Overview of content related to 'software'

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.

Upskilling Liaison Librarians for Research Data Management

lisrw — Thu, 06 Dec 2012 19:27:43 +0000

Andrew Cox, Eddy Verbaan and Barbara Sen explore the design of a curriculum to train academic librarians in the competencies to support Research Data Management.

For many UK HEIs, especially research-intensive institutions, Research Data Management (RDM) is rising rapidly up the agenda. Working closely with other professional services, and with researchers themselves, libraries will probably have a key role to play in supporting RDM. This role might include signposting institutional expertise in RDM; inclusion of the topic in information literacy sessions for PhD students and other researchers; advocacy for open data sharing; or contributing to the management of an institutional data repository.

'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.

Motivations for the Development of a Web Resource Synchronisation Framework

lisrw — Mon, 03 Dec 2012 15:58:46 +0000

Stuart Lewis, Richard Jones and Simeon Warner explain some of the motivations behind the development of the ResourceSync Framework.

This article describes the motivations behind the development of the ResourceSync Framework. The Framework addresses the need to synchronise resources between Web sites. Resources cover a wide spectrum of types, such as metadata, digital objects, Web pages, or data files. There are many scenarios in which the ability to perform some form of synchronisation is required. Examples include aggregators such as Europeana that want to harvest and aggregate collections of resources, or preservation services that wish to archive Web sites as they change.

The ARK Project: Analysing Raptor at Kent

lisrw — Tue, 04 Dec 2012 17:21:49 +0000

Leo Lyons describes how University of Kent librarians are benefitting from Raptor's ability to produce e-resource usage statistics and charts.

It is indisputable that the use of e-resources in university libraries has increased exponentially over the last decade and there would be little disagreement with a prediction that usage is set to continue to increase for the foreseeable future. The majority of students both at undergraduate and post-graduate level now come from a background where online access is the de facto standard.

SUSHI: Delivering Major Benefits to JUSP

lisrw — Wed, 05 Dec 2012 17:54:19 +0000

Paul Meehan, Paul Needham and Ross MacIntyre explain the enormous time and cost benefits in using SUSHI to support rapid gathering of journal usage reports into the JUSP service.

A full-scale implementation of the Journal Usage Statistics Portal (JUSP) would not be possible without the automated data harvesting afforded by the Standardized Usage Statistics Harvesting Initiative (SUSHI) protocol. Estimated time savings in excess of 97% compared with manual file handling have allowed JUSP to expand its service to more than 35 publishers and 140 institutions by September 2012. An in-house SUSHI server also allows libraries to download quality-checked data from many publishers via JUSP, removing the need to visit numerous Web sites. The protocol thus affords enormous cost and time benefits for the centralised JUSP service and for all participating institutions. JUSP has also worked closely with many publishers to develop and implement SUSHI services, pioneering work to benefit both the publishers and the UK HE community.

JUSP: Background to the Service

The management of journal usage statistics can be an onerous task at the best of times. The introduction of the COUNTER [1] Code of Practice in 2002 was a major step forward, allowing libraries to collect consistent, audited statistics from publishers. By July 2012, 125 publishers offered the JR1 report, providing the number of successful full-text downloads. In the decade since COUNTER reports became available, analysis of the reports has become increasingly important, with library managers, staff and administrators increasingly forced to examine journal usage to inform and rationalise purchasing and renewal decisions.

In 2004, JISC Collections commissioned a report [2] which concluded that there was a definite demand for a usage statistics portal for the UK HE community; with some sites subscribing to more than 100 publishers, just keeping track of access details and downloading reports was becoming a significant task in itself, much less analysing the figures therein. There followed a report into the feasibility of establishing a ‘Usage Statistics Service’ carried out by Key Perspectives Limited and in 2008 JISC issued an ITT (Invitation To Tender). By early 2009 a prototype service, known as the Journal Usage Statistics Portal (JUSP) had been developed by a consortium including Evidence Base at Birmingham City University, Cranfield University, JISC Collections and Mimas at The University of Manchester; the prototype featured a handful of publishers and three institutions. However, despite a centralised service appearing feasible [3], the requirement to download and process data in spreadsheet format, and the attendant time taken, still precluded a full-scale implementation across UK HE.

Release 3 of the COUNTER Code of Practice in 2009 however mandated the use of the newly-introduced Standardized Usage Statistics Harvesting Initiative (SUSHI) protocol [4], a mechanism for the machine-to-machine transfer of COUNTER-compliant reports; this produced dramatic efficiencies of time and cost in the gathering of data from publishers. The JUSP team began work to implement SUSHI for a range of publishers and expanded the number of institutions. By September 2012, the service had grown significantly, whilst remaining free at point of use, and encompassed 148 participating institutions, and 35 publishers. To date more than 100 million individual points of data have been collected by JUSP, all via SUSHI, a scale that would have been impossible without such a mechanism in place or without massive additional staff costs.

JUSP offers much more than basic access to publisher statistics, however; the JUSP Web site [5] details the numerous reports and analytical tools on offer, together with detailed user guides and support materials. The cornerstone of the service though is undeniably its SUSHI implementation, both in terms of gathering the COUNTER JR1 and JR1a data and - as developed more recently - its own SUSHI server, enabling institutions to re-harvest data into their own library management tools for local analysis.

JUSP Approach to SUSHI Development and Implementation

Once the decision was made to scale JUSP into a full service, the development of SUSHI capability became of paramount importance. The team had been able to handle spreadsheets of data on a small scale, but the expected upscale to 100+ institutions and multiple publishers within a short time frame meant that this would very quickly become unmanageable and costly in staff time and effort - constraints that were proving to be a source of worry at many institutions too: while some sites could employ staff whose role revolved around usage stats gathering and analysis, this was not possible at every institution, nor especially straightforward for institutions juggling dozens, if not hundreds, of publisher agreements and deals.

Two main issues were immediately apparent in the development of the SUSHI software. Firstly, there was a lack of any standard SUSHI client software that we could use or adapt, and, more worryingly, the lack of SUSHI support at a number of major publishers. While many publishers use an external company or platform such as Atypon, MetaPress or HighWire to collect and provide usage statistics, others had made little or no progress in implementing SUSHI support by late 2009 - where SUSHI servers were in place these were often untested or unused by consumers.

An ultimate aim for JUSP was to develop a single piece of software that would seamlessly interact with any available SUSHI repository and download data for checking and loading into JUSP. However, the only client software available by 2009 was written and designed to work in the Windows environment, or used Java, which can be very complex to work with and of which the JUSP team had limited expertise. The challenge therefore became to develop a much simpler set of code using Perl and/or PHP, common and simple programming languages which were much more familiar to the JUSP team.

Seb Schmoller Replies

lisrw — Fri, 07 Dec 2012 12:27:42 +0000

Stepping down from his pivotal role as CEO at ALT, Seb Schmoller kindly answers a few questions from Ariadne on his perspective on online learning.

Ariadne: Seb, please tell us a little about yourself.

21st-century Scholarship and Wikipedia

lisrw — Fri, 30 Nov 2012 13:18:23 +0000

Amber Thomas explores the ways in which emerging research practices and Wikipedia illustrate the changing boundaries of academic work.

Wikipedia, the world’s fifth most-used Web site [1], is a good illustration of the growing credibility of online resources. In his article in Ariadne earlier this year, “Wikipedia: Reflections on Use and Academic Acceptance” [2], Brian Whalley described the debates around accuracy and review, in the context of geology.

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.

CURATEcamp iPres 2012

lisrw — Thu, 13 Dec 2012 12:21:18 +0000

Mark Jordan, Courtney Mumma, Nick Ruest and the participants of CURATEcamp iPres 2012 report on this unconference for digital curation practitioners and researchers, held on 2 October 2012 in Toronto.

CURATEcamp is ‘A series of unconference-style events focused on connecting practitioners and technologists interested in digital curation.’ [1] The first CURATEcamp was held in the summer of 2010, and there have been just over 10 Camps since then.

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.

Hydra UK: Flexible Repository Solutions to Meet Varied Needs

lisrw — Thu, 13 Dec 2012 19:24:07 +0000

Chris Awre reports on the Hydra UK event held on 22 November 2012 at the Library of the London School of Economics.

Hydra, as described in the opening presentation of this event, is a project initiated in 2008 by the University of Hull, Stanford University, University of Virginia, and DuraSpace to work towards a reusable framework for multi-purpose, multi-functional, multi-institutional repository-enabled solutions for the management of digital content collections [1]. An initial timeframe for the project of three years had seen all founding institutional partners successfully implement a repository demonstrating these characteristics. Key to the aims of the project has always been to generate wider interest outside the partners to foster not only sustainability in the technology, but also sustainability of the community around this open source development. Hydra has been disseminated through a range of events, particularly through the international Open Repositories conferences [2], but the sphere of interest in Hydra has now stimulated the holding of specific events in different countries: Hydra UK is one of them.

The Hydra UK event was held on 22 November 2012, kindly hosted by the Library at the London School of Economics. Representatives from institutions across the UK, but also Ireland, Austria and Switzerland, came together to learn about the Hydra Project, and to discuss how Hydra might serve their digital content collection management needs. 29 delegates from 21 institutions were present, representing mostly universities but also the archive, museum and commercial sectors. Five presentations were given on Hydra, focusing on the practical experience of using this framework and how it fits into overall system architectures, and time was also deliberately given over to discussion of more specific topics of interest and to allow delegates the opportunity to voice their requirements. The presentations were:

Introduction to Hydra
Hydra @ Hull
Hydra @ Glasgow Caledonian University
Hydra @ LSE
Hydra @ Oxford

Introduction to Hydra

Chris Awre from the University of Hull gave the opening presentation. The starting basis for Hydra was mutual recognition by all the founding partners that a repository should be an enabler for managing digital content collections, not a constraint or simply a silo of content. Digital repositories have been put forward and applied as a potential solution for a variety of use cases over the years, and been used at different stages of a content lifecycle.

Figure 1: LSE Library
(Photo courtesy of Simon Lamb, University of Hull.)

To avoid producing a landscape of multiple repositories all having to be managed to cover these use cases, the Hydra Project sought to identify a way in which one repository solution could be applied flexibly to meet the requirements of different use cases. The idea of a single repository with multiple points of interaction came into being – Hydra – and the concept of individual Hydra ‘head’ solutions.

The Hydra Project is informed by two main principles:

No single system can provide the full range of repository-based solutions for a given institution’s needs,
o …yet sustainable solutions require a common repository infrastructure.
No single institution can resource the development of a full range of solutions on its own,
o …yet each needs the flexibility to tailor solutions to local demands and workflows.

The Hydra Project has sought to provide the common infrastructure upon which flexible solutions can be built, and shared.

The recognition that no single institution can achieve everything it might want for its repository has influenced the project from the start. To quote an African proverb, ‘If you want to go fast go alone, if you want to go far, go together’. Working together has been vital. To organise this interaction, Hydra has structured itself through three interleaving sub-communities, the Steering Group, the Partners and Developers, as shown by Figure 2.

Figure 2: Hydra community structure

The concept of a Hydra Partner has emerged from this model of actively working together, and the project has a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) process for any institution wishing to have its use of, and contribution and commitment to Hydra recognised. Starting with the original four partners in 2008, Hydra now has 11 partners, with two more in the process of joining. All have made valuable contributions and helped to make Hydra better. Hydra partnership is not the only route to involvement, though, and there are many in the Hydra developer community who are adopters of the software, but who have not reached a stage where partnership is appropriate.

The technical implementation of Hydra was supported through early involvement in the project by MediaShelf, a commercial technical consultancy focused on repository solutions. All Hydra software is, though, open source, available under the Apache 2.0 licence, and all software code contributions are managed in this way. The technical implementation is based on a set of core principles that describe how content objects should be structured within the repository, and with an understanding that different content types can be managed using different workflows. Following these principles, Hydra could be implemented in a variety of ways: the technical direction taken by the project is simply the one that suited the partners at the time.

Hydra as currently implemented is built on existing open source components, and the project partners are committed to supporting these over time:

Fedora: one of the digital repository systems maintained through DuraSpace [3]
Apache Solr: powerful indexing software now being used in a variety of discovery solutions [4]
Blacklight: a next-generation discovery interface, which has its own community around it [5]
Hydra plugin: a collection of components that facilitate workflow in managing digital content [6]
Solrizer: a component that indexes Fedora-held content into a Solr index

These components are arranged in the architecture shown in Figure 3.

Figure 3: Hydra architecture

A common feature of the last three components in the list above is the use of Ruby on Rails as the coding language and its ability to package up functionality in discrete ‘gems’. This was consciously chosen for Hydra because of its agile programming capabilities, its use of the MVC (Model–View–Controller) structure, and its testing infrastructure. The choice has been validated on a number of occasions as Hydra has developed. However, it was noted that other coding languages and systems could be used to implement Hydra where appropriate. This applies to all the main components, even Fedora. Whilst a powerful and flexible repository solution in its own right, Fedora has proved to be complex to use: Hydra has sought in part to tap this capability through simpler interfaces and interactions.

International Conference on Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries (TPDL) 2012

lisrw — Sun, 16 Dec 2012 13:44:54 +0000

Anna Mastora and Sarantos Kapidakis report on TPDL 2012 held at Paphos, Cyprus, over 23-27 September 2012.

The 16^th International Conference on Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries (TPDL) 2012 [1] was another successful event in the series of ECDL/TPDL conferences which has been the leading European scientific forum on digital libraries for 15 years. Across these years, the conference has brought together researchers, developers, content providers and users in the field of digital libraries by addressing issues in the area where theoretical and applied research meet, such as digital library models, architectures, functionality, users, and quality.

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.

Enhancing Collaboration and Interaction in a Post-graduate Research Programme

lisrw — Sat, 28 Jul 2012 08:39:58 +0000

Tertia Coetsee describes a community of practice for post-graduate students where RefShare is deployed for digital storage and retrieval, alongside Blackboard for the purposes of communication. She also describes the role of the information specialist in the programme.

The Phytomedicine Programme is a multidisciplinary and collaborative research programme investigating therapeutically useful compounds present in plants growing in South Africa. The programme was started in 1995 and was transferred to the Department of Paraclinical Sciences, Faculty of Veterinary Science, University of Pretoria in 2002. In 2007 it was designated as a National Research Foundation Developed Research Niche Area [1].

Evaluation of Assessment Diaries and GradeMark at the University of Glamorgan

lisrw — Sat, 28 Jul 2012 12:26:56 +0000

Karen Fitzgibbon and Alice Lau describe a JISC-funded project in evaluating the pedagogical and workload impact that two assessment- and feedback-related innovations have on students and staff and report on lessons for the sector.

Assessment and feedback practice in Higher Education has long been the major source of student dissatisfaction (National Student Surveys) [1]. While technologies are increasingly being used as a tool to improve the learning experience for students and staff, the use of technologies in improving the assessment experience is still patchy.

Making the Most of a Conference

lisrw — Tue, 31 Jul 2012 15:05:33 +0000

Stephanie Taylor writes about how she made the most of a conference to promote and inform the work of a project.

I’ve been working with repositories in various ways for over five years, so I have, of course, attended the major international conference Open Repositories before. I have never actually presented anything or represented a specific project at the event, though. This year was different. This year I had a mission - to present a poster on the DataFlow Project [1] and to talk to people about the work we had been doing for the past 12 months and (I hoped) to interest them in using the Open Source (OS) systems we had developed during that period.

Wikipedia: Reflections on Use and Acceptance in Academic Environments

lisrw — Sat, 28 Jul 2012 20:26:22 +0000

In the light of a workshop run by the Geological Society of London and Wikimedia UK, Brian Whalley reflects on the attitudes and practice of academia in respect of present-day Wikipedia content.

Wikipedia has become internationally known as an online encyclopaedia ('The Free Encyclopedia'). Developed by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger and launched in 2001 it has, to date, editions in 285 languages. Wikipedia is but one subset of the Web-based applications known as 'wikis'. The original wiki (as wikiwikiweb) was developed by Ward Cunningham in the 1990s as the least complex way of rapidly sharing and communicating 'information'. Wiki is Hawaiian for 'quick'; repeating the word is equivalent to adding 'very'.

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.

Redeveloping the Loughborough Online Reading List System

lisrw — Sat, 28 Jul 2012 14:32:55 +0000

Jon Knight, Jason Cooper and Gary Brewerton describe the redevelopment of Loughborough University’s open source reading list system.

The Loughborough Online Reading Lists System (LORLS) [1] has been developed at Loughborough University since the late 1990s. LORLS was originally implemented at the request of the University’s Learning and Teaching Committee simply to make reading lists available online to students. The Library staff immediately saw the benefit of such a system in not only allowing students ready access to academics’ reading lists but also in having such access themselves. This was because a significant number of academics were bypassing the library when generating and distributing lists to their students who were then in turn surprised when the library did not have the recommended books either in stock or in sufficient numbers to meet demand.

The first version of the system produced by the Library Systems Team was part of a project that also had a ‘reading lists amnesty’ in which academics were encouraged to provide their reading lists to the library which then employed some temporary staff over the summer to enter them into the new system. This meant that the first version of LORLS went live in July 2000 with a reasonable percentage of lists already in place. Subsequently the creation and editing of reading lists was made the responsibility of the academics or departmental admin staff, with some assistance from library staff.

LORLS was written in Perl, with a MySQL database back-end. Most user interfaces were delivered via the web, with a limited number of back-end scripts that helped the systems staff maintain the system and alert library staff to changes that had been made to reading lists.

Soon after the first version of LORLS went live at Loughborough, a number of other universities expressed an interest in using or modifying the system. Permission was granted by the University to release it as open source under the General Public Licence (GPL)[2]. New versions were released as the system was developed and bugs were fixed. The last version of the original LORLS code base/data design was version 5, which was downloaded by sites worldwide.

Redesign

By early 2007 it was decided to take a step back and see if there were things that could be done better in LORLS. Some design decisions made in 1999 no longer made sense eight years later. Indeed some of the database design was predicated on how teaching modules were supposed to work at Loughborough and it had already become clear that the reality of how they were deployed was often quite different. For example, during the original design, the principle was that each module would have a single reading list associated with it. Within a few years several modules had been found that were being taught by two (or more!) academics, all wanting their own independent reading list.

Some of the structuring of the data in the MySQL database began to limit how the system could be developed. The University began to plan an organisational restructuring shortly after the redesign of LORLS was commenced, and it was clear that the simple departmental structure was likely to be replaced by a more fluid school and department mix.

Library staff were also beginning to request new features that were thus increasingly awkward to implement. Rather than leap through hoops to satisfy them within the framework of the existing system, it made sense to add them into the design process for a full redesign.

It was also felt that the pure CGI-driven user interface could do with a revamp. The earlier LORLS user interfaces used only basic HTML forms, with little in the way of client-side scripting. Whilst that meant that they tended to work on any web browser and were pretty accessible, they were also a bit clunky compared to some of the newer dynamic web sites.

A distinct separation of the user interface from the back-end database was decided upon to improve localization and portability of the system as earlier versions of LORLS had already shown that many sites took the base code and then customised the user interface parts of the CGI scripts to their own look and feel. The older CGI scripts were a mix of user interaction elements and database access and processing, which made this task a bit more difficult than it really needed to be.

Separating the database code from the user interface code would let people easily tinker with one without unduly affecting the other. It would also allow local experimentation with multiple user-interface designs for different user communities or devices.

This implied that a set of application programming interfaces (APIs) would need to be defined. As asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX)[3] interactions had been successful applied in a number of recent projects the team had worked on, XML was chosen as the format to be used. At first simple object access protocol (SOAP) style XML requests was experimented with, as well as XML responses, but it was soon realised that SOAP was far too heavy-weight for most of the API calls, so a lighter ‘RESTful’ API was selected. The API was formed of CGI scripts that took normal parameters as input and returned XML documents for the client to parse and display.

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.

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!

Book Review: Getting Started with Cloud Computing

lisrw — Sat, 28 Jul 2012 22:42:54 +0000

Martin White reviews a collection of essays on cloud computing that attempts to clarify the technology and its applications for librarians and information professionals.

I will admit to having read very little in the way of fiction writing over the last half-century though perhaps as a chemist by training I do enjoy science fiction from authors such as Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov and Fred Hoyle. All were distinguished scientists, none more so than Fred Hoyle, who was Plumian Professor of Astronomy and Experimental Philosophy at the University of Cambridge.

Collaborations Workshop 2012: Software, Sharing and Collaboration in Oxford

lisrw — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 13:57:05 +0000

Simon Choppin reports on a two-day software workshop held at The Queen’s College, Oxford over 21 - 22 March 2012.

On the 21 and 22 March 2012 I attended a workshop which was unlike the stolid conferences I was used to. In the space of two sunny days I found I had spoken to more people and learnt more about them than I usually managed in an entire week. Presentations were short and focused, discussions were varied and fascinating, and the relaxed, open format was very effective in bringing people from differing disciplines together to consider a common theme. In this case the theme was software, and whether you used or developed it, there was plenty of food for thought.

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.

Perceptions of Public Libraries in Africa

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

Monika Elbert, David Fuegi and Ugne Lipeikaite describe the principal findings of the study Perceptions of Public Libraries in Africa which served to provide evidence of how public libraries are perceived by their stakeholders.

This article presents a summary of some results of the study Perceptions of Public Libraries in Africa [1] which was conducted to research perceptions of stakeholders and the public towards public libraries in six African countries. The study is closely linked with the EIFL Public Library Innovation Programme [2], which awarded grants to public libraries in developing and transition countries to address a range of socio-economic issues facing their communities, including projects in Kenya, Ghana and Zambia.

Kultivating Kultur: Increasing Arts Research Deposit

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

Marie-Therese Gramstadt discusses how the JISC-funded Kultivate Project is encouraging arts research deposit in UK institutional repositories.

Funded by the Deposit strand [1] JISC Information Environment programme and led by the Visual Arts Data Service (VADS), a Research Centre of the University for the Creative Arts, Kultivate will increase arts research deposit in UK institutional repositories.

The CLIF Project: The Repository as Part of a Content Lifecycle

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

Richard Green, Chris Awre and Simon Waddington describe how a digital repository can become part of the technical landscape within an institution and support digital content lifecycle management across systems.

At the heart of meeting institutional requirements for managing digital content is the need to understand the different operations through which content goes, from planning and creation through to disposal or preservation. Digital content is created using a variety of authoring tools. Once created, the content is often stored somewhere different, made accessible in possibly more than one way, altered as required, and then moved for deletion or preservation at an appropriate point.

Peculiarities of Digitising Materials from the Collections of the National Academy of Sciences, Armenia

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

Alan Hopkinson and Tigran Zargaryan give an overview of their experience of digitising paper-based materials in the Fundamental Scientific Library of the National Academy of Sciences, Armenia including some of the obstacles encountered during image processing and optical character recognition.

Early writing which first appeared as cuneiform protocols and then emerged in manuscript form and as printed materials is currently entering a new stage in its development – in the form of electronic publications.

Adapting VuFind as a Front-end to a Commercial Discovery System

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

Graham Seaman describes the adaptation of an open source discovery tool, VuFind, to local needs, discusses the decisions which needed to be made in the process, and considers the implications of this process for future library discovery systems.

VuFind is an open source discovery system originally created by Villanova University near Philadelphia [1] and now supported by Villanova with the participation in development of libraries around the world. It was one of the first next-generation library discovery systems in the world, made possible by the open source Solr/Lucene text indexing and search system which lies at the heart of VuFind (Solr also underlies several of the current commercial offerings, including Serials Solutions' Summon and ExLibris' Primo).

Editorial Introduction to Issue 68

lisrw — Mon, 12 Mar 2012 15:17:06 +0000

The editor introduces readers to the content of Ariadne issue 68.

I am pleased to introduce you to the content of Issue 68, and to have the opportunity to remind you that you have a far larger number of channels into the publication’s content.

The Future of the Past of the Web

lisrw — Mon, 27 Feb 2012 12:06:52 +0000

Matthew Brack reports on the one-day international workshop 'The Future of the Past of the Web' held at the British Library Conference Centre, London on 7 October, 2011.

We have all heard at least some of the extraordinary statistics that attempt to capture the sheer size and ephemeral nature of the Web. According to the Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC), more than 70 new domains are registered and more than 500,000 documents are added to the Web every minute [1]. This scale, coupled with its ever-evolving use, present significant challenges to those concerned with preserving both the content and context of the Web.

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: University Libraries and Digital Learning Environments

lisrw — Sun, 19 Feb 2012 16:38:31 +0000

Sylvie Lafortune reviews a collection of essays that examine the transformation of academic libraries as they become part of digital learning environments.

This book examines how academic libraries are realigning themselves with the university of the 21^st century, which is increasingly becoming a digital learning environment. The expectations of the Google generation, the interdependence of teaching and research, and the changing roles of library staff and technology all play a fundamental part in this environment–and to lead the discussions in this book, the editors have called on 18 experts and practitioners.

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.

Data Science Professionals: A Global Community of Sharing

lisrw — Mon, 27 Feb 2012 19:36:45 +0000

Sylvie Lafortune reports on the 37th annual conference of the International Association for Social Science Information Services and Technology (IASSIST), held over 30 May – 3 June 2011 in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.

The IASSIST [1] Conference is a long-standing annual event which brings together researchers, statistical analysts as well as computer and information professionals interested in all aspects of research data, from discovery to reuse. This 37^th meeting spanned five days where participants could attend workshops, IASSIST business meetings and a myriad of presentations. This year, the event focused on the sharing of tools and techniques which ‘improves capabilities across disciplines and along the entire data life cycle’.

eSciDoc Days 2011: The Challenges for Collaborative eResearch Environments

lisrw — Mon, 27 Feb 2012 20:20:52 +0000

Ute Rusnak reports on the fourth in a series of two-day conferences called eSciDoc Days, organised by FIZ Karlsruhe and the Max Planck Digital Library in Berlin over 26-27 October 2011.

eSciDoc is a well-known open source platform for creating eResearch environments using generic services and tools based on a shared infrastructure. This concept allows for managing research and publication data together with related metadata, internal and/or external links and access rights. Development of eSciDoc was initiated by a collaborative venture between FIZ Karlsruhe – Leibniz Institute for Information Infrastructure and the Max Planck Digital Library (MPDL) and was funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research.

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.

Towards Interoperabilty of European Language Resources

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

Sophia Ananiadou and colleagues describe an ambitious new initiative to accelerate Europe-wide language technology research, helped by their work on promoting interoperability of language resources.

A core component of the European Union is a common market with a single information space that works with around two dozen national languages and many regional languages. This wide variety of languages presents linguistic barriers that can severely limit the free flow of goods, information and services throughout Europe.