Overview of content related to 'accessibility'

Editorial Introduction to Issue 70

lisrw — Fri, 14 Dec 2012 14:20:23 +0000

The editor introduces readers to the content of Ariadne Issue 70.

Welcome to Issue 70 of Ariadne which is full to the brim with feature articles and a wide range of event reports and book reviews.

Gold Open Access: Counting the Costs

lisrw — Mon, 03 Dec 2012 20:23:29 +0000

Theo Andrew presents new data on the cost of Gold OA publishing at the University of Edinburgh.

Research Councils UK (RCUK) have recently announced a significant amendment to their open access (OA) policy which requires all research papers that result from research partly or wholly funded by RCUK to be made open access [1]. To comply with this policy, researchers must either; a) publish in an open access journal, termed Gold OA, which often incurs an article processing charge (APC); or, b) ensure that a copy of the post-print is deposited in an appropriate repository, also known as Green OA.

A subsequent clarification from RCUK stated that Gold OA is the preferred mechanism of choice to realise open access for outputs that they have funded and have announced the award of block grants to eligible institutions to achieve this aim [2]. Where a Gold OA option is unavailable, Green OA is also acceptable; however, RCUK have indicated that the decision will be ultimately left up to institutions as to which route to take [3].

Since RCUK are the major funder of research in the United Kingdom, this new policy will not only have a major impact on how researchers publish their work, but also huge implications for their budgets. Many research institutions funded by RCUK are currently investigating how they will implement this policy and are looking at the costs for open access publication, and how they can support the adoption of open access within their organisation. The ball is very much in the court of institutions to decide how to play the open access game.

One of the key factors that will affect institutions is the cost that publishers will set for their APCs. So far RCUK have steered clear of suggesting an appropriate fee, leaving individual publishers to determine the market level of the APCs as per the current situation. Meanwhile there seems to be a huge variability in costs. There is a general expectation that over time APCs will settle to a reasonable rate and similarly journal subscriptions will lower to reflect the gradual change in business model from subscription fees to APCs. Most publishers have not yet been upfront about what impact they will have on journal subscriptions, if any, and it is hard to access and assess real-life data. RSC Publishing is one notable exception since it has introduced a system of waiving a proportion of APC fees based on institutional subscription costs.

Much of this transition period to full open access will have to be navigated through uncharted territory, where no one has a clear handle on the costs involved. The rationale of this article is to present data on article processing charges gathered over the past five years, report on trends seen within this data, to suggest some approaches and to generally contribute to and inform the policy discussion.

The Problem

To put some rough-and-ready figures on the table, the University of Edinburgh publishes in the region of 4,000-4,500 peer-reviewed journal articles per year; this figure does not include other publication types like working papers not affected by the RCUK policy. Assuming an average Article Processing Charge (APC) of £1500 [4], the total publication costs to make all of these outputs Gold would be in the region of £6m. It is clear that even with guaranteed funding from HEFCE, and other funders of research, large research-intensive universities will not be able to pay for all of their research to be published under Gold OA. How to allocate funding to researchers will be a difficult choice that many institutions are currently asking themselves - will it be on a first-come-first-served basis, funder-specific, or will REF-submitted material take priority?

Equally problematic are the difficulties we face in fully assessing an institution’s total spend on open access. Whilst it is possible to find out through aggregate sources like Web of Science how many articles are published in fully open access journals. It is virtually impossible to find out the number of open access articles published in hybrid journals as there is currently no flag in the metadata which indicates the open status of the paper. A hybrid journal is a traditional subscription journal that offers open access to individual articles upon payment of an APC. Of course it is possible to find hybrid open access content through EuropePMC.org; however this will only give a snapshot for the biomedical and life sciences. With current systems and processes it is virtually impossible to gauge this spend accurately.

Cost Data

Unfortunately, financial data about open access publishing is scarce. The University of Edinburgh (UoE) has recently implemented account codes to allow the finance systems to track this spend going forwards; however, finding out costs retrospectively remains problematic. Furthermore, institutions are not typically in the habit of publishing this data with others. The institutions that have shared data show a degree of variability. In 2010, the foremost initial supporter and enabler of Gold Open Access publishing in the UK, the Wellcome Trust, found that the average cost of publication under the author-pays model was $2,367 (approximately £1,500) [4]. RCUK in their recent press release on block grants for open access estimate the average APC as £1,727 plus VAT [2], whilst, based on figures in the Finch Report, the University of Nottingham paid on average £1,216 [5].

All these figures are useful as they give a ballpark figure upon which further estimates can be based. The precise cost of individual APCs levied by publishers is generally unavailable in a form which easily enables further analysis. Typically this information is available from publisher’s Web sites; however, aggregating the data is cumbersome as there is no consistent way to interrogate the Web sites and APCs commonly vary from title to title in the publishers’ portfolio. There have been some commendable attempts to gather this information, for example the SHERPA RoMEO listing of Publishers with Paid Options for Open Access [7]. Here about 100 publishers have been surveyed and their APCs are listed. A large cost variance exists for some publishers’ records as individual journals often have different APCs, and also institutional subscriptions/memberships can reduce costs in a non-uniform way. It takes a lot of effort to gather these data and keep them it up to date. Other approaches have tried to crowd-source this activity, for example Ross Mounce’s survey of open access publishers, publications, licences and fees. Here approximately 130 publishers’ web sites were surveyed to find out what licences are being used on the open access content; the cost being a secondary focus of the survey. Analysis of these data shows less than 5% of publishers claiming 'open access' are fully compliant with the Budapest Declaration on Open Access [7].

The data we present here is an attempt to enrich the data available to interested parties and make them available in a reusable format for further analysis. It comprises articles funded by the Wellcome Trust at the University of Edinburgh between 2007 and 2012. In total there are 260 articles published in a mixture of open access journals and traditional subscription journals with an open access option (sometimes known as hybrid). All of the journals charged an article processing fee. Overall, the total cost incurred was £452,713.40. The mean article processing charge was £1,741.21, with the median value £1,644.22. The full data can be accessed online at the Edinburgh DataShare repository [8].

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

lisrw — Sat, 15 Dec 2012 15:18:25 +0000

Brian Kelly, Dominik Lukeš and Alistair McNaught highlight the risks of attempting to standardise easy-to-read language for online resources.

The idea that if we could only improve how we communicate, there would be less misunderstanding among people is as old as the hills. Historically, this notion has been expressed through things like school reform, spelling reform, publication of communication manuals, etc. The most radical expression of the desire for better understanding is the invention of a whole new artificial language with the intention of providing a universal language for humanity.

Mining the Archive: The Development of Electronic Journals

lisrw — Thu, 06 Dec 2012 15:50:18 +0000

Martin White looks through the Ariadne archive to trace the development of e-journals as a particular aspect of electronic service delivery and highlights material he considers as significant.

My career has spanned 42 years in the information business. It has encompassed 10,000-hole optical coincidence cards, online database services, videotext, laser discs, and CD-ROMs, the World Wide Web, mobile services and big data solutions. I find the historical development of information resource management absolutely fascinating, yet feel that in general it is poorly documented from an analytical perspective even though there are some excellent archives.

These archives include the back issues of Ariadne from January 1996. Ariadne has always been one of my must-reads as a way of keeping in touch with issues and developments in e-delivery of information. The recently launched new Ariadne platform [1] has provided easier access to these archives. Looking through its content has reminded me of the skills and vision of the UK information profession as it sought to meet emerging user requirements with very limited resources. The archives have always been available on the Ariadne site but the recent update to the site and the availability of good tags on the archive content has made it much easier to mine through the archive issues.

The Ariadne team, in particular Richard Waller, has given me the opportunity to mine those archives [2] and trace some of the developments in electronic service delivery in the UK.

Indeed working through the archives is now probably too easy as in the preparation of this column I have found myself moving sideways from many of the feature articles to revel in the other columns that have been a feature of Ariadne. This article is a personal view of some of these developments and is in no way intended to be a definitive account. Its main purpose is to encourage others to look into the archive and learn from the experiences of the many innovators that have patiently coped with the challenges of emerging technology, resource limitations and often a distinct lack of strategy and policy at both an institutional and government level.

Figure 1: Optical coincidence card, circa 1970

e-Journal Development

Arriving at the University of Southampton in 1967 my main surprise was not the standard of the laboratories but the quality and scale of the Chemistry Department library. School does not prepare you for reading primary journals and how best to make use of Chemical Abstracts, but I quickly found that working in the library was much more fun than in a laboratory. I obtained an excellent result in one vacation project on physical chemistry problems by reverse engineering the problems through Chemical Abstracts! Therefore, as it turned out, I had started my career as an information scientist before I even graduated. By 1977 I was working with The Chemical Society on the micropublishing of journals and taking part in a British Library project on the future of chemical information. Re-reading the outcomes of that project makes me realise how difficult it is to forecast the future. Now my past has re-asserted itself to good effect as I have both the honour and excitement of being Chair of the eContent Committee of the Royal Society of Chemistry.

Figure 2: Laser disc, circa 1980

So from my standpoint, in seeking to identify distinct themes in the development of information resource management in Ariadne, a good place to start is with the e-markup of chemical journals. In Issue 1 Dr Henry Rzepa wrote about the potential benefits of the semantic markup of primary journals to provide chemists with access to the content of the journal article and not just to a contents page and title [4]. The immediate problem you face reading this admirable summary of the potential benefits of markup is that many of the hyperlinks have disappeared. History has been technologically terminated. Almost 15 years passed by before the Royal Society of Chemistry set up Project Prospect and turned semantic markup into a production process [4]. Dr Rzepa is now Professor of Computational Chemistry at Imperial College, London.

By the mid-1990s good progress had been made in e-journal production technologies and the first e-only journals were beginning to appear. Among them was Glacial Geology and Geomorphology (GGG) which existed in a printed version only in as far as readers could print out a selection from it. One aim of GGG is therefore to provide the benefits of electronic transfer as well as other value added products in an accepted academic, peer-reviewed system. The author of the article describing the project [5] was Dr. Brian Whalley, who went on to become a Professor in the Geomaterials Research Group, Queens University of Belfast. As you will discover from his author profile (another Ariadne innovation), Brian is still active though retired from formal education. What struck me about this article was the author’s vision in January 1996 of how e-journals could be of benefit in university teaching.

23rd International CODATA Conference

lisrw — Sat, 15 Dec 2012 12:41:16 +0000

Alex Ball reports on a conference on ‘Open Data and Information for a Changing Planet’ held by the International Council for Science’s Committee on Data for Science and Technology (CODATA) at Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan on 28–31 October 2012.

CODATA was formed by the International Council for Science (ICSU) in 1966 to co-ordinate and harmonise the use of data in science and technology. One of its very earliest decisions was to hold a conference every two years at which new developments could be reported. The first conference was held in Germany in 1968, and over the following years it would be held in 15 different countries across 4 continents.

IFLA World Library and Information Congress 2012

lisrw — Tue, 11 Dec 2012 13:16:31 +0000

Marieke Guy reports on the 78th IFLA General Conference and Assembly held in Helsinki, Finland over 11-17 August 2012.

The Sunday newcomers session chaired by Buhle Mbambo-Thata provided us with some insight into the sheer magnitude of IFLA (as most people seem to call it) or the World Library and Information Congress (to give the formal name) [1]. This year’s congress had over 4,200 delegates from 120 different countries, though over a thousand of these were Finnish librarians making the most of the locality of this year’s event.

Book Review: User Studies for Digital Library Development

lisrw — Thu, 13 Dec 2012 22:10:17 +0000

Selenay Aytac reviews a collection of essays on user studies and digital library development that provides a concise overview of a variety of digital library projects and examines major research trends relating to digital libraries.

User Studies for Digital Library Development provides a concise overview of a variety of digital library projects and examines major research trends relating to digital libraries. While there are many books on user studies and digital library development, this work operates at the junction of these two domains and stands out for its insights, balance, and quality of its case-based investigations. The book brings together points of view from different professional communities, including practitioners as well as researchers.

Editorial Introduction to Issue 69

lisrw — Tue, 31 Jul 2012 11:45:13 +0000

The editor introduces readers to the content of Ariadne Issue 69.

Never blessed with any sporting acumen, I have to confess to a degree of ambivalence towards the London Olympics unfolding around this issue as it publishes. That does not mean that I do not wish all the participants well in what after all is an enormous achievement just to be able to compete there at all. While I admit to not watching every team walk and wave, I cannot deny that the beginning and end of the Opening Ceremony [1] did grab my attention. Who could blame me? I suspect we sat as a nation terrified to discover what this would say about us all.

Walk-in Access to e-Resources at the University of Bath

lisrw — Fri, 27 Jul 2012 19:10:21 +0000

Kate Robinson, Lizz Jennings and Laurence Lockton outline a low-cost solution to walk-in (visitor) access to licensed e-journals, drawing on their practice at the University of Bath with a wiki ERM and OPAC terminals.

Although the move from print to electronic journals over the last two decades has been enormously beneficial to academic libraries and their users, the shift from owning material outright to renting access has restricted the autonomy of librarians to grant access to these journals.

The Problem

Licence restrictions imposed by publishers define and limit access rights and librarians have increasingly taken on the role of restricting access on behalf of the publisher, rather than granting access on behalf of their institution. In other words, librarians and their institutions are no longer free to decide who may read this material as they no longer own it.

This situation has been the subject of negotiation for some time, and it is fair to say that an accommodation has been reached in many cases through less restrictive licensing terms. Some clearer definition of groups who can use e-journals has eased the situation for 'authorised users', such as those teaching students of an institution who are not directly employed by the institution itself, for example, through franchised courses. However, there is still a group of potential users who do not have a relationship with an institution other than a wish to access the Library's holdings to further their research or their curiosity. In the past, such access was at the discretion of the Librarian but with regard to e-journals it is now set out in publishers’ licences, usually under the terms of 'walk-in access' to these resources. This in itself is a positive move and seemingly restores some access control to the Librarian. In practice, however, it has not proved to be straightforward to implement.

In general terms e-journal access, although via the Web, piggybacks on established University IT systems and safeguards which have not always been specifically designed to support the licence restrictions of publishers. The definition of an authorised user for walk-in access is usually one who has been granted access to the Library building. This requirement for e-journal material to be restricted to the actual library building, not just University premises, presents a technical challenge. It is not reasonable to expect a University's IT infrastructure to be redesigned to accommodate the needs of those who are not part of the institution. However, there is a balance to be struck as a tipping point has been reached, with journal holdings become increasingly e-only and widening participation becoming increasingly important to institutions.

There are a growing number of groups who would like would and benefit from walk-in access. In recent years requests for access to e-journals have become more frequent from library users, such as researchers who already use and borrow hard-copy materials through the SCONUL Access scheme, and school/college students undertaking Extended Project or International Baccalaureate qualifications. Clearly it is desirable to support the research community of which we are part, and to encourage EP/IB students whose next steps may well be into Higher Education. Visits for school/college groups are increasingly encouraged at institutional level and often include teaching and other intensive support from library staff; support which increases as the range of material they are authorised to access decreases. Research areas and subjects for these pieces of work are diverse and cannot be easily satisfied through textbook material or residual hard-copy journal holdings. In this climate, we need to look again at how to implement walk-in access to open up resources wherever possible. To do this we first need to take two steps: to identify which online material we can allow access to and to facilitate access through a route which meets licence terms, that is, to this material only within the library building.

Eduserv Symposium 2012: Big Data, Big Deal?

lisrw — Mon, 30 Jul 2012 17:48:45 +0000

Marieke Guy attended the annual Eduserv Symposium on 10 May 2012 at the Royal College of Physicians, London to find out what are the implications of big data for Higher Education Institutions.

The annual Eduserv Symposium [1] was billed as a ‘must-attend event for IT professionals in Higher Education’; the choice of topical subject matter being one of the biggest crowd-drawers (the other being the amazing venue: the Royal College of Physicians). The past few years have seen coverage of highly topical areas such as virtualisation and the cloud, the mobile university and access management.

The Institutional Web Management Workshop (IWMW) 2012

lisrw — Tue, 31 Jul 2012 12:54:44 +0000

Kirsty Pitkin reports on the 16th Institutional Web Management Workshop held at the University of Edinburgh's Appleton Tower between 18 - 20 July 2012.

The 16th Institutional Web Management Workshop (IWMW 12) took place at the University of Edinburgh's Appleton Tower – a building with a stunning panoramic view over the volcanic city. The event brought together 172 delegates and attracted an additional 165 viewers to the live video stream of the plenary sessions over the three days.

The Third Annual edUi Conference 2011

lisrw — Mon, 27 Feb 2012 22:26:07 +0000

Danielle Cooley reports on the third annual edUi Conference, held over 13-14 October 2011, in Richmond, Virginia, USA, an opportunity for Web professionals in colleges, universities, libraries, museums, etc to discuss the latest developments in Web trends and technologies.

The third annual edUi Conference [1] was held October 13-14, 2011, in Richmond, Virginia, USA. The sold-out event saw 225 ‘Web professionals serving colleges, universities, libraries, museums, and beyond’ join together to discuss the latest and greatest in Web trends and technologies. The all-volunteer conference was presented by the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, and major sponsors included Microsoft, the University of Richmond, and Virginia Commonwealth University.

The two-day event consisted of four tracks [2]:

Editorial Introduction to Issue 67: Changes Afoot

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

Richard Waller introduces Ariadne issue 67.

For readers who might have been wondering, I shall resist Mark Twain's remark about reports of his demise being exaggerated, and reassure you that while Ariadne has been undergoing changes to the way in which it will be delivered to the Web, it has been business as usual in the matter of the content, as you will see from the paragraphs that follow. Issue 67, while currently not looking any different, is in the process of being migrated to a new platform developed to enhance functionality and give a more user-friendly look and feel to the publication.

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.

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.

Characterising and Preserving Digital Repositories: File Format Profiles

editor — Sun, 30 Jan 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Steve Hitchcock and David Tarrant show how file format profiles, the starting point for preservation plans and actions, can also be used to reveal the fingerprints of emerging types of institutional repositories.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Institutional Web Management Workshop 2010

editor — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 23:00:00 +0000

Keith Doyle provides a personal perspective on a conference organised by UKOLN for those involved in the provision of institutional Web services.

This was the 13th Institutional Web Management Workshop [1] to be organised by UKOLN [2] held at the University of Sheffield from 12 to 14 July 2010. The theme was 'The Web in Turbulent Times' [3]. As such, there was a healthy balance of glass-half-empty-doom-and-gloom, and glass-half-full-yes-we-can.

Eduserv Symposium 2010: The Mobile University

editor — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 23:00:00 +0000

Shailey Minocha reflects on the one-day symposium organised by Eduserv in May 2010. The aim of the event was to discuss whether and how mobile technology will play a significant role in the delivery of UK Higher Education in the future.

Book Review: Access, Delivery, Performance - The Future of Libraries Without Walls

editor — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 23:00:00 +0000

Michael Day reviews a Festschrift celebrating the work of Professor Peter Brophy, founder of the Centre for Research in Library and Information Management.

It is normal in some subject disciplines to publish volumes of edited papers in honour of a respected colleague, usually to mark a significant birthday or career change. The contributors to such Festschriften* are usually made up of former colleagues or pupils of the person being honoured. This volume celebrates the work of Professor Peter Brophy, the founder of the Centre for Research in Library and Information Management (CERLIM), which since 1998 has been based at the Manchester Metropolitan University. This volume contains twelve chapters written by sixteen contributors, many of them colleagues or ex-colleagues of Professor Brophy.

Peter Brophy has had an outstanding career both as a librarian and researcher. Alan MacDougall, Visiting Professor at Manchester Metropolitan University provides an outline in the opening chapter. A career that started at the Library Research Unit at Lancaster University in the early 1970s progressed to professional posts at Strathclyde University and Teeside Polytechnic, before Brophy eventually became Librarian at Bristol Polytechnic. From there, he moved to the University of Central Lancashire in 1989, where in 1993 he set up CERLIM. A selected bibliography of works by Professor Brophy fills eleven pages at the end of the volume, revealing the range and diversity of his research interests over the past few decades.

The contexts of the early years of Professor Brophy's career are sketched in more detail in the opening chapter by Michael Buckland, Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. Buckland was a colleague of Brophy's at the Library Research Unit at Lancaster in the early 1970s.This chapter gives a good flavour of how library and information research was undertaken in this time when the libraries at what were then 'new universities' had an active interest in innovation and when almost all library research in the UK was funded by the Office for Scientific and Technical Information of the Department of Education and Science.

Libraries and e-Learning

The remainder of the book is organised into four broad themes. The first covers libraries' role in supporting e-learning. The opening chapter in this section is by Gill Needham and Nicky Whitsed of the Open University. It is a series of reflections on a decade of developing library services for distance learners. Starting with the Follett Report of 1993 [1], the chapter identifies three main phases in the Open University's approach to delivering services to around 200,000 students and 8,000 tutors. The first phase was concerned with fairness; knowing exactly when to introduce online services at a time when a majority of Open University students did not have access to the relevant technologies or skills and when many tutors were reluctant to change their traditional ways of working. Responses to this included the development of library-mediated collections of quality-controlled Internet resources, supplemented by an online skills tutorial focused on generic information skills. Despite all of this, actual use of online resources remained relatively low (p. 30). The second phase, therefore, was mainly about integrating online services more deeply into the core learning activities of courses. The focus switched to the training of tutors and the integration of information resources within the university's emerging virtual learning environment (VLE), based on Moodle. In the interim, a pilot project using the open source MyLibrary software was found to be useful in helping to integrate library services into the learning experiences of individual students. The third phase - which Needham and Whitsed note is still ongoing - concerns the embedding of information literacy and resource-based learning concepts within the university more widely. The chapter ends with some comments on the, perhaps inevitable, tension between the 'invisible library' – 'quietly and strategically … [insinuating] resources and services into all those places where they have the most impact' - and the need to defend library budgets and status within the wider institution (pp. 35-36).

The following chapter, by Professor David Baker of the University College Plymouth St Mark and St John, is a general overview of the development of e-learning technologies in UK Higher Education over the past decade. Starting again with Follett, Baker explains how e-learning concepts and technologies have been taken up, focusing in particular on the facilitating role taken by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) in providing a national-level approach to the provision of both infrastructure (e.g., networks, access management tools) and content. In addition, the chapter refers to a number of JISC-funded programmes and initiatives focused on breaking down the barriers that prevent the sharing and re-use of e-learning content. The final sections look at some wider factors influencing the current transformation of learning, teaching and assessment practices. These include the need to integrate institutional services like VLEs with the generic social networking tools and mobile devices familiar to new generations of learners. However, successful integration is not just a matter of technology but of overcoming cultural differences. Baker uses a synthesis of the JISC-funded Learner Experiences of e-Learning projects [2] to note that there might have been 'an increasing "divide" between the needs, expectations and wishes of the learners and the expectations of the teachers, who were more "traditional" and perhaps not engaged with e-learning in the same way' (p. 49).

Mobilising the Internet Detective

editor — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 23:00:00 +0000

Diana Massam, Andrew Priest and Caroline Williams describe a recent project to adapt the online Internet Detective tutorial, to deliver a user-friendly mobile site which reflects their market research into user preferences for mobile content.

'The mobile phone is undoubtedly [a] strong driving force, a behaviour changer…Library users will soon be demanding that every interaction can take place via the cell phone' [1]

Usability Inspection of Digital Libraries

editor — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 23:00:00 +0000

Lorraine Paterson and Boon Low highlight findings from the usability inspection report conducted for the UX2.0 research project.

eBooks: Tipping or Vanishing Point?

editor — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Emma Tonkin investigates ebooks and takes a look at recent technological and business developments in this area.

Due in large part to the appearance since mid-2006 of increasingly affordable devices making use of e-Ink technology (a monochrome display supporting a high-resolution image despite low battery use, since the screen consumes power only during page refreshes, which in the case of ebooks generally represent page turns), the ebook has gone from a somewhat limited market into a real, although presently still niche, contender. Amazon sold 500,000 Kindles in 2008 [1]; Sony sold 300,000 of its Reader Digital Book model between October 2006 and October 2009. In September 2009, ebooks represented between 1% and 3% of the total US publishing market [2].

Following the JISC National eBooks Observatory Study [3] in the UK, one participant, David Nicolas, was quoted as stating that ebooks have 'reached the tipping point' [4]. Keeping in mind Bohr's statement that, 'prediction is very difficult, especially about the future', it's nonetheless safe to say that publicity about these devices is currently at a high point. But for ebook readers, as Figure 1 shows, this is not their first time in the spotlight.

"A good book has no ending. ~R.D. Cumming"

This article marks the third time that Ariadne has discussed the subject of ebooks, namely "Ebooks in UK Libraries: Where are we now?" [5] and "e-Books for the Future: Here But Hiding?" [6]. There is something very beguiling about the idea of a book that has 'the marvelous chameleon-like quality that it can very quickly be made to substitute for a different printed work by simply loading different content' [7] - a book that can play the role of a library.

As Striphas [8] points out, the concept of the electronic book, and the exploration of the interaction between the size of a container and the quantity of knowledge held, has an extraordinarily long history. He traces the idea back to the creation of miniature manuscript books, composed of 'tiny handwriting, or micrographia', in the late 15th century, which were functional objects and could be read by means of a magnifying glass.

Striphas notes the development of microphotography techniques in the 19th century. This was initially pioneered by John Benjamin Dancer, an optical instrument-maker who combined microscope and camera in order to create the earliest example of microphotography on record [9]. Luther reports that 'the 21 May 1853 issue of Notes and Queries carried a letter from a Dublin scholar asking "May not photography be usefully applied to the making of catalogues of large libraries?' Microphotography led to the report in the British Photographic Journal of, 'A page of printing, from Quekett's "Treatise on the Microscope", reduced to such size that the whole of the volume of 560 pages could be contained in a space one inch long and half-an-inch broad ' [8].

News and Events

editor — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 00:00:00 +0000

Ariadne presents a brief summary of news and events.

UKeiG Intranet's Forum: ERM's Knowledge Sharing Platform – February 2010

UKeiG Intranet's Forum: ERM's Knowledge Sharing Platform:
A chance to see one of the world's top 10 best intranets
Free informal Intranets Forum meeting for UKeiG members

ERM, 2/F Exchequer Court, 33 St. Mary Axe, London EC3A 8AA
Friday 26 February 2010, 4.00 - 5.30 p.m.
http://www.ukeig.org.uk/

Learning to YODL: Building York's Digital Library

editor — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Peri Stracchino and Yankui Feng describe a year's progress in building the digital library infrastructure outlined by Julie Allinson and Elizabeth Harbord in their article last issue.

Live Blogging @ IWMW 2009

editor — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +0000

Kirsty McGill provides a live blogger perspective on the three-day Institutional Web Managers Workshop, held by UKOLN at the University of Essex, Colchester, in July 2009.

The 12th annual Institutional Web Managers Workshop (IWMW) attracted nearly 200 delegates, making it the largest workshop in the event's history. Whilst the popularity of the physical event has grown, so too has the remote audience. So this year organisers Marieke Guy and Brian Kelly decided that it was time to start treating this remote audience as first class citizens.

Overlay Journals and Data Publishing in the Meteorological Sciences

editor — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 23:00:00 +0000

Sarah Callaghan, Fiona Hewer, Sam Pepler, Paul Hardaker and Alan Gadian introduce the OJIMS Project and discuss the impact of overlay and data journals in the meteorological sciences.

Historically speaking, scientific publishing has focused on publicising the methodology that the scientist uses to analyse a dataset, and the conclusions that the scientist can draw from that analysis, as this is the information that can be easily published in text format with supporting diagrams. Datasets do not lend themselves easily to normal hard copy publication, even if the size of the dataset were small enough to allow this, and datasets are more useful stored in digital media.

The Historic Hospitals Admission Records Project

editor — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 23:00:00 +0000

Sue Hawkins and Andrea Tanner describe a ground-breaking Web site using children's hospital admission registers.

The Historic Hospitals Admission Records Project (HHARP) is a digitisation and indexing project that covers the Victorian and Edwardian admission registers for the London children's hospitals Great Ormond Street Hospital (GOSH), the Evelina Children's Hospital in Southwark and the Alexandra Hip Hospital in Bloomsbury, together with Yorkhill Children's Hospital in Glasgow.

Missing Links: The Enduring Web

editor — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 23:00:00 +0000

Alexandra Eveleigh reports on a workshop on Web archiving, organised by the DPC, JISC and UKWAC at the British Library on 21 July 2009.

This workshop, jointly sponsored by the DPC [1], JISC [2] and UKWAC [3], aimed to bring together content creators and tool developers with key stakeholders from the library and archives domains, in the quest for a technically feasible, socially and historically acceptable, legacy for the World Wide Web.

Encouraging More Open Educational Resources With Southampton's EdShare