Overview of content related to 'database'

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.

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.

Mining the Archive: The Development of Electronic Journals

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

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

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

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

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

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

Figure 1: Optical coincidence card, circa 1970

e-Journal Development

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

Figure 2: Laser disc, circa 1980

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

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

23rd International CODATA Conference

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

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

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

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.

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.

Book Review: The Embedded Librarian

lisrw — Thu, 13 Dec 2012 22:32:15 +0000

John Azzolini reviews a comprehensive overview of embedded librarianship, a new model of library service that promises to enhance the strategic value of contemporary knowledge work.

Librarianship as a profession is confronting a growing demand to prove its worth. Library patrons expect utility. The organisations that fund them pre-suppose a contribution to their bottom lines.

The calls for this proof come from librarians themselves as much as from their employers. And the tone of the questioning is persistent if not redundant. It can be distilled to a fundamental query: Can the library sustain its basic mission of effectively and efficiently fulfilling its users' information needs given the technological, social, and economic developments that are transforming how people interact with data, documents, and each other?

Librarianship: In Search of the Value Proposition

These transformations have been occurring for some time, in different areas of living and working. Though not flowing from a single source, for librarians the impacts from these changes have seemingly converged on their profession as if they were collusive forces.

A global financial crisis and its lingering downturns have resulted in deeper budget cuts for many departments in every type of institution, public and private. A rising trend toward direct information consumption has caused many everyday users as well as executives to believe that removing librarians from the knowledge cycle is the next logical step. Caught within the sights of cost-conscious decision makers, libraries and information centres have become vulnerable to downsizing.

Students enter universities - even secondary schools - wedded unconsciously to their handhelds, always connected, assuming unmitigated and near-immediate digital satisfaction for their knowledge wants. Most of them were born into this socio-technical life-world as if it were a natural order. They know and expect nothing else. In such an environment, librarians orchestrate access but need not be confronted. They maintain crucial databases and finding aids, but can do so unseen and disembodied. They can be relegated to infrastructural innards.

For-profit organisations, the home of law firm and business librarians, are looking upon the outsourcing of support staff with increasing favour. And while library positions have not yet been handed over wholesale to third-party providers, there is industry trepidation that it could move in that direction. The threat is vague but distinctly present.

Many have taken to the outlets of library opinion and prediction, warning of impending disintermediation and possible obsolescence if the field fails to embrace drastic changes in how it carries out its service mission. Blogs, journals, and conferences are animated with calls to re-conceptualise philosophies and re-direct core methods. Some commentators merely emit distress signals on behalf of the library community. They are invocations of crisis without even a stab at real solutions. Others, however, are serious attempts to map out alternative pathways to a more stable occupational future. These need to be reckoned with.

A common path taken by the more constructive endeavours is demonstrating how librarianship can re-establish its value in a rapidly changing environment. This value is understood to be the knowledge-creating and disseminating efficacies that libraries bring to their users more ably and with less cost than other institutions. Since libraries are housed and financially supported by parent organisations of some kind, the value is usually construed as a combination of business and mission-relevant attributes. The emphasis on mission may be more pronounced in academic and public libraries, while corporate and firm libraries stress the financial aspects, but it is ultimately about how management assesses the library's contributions to the organisation's long-term integrity. Granted, the value has a large practical component for a library's patrons; the direct benefits are the answers, leads, and guidance they obtain when visiting the reference desk or searching the collections. However, the final criterion for most libraries will be the value proposition attributed to them by upper-level decision makers. User satisfaction is a valuable standard, but in the end it is often translated into a determination of whether the library produces distinct results in light of the resources devoted to maintaining it.

A concrete attempt to re-assert the business and service value of librarians has been the adoption of the practice model known as embedded librarianship. Although it has been applied in libraries in one form or another for a few decades - without necessarily using the word ‘embedded’ - only in the past several years has it risen to widespread notability. Judging by the upsurge in professional discussions and published cases devoted to this approach, librarians of many types are expressing keen interest in the value-enhancing potential of embedding themselves. Its contemporary significance is fully examined by David Shumaker in The Embedded Librarian: Innovative Strategies for Taking Knowledge Where It's Needed. The author, an associate professor at The Catholic University of America's School of Library and Information Science in Washington, D.C., is a well-known chronicler of embedded practices. This book is the field's first attempt at a comprehensive review of embedded librarianship's shared features, variable manifestations, and elements for success among major types of libraries.

Book Review: The E-copyright Handbook

lisrw — Thu, 13 Dec 2012 23:30:54 +0000

Charles Oppenheim takes a look at the latest of Paul Pedley’s copyright guidance books, and, in some respects, finds it wanting.

Paul Pedley is a name that needs no introduction to aficionados of copyright textbooks, being the author of several such books published by Facet Publishing in the past (and reviewed by Ariadne [1][2][3][4][5]). His latest effort, The E-copyright Handbook, attempts to cover the fast-moving and complex world of electronic copyright, using an interesting approach. Rather than the traditional way of such books, describing the media and describing the rights granted to copyright owners, the way the law applies to each media type, exceptions to copyright and so on, his approach is a mixture but with some emphasis on activities, as a glance at the chapter titles shows: Introduction, Content Types, Activities, Copyright Exceptions, Licences, the Digital Economy Act, Enforcement and The Hargreaves Review.

It is a complex approach, which requires careful cross-referencing and also checking that material is neither duplicated, nor that is anything is overlooked. It is not clear to me whether the book is meant for reading through, or whether it should be just dipped into when a particular issue causes someone to check the law; but I found the approach confusing.

The book also suffers from being in a fast-moving area, where the law, and technology, change fast and although it is clear that Facet got the book published in record time, as there are numerous references to 2012 developments in the text, the work is already out of date in several places, and will no doubt get more out of date as the months go on. Another problem is that the book cannot make up its mind whether it is written for UK readers, or readers in the EU, or in the USA. All too often, different countries’ court cases are mentioned together; one is (say) a UK case and another is a US case. Without the understanding that US law and UK law in this field are very different, people will come to incorrect conclusions about the significance of the cases to them in their day to day work. Moreover, all too often the cases are described without any court decisions relating to them being provided; so one is left with the worry ‘why did the author mention this case at all?’

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.

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.

Launching a New Community-owned Content Service

lisrw — Sat, 28 Jul 2012 16:36:05 +0000

Caren Milloy describes some of the challenges overcome and lessons learned by JISC Collections during the development of JISC eCollections.

JISC eCollections is a set of e-resource platforms launched in November 2011 by JISC Collections, in partnership with the JISC data centres EDINA and Mimas. The platforms (Figure 1) are JISC MediaHub, JISC Historic Books and JISC Journal Archives; together, they are intended to provide a sustainable, value-for-money alternative to accessing licensed content on publisher platforms, by consolidating and hosting the broad range of historical book, journal archive and multimedia content purchased by JISC Collections on behalf of the UK education community. The vision is to provide a world-class collection that ensures users’ broadest information needs are well met, and to work in partnership with the community to improve and develop the platforms around evolving student and researcher expectations.

Background

The primary role of JISC Collections is the licensing of content on behalf of its UK Higher Education (HE) and Further Education (FE) member organisations. Over the last 10 years, JISC Collections has invested over £40 million in centralised licensing of digital content, in perpetuity, on behalf of all its members. The first agreement was signed in 2002 for ProQuest’s Early English Books Online (EEBO). Since then, national licences have been negotiated for historic books, journal archives and multimedia content (Figure 1), such as documentaries and educational films. In 2010, JISC Collections invested a further £2.5 million in film and image content, representing UK and world history since 1987, specially selected for teaching and learning. The majority of JISC Collections’ member organisations would be unable to afford per-institution subscriptions to these book, journal and multimedia collections, so centralised licensing is critical to broadening access.

Figure 1: The three platforms that make up the JISC eCollections service

Why Develop JISC eCollections?

The platforms contain more than 4.5 million resources from over 20 providers. JISC Collections members were previously required to access this content via a range of separate services, each with different user interfaces and administrative requirements, and with a complex funding set-up including both JISC subsidies and publisher access fees payable by each institution. JISC Collections felt that its existing – and future – investments in content would best be protected and preserved by developing an independent service, as an affordable alternative to relying on content providers for access to perpetually licensed content. Such a service would allow the education community to take ownership of its acquisitions and assure it of future control. In 2011 each group of resources was consolidated into one platform to increase discoverability, simplify the user experience (making it more inclusive to users at all academic levels), reduce the administrative burden, and thereby enable maximum value to be derived from the initial content investments.

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.

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.

The Institutional Web Management Workshop (IWMW) 2012

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

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

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

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

Connecting Researchers at the University of Bath

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

Jez Cope and Geraldine Jones describe a recent series of events introducing social media to research students at the University of Bath.

The Connected Researcher initiative is a response to both local and sector-wide events. At the University of Bath groups of postgraduate research students from Chemistry and Social Sciences separately expressed an interest in finding out how to profile their own research and establish links with other researchers in their fields.

MyMobileBristol

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

Mike Jones, Simon Price, Nikki Rogers and Damian Steer describe the rationale, aims and progress of MyMobileBristol, highlighting some of the challenges and opportunities that have arisen during the project.

The MyMobileBristol Project is managed and developed by the Web Futures group at the Institute for Learning and Research Technology (ILRT), University of Bristol [1]. The project has a number of broad and ambitious aims and objectives, including collaboration with Bristol City Council on the development or adoption of standards with regard to the exchange of time- and location-sensitive data within the Bristol region, with particular emphasis on transport, the environment and sustainability.

Retooling Special Collections Digitisation in the Age of Mass Scanning

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

Constance Rinaldo, Judith Warnement, Tom Baione, Martin R. Kalfatovic and Susan Fraser describe results from a study to identify and develop a cost-effective and efficient large-scale digitisation workflow for special collections library materials.

The Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) [1] is a consortium of 12 natural history and botanical libraries that co-operate to digitise and make accessible the legacy literature of biodiversity held in their collections and to make that literature available for open access and responsible use as a part of a global 'biodiversity commons.' [2] The participating libraries hold more than two million volumes of biodiversity literature collected over 200 years to support the work of scientists, researchers and students in their home insti

UK Reading Experience Database

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

Bethan Ruddock reports from the launch event for the UK Reading Experience Database, held at the Betty Boothroyd Library, the Open University, Milton Keynes, on 24 February 2011.

I was invited down to the Open University (OU) Betty Boothroyd Library in Milton Keynes for the launch of the UK Reading Experience Database (UK RED) [1]. I had been asked to attend to talk about the LOCAH Project and Linked Data, but I was also looking forward to learning about the RED Project.

This was the first of two launch days, and was designed for librarians, archivists, and information managers. A second launch day for teachers in Higher Education was to be held in London the next day.

What Is UK RED?

The tagline for UK RED is 'the experience of reading in Britain from 1450 to 1945', and the database brings together reading experiences, making them both searchable and browsable. What is a reading experience? It is evidence of anyone alive between the mid-15th and 20thcenturies having read and interacted with a book or other piece of writing, such as magazines, newspapers, letters - even playbills and advertisements. Ownership alone is not enough; there must be something to show that the person in question actually read the work or at least part of it.

This information can be found in a number of places - a printed book review would be an obvious example. The RED team also find many entries in diaries. Such entries can range from simple lists of books that someone has read over the course of a year, to detailed descriptions of when and where they read a particular book, and how they felt about it. Often diary entries are not actually about the book; it is mentioned in passing and in the context of a number of other activities.

While the owner's name on the flyleaf is not itself enough to justify a 'reading experience', annotations to the text are, as they show that the person has actually interacted with the text. Of course, you then have to consider whether the person whose name is on the flyleaf is the same as the person doing the annotating!

RED is much more than a list of 'people who have read books'. The database aims to bring out as much information as possible about the reading experience. The interface to submit a new entry allows you to specify where the reading was taking place, all the way down to a particular room in a particular house. It also aims to identify if the reading was silent or aloud, alone or with other people; whether the book was owned by the reader, a library book, borrowed, or even stolen. All these data are then used to build up a rich database of information on who was reading what (and how!) in Britain.

UK RED is not just concerned with reading experiences within Britain: team members also look at the reading experiences of citizens abroad. Edmund King, Research Associate, Reading Experience Database, OU, told us that, as a consequence, there are fascinating examples of what captured British soldiers were reading in prisoner-of-war (POW) camps as well as examples of what they were not allowed to read. Books in Welsh and Pakistani were banned, as well as atlases and anything about the Russian revolution. I do not know if there are corresponding records for what prisoners in UK POW camps were forbidden to read, but it would be very interesting to find out.

Institutional Challenges in the Data Decade

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

Marion Tattersall, Carmen O'Dell and John Lewis report on Institutional Challenges in the Data Decade, organised by the Digital Curation Centre (DCC) in partnership with the White Rose University Consortium and held 1-3 March 2011 at the University of Sheffield.

Editorial Introduction to Issue 66: Sanity Check