Overview of content related to 'blog'

Editorial Introduction to Issue 64: Supporting the Power of Research Data

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

Richard Waller introduces Ariadne issue 64.

In these cash-strapped times among all the admonitions to save money here, and resources there, I rather hope to hear much about the necessity of protecting and building the knowledge economy if the UK is to make its way in the globalised world, since we cannot pretend to compete easily in other areas of endeavour. Hence research has to be regarded as one of the aces remaining to us, and thus I hope the importance of gathering, managing and preserving for long-term access research outcomes will be widely appreciated and supported.

Repository Software Comparison: Building Digital Library Infrastructure at LSE

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

Ed Fay presents a comparison of repository software that was carried out at LSE in support of digital library infrastructure development.

Public Library 2.0: Culture Change?

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

Sarah Hammond explores UK public libraries' growing participation in social media to reach their audiences online, with a focus on blogging.

Beginning in the mid 2000s I began keeping an eye on how libraries have been getting involved with social software - I started this haphazardly just out of interest but then I started to be more systematic when I needed to explore online resources for my organisation, the National Railway Museum. When I left to pursue my MA in Librarianship at the University of Sheffield I took the opportunity to do some serious research into the subject with a focus on UK public libraries as it seemed to me that they were hugely under-represented online.

Intute Reflections at the End of an Era

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

Angela Joyce, Linda Kerr, Tim Machin, Paul Meehan and Caroline Williams look back at the history and achievements of Intute, and reflect on lessons learned as the service enters its final year.

23 Things in Public Libraries

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

Helen Leech describes a collaborative project to increase front-line staff's understanding and use of Web 2.0 in public libraries.

Did you know that:

Of the Generation Y – the generation born in the 1980s and 1990s – 96% are members of a social network
There are some 200 million blogs on the World Wide Web
One in eight couples who married in the USA in 2009 met over the Internet
If Facebook were a country, it would be the fourth largest by population in the world after China, the USA and India

All the statistics emanate from Socialnomics [1]. They are designed to be attention-grabbers, and they will no doubt provoke ferocious debate. However, what is unarguable is that some seismic shifts have taken place on the Internet in the past ten years, and social media and user-generated content now play a huge role in the way many people create and share information and how they communicate with each other.

These changes have crept up on public libraries. Ten years ago, we became Internet experts when the People's Network initiative put 30,000 computers into our buildings. We became used to the new role of teaching people how to use a mouse, what a search engine is, how to create an email account. But when it came to content, we tended to leave that to our customers. Friends Reunited came along, followed by Myspace, Wikipedia, Youtube, Facebook, and we were dimly aware of them as social phenomena, but we did not have much to do with them in our day-to-day work.

Changes in Public Libraries

So what has changed and why do we need to know about them now? The list below is by no means exhaustive but represents some of the main drivers behind changes emerging within public libraries in the UK.

The need to help people get online. As I write, every public library in the UK is being asked to sign up to Race Online [2], the initiative to get 100% of the population clued up by the time the Olympics happens. The reappointed UK Digital Champion Martha Lane Fox launched the Race Online 2012 campaign in March 2010. The initiative reports that more than 600 partners have pledged to help more than 1.7 million new people to get online by the end of 2012. Its rationale is "to build a UK of near-universal web literacy by the time of the Olympics, with access as easy and affordable as water, electricity or gas and skills considered as fundamental as literacy and numeracy: [its] ambition is to get everyone of working-age online by the end of this Parliament." People need to know the key skills for getting around online, and a large part of these skills involves social networking.
Changes in the way people communicate. There is a subtle shift taking place in electronic communication, moving onwards from email towards more collaborative methods: file sharing and cloud computing, social media that include information 'walls,' instant messaging and mobile apps. There is growing evidence that Generation Y and the Millenials – the generations born after the late 1980s – are moving towards very different methods of communication. It is important that library staff understand these technologies, since they are going to become as mainstream as email very shortly.
Communities in Control [3]: you might recognise this as the title of a recent government paper, looking at the need to pass control over political processes to local communities, and how this could be achieved. The principle is being reinforced through the new administration's Big Society initiative [4]. New technologies are allowing people to mobilise in a way that simply has not been possible before, to create and share content, and to become involved in the running of public libraries in radical new ways. It is also worth looking at the International Association for Public Participation's Spectrum of Public Participation [5] which gives some idea of the range of ways in which we need to work with our communities, from providing them with information all the way up to acting as facilitators so that they can manage and run services themselves. It is also worth watching the film Us Now [6], which gives a glimpse of the way that new technologies might affect people's relationships with central government and public services. It highlights the way that social networking applications allow huge numbers of people to collaborate to do previously unthinkable things, like run a bank. If communities can make the day-to-day decisions necessary to run a bank or a second division football club, then it starts to become possible that they could do the same for political processes or delivery of public services. Library staff need to understand this culture of engagement, and to understand the tools that facilitate it.
The economic environment. The next four years, 2010-14, are going to be the hardest public services have seen, and we are going to have to make cost savings everywhere we can. There are clear benefits in collaboration, and the tools that are available for this are improving rapidly. Which is where 23 Things comes in.

Retooling Libraries for the Data Challenge

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

Dorothea Salo examines how library systems and procedures need to change to accommodate research data.

Eager to prove their relevance among scholars leaving print behind, libraries have participated vocally in the last half-decade's conversation about digital research data. On the surface, libraries would seem to have much human and technological infrastructure ready-constructed to repurpose for data: digital library platforms and institutional repositories may appear fit for purpose. However, unless libraries understand the salient characteristics of research data, and how they do and do not fit with library processes and infrastructure, they run the risk of embarrassing missteps as they come to grips with the data challenge.

Whether managing research data is 'the new special collections,'[1] a new form of regular academic-library collection development, or a brand-new library specialty, the possibilities have excited a great deal of talk, planning, and educational opportunity in a profession seeking to expand its boundaries.

Faced with shrinking budgets and staffs, library administrators may well be tempted to repurpose existing technology infrastructure and staff to address the data curation challenge. Existing digital libraries and institutional repositories seem on the surface to be a natural fit for housing digital research data. Unfortunately, significant mismatches exist between research data and library digital warehouses, as well as the processes and procedures librarians typically use to fill those warehouses. Repurposing warehouses and staff for research data is therefore neither straightforward nor simple; in some cases, it may even prove impossible.

Characteristics of Research Data

What do we know about research data? What are its salient characteristics with respect to stewardship?

Size and Scope

Perhaps the commonest mental image of research data is terabytes of information pouring out of the merest twitch of the Large Hadron Collider Project. So-called 'Big Data' both captures the imagination of and creates sheer terror in the practical librarian or technologist. 'Small data,' however, may prove to be the bigger problem: data emerging from individual researchers and labs, especially those with little or no access to grants, or a hyperlocal research focus. Though each small-data producer produces only a trickle of data compared to the like of the Large Hadron Collider Project, the tens of thousands of small-data producers in aggregate may well produce as much data (or more, measured in bytes) as their Big Data counterparts [2]. Securely and reliably storing and auditing this amount of data is a serious challenge. The burgeoning 'small data' store means that institutions without local Big Data projects are by no means exempt from large-scale storage considerations.

Small data also represents a serious challenge in terms of human resources. Best practices instituted in a Big Data project reach all affected scientists quickly and completely; conversely, a small amount of expert intervention in such a project pays immense dividends. Because of the great numbers of individual scientists and labs producing small data, however, immensely more consultations and consultants are necessary to bring practices and the resulting data to an acceptable standard.

Variability

Digital research data comes in every imaginable shape and form. Even narrowing the universe of research data to 'image' yields everything from scans of historical glass negative photographs to digital microscope images of unicellular organisms taken hundreds at a time at varying depths of field so that the organism can be examined in three dimensions. The tools that researchers use naturally shape the resulting data. When the tool is proprietary, unfortunately, so may be the file format that it produced. When that tool does not include long-term data viability as a development goal, the data it produces are often neither interoperable nor preservable.

A major consequence of the diversity of forms and formats of digital research data is a concomitant diversity in desired interactions. The biologist with a 3-D stack of microscope images interacts very differently with those images than does a manuscript scholar trying to extract the underlying half-erased text from a palimpsest. These varying affordances must be respected by dissemination platforms if research data are to enjoy continued use.

One important set of interactions involves actual changes to data. Many sorts of research data are considerably less usable in their raw state than after they have had filters or algorithms or other processing performed on them. Others welcome correction, or are refined by comparison with other datasets. Two corollaries emerge: first, that planning and acting for data stewardship must take place throughout the research process, rather than being an add-on at the end; and second, that digital preservation systems designed to steward only final, unchanging materials can only fail faced with real-world datasets and data-use practices.

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.

Blue Ribbon Task Force Symposium on Sustainable Digital Preservation and Access

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

Marieke Guy reports on a symposium which provided an opportunity for stakeholders to respond to the recent Blue Ribbon Task Force report on Sustainable Digital Preservation and Access.

On Thursday 6 May 2010 an historic event took place. The event allowed people to express their opinions on potential future action in a highly significant area. No, not the British general election, and I'm sure the concurrence of dates was unintentional! This event was the Blue Ribbon Task Force Symposium on sustainable digital preservation and access, held at the Wellcome Collection Conference Centre in London [1].

Open Repositories 2010

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

Philip Hunter and Robin Taylor report on the Open Repositories Conference held in Madrid between 6 -9 July 2010 at the Palacio de Congresos.

The air temperature in Madrid was around 37ºC when the Edinburgh contingent arrived in mid-afternoon on 5 July. The excellent air-conditioned Metro took us all the way into town - about 14km - for only 2 Euros. We were told later that the temperature during the preceding week had been about 21ºC, but by the end of the conference week we were enjoying 39ºC. The conference venue turned out to be opposite the Santiago Bernabeu stadium (home of Real Madrid), in Paseo de la Castellana.

Evidence, Value and Impact: The LIS Research Landscape in 2010

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

Stephanie Kenna reports on the Library and Information Science Research Coalition conference, held at the British Library on 28 June 2010.

Having been involved in developing the concept of a coalition for research in Library and Information Science (LIS) since 2006, it was with both pride and excitement that I took my place in the British Library's auditorium on Monday 28 June. There was a buzz of anticipation. We were not disappointed.

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.

Making Datasets Visible and Accessible: DataCite's First Summer Meeting

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

Tom J Pollard and J Max Wilkinson report on DataCite's First Summer Meeting, a two-day event focused on making datasets visible and accessible, held in Hannover, Germany, in June 2010.

Learning How to Play Nicely: Repositories and CRIS

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

Nick Sheppard reports on the event examining integrated, systemic approaches to research information management organised by the Welsh Repository Network and supported by JISC and ARMA at Leeds Metropolitan University, in May 2010.

More than 60 delegates convened at the Rose Bowl in Leeds on 7 May 2010 for this event to explore the developing relationship and overlap between Open Access research repositories and so called 'CRISs' – Current Research Information Systems – that are increasingly being implemented at universities.

Emerging Technologies in Academic Libraries (emtacl10)

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

Andrew Walsh reports on a new international conference on emerging technologies within academic libraries organised by the library of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology and held in Trondheim, Norway in April 2010.