JISC09 Closing Keynote – Ewan McIntosh

The closing keynote is from Ewan McIntosh, who is Digital Commissioner for 4iP – Channel 4’s Innovation for the Public Fund.

Ewan mentioning The Guardian’s Datastore (and reflecting that he wished ‘they’ (presumably Channel 4) had done it first!) – this is a collection data which the Guardian compiles, and is now making available in ways that encourage reuse (although you have to understand the data to make sensible mashups) – you can see some examples from Tony Hirst on OUseful.info

Now mentioning ‘MySociety‘ and ‘Theyworkforyou‘ – noting how making data reusable opens up ways of allowing interacting with the data and combining it to uncover new information. However, opening up data is difficult – example of European newspapers accusing Google of ‘stealing’ their information because they use headlines from their websites – but Ewan noting that Google is driving traffic to the newspapers via the route.

“Free is a hard price to beat”

Mentioning John Houghton and Charles Oppenheim report on economic impact of Open Access – if you rethink the model then there are savings to be made.

“Destination anywhere”

4iP funding lots of projects. But lots of proposals start “X is a site which…” – they are thinking in terms of ‘destinations’ – and Universities are the ‘ultimate destination’. But most people visit only about 6 websites in a day – if you see your website as a destination, then you are saying you are going to compete with those 6 top websites – you are really going to struggle with this.

The VLE is a destination. The only reason students go there is because Universities ‘compel’ them to – it is the only place they can get the information they need. However, this results in students visiting and leaving as soon as they can.

“Participation culture”

Higher Education is not a participatory culture. On the web the current ‘top’ participatory environment is probably Facebook. Example of ‘Who has the biggest brain?’ – like brain training – but you play against others. 50 million players (in 6 months)

iMob – iPhone game a text based strategy game.

Battlefront – a Channel 4 education project – via MySpace and Beebo – encourages young people to get involved in campaigning on issues they care about.

Ewan just said “Hands up if you are not currently twittering” (most of the room) – “you are doing nothing!”. Those twittering are participating – being much more cognitively active.

Ewan describing different ‘spaces’:

  • Watching spaces (tv, theatre, gigs)
  • Participation spaces (marches, meetings, markets)
  • Performing spaces (Second Life, WoW, Home)
  • Publishing spaces (Blogging, Flickr)
  • Group spaces (Bebo, Facebook)
  • Secret Spaces (Mobile, SMS, IM) – sounds like the ‘backchannel’?

The mobile phone is one of the most exciting developments in learning – Google Android and iPhone incredible platforms. But Universities not realising that students are leapfrogging tethered screens to go for mobile. Ewan suggests that the vast majority of students have mobile devices that access the internet – but does your university provide mobile services?

Ewan showing how if you represent his Facebook contacts graphically you can see how the contacts in Academia tend only to be connected to each other – it is a closed world.

“People don’t just do stuff because it’s in your business plan”

Ewan says “I don’t buy the Gen-Y stuff – the Google Generation, the Digital Natives”. It has nothing to do with being ‘young’ – but being ‘youthful’.

Parents think that young people spend about 18.8 hours per week online – but actually they spend an average 43.5 hours per week online – where is this missing time?

Don’t romanticise creativity – it isn’t easy. 90% of the a-v output that people consume comes from LA based corporations – this is not ‘building on the shoulders of giants’.

Access to creative technology comes far too late for most children. Higher Education and JISC can apply pressure to the school sector to give access to, and make use of creative technology.

Ewan says Anonymity is not a bad thing. Some examples where Anonymity does not work – School of Everything, Landshare (both with money from Channel 4). However, some services only work with anonymity – e.g. Embarassing Teenage illnesses (also C4)

Ewan showing a grid that helps thinks about startups – but he suggests it could also be used for University web services, or even other activites:.

 

  Visitor (just looks at stuff) Fan (will sign up but not create content) Contributor (uploads content, comments etc.)
Grab the attention      
Timescale      
Keep the attention again and again      
Timescale      
Turn the value into a tangible assett      
Timescale      

Ewan encourages us to think about applying the grid to your own online offerings (wonder what this would look like for an OPAC?)

Technorati Tags:

JISC09 – Moving from print to digital: e-theses highlight the issues

I’m chairing this session, so may be a bit difficult to blog (since I can’t see the screen from the front). The session goes from the international (DART), to the national (EThOS/EThOSNet), to the institutional (the From Entry to EThOS project at Kings College London)

First up, Chris Pressler (from the University of Nottingham) talking about DART:

DART-Europe – started as an 18 month project between a small group of academic institutions and Proquest. The first phase focussed on the creation of a simple search service to e-theses.

In the first phase the technology wasn’t too difficult, but some question about the business model. Proquest have a commercial service in the USA – but it didn’t seem suitable in Europe.

DART-Europe is now in the second phase administered by Nottingham and UCL – it is no longer a project, but an ongoing service. All partners have a seat on the DART board (really, there is a DART board). Although a UK led project partners (and potential partners) from across Europe.

  • DART now providing access to over 100,000 full-text e-theses. The thesis records come from:
    • 34 data sources (national, consortial or institutional)
    • 13 countries
    • 150 institutions
  • Daily updates
  • Data collection using simple OAI Dublin Core – but MODS and MARC also supported. Took an extremely simple approach to metadata – just 5 pieces of information per thesis.
  • Takes a pragmatic outlook
    • aims to keep things simple – minimise barriers

DART exposes theses to Google (wasn’t very clear how though?)

Although DART takes a simple approach, metadata still needs work.

DART now supports RSS, alerts, export results, multilingual interfaces, and provides usage statistics

How much does it cost to run DART? Not clear – need to look at this, and also benefits. Need to answer the question of whether this can run as a institutional supported service.

DART-Europe has other technical insterests – digital preservation, retrodigitisation…

Conclusions:

  • No dedicated funding means progress incremental – but has produced tangible results
  • Time to start marketing portal to academic community
  • DART-Europe provides a networking organisation for partners – not just about thesis issues

Next up EThOS/EThOSNet (declaration of interest, I’m the Project Director for EThOSNet):

EThOS aims

  • single point of access for UK HE Doctoral theses
  • Support HEIs in transition from print to electronic theses (via a toolkit)
  • digitise existing paper theses

Different participation options supported by EThOS

  • Open Access Sponsor – institution makes ‘up front’ payment to cover digitisation of a set number of theses
  • Associate Member Level 1 – institutions pays as it goes – each time a thesis is digitised, billed monthly
  • Associate Member Level 2 – the first researcher pays, then the digitised version available free
  • Associate Member Level 3 – EThOS simply routes the requester to the awarding institution (where the institution does not want EThOS to digitise theses)

EThOS takes an ‘opt-out’ approach – will put up theses without seeking author permission, but have strong rapid takedown policy so that if an author does not wish their thesis to be made available via EThOS it can be removed immediately.

98 UK HE institutions have signed up for EThOS.

Now Tracy Kent from University of Birmingham talking about the impact of EThOS on Birmingham.

  • University of Birmingham – is an Open Access Sponsor
  • From old ‘microfilm’ service, Birmingham used to supply 5-6 theses per week. In the first few weeks of EThOS going into public beta, providing 5-10 per day
  • University of Birmingham already had some theses in its institutional repository UBIRA – these are harvested by EThOS in order that they can be supplied via EThOS
  • Costs shifted from handling document supply requests to converting and loading etheses into reposityr to facilitate ‘front loading’ of e-thesis content
  • University of Birmingham took decision that if one of their users wanted a thesis from EThOS from a ‘Level 2’ member (i.e. equivalent of ILL) then this would have to be covered from researchers budgets, not from the library ILL budget

Birmingham contacted about 500 authors – only 5 got in touch to say that they would not want to be part of EThOS. A further 10 said they’d like to be included but couldn’t because of publisher restrictions (i.e. they had published, or were going to publish)

Birmingham have a number of procedures in place to check theses before they go to be digitised and believe that this due diligence approach combined with EThOS rapid takedown policy means that they are acting is a responsible way – and so far have had no requests for takedown from authors.

Birmingham have seen that once a thesis is on EThOS it is usually downloaded many times.

The service means that

  • Birmingham University thesis content is being seen and accessed
  • There is a changing role for document supply staff
  • There is a need to train authors to seek out necessary permissions and to ensure that submitted theses have the necessary permissions

Finally in the EThOS section Anthony Troman from the British Library. British Library run the EThOS service – they use a digitisation suite to digitise the paper theses, and make available to the end user by download, or (for additional payment) in other formats such as CD-ROM or paper.

Some questions that have come up:

  • Why not continue with microfilm service?
    • Requests for this service have been declining over the last few years – and was costing the BL large amounts of money
    • The system was not economically viable or sustainable
    • In 2 months usage 8517 individual theses requested for digitisation – well over a years worth under the microfilm service
    • In 2 months 17000 downloads
  • Popularity causing some problems with demand
    • New scanner installed
    • Double shifts – digitisation running 8am-midnight every day
  • Increase in quality between microfilm and digitised

Unfortunately this all costs money! However, a fundamental principal was that ideally theses should be free at point of use. Unfortunately the popularity means that some institutions who have made an upfront contribution are already running short of funds – but there are several options for institutions in this situation and they should contact the BL to discuss options.

Once a thesis is digitised – noone has to pay again – not the institution or the researcher.

Finally (running late which as chair is my fault!) Patricia Methven and Vikas Deora from Kings talking about Entry to EThOS:

Patricia reflecting how many different parts on the institution that needed to be involved in the move to e-theses. Now Vikas saying that Entry to EThOS about the ‘born digital’ theses rather than digitisation.

At Kings e-thesis submission is not mandatory. The Exam Office was keen to test student takeup and to streamline administration. The library was keen to see born-digital deposit due to storage issues and EThOS participation as important drivers. Vikas says with feeling (as a PhD) “The last thing you want to do once you have finished your thesis is to go to a website and fill out hundreds of pieces of information”!

The project looked at creating an e-thesis submission workflow
– how to capture the metadata, integrate with existing workflows, integrate with the repository (Fedora in this case) etc.

Found the student record system as a key source of data – this captures a lot of information about the title of thesis, names of tutors, status of student (e.g. writing up) – and the status of the student was seen as  the driver for the workflow. Because the data is coming from within the institution, the Exam Office don’t need to do further checking – so there were real benefits to the Exam Office which came out of the project – you need to convince them that this is going to save them work!

Bibliographic services had concerns about the metadata – assigning subject headings and keywords etc. So the project tried to integrate this into the workflow, so that the library could still classify the theses. They harvest back  information from the library system (e.g. subject headings) – they weren’t allowed to write into the library system (sounds like there is double entry going on here?)

Student doesn’t have to enter any information when they upload the thesis – just upload the pdf, check the information and it is submitted to the repository.

Kings recommend that the file the student submits is the ‘source’ file – e.g. Word doc or LaTeX etc. They can also submit PDF, or the conversion will be done for them – this allows for more flexibility in terms of long term preservation.

Literally takes 25-30secs for a student to submit an ethesis. Vikas sees this as absolutely key.

What’s next?

  • Move from e-thesis to Virtual Research Environment
  • Policy decision with exam board – does e-submission become mandatory? (Vikas sees this as key to adoption)
  • Embargos

Q: Has EThOS considered changing approaches to Intellectual Property rights after 2 months?

A: No – lots of issues around the IP issues, but must manage issues. Some institutions taking a ‘trial’ approach where they agree with legal advisors to try it out for a short period, subject to review, as a way of starting out, and hopefully getting agreement for long term committment if no legal problems come up. Also mention that institutions may well be insured against legal action.

Technorati Tags:

JISC09 Open Access

This session on the economic impact of Open Access recently published. John Houghton who authored the report with Charles Oppenheim is going to talk about the report to start with.

The project tried to quantify the costs and benefits – creating a series of spreadsheets contains elements identified in the process model of Scholarly Publishing, adding in cost data. There are about 2300 activity items that are costed in these sheets. Some example figures for activities in UK Scholarly publishing in 2007 – Reading cost £2.77billion, writing £1.6billion, Peer review £203million etc.

The overall estimate (for UK scholarly publishing in 2007) was £5.4billion

Then looked at cases and scenarios exploring cost savings result from the alternative publishing models throughout the system. Finally models the impact of changes in accessibility and efficiency on returns to R&D.

In summary – OA publishing models (whether Author pays, Overlay etc.) should save money.

John says ‘of course there would have to be a move of money from subscriptions to e.g. author pays funds’ – lets not underestimate the impact of this – this move of funds is likely to be politically charged, and challenging to organisations. I would also be interested in seeing some analysis of how (for example) ‘author pays’ might change the profile of expenditure across institutions – would this result in expenditure being more or less concentrated in research heavy institutions, or is it neutral in this respect?

Other side of the coin – benefits of Open Access models also more than benefits of traditional publishing.

See http://www.cfses.com/EI-ASPM/ for the opportunity to see, and play with, a simplified model.

Now Hector MacQueen (from University of Edinburgh School of Law) talking about Legal Perspectives on OA Publishing – going to make remarks from personal experience. Hector started by thinking about doing research by electronic means – and only gradually come to think of it in terms of Open Access.

In 1978 research was based around physical access – Hector’s material in libraries and archives. You had to get yourself to the physical location, or sometimes via ILL (although often material Hector wanted was not available via ILL).

The first electronic resource in Hector’s area was Lexis (now Lexis-Nexis) – but it was made very clear to the academics that this was not free. Not only was Lexis restricted to a single terminal but there was a ‘gatekeeper’ (person) who you had to go to to get searches done.

Courts (and others) started to make material available on the web – for free. So for formal sources, this was the start of ‘open access’ – or at least free access. The library became less of the place to get resources – moved to the desktop.

Then Hector started exploring the website of individuals who were publishing – and became aware of ‘self-archiving’ activity – especially in the USA. Hector followed suit. There was already a lot of informal sharing (and what Hector describes as ‘informal peer-review’ – essentially pre-publication comments from peers) happening – via email etc.

Hector notes that the Open Access world needs to recognise this informal activity. I agree – I’d go further and say that one of the problems we (Libraries/OA Movement) have is that we tried to formalise this type of activity, rather than working to support the existing informal sharing. Hindsight is a wonderful thing, but I’m not sure that we are past this stage yet (certainly not in all disciplines) – a consideration of how we can support informal sharing woudl still be a valuable exercise I think.

Hector now commenting on Copyright – the impact of the Google Book Search agreement (how will this impact in the UK?), Project Gutenberg, European Digital Library, Amazon + Kindle – also noting the impact of iTunes on availability of music and the dropping of DRM.

Finally before group discussion, an academic (who?) in Theatre studies.

Those studying early theatre groups (e.g. The King’s Men – Shakespeare’s troop) – have problems tracking records, as can be extremely distributed (around county record offices, various sources in their home location etc.) There is work (Reed) bringing together records from all over the UK – which are being published in an expensive series of books – one per town, a series that has been updated over the last 30 years (I think that’s right). However, the leader of the project negotiated from the off (30 years ago) that he had personal rights to the digital distribution – and so he can now make all the pdfs for the publications available via the Internet Archives, and build a database of information listing actors, troops, locations, plays, writers.

EEBO is another source – a resource created from this called DEEP (Database of Early English Playbooks) – which uses book title pages from EEBO to build a database of Early English Play Books.

EEBO is available via a JISC Collections deal in the UK. This, combined with seamless authentication via IP address, leads people to believe it is ‘free’ – this is an issue when trying to get people to understand the importance of Open Access.

The academic talking about a journal he is involved in which is not Open Access and reflecting why – an editorial stipend from the publisher allows the academics involved to promote the work. However he suspects that if these costs were met effectively by the tax payer, then the overall cost would be lower, as the

Q: I think the question was: What about Open Access outside Higher Education – that is should OA material created by HE be available to all others or just HE community?

A: In general the debate around OA has been focused on STEM – but OA would have a big impact on e.g. Law firms as well

A: The pharmaceutical industry could be a key beneficiary of OA – this is not necessarily a problem but needs to be recognised

A: Need to consider carefully how institutions add value – perhaps what is published is not the value add, but the interpretation of that – knowledge transfer etc.

Q: What would we need to do to make researchers fill the repositories that are out there and empty?

A: (not sure who said this, but a researcher) Mandating deposit essential – but not popular with the academics. Realising that some academics don’t want to be read!

A: Mandating good thing (John Houghton). Something that persuades colleagues is finding things that are available via OA. This means that your own institutional repository is very rarely of interest – it is what is being published elsewhere.

A: Charles Oppenheim – Citation advantage compelling – OA material gets cited more, but the reasons for this not well understood. University of Southampton now more highly cited than Oxford/Cambridge (according to Southampton)

Interesting that the view from the researchers is ‘mandate’. Really good to get researcher’s views, but suspect that the reason they are speaking at this event is exactly because they are atypical.

Technorati Tags:

JISC09 Keynote

The keynote is from Professor Lizabeth Goodman who is Prof of Creative Technology Innovation at the University of East London and Director of SMARTlab Digital Media Institute and MAGIC Multimedia and Games Innovation Centre – and also now involved in FutureLab (not sure what capacity)

In the current economic environment Lizabeth has found she is being asked to talk more at conferences about ‘forget the money, think about the people’ type stuff.

The keynote dotted through a lot of the work and projects from SMARTLab, and probably the best place to direct you is http://www.smartlab.uk.com/2projects/index.htm – it all sounds really interesting, but I didn’t find the presentation that engaging I’m afraid – too much reliance on a video and talking over it – anyway here are some brief notes.

Lizabeth playing a video about the work at SMARTLab –  one motto is “JUST MAKE IT” – the money always follows!

Now showing a clip from an early project – the Interactive Shakespeare – on CD-ROM  allowing the viewers to recut the film – participants people like Fiona Shaw, RSC etc. Had to work out how to engage 6000 Open University students and many more casual viewers.

I’m not sure I’m getting this – Lizabeth talking about our relationship to the material and ‘kinaesthetic’ experience – but I feel like I’m coming into a lecture half way through – I don’t understand half of what she is say I’m afraid.

Lizabeth is saying is that people who move in different ways (e.g. those with severe physical disability) learn in different ways – I think. Some work on using motion tracking to provide animated representations of the participants – allowing them to create different versions of themselves – an Avatar before there were virtual worlds such as Second Life readily available.

The Trust Game – allowing children to interact with the game by changing the form of the characters etc.

A project at the Stephen Hawking school in East London. Wanted to learn about the learning of severely disabled children. Which has informed the next project ‘Interfaces’. This uses a (large) screen that tracks eye movement (MyToby) – originally developed in the commercial sector for selling, was adapted to create an interface where you use your eyes to control the interface to create music.

Now relating how abused women were able to tell stories through pictures when they would never been able to tell the stories through speech – Safetynet project.

Chick2Go – where women with disabilities are mapping the streets of East London for the 2012 Olympics and Paraolympics – looking at safety and accessibility issues – where are there wheelchair ramps etc.

Some work in SecondLife – Wheelies – a wheelchair danceclub – everyone in the virtual space has to use a wheelchair

Stressing the importance of interacting with things and people that are close by, rather than remote (dissing Twitter – this is silly, it is just a technology, it is neutral on location – and since it contains location information, it can be used to identify and interact with local resources and people)

Project with Microsoft called ‘ClubTech’ – providing technology to US childrens clubs.

Bits and pieces – Fizzy, MobiMissions

Technorati Tags:

Opening Digital Doors – JISC09

Today I’m in Edinburgh for the JISC Conference. I’ve already done a brief post on a demonstration of the SWORD API for depositing material into digital repositories, but now the opening session with an introduction by Malcolm Reid (Executive Secretary JISC), and address by Tim O’Shea (Chair of JISC).

Malcolm Reid starts by reflecting on some of the issues raised yesterday at the ‘pre-conference’ sessions held yesterday, which unfortunately I wasn’t able to attend. This is a bit of a mixed bag – I think I might recommend looking out blog posts from yesterday instead of trying to summarise here.

Now Tim O’Shea talking about what JISC has been, is, and will be doing:

  • Research Excellence
    • Virtual Research Environments
    • Re-use of Research Materials in E-learning environments
  • Institutional Drivers
    • Open Access Learning Materials
    • Knowledge Transfers – engagement with commercial environment
  • Making Savings and Working Smarter
    • Access Management – UK Federation now the largest Access Management Federation in the world!
    • JISC Collections
      • Saviing money on license agreements
      • Giving access to more resources
    • Institutional Repositories
    • Green ICT – huge numbers of computers in UK HE – cost to sector over £100million in ICT electricity bills (I’d be suprised if this was anything like an accurate figure to be honest – instinctively feels low, don’t ask me to justify that)
  • Next 12 months
    • New strategy for JISC for 2010-12
    • Focus on Value for Money
    • Looking at Enterprise-wide Systems
    • Looking at Knowledge Transfer and Wealth Creation

Highlights for Tim over the day:

  • Launch of Box of Broadcasts (BoB) by BUFVC
  • New/updated services from Edina and Mimas (Geocode crosswalk, Archives Hub and COPAC)
Technorati Tags:

SWORD

Adrian Stevenson from UKOLN talking about, and demonstrating, SWORD. Uses Atom Publication Protocol (APP) profile (with some custom extentions) to provide a standard way of interacting with digital repositories such as DSpace, Fedora, E-Prints, Intralibrary etc.

The SWORD work has developed the APP profile, and paid for work to enable SWORD deposit to repository software in common use in HE. It has also enabled the development of some demonstration clients:

  • http://client.swordapp.org is a simple web client
  • Netvibes SWORD widget (available along with other JISC demonstrator widgets from http://rwidgets.co.uk) – example of importing image into Intralibrary – some issues that still need tidying up – e.g. resource name once loaded into Intralibrary is currently just a string of alphanumberic characters
  • Facebook App – (called SWORDAPP)
  • FeedForward – this is a tool being developed by staff at CETIS – allowing you to pull together lots of resources from various sources (focussing on RSS but also allowing you to add local files and other resources) – it will package up a set of resources in an appropriate packaged format for the target repository (e.g. METS for DSpace, IMS for Intralibrary)

There are some issues – but I’m not clear from a quick demonstration whether these are things that need further development in SWORD or just to do with the way the apps are currently coded. One of the issues is choosing appropriate metadata and deposit types, and a question of how the App might retrieve these from the target repository so it can prompt the user for the correct values.

 

Technorati Tags: ,