Overview of content related to 'university of bath'

'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.

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.

EMTACL12 (Emerging Technologies in Academic Libraries)

lisrw — Thu, 13 Dec 2012 14:42:26 +0000

Sarah Rayner and Olivia Walsby report on a three-day conference on Emerging Technologies in Academic Libraries, hosted by NTNU (Norwegian University of Science and Technology) in Trondheim, Norway over 1 - 3 October 2012.

Table of Contents

Paint-Yourself-in-the-Corner Infrastructure
Think Different

The three-day conference consisted of eight keynote presentations by invited speakers and a number of parallel sessions. The main themes set out for this year’s conference were supporting research, organisational change within the library, linked open data and other semantic web applications in the library, new literacies, and new services/old services in new clothes, along with other relevant perspectives on emerging technologies.

We attended the conference to gain an overview of organisational changes happening across the sector in relation to technological developments and to gather opinion on the relevance of the academic library within a digital society. We also wanted to explore how the future exploitation of new technologies within libraries might have a positive impact on the quality of teaching and learning together with the student experience.

This article will summarise a selection of keynote and parallel sessions from across the three days that addressed these issues.

1 October 2012: Keynotes

Paint-Yourself-in-the-Corner Infrastructure

Herbert Van de Sompel, Los Alamos National Laboratory, USA

The opening keynote presented by Herbert Van de Sompel from Los Alamos National Laboratory in the USA raised the issues brought about by changes to scholarly communication. Herbert spoke about an increase in dynamic scholarly records that are continually in flux, interdependent, and Web-based, and with which our current infrastructures are unable to cope. With the publication of interdependent and executable papers, research is now a native Web activity; supporting the re-execution of algorithms and the ability to add data at any time (i.e. PLoS Topic Pages [1] PeerJ [2]). Herbert pointed out that, as a consequence, we now need to be able to view the state of a scholarly record at certain moments in time; to track back in time to see where findings have come from, and to trace the workflow, and therein lies a challenge for academic libraries.

Herbert explained that at present the archive infrastructure is only able to deal with static, non-fluxing research output, that, when using URIs, you will always come to the current version, not prior versions, and that Web archives are not integrated into the Web. As Herbert went on to point out, the key problem is that the Web was created without motion of time; existing in the ‘perpetual now’.

Herbert believes that the challenges we face in this new environment are two-fold: archival approaches need to be changed to use a different infrastructure; and we need to reassess how we reference scholarly assets. We have CMS records, Web archives, and caches, but it would be better to trace the history or timeline of a URI. Therefore, Herbert offered some potential tools and solutions; Memento [3] (started in 2009) allows you to track back to a past version of an item in the Internet archive, bridging current URIs to old URIs from the Internet archive, using a time gate. SiteStory [4] is a tool which allows your Web server to take an active part in its own archiving; every request from a user is pushed back to an archive and stored. Therefore, every time material is accessed, it is archived, thereby providing a true history of an object in the archive.

Herbert Van de Sompel (Photo courtesy of Lukas Koster, University of Amsterdam.)

In conclusion, Herbert suggested that archiving needs to be an ongoing activity, tracing every interaction, including archiving links at the time of publication to ensure that the context and history of an evolving piece of research will never be lost.

Think Different

Karen Coyle, Berkeley, CA, USA

Karen Coyle (Photo courtesy of Lukas Koster, University of Amsterdam.)

Karen opened by raising a challenge to the way in which libraries are still holding on to outdated practices, such as the librarian’s obsession with alphabetical order, describing it as essentially only ‘an accident of language’ and questioning its continuing relevance given the now pervasive ability to cross-search. Karen continued on this theme citing bibliographic hierarchies such as Dewey as ‘knowledge prevention systems’ which only serve to lock our users into a set view of what's out there.

Karen’s introduction led nicely on to the main themes of her presentation: the current role of the library, the need to move away from the view that getting the book into the user’s hand is the end game, and the need to change our attitudes to bibliographic control and linear order. In effect, ‘the library should no longer be about volume and ownership!’. Karen talked about how we should instead focus on how resources are used and what resources should be used together, to inform how we approach provision in the future. Karen believes that the library must become connected to information on the Web, providing more context for our users and thus allowing greater information discovery. Karen argued that the library’s role is no longer simply to gather items into an inventory but to seek to organise information that until now has been inconveniently packaged. She suggested that we need to change our view, to focus on the information and its context, not the objects or books themselves. Karen noted in particular that currently we present nothing within the context of time, reiterating the theme of time travel covered in Herbert’s presentation. So, how can we do this? Karen proposed that we should be able to interrogate catalogues to provide items with context. She gave examples such as WorldCat [5], where you can view timelines on people, what they have published and what has been published about them, giving a relative image of their importance.

Karen argued that although linked data could prove to be an answer, or could certainly help, we must nonetheless seek to find a range of solutions and technologies. She warned that the pitfall of having an answer is that it stops you asking questions! Karen talked about how libraries must now recognise that bibliographic data are available everywhere, and that what libraries have that is essential and unique are the details on holdings. She proposed that on searching the Web, part of the rich snippet should include information about what the library holds and whether it's available. The Web should be used to direct readers to their library holdings, as well as making use of data such as location information, already being sourced by search engines. Karen’s concluding remarks were that libraries need to look to this new approach (using tools such as Schema.org [6]) or they will lose visitors, and that if we want to remain visible and relevant, we need to be where our users are - on the Web.

euroCRIS Membership Meeting, Madrid

lisrw — Thu, 13 Dec 2012 09:07:57 +0000

Rosemary Russell and Brigitte Jörg report on the bi-annual euroCRIS membership and Task Groups meetings which took place in Madrid on 5-6 November 2012.

euroCRIS membership meetings [1] are held twice a year, providing members and invited participants with updates on strategic and Task Group progress and plans, as well as the opportunity to share experience of Current Research Information System (CRIS)-related developments and seek feedback. A CERIF (Common European Research Information Format) tutorial is usually included on the first morning for those new to the standard, and the host country reports on local CRIS initiatives in the ‘national’ session.

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.

Online Information 2012

lisrw — Sun, 16 Dec 2012 17:10:56 +0000

Marieke Guy reports on the largest gathering of information professionals in Europe.

Online Information [1] is an interesting conference as it brings together information professionals from both the public and the private sector. The opportunity to share experiences from these differing perspectives doesn’t happen that often and brings real benefits, such as highly productive networking. This year’s Online Information, held between 20 - 21 November, felt like a slightly different event to previous years.

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.

Moving Ariadne: Migrating and Enriching Content with Drupal

lisrw — Fri, 27 Jul 2012 16:47:36 +0000

Thom Bunting explains some of the technology behind the migration of Ariadne (including more than 1600 articles from its back issues archive) onto a Drupal content management platform.

Tools and strategies for content management are a perennial topic in Ariadne. With more than one hundred articles touching on content management system (CMS) technologies or techniques since this online magazine commenced publication in 1996, Ariadne attests to continuing interest in this topic. Authors have discussed this topic within various contexts, from intranets to repositories and Web 2.0, with some notable surges in references to 'content management' between 2000 and 2005 (see Figure 1 below). Although levels of discussion are by no means trending, over recent years it is clear that Ariadne authors have taken note of and written about content management tools and techniques on a regular basis.

In the light of this long-established interest, it is noteworthy that Ariadne itself migrated into a content management system only recently. Although the formatting of its articles did change a few times since 1996, Ariadne remained 'hand-coded' for more than fifteen years. None of its articles had been migrated into a database-driven content management system until March 2012, when issue 68 was published.

As mentioned in the editorial introduction to that first issue, launching the new content management arrangements, and as discussed in some more detail below (see 'Technical challenges in content migration'), the considerable size of Ariadne's archive of back issues was daunting. With more than 1600 articles in hand-coded 'flat'-html formats, the process of migration itself required careful planning to result in a seamless, graceful transition into an entirely new content management arrangement. Over time, the sheer size of the Ariadne corpus had made it both increasingly rich in content and increasingly more challenging to convert retrospectively into a database-driven CMS as the total number of articles published within this online magazine steadily expanded.

In looking back over the recent process of migrating Ariadne onto a CMS platform, this article discusses some tools and techniques used to prepare content for transfer, testing, and then re-launch. After explaining some of the background to and objectives of this work, this article focuses on key features of content management supported by Drupal.

Figure 1: Ariadne timeline of references to content management

Requirements Analysis: Planning the Way Forward

Based on surveys of readers and authors conducted in late 2010, the Ariadne management team analysed the range of feedback, drew up sets of re-development requirements, and then considered the options available.

The following table provides an overview of key findings regarding the range of enhanced functionality and features considered:

Overview of findings derived from survey responses
enhanced functionality or feature	interest recorded in surveys
browsing by keywords	73.4% of respondents
updated look and feel	62.3% of respondents
browsing by title	50.0% of respondents
enhanced use of search engine	48.0% of respondents
improved display for portable devices	34.0% of respondents
more summative information on articles	32.1% of respondents
improved navigability from article level	32.1% of respondents
improved social media options	29.5% of respondents
browsing by author	28.0% of respondents
improved RSS feeds	27.0% of respondents

In addition to these findings derived from surveys, the management team also recognised the need for some other functionalities to support monitoring of Ariadne's on-going engagement with various domains and institutions across the UK and beyond.

Additional features to support monitoring of engagement
identification of author domains (higher education, further education, research, commercial, etc)	to support analysis of Ariadne connections and reach across various sectors
identification of authors by organisation	to support analysis of Ariadne connections and reach in UK and worldwide

Taking into account the key findings derived from survey questions as well as the additional functionality identified as useful in monitoring UK and worldwide engagement, the Ariadne management team drew up sets of re-development requirements and considered how to proceed. Migration into a content management system represented the obvious way forward, as it became clear that Ariadne's previous tradition of 'hand-coded' production (dating from the early days of the Web) had little chance of coping gracefully with the new sets of requirements.

In a review of CMS options available, it also became clear that Drupal [1] was well positioned as a content management system (or, emphasising its highly modular and extensible design, content management framework [2] ) to supply required functionality and features.

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.

The Second British Library DataCite Workshop

lisrw — Sun, 29 Jul 2012 18:54:47 +0000

Alex Ball reports on a one-day workshop on metadata supporting the citation of research data, held at the British Library, London, on 6 July 2012.

On Friday, 6 July 2012 I made my way to the British Library Conference Centre for the second in a series of DataCite workshops [1]. The theme was Describe, Disseminate, Discover: Metadata for Effective Data Citation. In welcoming us to the event, Lee-Ann Coleman, Head of Scientific, Technical and Medical Information at the British Library, said there had been some doubt as to whether anyone would turn up to an event about metadata, but as it happened there were 36 of us, drawn from across the UK and beyond.

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.

JISC Research Information Management: CERIF Workshop

lisrw — Sun, 29 Jul 2012 19:46:13 +0000

Rosemary Russell reports on a two-day workshop on research information management and CERIF held in Bristol over 27-28 June 2012.

Table of Contents

Workshop Scope and Aims
The New CERIF Support Project at the ISC, UKOLN
UK CERIF Landscape
UK Involvement in euroCRIS and Other International Initiatives

A workshop on Research Information Management (RIM) and CERIF was held in Bristol on 27-28 June 2012, organised by the Innovation Support Centre [1] at UKOLN, together with the JISC RIM and RCSI (Repositories and Curation Shared Infrastructure) Programmes. It was a follow-up to the CERIF Tutorial and UK Data Surgery [2] held in Bath in February.

Workshop Scope and Aims

The aim was to bring together people working on the various elements of the UK RIM jigsaw to share experience of using CERIF and explore ways of working together more closely. While the first day focused specifically on RIM, the second day widened to explore synergies with the repositories community. Participants therefore included JISC RIM and MRD projects and programme managers, support and evaluation projects, Research Councils, funders and repository infrastructure projects. There were around 30 participants [3] in total, with some variation across the two days, given the different content. The event was chaired by Josh Brown, RIM Programme Manager and Neil Jacobs, Programme Director, Digital Infrastructure, both at JISC. All presentations as well as breakout session outputs are available via the UKOLN ISC Events site [4].

The New CERIF Support Project at the ISC, UKOLN

The UK community was pleased to welcome Brigitte Jörg [5] to the meeting, in the first week of her new role at UKOLN’s Innovation Support Centre as National Coordinator for the CERIF Support Project. Brigitte is already well known to British practitioners working with CERIF – both in her role as as CERIF Task Group Leader [6] at euroCRIS and as advisor to several existing JISC projects. We look forward to working with her on further initiatives – her CERIF expertise will be a huge asset for Research Information Management support and coordination in British Higher Education.

UK CERIF Landscape

There is certainly extensive RIM-related activity in the UK currently, which looks set to continue. The landscape was outlined in the scene setting sessions by myself, based on the CERIF adoption study [7] carried out earlier this year. The rate of CRIS (Current Research Information System) procurement has increased very rapidly in the last few years, particularly during 2011. For example the first Pure system in the UK was procured jointly by the Universities of Aberdeen and St Andrews in May 2009; now there are 19 UK universities using Pure. Since all CRIS on the market are CERIF-compatible (to a greater or lesser extent) this means that a large number of UK institutions are CERIF users (again, to varying degrees) – around 31% [7]. The two other CERIF CRIS being used in the UK are CONVERIS (Avedas, Germany) and Symplectic Elements (UK-based); only one UK CERIF CRIS is being developed in-house, at the University of Huddersfield. There is therefore a significant potential user base for the many CERIF-based services discussed over the course of the workshop. Particularly as more institutions reach the end of their CRIS implementation phase, they are going to be looking for opportunities to exploit the interchange benefits offered by CERIF.

UK Involvement in euroCRIS and Other International Initiatives

As a reflection of the intensity of UK CRIS activity, the UK has the largest number of institutional members of euroCRIS – 25. The next country in terms of membership is Germany, with just 13 members (and then the Netherlands, with seven). It is also notable that there were six UK papers (up from three in 2010) at the recent euroCRIS conference in Prague (all openly accessible from the euroCRIS website [8]), reflecting the growing UK presence at international level. This indicates the significant impact of JISC programmes - both RIM and MRD (Managing Research Data). At euroCRIS meetings other European countries have expressed some envy of the resources currently available in the UK to support RIM development!

Delivering Open Educational Resources for Engineering Design

lisrw — Fri, 09 Mar 2012 14:06:59 +0000

Mansur Darlington describes two methods for presenting online OERs for engineering design that were developed and explored as part of the Higher Education Academy/JISC-funded DelOREs (Delivering Open Educational Resources for Engineering Design) Project.

A great deal of information is accessible on the World Wide Web which might be useful to both students and teachers. This material, however, is of variable quality and usefulness and is aimed at a wide spectrum of users. Moreover, such material rarely appears accompanied by guidance on how it may be most effectively used by potential users. To make information more usable it must be made more readily discoverable and there should be clear – and preferably machine-readable – indications of its provenance and quality and the legitimate uses to which it may be put.

IMPACT Final Conference 2011

lisrw — Sun, 26 Feb 2012 13:36:33 +0000

Marieke Guy reports on the two-day conference looking at the results of the IMPACT Project in making digitisation and OCR better, faster and cheaper.

The IMPACT Project (Improving Access to Text) [1] was funded by the European Commission back in 2007 to look at significantly advancing access to historical text using Optical Character Recognition (OCR) methods. As the project reaches its conclusion, one of its key objectives is sharing project outputs.

Book Review: Making Software - What Really Works, and Why We Believe It

lisrw — Fri, 09 Mar 2012 14:06:59 +0000

While acknowledging the genuine usefulness of much of its content, Emma Tonkin provides helpful pointers towards a second edition.

Published by O'Reilly, as part of the Theory In Practice series, this book is essentially academic in focus. It takes the form of thirty chapters. The first eight of these aim to provide an introduction to the area of software engineering, or more specifically, the collection and use of supporting evidence to support software engineering practices. These initial chapters are satisfyingly broad in scope, covering topics from human factors and personality to complexity metrics and the process of authoring a systematic review.

Editorial Introduction to Issue 67: Changes Afoot