social applications should be self-evident whilst, as described in a post on Institutional Readiness for Analytics – practice and policy, CETIS have been pro-active in the areas os learnig and knowledge analytics, having recently published a series of briefing paper on analytics. The prediction on collective intelligence was intended to be more speculative, so perhaps discussion would be best focussed on open practices.

However in retrospect all of the predictions were based on an assumption that evidence would demonstrate the value of technological developments for high education. Although the paper ”What Next for Libraries? Making Sense of the Future” highlighted the need to distinguish between invention, innovation and improvements, there was an assumption that technological developments would continue to enhance the value of higher education. But is this a valid assumption? And what if other other developments – economic, political, demographic, etc. – undermine the relevance of technical developments?

The Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come

These questions came to mind earlier today when I saw the following tweet from @phil_batty, the editor at large for Times Higher Education (@timeshighered) & editor of the World University Rankings (@THEWorldUniRank):

Current monopoly of HE will be lost & just few universities will survive RT @Lennie_SW: The Perfect Storm for Unis: http://wp.me/s2bamO-storm

The post on The Perfect Storm for Universities was published on 3 December 2012 by Dr Stefan Popenici, an academic, public speaker, author and international consultant with extensive experience in leadership in the global higher education arena including the United States of America, the United Kingdom, Israel, Austria, Canada, the People’s Republic of China, France, Italy, Hungary, Philippines, Serbia, the Republic of Moldova, Portugal, Spain, Poland, Romania, Belgium, Georgia.

The post begins:

Even if universities may look well on the surface there is an increasing (and justified) concern that all will change soon. New data and analysis increase the anxiety that the current monopoly of higher education will be lost and just few universities will survive. No one knows which, how many or even if any university will have the chance to celebrate the middle of this century. Deafened by the noise of various bureaucrats and mediocre academics interested to say only what their masters like to hear, some universities and academic groups struggle to see beyond fads and slogans what is shaping the future that will change their existence. This hidden uneasiness is justified. An increasing number of disruptive factors – adding to the obvious and massive impact of Internet and online education – already are changing the landscape for higher education: the significant increase of youth isolation and marginalization, graduate unemployment and persistent underemployment, a concerning economic forecast of a constant slowdown of global growth (with implications for numbers of international students) and issues evolving from the global ageing population (and implications on lifelong learning strategies and numbers of local students). There is even more on the horizon and – while teaching and learning are still organized within university walls by models designed in early 1960s – the pace of change is accelerating.

I’d recommend that those who have an interest in the future of higher education should read this post. The (rather long) post concludes:

In the middle of this storm, universities that continue to glorify mediocrity and impose compliant thinking are condemned to perish. These victims of the storm may still consider that is safer to shut their eyes and stay comfortable within the limits of the status quo. After all, this is what has worked well for the last century. However, on the day after the storm, higher education will be anything but comfortable. The era of compliance and contentment is over!

It’s interesting to see how the damning conclusions are targetted at institutions which “glorify mediocrity and impose compliant thinking“. If that reflects the current culture within your organisation, I’d be worried.

It will be interesting to start observing signals of a future for higher education in which the “current monopoly of HE will be lost & just a few universities will survive”. As it’s Christmas Eve I’ll not comment on such signals today, but may revisit this post in a year’s time. To update the comment I made last year “a greater challenge is being able to demonstrate that such predictions have come true. How might we go about deciding, in December 2013, whether these predictions reflect reality?“.

Merry Christmas!

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Announcement: UKOLN – Looking Ahead

An official announcement was published yesterday on the UKOLN home page:

Following nearly 20 years of supporting Jisc innovation activities, UKOLN is now looking ahead to new challenges. In response to the Wilson review of Jisc, the organisation has confirmed that it will only provide core funding to the UKOLN Innovation Support Centre, up to July 2013 but not beyond.

Since Jisc’s inception in 1993, UKOLN has worked collaboratively to support the development and use of digital libraries and digital information management in many innovative areas. The decision to cease funding in no way reflects on the contribution of UKOLN to this agenda for education and research, but rather the new ways in which Jisc innovation activity will need to be taken forward into the future. There will be more targeted innovation where Jisc works directly with its stakeholders and although the scale of activity will be reduced, there will be new innovation taking place in line with the changes in the environment.

During these years, UKOLN has established a substantive global reputation, and has led innovation work to develop information environments, repositories, resource discovery, metadata registries, metadata standards, collection level descriptions and software tools. We are currently supporting innovation in areas such as research information management, repository metadata and infrastructure, and resource discovery. We continue to support and facilitate communities of practice, notably Web managers and software developers working in higher education. UKOLN has also published the Ariadne Web journal since 1996.

We would like to take this opportunity to thank the many people with whom we have worked closely, for your participation and engagement in our Innovation Support Centre activities. While the Innovation Support Centre will cease operating after July 2013, UKOLN will continue and as the organisation enters a new phase, it is a time to reflect on what we’ve achieved. We’d be interested to hear from you about how UKOLN’s work has made an impact. From August 2013, we will continue to build on this reputation and we very much look forward to working with you again in the future.

Dr Liz Lyon, Director UKOLN
Paul Walk, Deputy Director UKOLN

Note that a similar announcement has been published by CETIS. I think it is clear that 2013 will provide interesting challenges!

Merry Christmas.

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Commercial Exploitation of Content and the Instagram Story

Licence Conditions for this Blog

On 12 January 2011 I described how Non-Commercial Use Restriction [had been] Removed From This Blog. This post explained how:

The BY-NC-SA licence was chosen [in 2005] as it seemed at the time to provide a safe option, allowing the resources to be reused by others in the sector whilst retaining the right to commercially exploit the resources. In reality, however, the resources haven’t been exploited commercially and increasingly the sector is becoming aware of the difficulties in licensing resources which excludes commercial use, as described by Peter Murray-Rust in a recent post on “Why I and you should avoid NC licence“.

I have therefore decided that from 1 January 2011 posts and comments published on this blog will be licenced with a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 licence (CC BY-SA).

Later that year, on 24 October 2011 in a post entitled My Activities for Open Access Week 2011 I described how the licence conditions had been liberalised from CC-BY-SA to CC-BY. The post provided the background to the changes of the licence conditions:

… the share-alike clause can also provide difficulties in allowing others to reuse the content. Although I would encourage others to adopt a similar Creative Commons licence I realise that this may not also be achievable. So rather than requiring this as part of the licence, I will now simply encourage others who use posts published on this blog to make derived works available under a Creative Commons licence and limit the licence conditions to a CC-BY licence which states that:

You are free:

• to copy, distribute, display, and perform the work
• to make derivative works
• to make commercial use of the work

Under the following conditions:

• Attribution — You must give the original author credit.

These developments reflect a more general move towards the minimisation of barriers to the reuse of content, not just by others in the public sector but by the wider community. Such policies can help to stimulate growth in the economy by ensuring that resources are spent in development activities and not in negotiating licences. Such approaches are well-established in the software development environment in which open source software products are freely-available for everyone to use (large companies, such as Microsoft, thus benefit from using open source software products such as the Apache Web server). In the area of content, Peter Murray-Rust has argued that Scientists should NEVER use CC-NC. This explains why.

Commercial Exploitation of Content

Whilst there is a growing, but by no means universal, understanding of the benefits of allowing commercial exploitation of content, moves towards licences which grant commercial companies the right to commercially exploit content uploaded to their services tend to generate anger, as we have seen from the recent changes to the terms and conditions for users of the Instagram photo-sharing service. “Instagram makes you the product” argued Josh Halliday in The Guardian whilst TechCruch reported how “The Backlash Continues: Zuck’s Sis Doesn’t Seem To Like The Instagram Changes Either“.

But there is another angle to this story. Another TechCrunch article entitled “Quit Instagram, They Said. They’re Selling Your Photos, They Said.” poked fun at the outrage whilst in an article entitled “No, Instagram can’t sell your photos: what the new terms of service really mean” The Verge provided a more measured summary of the changes in the terms and conditions.

Yesterday Instragram responded to the storm in the blogosphere in which they acknowledged mistakes in the announcement regarding the changes: Thank you, and we’re listening. The post addresses some of the concerns which have been raised:

Ownership Rights Instagram users own their content and Instagram does not claim any ownership rights over your photos. Nothing about this has changed. We respect that there are creative artists and hobbyists alike that pour their heart into creating beautiful photos, and we respect that your photos are your photos.

Privacy Settings Nothing has changed about the control you have over who can see your photos. If you set your photos to private, Instagram only shares your photos with the people you’ve approved to follow you. We hope that this simple control makes it easy for everyone to decide what level of privacy makes sense.

The real change related to how Instagram would seek to make money, both to cover the costs of providing a global photo-sharing service, as well as to make money for the company:

Advertising on Instagram From the start, Instagram was created to become a business. Advertising is one of many ways that Instagram can become a self-sustaining business, but not the only one. Our intention in updating the terms was to communicate that we’d like to experiment with innovative advertising that feels appropriate on Instagram. Instead it was interpreted by many that we were going to sell your photos to others without any compensation.

Personally I’m quite happy to make use of a service such as Instagram for free. I also acknowledge that the company is neither a charity nor a public-sector organisation and has a legitimate need to make money. It has provided notification of changes to its terms and conditions which clarifies how it will seek to make money from “innovative advertising that feels appropriate on Instagram“.

I am also willing for others to commercially exploit content which I have released under a Creative Commons licence which does not exclude commercial use. I wonder if those who are unhappy with Instagram’s terms and conditions will apply the same arguments to content released under a CC-BY licence? Yes, such content could be used in ways you may not approve of. Accept this – and avoid applying discriminatory licence conditions. Open source software developers learnt this lesson long ago.

I’ll conclude by suggesting that if anyone wishes to respond to this post by using the “If you’re not paying for the product, you are the product” cliché, you should read the Powazek post on I’m Not The Product, But I Play One On The Internet which describes how:

There are several subtextual assumptions present in “you are the product” I think are dangerous or just plain wrong that I’m going to attempt to tease out here. Many of these thoughts have been triggered by Instagram’s recent cluelessness, but they’re not limited to that. I also want to be clear that I’m not arguing that everything should be free or that we shouldn’t examine the business plans of the services we consume. Mostly I’m just trying to bring some scrutiny to this over-used truism.

Many thanks to Wilbert Kraan for alerting me to this post last night. The post could, of course, have pointed out that the absurdity of applying the cliché to use of Creative Commons content.

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‘Does He Take Sugar?’: The Risks of Standardising Easy-to-read Language

Back in September 2012 in a post entitled “John hit the ball”: Should Simple Language Be Mandatory for Web Accessibility? I described the W3C WAI’s Easy to Read activity and the online symposium on “Easy to Read” (e2r) language in Web Pages/Applications“.

The article highlighted the risks of mandating easy-to-read language and, following subsequent discussions with Alastair McNaught of JISC TechDis, led to a submission to the online symposium. Although reviewers of the paper commented that the submission provided “very sound ideas about how to approach e2r on level with other accessibility issues” and “The argument that the user perspective needs to be taken into account for discussing and defining “easy to read” makes a lot of sense“ the paper was not accepted. Since the reviewers also suggested that “The authors should provide more material on how this step could be realized” and “More background on BS 8878 and a justification should be added” we decided to submit an expanded version of our paper to the current issue of the Ariadne Web magazine.

In subsequent discussions when preparing the paper I came across Dominik Lukeš, Education and Technology Specialist at Dyslexia Action, who has published research in the areas of language and education policy. Dominik’s blog posts, in particular a post on The complexities of simple: What simple language proponents should know about linguistics, were very relevant to the arguments which Alastair and myself had made in our original paper. I was therefore very pleased when Dominik agreed to contribute to an updated version of our paper. The paper, ‘Does He Take Sugar?’: The Risks of Standardising Easy-to-read Language, has been summarised by Richard Waller in his editorial for the current issue of Ariadne:

In “Does He Take Sugar?”: The Risks of Standardising Easy-to-read Language, Brian Kelly, Dominik Lukeš and Alistair McNaught highlight the risks of attempting to standardise easy-to-read language for online resources for the benefit of readers with disabilities. In so doing, they address a long-standing issue in respect of Web content and writing for the Web, i.e. standardisation of language. They explain how in the wake of the failure of Esperanto and similar artificial tongues, the latest hopes have been pinned on plain English, and ultimately standardised English, to improve accessibility to Web content. Their article seeks to demonstrate the risks inherent in attempts to standardise language on the Web in the light of the W3C/WAI Research and Development Working Group (RDWG) hosting of an online symposium on the topic. They describe the aids suggested by the RDWG such as readability assessment tools, as well as the beneficiaries of the group’s aims, such as people with cognitive, hearing and speech impairments as well as with readers with low language skills, including readers not fluent in the target language. To provide readers further context, they go on to describe earlier work which, if enshrined in WCAG Guidelines would have had significant implications for content providers seeking to comply with WCAG 2.0 AAA. They interpret what is understood in terms of ‘the majority of users’ and the context in which content is being written for the Web. They contend that the context in which transactional language should be made as accessible to everyone as possible differs greatly from that of education, where it may be essential to employ the technical language of a particular subject, as well as figurative language, and even on occasions, cultural references outside the ordinary. They argue that attempts to render language easier to understand, by imposing limitations upon its complexity, will inevitably lose sight of the nuances that form part of language acquisition. In effect they supply a long list of reasons why the use and comprehension of language is considerably more complex than many would imagine. However, the authors do not by any means reject out of hand the attempt to make communication more accessible. But they do highlight the significance of context. They introduce the characteristics that might be termed key to Accessibility 2.0 which concentrate on contextualising the use of content as opposed to creating a global solution, instead laying emphasis on the needs of the user. They proceed to detail the BS 8878 Code of Practice 16-step plan on Web accessibility and indicate where it overlaps with the WCAG guidelines. Having provided readers with an alternative path through the BS 8878 approach, they go on to suggest further research in areas which have received less attention from the WCAG guidelines approach. They touch upon the effect of lengthy text, figurative language, and register, among others, upon the capacity of some readers to understand Web content. The authors’ conclusions return to an interesting observation on the effect of plain English which might not have been anticipated – but is nonetheless welcome.

The article is of particular relevance since it brings home very clearly the limitations of WAI’s approach to Web accessibility and the belief that universal accessibility can be obtained by simply following a set of rules documented in the WCAG guidelines. As we’ve explained in the article, this isn’t the case for the language used in Web pages. However although the approach developed by WAI has significant flaws, the BS 8878 Code of Practice enables guidelines developed by WAI and other organisations to be used in a more pragmatic fashion. We hope that the experiences in using this Code of Practice described by EA Draffan in her talk on Beyond WCAG: Experiences in Implementing BS 8878 at the IWMW 2012 event help in the promoting greater use of this approach, including use of the standard to address the readability of Web pages.

Reflections on the “Great Dropbox Space Race”

The Great Dropbox Space Race

Back on 15 October 2012 the Dropbox blog announced The Great Dropbox Space Race!. The post described how:

Space Race is a chance for you to support your school and compete against other schools for eternal glory (by eternal glory we mean up to 25 GB of free Dropbox space for two years).

Everyone who signed up with an institutional email address for a bona fide educational institution received a minimum of 3 Gb storage for 2 years. Additional storage up to 25 Gb for 2 years was available based on the numbers of people who have signed up from the institution.

The space race is now over. The leader table shows the top ten institutions which have gained the largest amount of free disk space in the Cloud for members of the institution.

No.	Institution	Number of “Space Racers”	Points
1	University College London	4,020	10,977
2	University of Cambridge	4,129	10,810
3	University of Oxford	3,999	9,817
4	Imperial College London	3,566	9,284
5	University of Edinburgh	2,545	6,662
6	University of Southampton	2,515	6,429
7	University of Manchester	2,025	6,224
8	University of Nottingham	2,208	6,016
9	Open University	1,503	4,431
10	University of Warwick	1,684	4,325
	TOTAL	28,194

There is also a table for the top 100 institutions, which goes down as far as Dartington College of Arts which has 134 “space racers” with a total of 428 points.

Note, incidentally, that the numbers of points aren’t directly related to the numbers of users as additional points can be scored in other ways, including reading the getting started manual!

Reflections

I have to admit that I am a fan of Dropbox. Its ease-of-use makes the shipping of files across my desktop computers and mobile devices trivial. I was therefore hopeful that there would be significant take-up of the service across the University of Bath, which would increase my storage capacity. However after the closure of the space race the University was only in 26^th place. Perhaps we should have emulated the approach taken at the University of Portsmouth and been more pro-active in encouraging take-up of the offer.

The global league table appears surprising, with no UK institutions and only 21 US institution in the top ten. The top UK institution, UCL, is in 68^th position in the global table.

No.	Country	Institution	Number of “Space Racers”	Points
1	Singapore	National University of Singapore	20,406	42,354
2	Taiwan	National Taiwan University	16,485	38,044
3	Italy	Politecnico di Milano	14,359	32,017
4	Singapore	Nanyang Technological University	14,875	31,355
5	Mexico	Tecnológico de Monterrey	13,235	30,550
6	Netherlands	Delft University of Technology	13,226	30,511
7	Brazil	Universidade de São Paulo	13,469	28,307
8	USA	University of California Berkeley	12,126	28,214
9	Ukraine	Sumy State University	7,303	27,007
10	Germany	Rheinisch Westfalische Technische Hochschule Aachen	10,038	25,777
	TOTAL		135,522

What might the apparent low take-up of this offer tell us? It may be that other institutions around the world have been pro-active in encouraging take-up of the service. Alternatively it may simply be that institutions currently provide sufficient disk space for their staff and students. Alternatively it may be that institutions do not want their staff and students to make use of cloud-based storage services due to concerns regarding security, privacy and data protection.

These are legitimate issues, although when I hear people say “We can’t use Dropbox – it’s based in the US” I assume they are referring to data protection legislation. However there seems to be a lack of awareness of the Safe Harbor Agreement (a streamlined process for US companies to comply with the EU’s Directive 95/46/EC on the protection of personal data) and Dropbox’s announcement on 14 February 2012 that they had signed up to the Safe Harbor Agreement.

But what is being lost by not using such services? The 28,194 users of the top ten UK institutions are being provided with a minimum of 82.6 Terrabytes (according to this conversion table) or up to 688 Terrabytes if they each receive the maximum allowance of 25 Gb. According to a Wikipedia page which provide a List of Storage hierarchy media with costs the disk storage provided by a reliable cloud service with cost $140 per Terrabye per month. If each of the 28,194 users of the top ten UK institutions used the maximum of 25Gb allowable storage the commercial cost of this would appear to be $11,564 per month, or $277,536 over the two years for which the free deal is available.

Conclusions

I’ll be the first to admit that my back-of-envelop calculations are likely to be flawed. Pat Parslow suggested I take a look at Amazon’s calculator to provide a sanity check. I would therefore invite others to provide feedback on the estimates of the disk storage which Dropbox are offering and do the sums of the costs in providing similar disk storage over two years within the institution based on the many thousands of users listed in the top 100 UK institutions who have signed up to the Dropbox offer.

But in addition to the financial aspects, even if the service appears to be more popular outside the UK and US, the numbers of people who have subscribed to the service suggests that there will be a need to provide education on best practices for use of the service, including highlighting the risks of using the service.If you are a researcher I would suggest you do not allow sensitive research data to be hosted on services hosted in the US, even if the company hosted the data has signed up to the Safe Harbor Agreement.

But if a key aspect regarding use of Dropbox relates to digital literacy and risk assessment, might there be a need to ask whether the popularity of Dropbox in countries such as Taiwan and Singapore suggests that the company might be well-placed to carry out espionage on research activities in these countries? Might Dropbox be a cost-effective way of the US intelligence services to monitor activities in universities around the world? Or am I being paranoid?

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Performance Analytics: Twitter, 20Feet and Crowdbooster

CETIS Series of Analytics Briefing Papers

Adam Cooper, CETIS Director, recently published a post in which he tried to answer the question What does “Analytics” Mean? (or is it just another vacuuous buzz word?). In the post Adam asks the question:

But is analytics like cloud computing, is the word itself useful? Can a useful and clear meaning, or even a definition, of analytics be determined?

Adam concludes that “the answer is ‘yes’” and describes how this definition is explained in a CETIS briefing paper on What is Analytics? Definition and Essential Characteristics. Adam’s post also introduces the CETIS series of briefing papers on Analytics which includes papers on Analytics; what is changing and why does it matter?, Analytics for the whole institution, Analytics for Learning and Teaching, Legal, Risk and Ethical Aspects of Analytics in Higher Education, Analytics for Understanding Research and A Framework of Characteristics for Analytics.

The What is Analytics? Definition and Essential Characteristics briefing paper provides the following useful pithy definition:

Analytics is the process of developing actionable insights through problem definition and the application of statistical models and analysis against existing and/or simulated future data.

The CETIS work in this area has a focus on learning analytics, which reflects their core area of interest and expertise. However there are other areas of interest which are of relevance to the higher education sector. In addition there are approaches which have been taken to analytics beyond our sector which may provide useful insights.

Beyond Learning Analytics

Adam Cooper’s blog post concludes by encouraging people to focus on the applications of use of analytics, rather than seeking formal definitions:

Rather than say what business analytics, learning analytics, research analytics, etc is, I think we should focus on the applications, the questions and the people who care about these things.

I would agree with this approach. An example of possible dangers in focussing on the terms being used and the associated definitions can be see in the discussions surrounding altmetrics. As highlighted by Jean Liu in a post on Metrics and Beyond @ SpotOn London 2012:

A commonly held assumption about alt-metrics is that they are meant to replace traditional measures of research impact like citation counts. Actually most in the field (us included) think that alt-metrics should complement traditional metrics, not eliminate them altogether.

Although I recently commented on the need to understand the limits of altmetrics in a post on Understanding the Limits of Altmetrics: Slideshare Statistics in this post I want to focus on what I will refer to as performance analytics.

Performance Analytics in Sport and Hobbies

Wikipedia defines permance metrics as “a measure of an organization’s activities and performance. Performance metrics should support a range of stakeholder needs from customers, shareholders to employees“. We can see how such approaches can be applied in areas such as sports from the article published in the Guardian in August 2012 which described how Manchester City to open the archive on player data and statistics.

On a personal level in a post entitled Personal Perspectives on How Metrics Can Influence Practice I described the judge’s marks for last year’s rapper sword dancing competition (in which we came bottom of our group). The evidence of our low marks led to a decision to change our approaches to the dance, to the structure of the team and our weekly practices. The scores provided us with ‘actionable insights‘ into our performance which led to subsequent changes in behaviour.

I have noticed a growing interest in performance analytics across people I follow on Twitter, with a number of people in my network having purchased a Fitbit gadget and, judging my tweets I see in my Twitter stream, the Runkeeper app on their iPhone or Android device. If you’re looking for a Christmas present for a gadget-minded friend who is starting to think about their fitness the Duigital Trends Web site provides suggestions for Eight fitness gadgets that actually work.

Twitter Analytics

If metrics can provide insights into real world activities such as football, sword dancing, running and walking, then their relevance in a digital environment would appear obvious.

But should one care about performance analytics for activities such as use of Twitter?

John Spencer in a post entitled Twitter Isn’t a Tool has explained how he is unhappy with “organizations inquir[ing] about the best ways to maximize Twitter for professional development“. For John “Twitter isn’t a commodity“. Rather “Twitter is where I go when I want to talk to teacher friends … when I want to hang out with some teachers with my same quirky sense of humor [and] where people challenge my groupthink and push me to rethink my practice“.

@mr_brett_clark was in agreement: “I often describe Twiter like a party“. Curt Ress had a similar view: “I often see Twitter as a cocktail party. Lots of people having quick exchanges amidst a lot of noise. But through time, relationships are formed and real learning happens.“

But although Twitter may be an informal conversational medium which can enhance informal learning, I feel that others may agree with this characterisation and yet still find value in using analytics to “develop actionable insights”. After all although my hobby, rapper sword dancing, is a fun activity. there is widespread, although my no means universal, agreement that the judging and the competitive nature can improve standards.

And, of course, beyond Twitter’s role in informal learning and social intercourse, the tool is also being used to support formal institutional activities, as can be seen from the survey in August 2012 which showed that there have been almost 50,000 tweets from official Russell Group university Twitter accounts, which have over 300,000 followers.

Crowdbooster

The Crowdbooster service allows you to:

Analyze the performance of your individual tweets and posts with an interactive graph and table to quickly understand what’s working. Customize the date range to understand the impact of your campaign. Drill down to view engagement and reach metrics on Facebook and Twitter.

Use of the free version of the service is illustrated in the accompanying screenshot.

As can be seen you can view the potential impact of tweets on a daily, weekly, monthly basis, over all your tweets or for a customised range.

As an example, I have an interest in seeing how the initial announcement of the date of the IWMW 2013 event has been shared across Twitter.

It seems that there have been 11 retweets of the posts which have the potential to have been seen by 8.3K Twitter users. As Twitter users will know, this potential audience is unlikely to reflect reality. However it does provide an indication of outreach and the 11 retweets (and 2 conversations) are based on reality.

TwentyFeet

The TwentyFeet Web site describes how:

TwentyFeet is an “egotracking” service that will help you keep track of your own social media activities and monitor your results. We aggregate metrics from different services, thus giving you the full picture of what happens around you on the web – all in one place.

The TwentyFeet service (also known as 20ft) provides a range of graphs which help to visualise one’s Twitter performance over time. These include:

• Reputation influence: the numbers of followers gained and lost over a specified period together with the number of Twitter lists you are on.
• Influence indicators: the number of mentions and retweets.
• Conversations: including tweets, retweets and @ messages.
• Followers analyses: the numbers following you, people not following back and the rato of followers to following.
• List analyses: the numbers of lists you own, the numbers of members of lists you own and the number of subscribers to one’s lists.
• Additional information: the numbers of tweets you have favourited, the number number of tweets posted, the total number of links posted and the total number of lists followed.

Examples of TwentyFeet graphs for my numbers of followers in November 2012 are illustrated.

Business Models

The basic Crowdbooster service is available for free. As described on the pricing page this can be used to analyse one Twitter and one Facebook account. A Professional account, costing $39/month allows up to 10 accounts to be analysed with the Business account costing $99/month allowing up to 30 accounts to be analysed. No additional functionality is available for the paid-for accounts, apart from access to a live chat and phone support service,

The basic TwentyFeet service is available for free which can be used to analyse a single Twitter and Facebook account. However users of the free service will also find that the service sends a weekly tweet summarising the week’s performance, along the lines:

My week on twitter: 40 retweets received, 1 new listings, 37 new followers, 78 mentions. Via: http://20ft.net/p

Some people find such automated tweets irritating (with the tweet from TwentyFeet perhaps being regarded as boastful). It is possible to buy a subscription service which can be used to disable the public notifications as well as provide various other benefits. Subscriptions costs $12.45 for 5 credits – however it is not clear how long the credits last for.

Discussion

As mentioned previously many Twitter users may well have no interest in their Twitter metrics. However if you do have an interest, which service should you use? A similar answer would be to sign up for both. However the real decision to be made is probably whether to use the free version of TwentyFeet and accept the weekly automated tweets from one’s account.

Power Twitter users should have no difficulty in filtering tweets which are of no interest if they have a well-formed and consistent string of characters – which is the case for the alert from TwentyFeet as well as service such as paper.li (“The foo Daily is out“) and FourSquare (“I’m at foo http://4sq.com/bar“). Back in 2009 Mashable published an article entitled Twitter Better: 20 Ways to Filter Your Tweet. More recently posts on How to Filter out Noise from your Twitter Timeline and How to Filter Your Twitter Stream and a question on Quora which asked What tools can one use to filter one’s Twitter stream? highlighted some tools and techniques for Twitter management.

However many users will not wish to use such advanced filtering techniques. Perhaps in response to the public Twitter alerts provided by TwentyFeet, Crowdbooster now provides a private email alert. A few days ago I received s message saying:

You gained 7 followers a day over the past week! (On average, you gain 2) View your follower growth now.

To reach the most people, schedule your tweets for 12PM today, 8PM today and 9PM today.

In light of the developments to Crowdbooster I have just withdrawn permissions for TwentyFeet to post to my Twitter stream. The last tweet from the service was published 30 minutes ago:

My week on twitter: 45 retweets received, 8 new followers, 108 mentions. Via: http://20ft.net/p

For me, Crowdbooster provides the deeper understanding of how I use Twitter. I know know that my second most retweeted post ever was posted two years ago:

A classic for those who like spotting misuse of apostrophe’s – spotted in Bath charity shop. http://yfrog.com/h7bppsqj

It seems there are a lot of grammar pedants amongst my Twitter followers!

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Reflections on the “Top 10 Tips on How to Make Your Open Access Research Visible Online”

Top 10 Tips on How to Make Your Open Access Research Visible Online

Yesterday I received an email which informed me that contribution to the Jisc Inform online newsletter (issue 35, December 2012) had been published. The article on Top 10 Tips on How to Make Your Open Access Research Visible Online is based on a blog post originally published on the Networked Researcher blog which was tweaked slightly and republished on the Jisc blog. The version published in the Jisc Inform newsletter includes a series of images to accompany each of the ten tips.

The tips were originally developed to accompany a series of presentations given at the universities of Exeter, Salford and Bath during Open Access Week. These presentations were based on the experiences gained in use of social media to help maximise access to peer-reviewed publications. In particular the tips documented the experiences of use of social media services such as blogs, Twitter and Slideshare to help maximise the readership of a paper entitled “A Challenge to Web Accessibility Metrics and Guidelines: Putting People and Processes First“.

The Complexities Behind the Tips

It is interesting to see how the advice initially given in a one-hour seminar can be distilled into a series on top tips. The sceptic may be dismissive of the value of reducing the complexities of open practices for researchers to a series of top tips. However at the recent SpotOn 2012 conference in sessions such as How to do Smart Journalism on Complex Science the value of science writers in being able to communicate complex scientific ideas in ways which can be understood by the general public was emphasised. The challenges, however, was to ensure that those with a deeper interest in the complexities can be able to access resources which provide more in-depth discussions.

In the case of the Top 10 Tips on How to Make Your Open Access Research Visible Online more detailed information was provided in the slides of the original talk. In addition, as illustrated the slides also contain links to further information. In the example shown evidence that being proactive in ensuring that the co-authors of the paper provided links to the presentation on their blog posts and Twitter channels can be seen from the large numbers of views of the slides during the week of the conference.

The limitations of Slideshare statistics was mentioned, but the slide also contain a link to the usage statistics which showed how the accompanying paper was, at the time, the most downloaded of my peer-reviewed papers which had been deposited in the University of Bath repository this year.

In addition to the more detailed information provided in the slides during the presentation itself I expanded on a number of issues, including responding to questions raised during the talk. A post has been published on the JISC-funded Open Exeter blog about the Open Access Week @ Exeter which includes a series of videos of the invited presentations. The video of my talk is available on YouTube and embedded below. I hope this additional information complements the top 10 tips published in Jisc Inform.

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Good News From the UK Government: Launch of the Open Standards Principles

In April 2012 I wrote a post entitled Preparing a Response to the UK Government’s Open Standards: Open Opportunities Document which summarised my experiences of support for open standards in JISC development programmes since the 1990s and encouraged others to participate in the UK Government’s consultation exercise.

A post by Simon Wardley entitled The UK’s battle for open standards which began:

Many of you are probably not aware, but there is an ongoing battle within the U.K. that will shape the future of the U.K. tech industry. It’s all about open standards.

motivated me to write a follow-up post entitled Oh What A Lovely War! in which I described the language which was being used to describe this consultation exercise:

In brief we are seeing a “battle for open standards” that will “shape the future of the UK tech industry” in which we are seeing “UK Government betrayal” which has led to a “proprietary lobby triumph” . The ugly secrets of “how Microsoft fought true open standards” have been revealed and now every man must do his duty and “get involved”! Who said standards were boring?

Yesterday I received the following email from Linda Humphries of the Government Digital Service, Cabinet Office.

Thank you for your response to the UK Government’s Open Standards: Open Opportunities public consultation. The consultation ran from 9 February to 4 June 2012. At the close of the consultation, we had received evidence from over 480 responses and we would like to take this opportunity to thank you for sharing your views and helping us to formulate new policy on this topic.

As you may know, the consultation process concluded with the publication of a government response and a new policy – the Open Standards Principles – on 1 November 2012. The government response covers the process we followed, a review of the key themes that emerged in the consultation, how they have been taken on board and the next steps for open standards in government IT.

Online submissions were published during the consultation period to encourage debate and we have now also made available the written responses submitted through other channels. The only exception to this is any submissions which explicitly requested confidentiality.

Two independent reports commissioned by the Cabinet Office from Bournemouth University have also been published and are available on the Cabinet Office website – an analysis of the consultation responses and an evidence review of aspects of the proposed policy. The responses, reports and new policy are all available here.

In the new year, we shall be setting up the Open Standards Board, as described in the Open Standards Principles. We look forward to your continuing engagement through the Standards Hub during 2013.

Kind regards,

Linda

Linda Humphries
Government Digital Service
Cabinet Office

The Key Documents

The key documents which have been published are Open Standards Principles (PDF, MS Word and ODT formats), Open Standards Consultation – Government Response (PDF, MS Word and ODT formats), Statistical data (PDF, MS Word and ODT formats), An Analysis of the Public Consultation on Open Standards: Open Opportunities (PDF, MS Word and ODT formats), Open Standards in Government IT: A Review of the Evidence (PDF, MS Word and ODT formats) and B (PDF, MS Excel and CSV formats).

The first document summarised the key principles:

Open Standards Principles

These principles are the foundation for the specification of standards for software interoperability, data and document formats in government IT:

1. We place the needs of our users at the heart of our standards choices
2. Our selected open standards will enable suppliers to compete on a level playing field
3. Our standards choices support flexibility and change
4. We adopt open standards that support sustainable cost
5. Our decisions on standards selection are well informed
6. We select open standards using fair and transparent processes
7. We are fair and transparent in the specification and implementation of open standards

The introduction to the document states that:

This policy becomes active on 1 November 2012. From this date government bodies [1]
must adhere to the Open Standards Principles – for software interoperability, data and document formats in government IT specifications.

The other documents summarised the responses which had been received to the consultation (which included feedback from Adam Cooper, JISC CETIS, Rowan Wilson, JISC OSS Watch, Rob Englebright, JISC and Tony Hirst, Open University in addition to myself and several others from the university sector).

The document Open Standards in Government IT: A Review of the Evidence which provided an independent report for the Cabinet Office by the Centre for Intellectual Property & Policy Management at Bournemouth University concluded:

Although there is a lack of quantitative evidence on expected cost savings from adopting open standards, abundant examples exist where an open standards policy has been adopted with various consequent benefits, and the literature identifies few downside risks. The challenges appear to lie in the manner of implementation so that potential pitfalls, such as adopting the wrong standard, are avoided while potential gains from increased interoperability, including more competitive procurement and benefits to SMEs and citizens are maximised.

Perhaps some unexpected good news from the Government for Christmas? Might we be able to announce that the standards battle is now over and cry out “Peace in our time”? Time to read the documents in more detail, I feel. But I’d welcome comments from anyone who may already had read the documents and digested the implications.

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[1] Central government departments, their agencies, non-departmental public bodies (NDPBs) and any other bodies for which they are responsible.

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“It Was 20 Years Ago Today”

On 9 December 1992 I saw the Web for the first time. As I described in a handbook entitled Running A World-Wide Web Service published in 1995:

[I] first came across the World-Wide Web (WWW) at a workshop on Internet tools organised by the Information Exchange Special Interest Group, University of Leeds on 9th December 1992. In January 1993 the Computing Service installed the CERN httpd server on its central Unix system – this was probably the first WWW service provided by a central service in the UK academic community.

The workshop included demonstrations of a number of Internet applications. The aim of the workshop, was to raise awareness of the importance of the Internet to support institutional research, teaching and marketing activities.

At the time I was familiar with Gopher, Veronica, WAIS and Archie but the Web was new to me. The applications were probably demonstrated on Silicon Graphics or possibly Sun workstations. The Web browser I saw was the Viola which was publicly released in May 1992.

A screenshot of Viola running under X-Windows is illustrated. It should be noted, however, that this image shows a later release of the browser since, in December 1992, the Web was text-only with inline images only becoming available with the release of the NCSA Mosaic browser.

Despite its text-only origins the potential of the Web was apparent to me from the first time I saw it. The ability to have have links within a document, as opposed to Gopher which provided only links from menu items, was a clear strength of the application as was the integration with a range of existing Internet services, such as FTP and Gopher, as well as links with a variety of backend services, such as directory applications which were already starting to be integrated with the Web.

At that time I was the Information Officer in the University Computing Service and was looking for a tool which could be used to provide access to online information provided by the Computing Service as well as, I hoped, form the basis of a Campus Wide Information Service (CWIS).

A small number of Universities were at that time starting to explore the potential of Gopher to provide a CWIS and that was the technology I expected would be used at Leeds. But on 9 December 1992 I saw the Web for this first time and was convinced that I have seen a new vision of the future. It was twenty years ago today, but it’s another set of Beatles lyrics which are more appropriate:

Roll up for the mystery tour.
The magical mystery tour is waiting to take you away,
Waiting to take you away.

When were you taken away by the Web?

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Guest Post: “1 billion people, 17 million students, 500+ colleges and millions of eager learners”

Today’s guest post is written by  Gwen van der Velden, Director, Learning and Teaching Enhancement at the University of Bath. Following a chat last night along our shared corridor on level 5 of the Wessex House building Gwen kindly agreed to write a guest post about her recent trip to India.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Guest Post: Reflections on Open Access Week 2012 at the University of Oxford

During Open Access Week a series of guest blog posts were published on this blog in which three repository managers shared their findings of SEO analyses of their institutional repositories.

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

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Open Access Week at Oxford

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

What We Were Trying To Do

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

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

What We Did

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

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

The presentations are available online.

Wikipedia Editathon

Ada Lovelace by Margaret Carpenter, 1836

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Special thanks to:

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

Reflections

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

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

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

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

Next Time

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

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

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

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

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

Announcing IWMW 2013

I’m pleased to announce that next year’s Institutional Web Management Workshop, IWMW 2013, will be held at the University of Bath on 26-28 June 2013.

The Roman Baths. From Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_Baths_(Bath)

The annual IWMW event has taken place in Bath previously: IWMW 2000 and IWMW 2006. We know that participants welcome the opportunity to visit our beautiful city, which has been a World Heritage Site since 1987. The combination of Georgian architecture and Roman remains make Bath a city well-worth revisiting. We have already booked the Roman Baths for the IWMW 2013 reception which promises to provide a memorable occasion for all participants.

The theme of IWMW 2013 is “What next?“. This will provide participants with an opportunity to consider the challenges facing the higher education sector in light of the economic downturn, and also the opportunities provided by the continuing technical developments we see in our online networked environment. The final session at the event will provide an opportunity to reflect on the challenges which lie ahead and strategies for addressing those challenges.

The call for submissions is now open. We welcome proposals for plenary talks, workshop sessions and other ideas you may have (for example, it might be timely to revisit the debates which took place in 2002, 2003 and 2006).

If you are unfamiliar with the IWMW event and the format, it would be useful to visit the IWMW 2012 Web site to see the timetable and view the abstracts for the plenary talks and workshop sessions.

If you would like to discuss ideas for a proposal, feel free to contact me, the IWMW 2013 chair. In addition I would welcome the opportunity to make contact with potential sponsors for the event.

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Disappearing Conference Web Sites: Learning From the EUNIS Experience

EUNIS Conference Resources

Back in June 2005 I presented peer-reviewed papers on Let’s Free IT Support Materials!, IT Services – Help Or Hindrance To National IT Development Programmes? and Using Networked Technologies to Support Conferences. I also, I’ve just noticed, facilitated a half-day workshop session on Supporting Technology-Facilitated Learning In The Conference Environment - this was, I think, the first time I gave a workshop on what subsequently became better known as ‘amplified events’.

But what of the context of this work? The papers were presented at the EUNIS 2005 conference, with the workshop being one of several pre-conference sessions. The conference was held at the EUNIS 2005 conference at the University of Manchester on 20-25 June 2005. But recently I noticed that the conference Web site, which was hosted at http://www.mc.manchester.ac.uk/eunis2005/, was no longer available.

Does this matter? The conference, which is organised annually by the European University Information Systems Organization, took place over 7 years ago. Might it not be argued that the sharing of best practices and innovation across IT support services departments across Europe does not need a record of best practices dating back to the mid 1990s?

EUNIS does provide information about its previous conferences, as illustrated. This shows that conferences were held in Düsseldorf in 1995 and Manchester in 1996. However the EUNIS 1997 conference, held in Grenoble, is the oldest EUNIS event for which Web resources are still available.

From the list of papers presented at EUNIS 1997 (which is hosted on the main EUNIS Web site) I discovered a paper on Information Services – the Convergence Agenda by M Clark, IT Services Director at the University of Salford, about mergers at Salford University.

The other papers with authors from UK institutions were Preservation of the Electronic Assets of a University by Alex Reid, University of Oxford; “Applying Risk Analysis Methods to University Systems” by W R Chisnall, University of Manchester; Managing Information for Management by John Townsend, Edge Hill University College and Information Strategy – a Tool for Institutional Change by Andrew Rothery, Worcester College of Higher Education and Ann Hughes, University of Nottingham.

Ironically all of these papers have some relevance to the disappearance of the EUNIS 2005 Web site. The conference took place shortly after a merger of the University of Manchester and UMIST, which led to the integration of the IT Service departments from both of these institutions, with subsequent changes in staffing, departmental names and responsibilities. It seems that Manchester Computing no longer exists, with the http://www.mc.manchester.ac.uk/ URL now being redirected to Research Computing at http://www.rcs.manchester.ac.uk/

It would appear that there is still a need for the sector to be able to develop strategic responses and use of risk analysis methods to held ensure the preservation of digital resources arising from mergers. It would seem that all of the papers from the EUNIS 1997 conference still have some relevance!

Preserving Conference Resources

If, as had been suggested, old conference Web sites have value, how should one respond to the disappearance of sites such as the EUNIS 2005 Web site?

For me the first port of call is the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. It seems that the EUNIS 2005 Web site has been crawled 52 times, going all the way back to November 19, 2004.

The earliest archive contains a record of the call for papers and therefore does not contain any of the papers. It is therefore the latest archive, which was carried out on 5 May 2008, which should be of the most relevance. However in order to ensure that this archive contained relevant information I ensured that it contained a copy of the final programme. As illustrated, the final programme is available in the archive, but I noticed that this page had been archived on 8 October 2007; there had been 14 captures of this paper between 3 March 2006 and 8 October 2007.

I also found that my papers on Using Networked Technologies To Support Conferences, Let’s Free IT Support Materials! and IT Services – Help Or Hindrance To National IT Development Programmes? were also available in the archive. It was interesting to note that the archive included the PDF versions of the papers as well as the HTML resources for the conference Web site.

The Internet Archive appears to have been successful in keeping a copy of the key resources on the conference Web site. However when I followed a link to “Photographs from the Conference: (registration staff, sessions, conference dinner)” I found that the archive appeared to simply contain a copy of an error message, as shown below.

This may have been a failing by the Internet Archive’s software but, looking at the path name, I suspect the crawler simply captured an error message generated by the EUNIS 2005 Web server software.

Next Steps

When I noticed that the EUNIS 2005 Web site had vanished I informed the EUNIS organisers and suggested that they may wish to provide a link to the Internet Archive’s copy. This has now been done. I have also updated the links to the conference Web site from my list of papers and presentations.

There are clearly operational decisions which need to be take in order to minimise the risk of loss of content (and context) when intellectual content is deposited on conference Web sites. But what are the implications as we look to the future? For my content, I had previously ensured that the papers were deposited in the University of Bath repository so, for me, it was the loss of context which had the greatest significance. But what is likely to be the more sustainable resource in the future: the conference Web site hosted on an established, viable and trusted University Web site or the Internet Archive? I can’t help but feel that I should be looking to ensure that the Internet Archive contains a working copy of content currently hosted on areas of institutional Web sites which may not be sustained in light of policy or organisational changes. And what of EUNIS? Might they find it useful to provide links to the copies of previous EUNIS conferences held on Internet Archive, in addition to the existing conference Web sites?

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Why You Should Do More Than Simply Claiming Your ORCID ID

Background to ORCID

Last week the SpotOn London 2012 conference (#solo12) included a session entitled ORCID – Why Do We Need a Unique Researcher ID? As described in the abstract for the session:

Open Researcher & Contributor ID (ORCID) provides a persistent digital identifier that distinguishes you from every other researcher. Through integration with key research workflows and other identifiers, ORCID supports automated linkages between you and your professional activities, ensuring that your work is recognized. The ORCID service launched in October 2012 and in this hands-on workshop we will demonstrate the different tools that already use the ORCID identifier, from manuscript submission to altmetrics for your publications. The focus will be on working with these tools so that at the end of the workshop you will have registered for your personal ORCID (if you didn’t have one already), started creating your ORCID record, and explored cool ways to use your ORCID to connect your research back to you. Wide usage and adoption of a researcher naming standard is a key component of effective research communication. Such a standard is fundamental to improving data quality and system interoperability, and ultimately will reduce the amount of time individuals spend maintaining their professional record—freeing time for research itself.

As described in a recent post on Observing Growth In Popularity of ORCID: An SEO Analysis we can already observe take-up in use of ORCID since its launch last month.

Claiming an ORCID ID

Shortly after the launch I claimed my ORCID ID: 0000-0001-5875-8744. As suggested on the ORCID home page this is a painless exercise, taking about 30 seconds to complete.

I then added addition information including details of my research papers. Citation information for my papers were added automatically once I had associated my ORCID ID with my Scopus account. I then had to individually change the visibility of these items from Private to Public in order that the records were including in the public display of my ORCID profile.

The final thing I did was to add links to my key Web resources, including the UKOLN Web site, my UK Web Focus blog and my LinkedIn profile.

If you a researcher and have published peer-reviewed papers I would recommend claiming of your ORCID ID. But beyond investing 30 seconds in claiming the ID I would also suggest that you should associate your ORCID ID with your papers and then make them public (note it has been suggested that the display should be public by default). I would also recommend that your ORCID record should provide links so that others can find out more about you and your research activities, including your current contact details.

Using An ORCID Record

Maintaining Links, As Author Affiliations Changes

I would suggest, however, that researchers should do more than simply claim their ORCID ID. I recently realised recently that I was in danger of losing contact with people I have co-authored papers with since writing my first peer-reviewed paper back in 1999. This has always been a danger in light of the turn-over in affiliations for those working as researchers and will become even more relevant in light of cutbacks in higher education.

I have therefore started to make contact with co-authors and have invited them to claim their ORCID ID. I will include this information in citation records which I maintain. As an example the papers tab on this blog contains details of papers I have published and includes links to further information for each of the papers.

I have recently begun updating the citation details with links to the ORCID ID for my co-authors when I have been notified of their ORCID ID.

An example for the paper on A Challenge to Web Accessibility Metrics and Guidelines: Putting People and Processes First is illustrated, for which ORCID IDs for three of the four authors are available.

In this case the co-authors are still based at same institution. However for a paper on Developing Countries; Developing Experiences: Approaches to Accessibility for the Real World written by three of the four same authors, Sarah Lewthwaite was at the time based at the University of Nottingham. The page containing the citation information has Sarah’s institutional details from when the paper was published (and the paper itself will have the email details for this institution which will no longer work). However the ORCID ID will continue to be valid, and can be updated with any new organisational details and email address.

Supporting Resource Discovery

Since claiming my ORCID ID I have found that a Google search for ‘Brian Kelly ORCID‘ includes my ORCID record in the first page of results, as illustrated. And whilst finding the page probably reflects a personalised view of my Google search results, it did occur to my that a search for ‘researcher’s name ORCID’ may become a quick way of finding research publications for an individual. Since my initial experiments tended to find results related to the Orcid flower I realised that use of ‘ORCID ID’ may provide a useful disambiguation term. I have therefore decided to use this structure in my Web resources, even if pedants point out the redundancy in use of ‘ID’ since ORCID stands for Open Researcher & Contributor ID. After all, we talk about the Sahara Desert even though Sahara means desert.

If a search for ‘name ORCID ID’ becomes a means of helping to find details for a researcher’s publication record might it also be useful for finding the papers themselves?

As illustrated, a Google search for ‘A Challenge to Web Accessibility Metrics and Guidelines: Putting People and Processes First‘ finds the item in the institutional repository, an article posted on this blog and, in third place, the information provided in my ORCID record.

Although it should again be mentioned that these findings may be skewed by Google personalisation features (I was logged into Google when carrying out the search and used the PC in my office) the point to be made is that content held in ORCID will be found by Google.

In addition, the visibility of the ORCID Web site is likely to be enhanced as more people link to ORCID from their Web sites, especially high-ranking Web sites. This may mean that the early adopters who claim an ORCID ID in its early stages of development will gain benefits through their peers finding their published research papers – something likely to be of particularly important within the UK higher education sector in the run-up to REF 2014.

Why would you not claim your ORCID ID? Why would you not make use of your ORCID record as I have suggested? And if any of my co-authors read this post, feel free to get in touch and let me have details of your ORCID ID.

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Observing Growth In Popularity of ORCID: An SEO Analysis

The ORCID (Open Researcher and Contributor ID) service was launched recently. From the ORCID Web site we learn that

“ORCID provides a persistent digital identifier that distinguishes you from every other researcher and, through integration in key research workflows such as manuscript and grant submission, supports automated linkages between you and your professional activities ensuring that your work is recognized“

We would expect all public networked services to have an interest in monitoring take-up of the service, especially in the period after the launch. The ORCID team will be monitoring registrations on the service, but it is also possible to monitor the growth of a networked service by monitoring the links to the service.

The MajesticSEO tool can be used to monitor links to a Web site, and provide information on the number of links and domains as well as providing additional information such as the Alexa ranking the domains, link text used, resources linked to, etc.

The findings from the MajesticSEO tool taken on 15 November 2012 are illustrated. As can be seen there are currently 521 domains linking to the service, with a total of 11,923 links, 2,295 of which are from educational institutions.

The current findings can be viewed on the MajesticSEO Web site (a free subscription is needed to view the findings). The findings for the top ten referring domains are shown below.

#	Referring Domains	Backlinks	Alexa Rank	Flow Metrics
				Citation Flow	Trust Flow
1	hull.name	2,462	N/A	24	26
2	figshare.com	2,086	279,286	27	22
3	upc.edu	2,049	21,837	63	65
4	neilernst.net	755	N/A	17	10
5	duraspace.org	410	718,279	47	49
6	knowledgespeak.com	351	N/A	33	25
7	knowledgenavigator.ca	241	N/A	9	5
8	datadryad.org	197	N/A	30	26
9	mchabib.com	170	N/A	22	16
10	wordpress.com	144	22	95	93

The hull.name domains appears to me an anomaly.  Following discussions with the owner of this domain, a researcher at the University of Manchester it appears he is not carrying out any ORCID development or harvesting activities, so perhaps there was a flaw in the data collection carried out by the MajesticSEO service. The other entries in the table give an indication of the organisations which seems to be early adopters of ORCID or, perhaps in the case of WordPress.com, suggest where blog posts about ORCID are being discussed.

Sorting the table by Alexa ranking shows the most highly ranked Web services which contain links to the ORCID site.

#	Referring Domains	Alexa Rank	Backlinks	Flow Metrics
				Citation Flow	Trust Flow
1	google.com	2	1	99	99
2	blogspot.com	11	37	98	94
3	wordpress.com	22	144	95	93
4	slideshare.net	177	1	79	77
5	guardian.co.uk	192	6	91	88
6	blogspot.com.es	238	4	62	52
7	hatena.ne.jp	281	1	82	69
8	blogspot.co.uk	290	2	64	55
9	typepad.com	317	21	87	83
10	blogspot.de	342	4	67	54

The presence of two popular cloud-based blog platforms, WordPress.com and Blogspot.com, suggest that researchers are either talking about ORCID on these blogs or perhaps even linking to ORCID records from blog posts. However the number of links are currently too small to draw any significant conclusions from the findings.

But perhaps of most interest is the geographical display of take-up of ORCID IDs.  The global map probably reflects the location of leading research institutions and publishers of research journals. But zooming in on the UK provides a more interesting view of the location of Web sites which have links to the ORCID domain.  Bath is currently represented by 22 links from the UKOLN Web site and one from the Ariadne ejournal. As mentioned above, the map is skewed by the large numbers of links from the hull.name domain which is based in Manchester which has 2,462 links. Two locations for Scotland are shown: 9 links from the Edinburgh University Web site, 3 from EDINA and 3 from the DCC. The other location is the city of ‘Heriot’ (which actually refers to Heriot-Watt University which is based in Edinburgh).

It will be interesting to observe how this map develops as ORCID takes off.

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Reflections on Event Amplification and the #SOLO12 Conference

About the #SOLO12 Conference

On Monday evening I returned home, tired but feeling exhilarated after a great #SOLO12 (Spot On 2012) conference. This two-day conference, formerly known as Science Online, is part of “a series of community events for the discussion of how science is carried out and communicated online“. After the two opening plenary talks delegates could then attend one of three parallel sessions covering (1) science communication and outreach; (2) online tools and digital publishing or (3) science policy. In total there were 27 parallel sessions, with participants being able to attend up to 9 sessions, in any of the three tracks.

In reality we could also eavesdrop on sessions we weren’t attending as participants made extensive use of Twitter over the two days which helped the participants renew old connections, establish new ones, share resources and engage in discussions. I have been informed that there are were 6,900 distinct tweets for the event (and over 10,000 if you include retweets). The conference organisers will shortly be providing access to the archive of tweets, together with a range of visualisations.

Since I have an interest in archiving and analysis of tweets, especially at events, I made use of a couple of freely available tools in order to illustrate approaches which others may find useful.

I set up an Epilogger archive of the conference tweets on the afternoon of the second day of the conference and therefore this does not provide complete coverage. However, as shown below, that there have been 1,977 tweets to date posted using one of the ~28 conference hashtags (the #solo12 hashtags was for the conference in general, with separate hashtags, such as #solo12open, being used for the parallel sessions.

Epilogger statistics for Twitter usage at the Spot On 12 conference (10-14 Nov 2012)

It should be noted I set up the Epilogger archive halfway though the conference after realising that it could be used to provided an aggregation of the session hashtags. This was a feature of Epilogger I was previously unaware of. The service is one I would recommend to others, particularly if they wish to make use of multiple hashtags at an event.

Using Social Media at Conferences and Other Events (#solo12SMC)

Background

In addition to participating in the workshop sessions, Tony Hirst (@psychemedia) and myself facilitated a session on Using Social Media at Conferences and Other Events: Backchannel, Amplification, Remote Participation and Legacy.

This was a very relevant topic for Tony and I to facilitate: back in 2005 I was the lead author of a paper on “Using Networked Technologies to Support Conferences” which described approaches to exploiting what later became known as ‘Amplified conferences’ – and after Lorcan Dempsey coined this phrase I set up the corresponding Wikipedia entry. Since 2005 UKOLN’s annual IWMW (Institutional Web Management Workshop) has been amplified, through video-streaming of plenary talks and support for discussions, initially using IRC and later Twitter. Our experiences in providing amplified events, and advising others on best practices, led to joint work with ILRT, University of Bristol for the JISC-funded Greening Events II project. Our key deliverable (illustrated) was the Greening Events II: Event Amplification Report (available in PDF and MS Word formats). The report, which provided case studies from a number of amplified events organised by UKOLN, was written by Kirsty Pitkin, who runs the Event Amplifier blog, together with Paul Shabajee, ILRT, University of Bristol.

Tony Hirst has been active in analysing and visualising Twitter discussions on events, as well as providing broader observations on the relevance of technologies to support events, which he has described on his OUseful blog. This has included posts on So What Do Simple Hashtag Community Visualisations Tell Us?, Structural Differences in Hashtag Communities: Highly Interconnected or Not?, Small World? A Snapshot of How My Twitter “Friends” Follow Each Other…, Visualising Twitter User Timeline Activity in R, Blogging Academic Lectures, Twitter Powered Subtitles for Conference Audio/Videos on Youtube and Searching the Backchannel – Martin Bean, OU VC, Twitter Captioned at JISC10.

Reflections on the Session

I had produced some slides and uploaded them to Slideshare in advance of the workshop but, since the conference organisers had asked the workshop facilitators to keep the presentations to a minimum, I didn’t make significant use of the slides. Instead I asked the participants to address the questions “What is an Event?“, “What are the main purposes of an event?” and “How can technologies enhance these purposes?“.

As the session was being live-streamed we were able to engage a remote audience in these discussions. And since there was a local and remote audience we encouraged people to ensure that discussions taking place in the room were also shared on Twitter.

I had previously set up an Epilogger archive for the #solo12smc tweets. The service reports that there were 384 tweets, with 80 links and 4 photographs shared. In addition to the Epilogger archive, as a backup I also created a Twubs archive. Shortly after the workshop was over I manually curated the tweets using Storify. I also manually curated the tweets using Chirpstory in order to be able to compare these two manual curation Twitter tools.

Reading the archive of the tweets posted during the session was very valuable in being able to have a broader view of the discussions than was possible through participation in the smaller discussion groups. The resource is also useful not just for the workshop participants but also others with an interest in the evolving best practices for the provision of amplified events.

I will therefore summarise some of the key points made in the Twitter discussion and give my thoughts.

Key Points

At the start of the workshop Tony Hirst tweeted “If you’re in the #solo12smc session, please send a tweet using the tag.” There was a purpose for this request: to provide an identifier (the Twitter user’s ID) which, used in conjunction with the session hashtag, will enable Twitter analysis tools to identify those who participated. It should be added that such ‘checking in’ will also be helpful for others who see the tweet as this can be useful in building new connections or restablishing existing ones (along the lines of “Are you in the same room? We’ve only met on Twuitter – fancy coffee later?“).

I have found that having people summarised what I have said can provide useful insights which may not have occurred to me previously. I therefore found the following observation from @nailest useful:

@BrianKelly in #solo12smc trying to get away from idea of “one to many” plenary talk and get us all sharing opinions & expertise. 

It was also useful to get feedback on the decision to move away from the planned structure for the session and let the participants help set the agenda:

“I had planned a structure but decided to throw it away” Yay!! #solo12smc

I then asked people to describe why they were attending the session and what they hoped to gain. The responses included:

#solo12smc here to find out how to optimise @SfAMtweets effectiveness online at conferences – how to get critical mass “talking”

In the #solo12smc session to find out how to boost the SM activities of @britsciassociat and it’s various events and programmes

#solo12SMC Social media use creates a parallel, virtual conference which frees content to the world. How do you measure conference impact?

Why are we at #solo12SMC ? I want to understand best practice to help when planning/attending future conferences #solo12

I find it interesting why some conference have a lot of twitter activity and others none. I wonder why this is. #solo12SMC

As an occasional conference organiser, I’d like to know how to maximise social media use and my responsibilities re archiving. #solo12smc

We also received comments from remote participants:

Watching @briankelly talk about soc media and conferences at #solo12SMC http://t.co/H8P5ezqF ’Tis lovely to feel involved from my bathroom.

which led to some discussion in the room which was relayed to Twitter:

Are people who listen to events on twitter freeloading by virtually lurking? #solo12SMC

A number of other concerns about event amplification were raised:

#solo12SMC Is using twitter at conferences more alienating than helpful? Not everyone has a device to tweet from!

If you have gone to the trouble to get everyone in one place at one time, they should talk to each other, not tweet in isolation #solo12SMC

I have to admit that since I was the session facilitator, I was not able to engage with this Twitter discussion at the time. The use of Twitter seems to provide a higher bandwidth at such events, in which discussions would normally have to be mediated by the facilitator or speaker. An advantage of having an archive of tweets, rather than regarding tweets as disposal and not to be viewed after they have been posted, is being able to see the issues raised, reflect on them and respond to them.

Responding to the Issues

The amplified event ‘free-loaders’

Are those who participate in amplified events ‘free-loaders’? Does the time and energy spent in setting up an amplified event environment detract from effort which could be spent in supporting the local audience, especially if the local participants have had to pay to attend? This topic was addressed earlier this year in a post entitled Streaming of IWMW 2012 Plenary Talks – But Who Pays?

The post gave an example of how one former attendee at IWMW events was unable to attend last year’s event as she was away on maternity leave. However since a live video stream was available she was able to keep up-to-date with developments and engage in discussions on Twitter whilst, as shown, still holding her baby. Rather than free-loading, this provides an example of how amplification of an event can help members of the community to maintain their links with the community. This example was for someone on maternity leave, but it could equally apply for those may may be too ill to attend or even those who do not have the finances to pay the event fee or the associated travel

Equality of access?

Is using Twitter at conferences more alienating than helpful, since not everyone has a device to tweet from? I suspect this may have been a rhetorical response to my request for examples of possible barriers to event amplification. Should we ban people using laptops at conferences as not everyone will have a laptop?

Lack of Engagement?

A more relevant concern relates to the dangers that participants at an event will fail to engage with others if they spend their time looking at the screen of the mobile devices. This issue was commented on by @MCeeP in his Notes on my brief time at SpotOn 12:

At one sessions (Assessing social media impact) I was standing right at the back, because it was so popular, and I could see the entire audience (and their many screens) throughout. At a conservative estimate I would say that around 75% of the audience were simultaneously tweeting/facebooking and at one point 2/3 of the presenters were tweeting as well! Now I am all for social interaction and communication but I did think that it was a little bizarre, presenting anything to a room full of people staring at screens is not the best experience and I am not convinced that they were all discussing/live tweeting the actual talk.

As can be seen from the accompanying photograph (taken from a IWMW event), this does provide an accurate description of technology-focussed events which take place in the sector.

This was a topic addressed in a recent post on Sharing (or Over-Sharing?) at #ILI2012 under the heading Does Sharing on Mobile Devices Hinder Real World Discussions? The sentiment expressed in the comments reflects my feelings – tweeting at events can help develop and strengthen connections. And just because people are looking at their screens or typing comments doesn’t mean they aren’t concentrating.

Perhaps the differing views simply reflect differences in our personal styles of working. I’ve expressed my thoughts in this post. However I’d be very interested in the opinions of others, as such feedback may help shape the plans for future Spot On events.

NOTE: Shortly after publishing this post I noticed that a video-recording of the session has been published on the Spot On 2012 Conference Web site. The video is also available on YouTube and is embedded below.

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The ‘Altmetrics everywhere – but what are we missing?’ #solo12impact Session

I’m looking forward to attending the session on “Altmetrics everywhere – but what are we missing?” which takes place on Monday at the SpotOn London (#SOLO12) conference.

In a post entitled Altmetrics everywhere – but what are we missing? #solo12impact #solo12impact Alan Cann, the workshop co-facilitator, has provided a taster for the session.  In the post Alan describes how:

In the last couple of years altmetrics (the creation and study of new metrics based on social media for analyzing and informing scholarship) have popped up across the web. 

Alan refers to a recent guest post on this blog entitled Social Media Analytics for R&D: a Catalan Vision which suggests a range of parameter which may be relevant. However Alan feels that:

The reality is that this is too complex for those of us with lives and jobs. We need services / dashboards to provide and digest this information.

I agree, the research community will need similar dashboards which can provide indications of engagement and outreach. Alan mentions a number of possible solutions. He is dismissive of Klout (which I would agree is not appropriate in our context although if you are an advertising agency and wish to decide which Twitter star to employ to post sponsored tweets this might provide useful information to assist the selection process). Alan is more positive about  Kred, but his preferred tool seems to be CrowdBooster. Alan’s post includes screen shots which illustrate the data visualisation provided by the tool.

I have also recently started to make use of Crowdbooster. However I feel that the dashboard provided by the Twentyfeet service is better.

The screen illustrates one of the dashboard views of  my Twitter engagement during October 2012.

However Twentyfeet (also known as 20ft.net) is not popular in some quarters as the free version sends a singly weekly tweet summarising the data over the previous week.

It is possible to disable this alert for a small annual fee (of, I think, ~$12 per year), although since this is only a single weekly tweet it is not be too intrusive.

I will be making comparisons between these services once Crowdbooster has aggregated a sufficient number of my tweets to make valid comparisons. For now I hope this contribution to the #solo12impact session will be of interest to the participants.

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