Graeme Rosenberg (REF Pilot Manager) from HEFCE presenting on this.

I’ve sat at the back with the only other blogger (afaik) in the room as we both run low on battery, and the only power sockets are next to the projector – which means I can’t hear so well 🙁

Some of this may be a  repetition of stuff I blogged at the earlier REF event at Kings College London. Following consultation the REF is going ahead with 2 key changes – assessment for all subjects will include some metrics and some peer-review process, and timescale lengthened.

The key features of the REF are:

• Unified framework for research assessment and funding
• Robust research quality profiles for all disciplines
• Emphasis on identifying and encouraging excellent research
• Greater use of metrics than at priesent – including bibliometrics “for all disciplines where these are meaningful”
• Reduced burden on HEIs

Timetable:

• Up to spring 2009 – bibliometrics pilot and other development work
• Spring/Summer 2009 – consult on all main features of the REF
• By Sept 2009 – decide on main operational features of the framework

Use of bibliometrics:

• Bibliometrics to be used in those disciplines in which they are meaningful – alongside other data and information
• Interpretation by expert panels
• To be based on citation rates per paper – not journal impact factors – and taking account of worldwide norms for the field, year of publication, and document type
• Results to be aggregated for substantial bodies of work; presented as a citation profile

About to run a pilot – starting imminently, with 22 institutions involved. This will look at a number of issues:

• Which disciplines?
• Which staff and papers should be included? Universal or selective coverage? Are papers credited to the research or the institution?
• How to collect data – and the implications for institutions (looking at Web of Science and Scopus for bibliometric data, but need institutions to at least identify the papers that ‘belong’ to them)
• Which citation database(s)? (as mentioned looking at WoS and Scopus – they have different coverage, and continue to develop – what is best for the pilot, may not end up being the best for the REF, or may change over time – need to pick the best one at the time)
• Refining the methods of analysis – including normalisation fields and handling self-citation
• Thresholds for the citation profile
• Interpretation by expert panels

Last point is key – allows flexibility in terms of what numbers are presented, as long as the expert panel know what is included and what is not (e.g. this could be a way of dealing with the self-citation issue)

It will be possible to compare the results to the 2008 RAE and investigate discrepancies and why they arise

The pilot institutions are:

• Bangor
• Bath
• Birmingham
• Bournemouth
• Cambridge
• Durham
• UEA
• Glasgow
• Imperial
• Institute of Cancer Research
• Leeds
• LSHTM
• Sussex
• …

The timetable is:

• May-Jun 08 – Select HEIs/contractors
• Aug-Oct 08 – Data collection
• Nov 08 – early 09 – Data analysis
• Spring 09 – Pilot results

Participating institutions will be asked to:

• Provide as much data as available on all researchers and publications eligible for the 2008 RAE (in relevant disciplines)
• To be matched to Web of Science initially, and supplemented by additional records
• We will evaluate issues of completeness and accuracy and seek feedback from the institutions
• JISC project to document the data systems requirements

Some issues for institutions:

• As REF developed need to assess the potential impact on the sector (accountability burden, equal opportunities and perceived behavioural incentives)
• Information management
  • Populating database for the initial bibliometrics exercise (Looking at Australia who are moving in a similar direction, and have had a requirement for collecting information on their published research outputs for some time)
  • Ongoing management of bibliographic data for multiple purposes
• Management information and internal resource allocation
• Relationships between citation data coverage and publication outlets – where are the gaps in WoS and Scopus?

For more information http://www.hefe.ac.uk/research/ref and/or join the REF-NEWS mailing list (details at the URL given here).

This talk by Dr Andreas Rauber (as an aside, it is great to see some academics here, as opposed to librarians – although quite a few of them and publishers here as well) from Vienna University of Technology (in the Dept of Software Technology and Interactive systems)

Andreas starting with ‘what is digital preservation?’, then going to cover preservation planning and a tool called ‘Plato’ – a preservation planning tool.

So – why do we need digital preservation?

Basic issue of ‘keeping the bits alive’ – but this is not really digital preservation. We know a lot about this kind of work, and it can be a lot of work, but a bottom line, can be done.

However, maintaining the bits is just a small part of the problem. Digital Objects require specific environment to be accessible – files need specific programs, proggrams need specific operating systems, and operating systems need specific hardware components.

Software and Hardware environment is not stable – you encounter issues where:

• Finels cannot be opened anymore
• Embedded objects are not longer accessible/linked
• Programs won’t run
• Information in digital form is lost – usually completely failure rather than gradual degradation

Strategies for Digital Preservation (using http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0013/001300.130071e.pdf) for categories:

• Short term
• Medium term
• etc.

Andreas going to look at two approaches:

Migration

• Transformation into different format

Usually get some changes in transformation – if you do this several times, will have ‘damage’ to the digital object

Emulation

Emulation of h/w or s/w

Both advantage and disadvantage that object is rendered identically – you can access the object, but you may not know how to use the interface.

Looking specifically at Scientific Publishing – what are you trying to preserve?

• The publication
• Context of the publication
• Adjunct material (slides, notes, videos)
• Demos, exercises, interactive elements
• Data sets and simulations
• Community aspects – discussion etc.
• …

So – Digital Preservation is complex

You need to under both the object, and its use and context.

So – ‘Preservation Planning’…

There are many different strategies – how do you know which one is most suitable – and how do you know if you’ve been successful 10/20/50 etc. years later?

As part of the DELOS DP Cluster here was a workflow developed, which has now been refined and integrated within PLANETS. It is based on the ‘utility analysis’ approach developed in Vienna.

Plato is a tool which helps with preservation planning – you need to:

• Define requirements (requires detailed analysis of what you want and what is important – for e.g. for a web page is the appearance of the hyperlinks important, or just the target information; if there is a web counter is it preserved at a specific date, does it count hits on the archived copy, does it continue to count hits on the ‘live’ copy? etc.)
• Evaluate alternatives (including not to draw up preservation plan if you want)
• Consider results
• Build preservation plan

All this looks interesting but suggests that this is going to be an incredibly expensive process (even to do the preservation planning, nevermind the actual preservation). This drives it home – we need to be good at deciding what is worth preserving in the medium/long term – and only embark on this kind of exercise where we know we want to do the preservation.

Plato is a ‘concretization’ (is that a word?) of the OAIS model, which follows recommendations of TRAC and nestor – it is a pretty generic workflow, so should be easy to integrate it into different settings.

In a case study of electronic theses, found that for these Plain text doesn’t satisfy several minimum requirements, RTF is weak in Appearance and Structure, and that the deactiviation of scripting and security are knock-out criterium (for PDF)

Andreas stressing the key role of the the ‘defining requirements’ stage – this is the point at which people start identifying what is important, and you can start to see cost vs. benefit

http://www.ifs.tuwien.ac.at/dp

http://www.ifs.tuwien.ac.at/dp/plato

Some conferences coming up on Digital Preservation including one at the British Library on 29th July.

Q: Who should take responsibility?

A: Need people from the ‘user’ side who at least know what they want, also need skills in IT, and input from Management on cost etc.

Once there are a number of examples of needs analysis of ‘type’ of material – e.g. e-theses, they can consolidate into a shareable template – however, need a number of studies first to capture wide range of requirements, rather than finding requirements from first study results in others narrowing their view down to whatever the first institution identified.

This session starting with Dr Sarah Bridle, a physicist from UCL. Sarah saying because of arXiv in her subject area the library could happily cancel all relevant journal titles from her point of view, since they only serve to ‘badge’ the papers, and she doesn’t need the subscription for this to exist.

However, clearly some issues with the functions journal server (peer-review) and the need for a business model, or process, which enables these functions.

Number of things lead to the idea of ‘overlay journal’ – very little copy editing seems to happen in published version, and often leads to confusion (e.g. with page numbers) between arXiv version and published version. So, they started talking to the library about the idea of running an ‘overlay journal’

Now Dr Panayiota Polydoratou from UCL library relating work that they undertook in partnership with other institutions (funded by JISC) to look at the issues – i.e. the RIOJA project.

The aims of RIOJA were:

• Build the RIOJA toolkit
  • APIs etc.
• Sustainability
  • estimate running costs for arXiv overlay journal
  • …

[Panayiota going very very fast – can’t get all of this – I guess it will be on the RIOJA website somewhere…)

Started by surveying 4000+ researchers (got 683 responses), and interviewing editorial boards and publishers. In general the latter two categories interested in looking at new models (which isn’t so suprising I guess – the current model, like music etc. is clearly not going to work well in the internet age)

Interestingly when researchers were asked about what they thought ought to be prioritised in terms of payment, paying referees was very low on the agenda.

More work needs to be done on exploring sustainability issues, business model and potential implementations.

Not very clear exactly what RIOJA has done except the survey – but now Antony Lewis from the Institute of Astronomy, Cambridge is going to talk about the APIs and show demos so perhaps that will make it clearer…

OK – so technical objectives were:

• Develop open API for communication between repositories and journals
• Develop software for hosting overlaid journals using the API
• Demonstrate journal s/w using API implemented on arXiv.org repository
• Develop version of ePrints repository s/w to make complete open source package for any subject area

The RIOJA APIs support:

• Paper metadata communication
• Author authentication
• Integrated submission
• Publication status

I’m worried there has been no mention of SWORD or OAI-PMH yet – which would seem to cover some of these areas?

There were specific issues:

• Paper version tracking – only a specific version of the paper on the repository should be ‘published’
• Science specific issues e.g. handling equations
• Simplifying workflows, dealing with ‘continuous publication’

Journal software used was ‘Open Journal Systems’. The submission was done ‘via repository ID’ – presumably meaning this is what was used as the identifier (surely would have been better to use a DOI or other independent identifier?)

Antony now showing some screenshots etc. Submitter asked to assign keywords as part of ‘submission’ process.

Conclusions:

• Software and API infrastructure now mostly in place
  • academics who want to run journals covering costs themselves, they can do it using this
• Make any number of journals based on any nyumber of repositories in any subject areas
• Aim to have suite of Open Source s/w for easily setting up repositories
• Some work still to do
  • Support for metada with equaicty latex display, referee report publciation, options for ways of handling copyediting
• Then just need some good editors and a small amount of money

Test site: http://arxivjournal.org

Source code and information: http://arxivjournal.org/rioja

API specification: http://cosmologist.info/xml/APIs.html

A number of questions:

• Are we not rushing ahead here where we haven’t sorted some basic problems around citation (e.g. things cited in arXiv before publication)
• Mention of ‘Storelink’ as a project looking at some of these areas
• I asked about overlap with SWORD and OAI-PMH and the Rioja APIs – not convinced by the answer to be honest – but my main concern is lack of overlap here.
• Some defense of ‘publishers’ and the roles they play from the floor: legal issues, communication, marketing, specialist expertise etc. Bottom line – don’t think you can do high quality publication without publishers, and if you get rid of publishers from the system, you would have to reinvent them in some form.

This first session is the keynote, by Stephen Pinfield.

Stephen is going to give some background and definitions, then look at three different models of interaction between journals and repositories, finally looking at issues around implementation of these models.

Stephen takes us back to the Budapest initative which identified two routes to ‘Open Access’:

• OA Repositories (a.k.a. ‘green’)
• OA Journals (a.k.a. ‘gold’)

Stephen is saying that these have sometimes been seen as ‘competitive’ – perhaps mutually exclusive? – but we are now seeing these as complimentary, or even overlapping, approaches.

Stephen breaking down some terminology:

• Repository: a set of systems and services which facilitates the ingest, storage, management, retrieval, display and reuse of digital objects
• Journal: a collection of quality-assured articles normally within a defined subject area, made available at regular intervals under a single ongoing title’ (n.b. quality-assured in academic context is usually peer-review) – I’m suprised no mention of ‘edited’ here – Stephen saying brand is key, journal titles are a ‘brand’
• Open Access: where the full content is freely, immediately and permanently available and can be accessed and reused in an unrestricted way. Stephen stresses the ‘timeliness’ of OA as a key point

Stephen now moving onto 3 possible models for repositories and journals interacting:

1. Repository -> Journal
2. Journal -> Repository
3. Repository -> Overlay Journal

1. Repository -> Journal

Stephen describing possible workflow associated with this:

• Author writes paper, and submits to journal for publication and puts pre-print in repository (which is immediately available)
• Paper is peer-reviewed by journal, revised, and the author submits final version to the journal, and to the repository (post-print)
• Journal publisher edits and formats paper, and publishes

In general the ‘repository copy’ is made available before the journal copy. Stephen notes that the pre-print doesn’t have to be deposited, but in typical scenario for this model (arXiv) this is what happens.

There is an assumption that once the paper has been formally published in a journal, usage switches from the post-print (post peer-review that is) copy in the repository, to the journal copy. Study by Henneken et al (http://arxiv.org/abs/cs/0609126) shows that this is what happens (in astronomy at any rate).

All this suggests that in this model repositories and journals can happily coexist

2. Journal -> Repository

• Author goes through publication process with OA/hybrid journal – with peer-review, revisions, editing and formatting etc. The article is published formally in the journal
• After formal publication, the author/publisher deposits paper in repository, the repository processes the paper (e.g. restructuring, re-formatting), manages preservation, and makes the paper available

Some key points are in this model the copy in the repository is the published version (unlike above), and it includes management of preservation (which isn’t handled within model 1 at all – although it may be handled outside the model)

This is the model taken by Wellcome Trust/UKPMC particularly. Described by R Terry (2005). In this model the repository sets up the article for re-use and analysis, including ‘mining’ (i.e. machine parsing of the text to extract meaning or data)

UKPMC currently 600,000 hits a month, with 60,000 article downloads a month. Current content stands at 1.4 million full text articles, increasing at about 40,000 articles a month. Specifically this model is being driven by funder mandates.

David Prosser (SPARC) has suggested a development on this model, which is very similar, but rather than there being a ‘published’ copy and a ‘repository’ copy, the publisher publishes to the repository – so one copy, held in the repository, with the publisher linking to the paper in the repository. In this situation (as opposed to the one Stephen is about to come to), the process is still driven through a traditional ‘publisher’ workflow – it is just the final location of the article is different.

Before coming onto the final model Stephen is noting the functions of Scholarly Communication:

• Registration (e.g. register first discovery against specific researchers)
• Certification (quality)
• Dissemination
• Archiving

David Prosser notes a 5th function:

• Reward

This is the idea that by publishing in a known journal, this is recognised in ways that reward the author (promotion, reputation etc.)

3. Repository -> Overlay Journal

The final model that Stephen is going to describe, the author interacts with both the publisher and the repository – rather than above, where really the author generally works with the publisher only.

• Author writes paper, and submits as pre-print to the repository, which makes it available
• an ‘Overlay journal’ selects the paper (made available by the repository), and subject it to peer-review
• The author revises the paper on the basis of peer-review
• Publisher edits and formats the paper (possibly?), and publisher/author deposits paper (post peer-review and post editing) in the repository which deals with management, preservation, access etc. as in model 2 described above

This model has been described by both JWT Smith (1997) and AP Smith (2000). The model involves the repository as the primary means of management and dissemination of content, where the publisher provides quality assurance etc.

Stephen now covering some of the ‘issues’ around these models:

• Changing shape of the ‘journal’
  • ‘Deconstructed journal’
  • Journal as quality stamp
  • Journal as brand
• Changing shape of the ‘article’
  • Single article in multiple journals (I can see this, but wonder how interested academics are in this – possibly generating multiple different versions as each journal applies different quality measures, peer-review for each journal could end up with contradictory revisions?)
  • Version identification and management becomes key in this type of scenario – integrity assurances; standards; custom and practice for citations; version of record
• Changing shape of ‘publication’
  • Formal publication and dissemination
  • Publication process

Overlay journal very ‘new’ – not very many examples of it yet.

Stephen says that in all of these models the ‘repository’ is key. This seems a bit self-fulfilling based on Stephen’s approach – he hasn’t considered any other model here – or possibly his definition of a repository is so encompassing any system that makes the article available becomes a repository. I’d argue that although each model relies of a ‘repository’ it wouldn’t have to bear much resemblance to what we have at the moment (especially if you accept, as model 1 does, that preservation may take place outside the model)

Stephen noting that all the models (to some extent) separate dissemination from quality assurance.

Stephen throwing out some questions:

What are business and funding models – for repositories as well as for publishers, and for research funders and institutions

We need to develop models that allow/enable/encourage(?) institutions to provide funds to author for OA publication in an author-pays mode.

There are still many issues relating to ‘content management’ – technical etc.

There are policy issues – funder requirement, institutional practices, and the REF (Research Evaluation Framework) which is coming, and will contain a citation analysis component using figures from the ‘traditional publishing process’.

Stephen strongly believes the REF risks stifling innovation by
measuring in a specific way, and pushing us back to reliance on traditional models (e.g. academics will want to publish in ISI indexed journals to get figures into ISI citation measures) – I suspect he is right…

Finally Stephen stressing the cultural issues around the way scholarly communication works. However, all the challenges that are there, challenge the traditional publishing model as well as being issues when trying to develop new models.

We need to move away from ‘paper-based’ models to harnessing the power the internet offers.

Question at the end from someone for ALPSP asking about how can it be efficient/economic for each institution to run a repository. Stephen says that repositories deliver more functions to institutions than just dissemination etc. (I think this is a bit of a weak answer – the point made is a good one, and it far from clear that we need each institution to run a repository to enable any of the models Stephen has described)

I’m at a meeting today at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, about the RIOJA project. This is a JISC funded project looking at a new way of approaching publishing, with the concept of an ‘overlay journal’ – which the project defines as ‘a quality-assured journal whose content is deposited to and resides in one or more open access repositories’

However, the day will also have sessions of digital preservation, the REF and other related issues.

OK – following the overwhelming response (ok, a few people, but all very keen) who responded to my recent post on a kind of unconference/hackfest/barcamp thing around library technologies, I’m going ahead with it.

It’s early days yet – no venue, no date etc. – although it looks like I’ve already had an offer of some possible funding, and a couple of tips on venues – so capitalising on my own enthusiasm, and that of others, I’m determined this is going to happen. Although the event will be about using technologies in libraries, we need a mix of non-techy (but interested) people, as well as any programmers or part-time coders/messers (where I’d count myself).

I’ve setup a website at http://mashedlibrary.ning.com/ with some ideas from me of how the day might work, and asking for input from you (dear reader) to say how you think it might work, and anything else you want to contribute.

I’ve been at ALA for the last few days, and as usual, time out of the office has triggered some ideas. The one I’m most excited about is that I think we could do with having an event in the UK that is about bringing together interested people and doing interesting stuff with libraries and technology.

The kind of thing I’m thinking of is along the lines of the recent ‘Mashed Museums’ event which Mike Ellis blogged about at https://variousbits.net/2008/06/27/mashed-museum-2008/

I’m also inspired by the annual ‘Hackfest’ that happens in conjunction with the ‘Access’ conference in Canada – described by Roy Tennant, and the various Barcamp and Unconference events that spring up quite regularly now.

At this stage, I’m looking for some interest and answers – please leave comments below about the idea and if you want, answer the following questions:

• Is this a good idea?
• Would you come?
• Are weekends or workdays better?
• Would you be worried about not being ‘techie’ enough to participate?

Here’s hoping it’s not just me sitting in a room with my laptop…

Diane Hillmann is Director of Metadata Initiatives and the Information Institute of Syracuse (formerly of Cornell)

There are several converging trends:

• More catalogers work at a support staff level than as professional librarians
• More cataloging records are selected by machines
• More catalog records are being captured from publisher data or other sources
• More updating of catalog records is done via batch processes
• Libraries continue to de-emphasize processing of secondary research products (books and serials) in favour of unique, primary materials

Options:

• Extinction
• Retool

Extinction:

• Keep cranking about how nobody appreciates us
• Asert over and over that we’re already doing everything right – why should we change?
• Adopt a ‘chicke little’ approach to envisioning the future “the sky is falling”

Retool

• Consider what cataloger do, and what they will do, and map training
• Look for support for retraining at many levels
• Find a new job title – catalogers do a lot of other things

What do ‘metadata librarians’ do (as opposed catalogers – the retooled cataloger):

• Think about descriptive data without pre-conceptions around descriptive level, granularity or descriptive vocabs
• Consider the entirety of the discovery and access issues around a set or collection of materials
• Consider users and uses beyond an individual service when making data design decisions

The metadata librarian is

• aware of changing user needs
• understands the evolving information environment
• works collaboratively with technical staff
• familiar with all metadata formats and encoding standards

The metadata librarian skill set is:

• Views data as collections, sets or streams
• Familiar with a variety of metadata formats (DC, VRA Core, MODS etc.)
• Understands basics of data encoding (XML, RDF etc.) but is generally not a provrammer
• Understands the various ways that data can be created (by humans or machines) and manipulated (crosswalked etc.)

Characterisitics of the New World:

• No more Integrated Library Systems
• Bibliographic utilities are unlikely to be the ‘central node’ for all data
• Creation of metadata will become far more decentralized – not all library data
• Nobody knows how this will all shake out
• But: Metadata Librarians will be critical in forging solutions

Disintegrated Library Systems:

• All metadata will not be managed in and delivered from one central store
• Discovery is the first function that is being disaggregated from the ILS – there will be others
• Metadata may be managed in a variety of databases, structures and systems
• …

Role of bibliographic utilities:

• Optimized to be the middleman of the traditional data sharing system
• Currently limited to handling MARC data – not sure whether or when that will change (RDA will be firths challenge here)
• New services are contemplated

(as an aside OCLC getting a hard time here today – feel a bit sorry for Roy!)

New models of creation and distribution

• All data will not be created by librarians
• some will originate from machine processes
• We need to exchange data based on a more open model – on the web
• Broader use of OAI-PMH is a good start towards opening data beyond applications and bespoke portals
• Need to avoid commoditizing DATA instead base business model on building necessary SERVICES

Not sure about OAI-PMH – why not just published the stuff on a webpage with semantic markup to give structure?

Open data:

• Nobody knows how rich our data is unless we make it fully available – we can’t compete as data providers unless we do this

 

The first part of this session from Clint Chamberlain from University of Texas libraries.

Clint talking about ‘lumpers’ vs ‘splitters’ in terms of people of categorising stuff:

• Lumpers: look for similarities between things and group them by what they have in common
• Splitters: look for differences and create new classifications for things that don’t fit neatly into already existing categories.

In this context we had ‘monographs’ and ‘serials’ – and then along cam e-resources – familar, yet wildly different in some ways. Require different skills and processes, and difficult to integrate into existing workflows.

E-Journals make print journals look simple!

As we start relying on e-resources more exclusively, and we see reduction in staffing, we need to bring workflows together to work more efficiently.

At UT Libraries, Clint describes acquisitions:

• Library Assistants handle
• Ordering
• Receiving
• Invoicing
• etc
• 3 librarian who do a little bit of everything (including Clint)
• more complex orders
• licensing
• metadata coordinator – works with link resolver and other systems

At UT, they have a form called SMEAR – Serial, Monographic and E-Resource Action Request form. This covers every type of action related to all these resources. Also alongside this they have a ‘TAP’ team (Troubleshooting Access Problems) (includes phone contact for immediate response).

SMEAR/TAP is a single point of contact for all issues – the ‘end user’ (in this case usually a member of library staff) doesn’t have to do any analysis of the problem. Because a single cohesive team, with significant overlap between staff responsibilities, lots of shared knowledge.

For acquisition, the same form is used for any format, they use a subs agent where possible, license, setup and admin metadata setup is routed to appropriate person, and bib information routed to cataloging.

Clint saying that where there are unusual problems or issues, the workflow allows these to be picked out during the flow and sorted out, while all other normal items go straight through.

They use order record in teh library system to record all pertinent data, whether for e- or print. They have agreed standards for formatting notes to make them searchable.

When reporting problems, they have the ‘TAP’ form – they have just started trialling a system of ‘ticketing’ where each issue is given a ticket, and tickets are routed to the appropriate team, or staff member. Also the system allows tracking and reporting – so you can see all problems with a particular package or platform over a period of time.

Clint is identifying areas where they feel there is convergence, and where practice diverges:

• Convergence
• Selection
• Placing order
• Creating metadata
• …
• Divergence
• licensing
• claims
• …

Apologies -slide not very clear, so couldn’t get all this.

Clint mentioning SEESAU (Serial Experimental Electronic Subscriptions Access Utiltities) at the University of Georgia which proactively checks access. Clint noting that he doesn’t like it when the user notices a problem first. I sympathise with this, but I’m a bit unconvinced in the situation that Clint describes (reducing resources etc.) that this is something we need to look at. I’d argue there is a difference between print and electronic here – if you miss a print copy and don’t claim, you will probably never get it (very difficult to get if you notice it a year later) – this isn’t the case with electronic access.

Clint mentioning SERU (Share E-Resource Understanding) – I didn’t quite understand what this was, need to look it up – seems to be a NISO Initiative

At UT, they want to make ‘e-‘ team the norm, not the exception, with more cross-training so all staff can deal with the issues.

Clint saying that ‘one size does not fit all’ – we need to ‘lump’ where appropriate but ‘split’ when necessary – need to recognise that print and e are not the same. But we need to do all the ‘normal’ stuff (e and p) with the least possible effort and reserve our energy for the ‘problems’.

Q: Didn’t quite catch it – something about who assigns tickets?

A: E.g. with SFX, there is a supervisor who allocates, but small team – good comms the key

Q: Notes can be confusing. Note UT have standardised Notes in SMEAR – but how did they get it adopted by other staff?

A: Not all staff happy, but most have got used to it – you need to make sure . My own feeling is that you need to provide a compelling service, and if people see the benefit, and problems are resolved quickly, they will be happy.

Q: How has the budget structure/allocation changed?

A: Collection Management has developed funds to parallel serials funds. Actually one lump sum in reality, but split down by subject areas – so ‘Print Serials Chemistry’ and ‘E Serials Chemistry’  – so these are both drawing on the same lump of money, but allows differentiating. (UT is 70-80% e for serials at the moment)

Q: Do you accept every single request for new items regardless of cost?

A: Generally left up to the ‘bibliographers’ – who have responsibility for their budget – although they have to consult on some stuff (esp on subs). I suspect based on comments this morning that this will become more restrictive as monographs go e and possibly to subs model.

 

I can't quite resist this post to join in the series of comments on the use of Web 2.0 in HE, started by Brian Kelly with his presentation to the JISC-Emerge community: "What if we're wrong?"

Martin Weller responded to Brian's presentation with a blog post "Web 2.0 – even if we're wrong, we're right" in which Martin notes "it will never go back to how it was" – essentially we need to engage even if we are sceptical about the future of specific services or concepts, some of it will survive, and the next generation of technology will be built on this.

Brian has now posted "What if we're right" asking "are the Web 2.0 sceptics assessing the risks hat they may be wrong?"

So, now I'm jumping in. I've just been reading the JISC sponsored report "Great expectations of ICT: How Higher Education institutions are measuring up". This is a follow on from the Student expectations study from last year, and looks at first year university students' experiences of ICT us and provision in HE.

Both of these reports make interesting reading, but in this context I want to draw out some particular points.

The latest report notes:

"Students are somewhat ‘forced’ into becoming familiar with these applications since they are needed to access very basic things such as timetables, as well as lecture notes or PowerPoint slides from lecturers, with some students even taking exams via this portal. Despite them ‘having’ to use these systems students appear to feel comfortable with them, can see the benefits, and feel well supported on the technical front."

Some quotes from a couple of participants in the study:

‘The system WebCT seems a lot more suited
for university work and lectures’

‘I didn't expect to be using computers as much
as we do but I'm glad that things are accessible
on WebCT.’

The report identifies a number of activities that students weren't comfortable with using, and that were generally unfamiliar – these included:

• Submitting assignments online
• Using podcasts
• Making podcasts
• Making wikis

In both reports "the least popular form of ICT is participation in an online
community such as Second Life".

Some quotes from a number of participants about the idea of using Facebook or other social networking sites for teaching:

‘I only use it for peers and friends. You wouldn’t
want lecturers and tutors to see Facebook’

‘I’d probably get distracted by other stuff on
Facebook and not end up doing anything’

‘I don't know, it would seem kind of weird getting
lecture notes or speaking to your lectures
through Facebook!’

I would be a bit angry to be honest – tuition fees
aren't cheap!

As I read one of the comments on Brian's latest post from Frankie Roberto who says "When I was at University, we barely ever used our Uni e-mail addresses, apart from checking them occassionally to read all-student e-mails.", I thought that although I use a personal email account, I also use my work one, and I don't really want to mix them up – I like the separation that two addresses gives me.

So, can an 'institution' such as a University do Web 2.0 stuff right – even if it is the future? Is this a bit like the government trying to persuade me to txt a mnstr? It's not that I don't use SMS – I just don't want to hold particular conversations in that way.

I'd note that any of this doesn't excuse us from engaging with Web 2.0 – I agree with Martin that whatever comes next will build on what proves persistent in the current generation of technology. I'm just wondering if students will accept services from the institution without the 'official' feel?

Anyway, this is a long way of recommending you read both reports. For those of you of a library bent, the section in the latest report some interesting comments on attitudes towards research and plagiarism – and I'll leave you with this quote from one participant:

‘I usually Google…then go to the library’

Don't we all?