Table of contents: issue67

DataCite UK User Group Meeting

editor — Sun, 03 Jul 2011 23:00:00 +0000

Alex Ball reports on the 2nd UK User Group meeting for DataCite, held at the British Library in London, in April 2011.

DataCite [1] is an international not-for-profit organisation dedicated to making research data a normal, citable part of the scientific record. It is made up of a membership of 15 major libraries and data centres, which, along with four associate members, represent 11 different countries across four continents. The approach taken by DataCite currently centres on assigning Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) to datasets; it is a member of the International DOI Foundation and one of a handful of DOI registration agencies.

A Double-edged Sword: What Are the Implications of Freedom of Information for the HE Sector?

editor — Sun, 03 Jul 2011 23:00:00 +0000

Amy Gibbons reports on the second in a series of workshops organised by the Research Information Network to explore the impact of the Freedom of Information Act on the Higher Education sector, held at University College London on 1 April 2011.

UK Reading Experience Database

editor — Sun, 03 Jul 2011 23:00:00 +0000

Bethan Ruddock reports from the launch event for the UK Reading Experience Database, held at the Betty Boothroyd Library, the Open University, Milton Keynes, on 24 February 2011.

I was invited down to the Open University (OU) Betty Boothroyd Library in Milton Keynes for the launch of the UK Reading Experience Database (UK RED) [1]. I had been asked to attend to talk about the LOCAH Project and Linked Data, but I was also looking forward to learning about the RED Project.

This was the first of two launch days, and was designed for librarians, archivists, and information managers. A second launch day for teachers in Higher Education was to be held in London the next day.

What Is UK RED?

The tagline for UK RED is 'the experience of reading in Britain from 1450 to 1945', and the database brings together reading experiences, making them both searchable and browsable. What is a reading experience? It is evidence of anyone alive between the mid-15th and 20thcenturies having read and interacted with a book or other piece of writing, such as magazines, newspapers, letters - even playbills and advertisements. Ownership alone is not enough; there must be something to show that the person in question actually read the work or at least part of it.

This information can be found in a number of places - a printed book review would be an obvious example. The RED team also find many entries in diaries. Such entries can range from simple lists of books that someone has read over the course of a year, to detailed descriptions of when and where they read a particular book, and how they felt about it. Often diary entries are not actually about the book; it is mentioned in passing and in the context of a number of other activities.

While the owner's name on the flyleaf is not itself enough to justify a 'reading experience', annotations to the text are, as they show that the person has actually interacted with the text. Of course, you then have to consider whether the person whose name is on the flyleaf is the same as the person doing the annotating!

RED is much more than a list of 'people who have read books'. The database aims to bring out as much information as possible about the reading experience. The interface to submit a new entry allows you to specify where the reading was taking place, all the way down to a particular room in a particular house. It also aims to identify if the reading was silent or aloud, alone or with other people; whether the book was owned by the reader, a library book, borrowed, or even stolen. All these data are then used to build up a rich database of information on who was reading what (and how!) in Britain.

UK RED is not just concerned with reading experiences within Britain: team members also look at the reading experiences of citizens abroad. Edmund King, Research Associate, Reading Experience Database, OU, told us that, as a consequence, there are fascinating examples of what captured British soldiers were reading in prisoner-of-war (POW) camps as well as examples of what they were not allowed to read. Books in Welsh and Pakistani were banned, as well as atlases and anything about the Russian revolution. I do not know if there are corresponding records for what prisoners in UK POW camps were forbidden to read, but it would be very interesting to find out.

Open Educational Resources Hack Day

editor — Sun, 03 Jul 2011 23:00:00 +0000

Kirsty Pitkin reports on a two-day practical hack event focusing on Open Educational Resources (OER), held by DevCSI and JISC CETIS in Manchester on 31 March - 1 April 2011.

The Open Educational Resources Hack Day event was designed to bring together those interested in rapidly developing tools and prototypes to solve problems related to OER. Whilst there is a growing interest in the potential for learning resources created and shared openly by academics and teachers, a number of technical challenges still exist, including resource retrieval, evaluation and reuse. This event aimed to explore some of these problem areas by partnering developers with the creators and users of OER to identify needs and potential solutions.

Institutional Challenges in the Data Decade

editor — Sun, 03 Jul 2011 23:00:00 +0000

Marion Tattersall, Carmen O'Dell and John Lewis report on Institutional Challenges in the Data Decade, organised by the Digital Curation Centre (DCC) in partnership with the White Rose University Consortium and held 1-3 March 2011 at the University of Sheffield.