Table of contents: issue65

Editorial Introduction to Issue 65: Ariadne in Search of Your Views

editor — Fri, 29 Oct 2010 23:00:00 +0000

Richard Waller introduces Ariadne issue 65.

You may have already noted in the editorial section of this issue a link to the Reader Survey which I ask you seriously to consider completing, whether you are a frequent Ariadne reader or are reading the Magazine for the first time. Moves are afoot to give Ariadne some effort towards improvements in your experience of the publication and I cannot emphasise enough the value I place on suggestions and comments from you. I am very keen to know what readers value and dislike in Ariadne.

Reader Survey

editor — Fri, 29 Oct 2010 23:00:00 +0000

The editor invites readers to let Ariadne know what they think about the Magazine.

From Passive to Active Preservation of Electronic Records

editor — Fri, 29 Oct 2010 23:00:00 +0000

Heather Briston and Karen Estlund provide a narrative of the process adopted by the University of Oregon in order to integrate electronic records management into its staff's workflow.

Permanent records of the University of Oregon (UO) are archived by the Special Collections and University Archives located within the University Libraries. In the digital environment, a new model is being created to ingest, curate and preserve electronic records. This article discusses two case studies working with the Office of the President to preserve electronic records.

Locating Image Presentation Technology Within Pedagogic Practice

editor — Fri, 29 Oct 2010 23:00:00 +0000

Marie-Therese Gramstadt contextualises image presentation technology and methods within a pedagogic framework for the visual arts.

Trust Me, I'm an Archivist

editor — Fri, 29 Oct 2010 23:00:00 +0000

Christopher Hilton, Dave Thompson and Natalie Walters describe some of the issues of engaging with donors when it comes to transferring born-digital material to the Library.

Born-digital archival material represents the single most important challenge to the archival profession for a generation or more. It requires us to rethink issues and assumptions around acquisition, preservation, cataloguing and reader access. Not least is the problem of getting donors to transfer their born-digital material to us. We have encountered four common scenarios that seem to act as blocks to the transfer of such material. We also need to change the way we engage with donors. This is a challenge that we cannot duck unless we wish to condemn our collection to increasing irrelevance.

The Problem?

Managing born-digital material is difficult. We all have trouble finding, storing and managing the data we create. Yet we have an attachment to this transient and ephemeral stuff that we find hard to relinquish. We seem to have a stronger emotional attachment to digital material than we did with paper. Thus, donors who have happily donated paper archival materials to the Library struggle with the challenges of donating born-digital material, challenges that are not always technical.

The Current State of Play

Two previous articles in Ariadne [1][2] have reported on the Wellcome Library's engagement with born-digital material: for readers who have not seen these it is appropriate to begin by recapitulating the themes established there.

The Wellcome Library is a collecting institution and the majority of its archival holdings are acquired from outside bodies or individuals by purchase, deposit or gift. The Library has no mandate to require an organisation or individual to lodge their records in the Library, and little influence over their use of particular formats or technologies. Conversely the Library is not required to take in any given material. The archivists have the freedom to decide what material to accept or if a particular format is too problematic to acquire when set against the material's informational value.

The Library's work with digital material is based on two central principles:

That sound archival practice is wholly appropriate to working with born-digital materials.
That if the Library does not acquire born-digital archival material then its future relevance as a research Library is compromised.

Why UK Further and Higher Education Needs Local Software Developers

editor — Fri, 29 Oct 2010 23:00:00 +0000

Mahendra Mahey and Paul Walk discuss the work of the Developer Community Supporting Innovation (DevCSI) Project which focuses on building capacity for software developers in UK Further and Higher Education to support innovation in the sector.

Software developers are important to Further (FE) and Higher Education (HE). They are needed to develop and implement local FEI (Further Education Institution) and HEI (Higher Education Institution) solutions, to build e-infrastructure, and to innovate and develop ideas and prototypes that can be exploited by others. They also play an important part in the development and uptake of open standards and interoperability.

Academic Liaison Librarianship: Curatorial Pedagogy Or Pedagogical Curation?

editor — Fri, 29 Oct 2010 23:00:00 +0000

Allan Parsons presents a strategic view of the need to develop the academic liaison librarianship role.

What Is a URI and Why Does It Matter?

editor — Fri, 29 Oct 2010 23:00:00 +0000

Henry S. Thompson describes how recent developments in Web technology have affected the relationship between URI and resource representation and the related consequences.

URI stands for Uniform Resource Identifier, the official name for those things you see all the time on the Web that begin 'http:' or 'mailto:', for example http://www.w3.org/, which is the URI for the home page of the World Wide Web Consortium [1]. (These things were called URLs (Uniform Resource Locators) in the early days of the Web, and the change from URL to URI is either hugely significant or completely irrelevant, depending on who is talking—I have nothing to say about this issue in this article. If you have never heard of URIs (or IRIs, the even more recent fully internationalised version), but are familiar with URLs, just think 'URL' whenever you see 'URI' below.)

Historically, URIs were mostly seen as simply the way you accessed Web pages. These pages were hand-authored, relatively stable and simply shipped out on demand. More and more often that is no longer the case; in at least three different ways:

Web pages for reading have been complemented by pictures for viewing, videos for watching and music for listening;
The Web is now more than a conduit for information, it is a means to a variety of ends; we use it to do things: purchase goods and services, contribute to forums, play games;
The things we access on the Web are often not hand-authored or stable, but are automatically synthesised from 'deeper' data sources on demand. Furthermore, that synthesis is increasingly influenced by aspects of the way we initiate the access.

It is against this background that I think it is worth exploring with some care what URIs were meant to be, and how they are being used in practice. In particular, I want to look at what is to be gained from a better understanding of how other kinds of identifiers work.

The Official Version

Insofar as there are definitive documents about all this, they all agree that URIs are, as the third initial says, identifiers, that is, names. They identify resources, and often (although not always) allow you to access representations of those resources. (Words in bold are used as technical terms—their ordinary language meaning is in many cases likely to be more confusing than helpful.)

'Resource' names a role in a story, not an intrinsically distinguishable subset of things, just as 'referent' does in ordinary language. Things are resources because someone created a URI to identify them, not because they have some particular properties in and of themselves.

'Representation' names a pair: a character sequence and a media type. The media type specifies how the character string should be interpreted. For example JPG or HTML or MP3 would be likely media types for representations of an image of an apple, a news report about an orchard or a recording of a Beatles song, respectively.

Developing Infrastructure for Research Data Management at the University of Oxford

editor — Fri, 29 Oct 2010 23:00:00 +0000

James A. J. Wilson, Michael A. Fraser, Luis Martinez-Uribe, Paul Jeffreys, Meriel Patrick, Asif Akram and Tahir Mansoori describe the approaches taken, findings, and issues encountered while developing research data management services and infrastructure at the University of Oxford.

The University of Oxford began to consider research data management infrastructure in earnest in 2008, with the 'Scoping Digital Repository Services for Research Data' Project [1]. Two further JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee)-funded pilot projects followed this initial study, and the approaches taken by these projects, and their findings, form the bulk of this article.

Moving Researchers across the EResearch Chasm

editor — Fri, 29 Oct 2010 23:00:00 +0000

Malcolm Wolski and Joanna Richardson outline an Australian initiative to address technology challenges within current research paradigms.

In 1999 Sir John Taylor [1], then Director General of the UK Research Councils, talked about e-Science, i.e. global collaboration in key areas of science and the next generation of infrastructure that will support it. It encompasses computationally intensive science that is carried out in highly distributed network environments or that uses immense datasets that require grid computing. In the US the term cyberinfrastructure has been used to describe the new research environments that support advanced data acquisition, data storage, data management, data integration, data mining, data visualisation and other computing and information processing services over the Internet. In Australia—and other countries—the term eResearch extends e-Science and cyberinfrastructure to other disciplines, including the humanities and social sciences, and denotes the use of information technology to support existing and new forms of research.

It is within this rapidly evolving context that the researcher of the 21st century now operates. However not all researchers are responding to changes in this new environment. In this article we will examine the current research paradigm, the main drivers for researchers to engage with this paradigm, reasons for lack of engagement, and a project undertaken at an Australian university—as part of a national initiative—to start to address the problem of making data from research activity, past and current, more discoverable and accessible.

Trends in the Evolution of Research Paradigms

Gray [2] discusses the evolution of research paradigms which has led to the increasingly important role that information technology now plays in supporting research. For thousands of years there was experimental / empirical science followed in the last few hundred years by theoretical science. The third research paradigm, which evolved in the last few decades, was characterised by increasingly complex research challenges based principally on large-scale computational simulation. This led to the concept of holistic systems of systems; the evolution from wet labs (hands-on scientific research and experimentation) to virtual labs; and an emphasis on modelling, simulation, projection and prediction.

E-Science / cyberinfrastructure / eResearch are short-hand terms for a new fourth paradigm which is characterised by data-intensive science. The focus is on data analysis and mining; patterns discovery; and the evolution of large databases and data archives. One by-product is the so-called 'data deluge', which has led to enormous challenges in research data management. The fourth paradigm is changing the longstanding model of scholarly communication as, in the words of Clifford Lynch [2], 'the paper becomes a window for a scientist to not only actively understand a scientific result, but also reproduce it or extend it'. This latest paradigm is also characterised by the collaborative and multidisciplinary nature of the research being undertaken at both national and international levels.

Repository Fringe 2010

editor — Fri, 29 Oct 2010 23:00:00 +0000

Martin Donnelly (and friends) report on the Repository Fringe "unconference" held at the National e-Science Centre in Edinburgh, Scotland, over 2-3 September 2010.

2010 was the third year of Repository Fringe, and slightly more formally organised than its antecedents, with an increased number of discursive presentations and less in the way of organised chaos! The proceedings began on Wednesday 1 September with a one-day, pre-event SHERPA/RoMEO API Workshop [1] run by the Repositories Support Project team.

Survive or Thrive

editor — Fri, 29 Oct 2010 23:00:00 +0000

Ed Fay reports on a two-day conference organised by UKOLN on behalf of JISC to consider growth and use of digital content on the Web, which was held in Manchester in June 2010.

Survive or Thrive [1] is the punchy title given to an event intended to stimulate serious consideration amongst digital collections practitioners about future directions in our field - opportunities but also potential pitfalls. The event, which focused on content in HE, comes at a time of financial uncertainty when proving value is of increasing importance in the sector and at a point when significant investment has already been made in the UK into content creation, set against a backdrop of increasingly available content on the open Web from a multitude of sources.

Europeana Open Culture 2010

editor — Fri, 29 Oct 2010 23:00:00 +0000

David Fuegi and Monika Segbert-Elbert report on the annual Europeana Conference, held at the Westergasfabriek in Amsterdam in October 2010.

The Europeana Conference is a free annual event which highlights current challenges for libraries, museums, archives and audio-visual archives and which looks for practical solutions for the future. It connects the main actors in cultural and scientific heritage in order to build networks and establish future collaborations. The Europeana Open Culture 2010 Conference [1] was the third annual conference and the biggest so far. It focused on how the cultural institutions can create public value by making digital, cultural and scientific information openly available.

CIG Conference 2010: Changes in Cataloguing in 'Interesting Times'

editor — Fri, 29 Oct 2010 23:00:00 +0000

Rhiannon McLoughlin reports on a three-day conference on cataloguing in a time of financial stringency, held by the CILIP Cataloguing and Indexing Group at Exeter University, from 13-15 September 2010.

The focus of this conference was initiatives to get through the current economic climate. Cataloguing departments are under threat of cutbacks as never before. Papers on streamlining, collaborative enterprises, shared catalogues and services, recycling and repurposing of content using metadata extraction techniques combined to give a flavour of the new thrift driving management. The continuing progress of the long awaited Resource Description and Access (RDA)[1][2] towards becoming the new international cataloguing standard was another hot topic.

Internet Librarian International Conference 2010

editor — Fri, 29 Oct 2010 23:00:00 +0000

Claire Tylee, Katrin Flemming and Elly Cope report on the two-day Internet Librarian International Conference focusing on innovation and technology in the information profession, held in London on 14-15 October 2010.

Table of Contents

Thursday 14 October
Track A: Looking Ahead to Value

Thursday 14 October

Track A: Looking Ahead to Value

A102: Future of Academic Libraries

Mal Booth, University of Technology Sydney (Australia)

Michael Jubb, Research Information Network (UK)

Mal Booth from the University of Technology Sydney started the session by giving an insight into current plans and projects underway to inform a new library building due to open in 2015 as part of a major redeveloped city campus.

Book Review: Acquisitions in the New Information Universe

editor — Fri, 29 Oct 2010 23:00:00 +0000

Eilidh Mackay reviews a work which takes a concept-based approach to contemporary acquisitions practices.

In Acquisitions in the new information universe, Jesse Holden provides a comprehensive introduction to fundamental acquisitions concepts, and strategies for translating these into practice in the twenty-first century.

Book Review: Introductory Concepts in Information Science

editor — Fri, 29 Oct 2010 23:00:00 +0000

Charles Oppenheim takes a look at an introduction to Information Science but fails to be impressed.

With a title like that, one would expect a primer, introducing all the key concepts of information science to someone studying the topic for the first time at undergraduate or Masters' level, and possibly for the interested layman. Such a book would be a worthy successor to Chris Hanson's Introduction to Science Information Work, and Roger Meetham's Information Retrieval, both of which were first published about 40 years ago. Sadly, however, this book does not fulfil the promise of its title.

Book Review: The Accidental Taxonomist

editor — Fri, 29 Oct 2010 23:00:00 +0000

Emma Tonkin takes a look at a book on the work of the taxonomist and notes both merits and disappointments.

Definitions

TAXON''OMY, n. [Gr. order, and law.] Classification; a term used by a French author to denote the classification of plants.
Webster's Revised Dictionary (1828 Edition) [1]

Tax*on"o*my (?), n. [Gr. an arrangement, order + a law.] That division of the natural sciences which treats of the classification of animals and plants; the laws or principles of classification.
Webster's Revised Dictionary (1913 Edition) [1]

Taxonomy

Conference Review: M-Libraries 2, A Virtual Library in Everyone's Pocket

editor — Fri, 29 Oct 2010 23:00:00 +0000

Martin White reviews the proceedings of a 2009 M-Libraries conference on mobile applications in libraries.

I have no doubt at all that smart phones are going to cause a revolution in information access. People need location-free access to information, whether they are walking down a corridor in an office, working in a laboratory or sitting in a library. If you doubt that forecast, then just look at the speed with which around 300,000 applications have been developed for the Apple iPhone, a substantial number of which are information-centric rather than entertainment-centric. There is also a lot of interest in providing access to enterprise applications, notably intranets, from a smart phone.

Book Review: Learning with Online and Mobile Technologies

editor — Fri, 29 Oct 2010 23:00:00 +0000

Brian Whalley looks at a student survival aid in the information age that should also be valuable for tutors.

'Learning with Online and Mobile Technologies' is an example of an ever-increasing range of 'self-help' books for students on a variety of topics relating skills, tips and education. Such books range from 'Critical thinking skills' [1] to the quite specific, for example, 'Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts and more' [2]. This offering from Gower/Ashgate comes somewhere in between. It introduces students to the main current technologies and some of the pedagogic devices they might find in modern education.