Overview of content related to 'dissemination'

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

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

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

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

23rd International CODATA Conference

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

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

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

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.

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.

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?’

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.

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.

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.

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.

Developing Research Excellence and Methods (DREaM) Project Launch Conference

lisrw — Mon, 27 Feb 2012 16:59:05 +0000

Ray Harper reports on a one-day conference which launched the DREaM Project, held by the Library and Information Science Research Coalition in London on 19 July 2011.

The DREaM (Developing Research Excellence and Methods) Conference [1] was held at the British Library Conference Centre in London in July 2011. The conference was attended by 86 delegates, and consisted of an overview of the DREaM Project, two keynote papers, a one-minute madness session, and four parallel breakout sessions. I had the opportunity to attend as a sponsored delegate, thanks to Glen Recruitment, Sue Hill Recruitment and TFPL.

Book Review: The Future of Archives and Recordkeeping

lisrw — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 14:50:08 +0000

John Azzolini reviews an anthology of perceptive essays on the challenges presented to archival thought and practice by Web 2.0, postmodern perspectives, and cross-disciplinary interchanges.

Librarians, archivists, and records managers do not share identical challenges or controversies in their practical endeavours or theoretical queries. However, a common issue for all the information professions and a dominating topic of discussion in their literature is the fundamental change in the structure and distribution of knowledge caused by mass digitisation. The proliferation of daily digital content, in quantity, reach, and manifestation, is confronting them all with a disquieting role ambiguity. The expanding tools and expectations of Web 2.0 have made this self-questioning a recurrent one, but they have also stimulated invigorating debate on the purpose and direction of these fields. The perception is one of extraordinary change initiated by emerging technologies, unprecedented knowledge production and dissemination, and a new centralised role for the information user. In these galvanising changes leading library and archives practitioners are sensing opportunities for confirming the professions’ relevance, in the estimation of other scholarly disciplines and of society at large, but, perhaps most of all, in their own eyes as well.

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.

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.

A Double-edged Sword: What Are the Implications of Freedom of Information for the HE Sector?

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

Amy Gibbons reports on the second in a series of workshops organised by the Research Information Network to explore the impact of the Freedom of Information Act on the Higher Education sector, held at University College London on 1 April 2011.

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.

Book Review: Envisioning Future Academic Library Services

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

John Azzolini reviews a timely collection of essays that highlights the values of institutional leadership and resourcefulness in academic librarianship's engagements with Web 2.0.

Since networked information technology has initiated a breathtaking transformation of knowledge practices, librarians have had a generous supply of thought leaders whose lifetime experience has permitted them to issue credible translations of the 'writing on the wall'. Recently, however, there seems to be many more analysts (and soothsayers) and much more anxious observation and published interpretation of such writing. And the message comes in a red ink, in bold, and with distinct portent, when not downright ominous.

RefShare: A Community of Practice to Enhance Research Collaboration

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

Tertia Coetsee describes a community of practice for postgraduate students in phytomedicine using RefShare, to enhance collaborative research.

10 Cheap and Easy Ways to Amplify Your Event

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

Marieke Guy describes new tools and services that can help you get your event heard.

In 2007 Lorcan Dempsey coined the phrase 'the amplified conference' [1]. He used the term to refer to how event outputs (such as talks and presentations) were being amplified 'through a variety of network tools and collateral communications'.

Characterising and Preserving Digital Repositories: File Format Profiles

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

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

Repository Fringe 2010

editor — Fri, 29 Oct 2010 23:00:00 +0000

Martin Donnelly (and friends) report on the Repository Fringe "unconference" held at the National e-Science Centre in Edinburgh, Scotland, over 2-3 September 2010.

2010 was the third year of Repository Fringe, and slightly more formally organised than its antecedents, with an increased number of discursive presentations and less in the way of organised chaos! The proceedings began on Wednesday 1 September with a one-day, pre-event SHERPA/RoMEO API Workshop [1] run by the Repositories Support Project team.

Survive or Thrive

editor — Fri, 29 Oct 2010 23:00:00 +0000

Ed Fay reports on a two-day conference organised by UKOLN on behalf of JISC to consider growth and use of digital content on the Web, which was held in Manchester in June 2010.

Survive or Thrive [1] is the punchy title given to an event intended to stimulate serious consideration amongst digital collections practitioners about future directions in our field - opportunities but also potential pitfalls. The event, which focused on content in HE, comes at a time of financial uncertainty when proving value is of increasing importance in the sector and at a point when significant investment has already been made in the UK into content creation, set against a backdrop of increasingly available content on the open Web from a multitude of sources.

Europeana Open Culture 2010

editor — Fri, 29 Oct 2010 23:00:00 +0000

David Fuegi and Monika Segbert-Elbert report on the annual Europeana Conference, held at the Westergasfabriek in Amsterdam in October 2010.

The Europeana Conference is a free annual event which highlights current challenges for libraries, museums, archives and audio-visual archives and which looks for practical solutions for the future. It connects the main actors in cultural and scientific heritage in order to build networks and establish future collaborations. The Europeana Open Culture 2010 Conference [1] was the third annual conference and the biggest so far. It focused on how the cultural institutions can create public value by making digital, cultural and scientific information openly available.

Internet Librarian International Conference 2010

editor — Fri, 29 Oct 2010 23:00:00 +0000

Claire Tylee, Katrin Flemming and Elly Cope report on the two-day Internet Librarian International Conference focusing on innovation and technology in the information profession, held in London on 14-15 October 2010.

Table of Contents

Thursday 14 October
Track A: Looking Ahead to Value

Thursday 14 October

Track A: Looking Ahead to Value

A102: Future of Academic Libraries

Mal Booth, University of Technology Sydney (Australia)

Michael Jubb, Research Information Network (UK)

Mal Booth from the University of Technology Sydney started the session by giving an insight into current plans and projects underway to inform a new library building due to open in 2015 as part of a major redeveloped city campus.

Trove: Innovation in Access to Information in Australia

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

Rose Holley describes a major development in the Australian national digital information infrastructure.

In late 2009 the National Library of Australia released version 1 of Trove [1] to the public. Trove is a free search engine. It searches across a large aggregation of Australian content. The treasure is over 90 million items from over 1000 libraries, museums, archives and other organisations which can be found at the click of a button. Finding information just got easier for many Australians. Exploring a wealth of resources and digital content like never before, including full-text books, journals and newspaper articles, images, music, sound, video, maps, Web sites, diaries, letters, archives, people and organisations has been an exciting adventure for users and the service has been heavily used. Finding and retrieving instantly information in context; interacting with content and social engagement are core features of the service. This article describes Trove features, usage, content building, and its applications for contributors and users in the national context.

Opportunities for Libraries

I see tremendous opportunities for libraries this year because of advances in technology. The changes in technology mean that anyone can create, describe or recommend content, which means that many people and organisations are becoming librarians or libraries in their own way. Librarians should not be threatened or dismayed by this but rather encouraged, since it means that society is retaining its ongoing interest in the creation, organisation and dissemination of content, and we have an integral role to play in these developments. Libraries and librarians are relevant more than ever in this environment because we have vast amounts of data and information to share, a huge amount of information expertise, and an understanding of how technology can assist us in making information more accessible.

We need to have new ideas and re-examine our old ideas to see how technology can help us. What things have we always wanted to do that we couldn't before, like providing a single point of access to all Australian information? Is this still pie in the sky or can we now achieve it? Libraries need to think big. As Charles Leadbeater would say 'Libraries need to think they are leading a mass movement, not just serving a clientele.' [2] Librarians are often thought of as gatekeepers with the emphasis being on closed access, but technology enables gatekeepers to open doors as well as close them and this is the opportunity I see. However many institutions will need to change their strategic thinking from control/shut to free/open before they can make this transition, and take a large dose of courage as well. The American author Harriet Rubin says, 'Freedom is actually a bigger game than power. Power is about what you can control. Freedom is about what you can unleash.' [3] The National Library of Australia already took this step forward in 2008 with the advent of the Australian Newspapers beta service, which opened up the raw text of digitised Australian newspapers to the public for improvement, without moderation on a mass scale [4]. With a long history of collaboration across the Australian cultural heritage sector [5] with regard to digitisation, storage, and service delivery, the National Library of Australia is well placed to take the lead with innovation in access to information.

Some people may say, 'But isn't Google doing that, so why do we still need libraries?' There is no question in my mind that libraries are fundamentally different from Google and other similar services. Libraries are different to Google for these reasons: they commit to provide long-term preservation, curation and access to their content; they have no commercial motives in the provision of information (deemed by various library acts); they aim for universal access to everyone in society; and they are 'free for all'. To summarise: libraries are always and forever. Who can say that of a search engine, or of any commercial organisation, regardless of size?

Intute Reflections at the End of an Era

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

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

Retooling Libraries for the Data Challenge

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

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

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

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

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

Characteristics of Research Data

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

Size and Scope

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

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

Variability

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

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

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

Editorial Introduction to Issue 63: Consider the Users in the Field

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

Richard Waller introduces Ariadne issue 63.

For those who can either remember or are battling still to make the technology work, be it coding, integration or test, it is easy and understandable enough if the technology assumes an overwhelming profile on the horizon of one's project and daily work. It is very understandable when they privately grumble that colleagues unburdened with the minutiae of such work display a breath-taking insouciance to the consequences of asking for a change in spec because there has been an unexpected development in the requirements of the users.

A Pragmatic Approach to Preferred File Formats for Acquisition

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

Dave Thompson sets out the pragmatic approach to preferred file formats for long-term preservation used at the Wellcome Library.

This article sets out the Wellcome Library's decision not explicitly to specify preferred file formats for long-term preservation. It discusses a pragmatic approach in which technical appraisal of the material is used to assess the Library's likelihood of preserving one format over another. The Library takes as its starting point work done by the Florida Digital Archive in setting a level of 'confidence' in its preferred formats. The Library's approach provides for nine principles to consider as part of appraisal. These principles balance economically sustainable preservation and intellectual 'value' with the practicalities of working with specific, and especially proprietary, file formats. Scenarios are used to show the application of principles (see Annex below).

This article will take a technical perspective when assessing material for acquisition by the Library. In reality technical factors are only part of the assessment of material for inclusion in the Library's collections. Other factors such as intellectual content, significance of the material, significance of the donor/creator and any relationship to material already in the Library also play a part. On this basis, the article considers 'original' formats accepted for long-term preservation, and does not consider formats appropriate for dissemination.

This reflects the Library's overall approach to working with born digital archival material. Born digital material is treated similarly to other, analogue archival materials. The Library expects archivists to apply their professional skills regardless of the format of any material, to make choices and decisions about material based on a range of factors and not to see the technical issues surrounding born digital archival material as in any way limiting.

Why Worry about Formats?

Institutions looking to preserve born digital material permanently, the Wellcome Library included, may have little control over the formats in which material is transferred or deposited. The ideal intervention point from a preservation perspective is at the point digital material is first created. However this may be unrealistic. Many working within organisations have no choice in the applications they use, cost of applications may be an issue, or there may simply be a limited number of applications available on which to perform specialist tasks. Material donated after an individual retires or dies can prove especially problematic. It may be obsolete, in obscure formats, on obsolete media and without any metadata describing its context, creation or rendering environment.

Computer applications 'save' their data in formats, each application typically having its own file format. The Web site filext [1] lists some 25,000 file extensions in its database.

The long-term preservation of any format depends on the type of format, issues of obsolescence, and availability of hardware and/or software, resources, experience and expertise. Any archive looking to preserve born digital archival material needs to have the means and confidence to move material across the 'gap' that exists between material 'in the wild' and holding it securely in an archive.

This presents a number of problems: first, in the proliferation of file formats; second, in the use of proprietary file formats, and third, in formats becoming obsolete, either by being incompatible with later versions of the applications that created them, or by those applications no longer existing. This assumes that proprietary formats are more problematic to preserve as their structure and composition are not known, which hinders preservation intervention by imposing the necessity for specialist expertise. Moreover, as new software is created, so new file formats proliferate, and consequently exacerbate the problem.

News and Events

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

Ariadne presents a brief summary of news and events.

Engagement, Impact, Value Workshop

University of Manchester
Monday 24 May 2010
http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/engagement-impact-value-201005/

Editorial Introduction to Issue 62: The Wisdom of Communities

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

Richard Waller introduces Ariadne issue 62.

Readers of last year's issues will possibly have been aware of a small initiaitive on Ariadne's part to give practitioners with in the archives field the opportunity to voice their views on developments in their airspace. You may recall in Issue 61 an open and sincere investigation by Michael Kennedy into his views of the wider involvement of non-professionals in the generation of information for archival entries.

An Attack on Professionalism and Scholarship? Democratising Archives and the Production of Knowledge

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

Andrew Flinn describes some recent developments in democratising the archive and asks whether these developments really deserve to be viewed as a threat to professional and academic standards.

This article was originally delivered as a paper for the 'Archives 2.0: Shifting Dialogues Between Users and Archivists' conference organised by the University of Manchester's ESRC Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change (CRESC) in March 2009. The paper came at an opportune time. I was absorbed in a research project examining independent and community archival initiatives in the UK and exploring the possibilities of user- (or community-)generated and contributed content for archives and historical research [1]. Furthermore I had just received referees' comments on a proposed research project examining the potential impact of the latter developments on professional archival practice. Whilst two of the reports were very positive, one was more than a little hostile. The reviewer was scathing about the focus of the proposed research on the democratisation of knowledge production, dismissing the notion as part of a short-term political agenda that was detrimental to the idea of scholarship and one with which the archive profession should not concern itself. In particular, scorn was reserved for the idea that, in future archive catalogues, many 'voices' might be enabled 'to supplement or even supplant the single, authoritative, professional voice', an idea which was described as being, in extremis, 'a frontal attack on professionalism, standards and scholarship'.

At the time of receiving this review and considering my response, I was also beginning to write my paper for the conference and had already decided that my theme would be democratising the archive. However I realised that these comments neatly encapsulated a powerful and genuine strand of thinking within the archive profession and academia more generally, which one might loosely term 'traditional'. Although there are now many user-generated content archive and heritage projects in existence, and terms such as participatory archives, Archives 2.0 and even History 2.0 are an increasingly common part of professional discourse [2], some, perhaps many, archivists and scholars remain deeply sceptical about the need for a democratisation of the archive and of scholarship.

In the end the research project was supported by the AHRC despite the critical review and has now commenced [3]. However, in this brief article I will try to respond to this strand of thinking by, first identifying what is meant by the democratisation of the archive and why advocates of such a thing believe it to be important. I will then briefly introduce two different but linked developments (independent or community archives and user- or community-generated content), which in harness with new technologies might play a role in such a democratisation, and in so doing challenge aspects of traditional archival thinking and practice. Finally I will offer a few thoughts on the shifts in our understanding of the archive and the resistance to those shifts. Ultimately, I will suggest that rather than viewing this debate as one between the expert (or the academic or the professional) and the crowd, it is in the concept of communities that the key might be found. A successful democratised and participatory archive is one which recognises that all those who come into contact with the archive (directly or indirectly), the 'community of the record', can and do affect our understanding and knowledge of that archive.

Uncovering User Perceptions of Research Activity Data

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

Cecilia Loureiro-Koechlin discusses the outcomes and lessons learned from user tests performed on the Oxford Blue Pages, a tool designed to display information about researchers and their activities at the University of Oxford.

Competition, complex environments and needs for sophisticated resources and collaborations compel Higher Education institutions (HEIs) to look for innovative ways to support their research processes and improve the quality and dissemination of their research outcomes. Access, management and sharing of information about research activities and researchers (who, what, when and where) lie at the heart of all these needs and driving forces for improvements.

Intranet Management: Divine Comedy or Strategic Imperative?

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

Martin White suggests that a failure to recognise the value of intranets is a symptom of a failure to recognise information as a strategic asset.

According to Dante in his Divine Comedy the inscription above the door to Hades reads "Abandon hope all ye who enter here". For many this could also be the sign on the home page of their organisation's intranet as, with business-critical decisions to make, they begin the daily hunt for information that they are sure should be somewhere in the application. It could just as easily be the sign on the door of the intranet manager of the organisation, though this door usually also carries a number of other job descriptions, all of which seem to be given more priority by the organisation than the care and development of the intranet. Most organisations of any size will have a full-time web manager, often with a support team, but this is rarely the case with the intranet.

There are a substantial number of intranets in the UK. Statistics from the Office for National Statistics indicate that 22% of all businesses have an intranet [1]. As the size of the business increases so does the level of penetration, and most businesses of more than 500 people will now have some form of intranet. Given the number of businesses in the UK the author estimates that there are probably around 300,000 intranets in the commercial sector, and at a guess a further 100,000 in the public sector, charities, Higher Education institutions (HEIs) and other organisations. Only over the last few years has any reliable statistical information become available on intranet use and development, and this is a in-depth global survey of only around 300 intranets [2]. In the UK HEI sector a major opportunity was lost in a survey commissioned in 2009 by Eduserv into the management of web content in the HEI sector as no account of intranet use of CMS applications was included in the scope of the survey [3]. A survey of SharePoint use in HEIs undertaken for Eduserv in late 2009 [4] did indicate that a number of institutions were using SharePoint for intranet applications but the survey did not look in detail at intranet implementation.

It is also only over the last few years have forums been set up in which intranet managers are able to share experiences and challenges with others. The work of the Intranet Benchmark Forum [5] is focused on providing services to large organisations, but there are also other virtual and physical discussion forums, such as the Intranet Forum [6] run by UKeiG for its members. It is probably reasonable to suggest that the majority of intranet managers have seen very few intranets from which to gain a sense of good practice, whereas web managers have an almost unlimited supply of sites from which to gain ideas for their own use. This is as true in the HEI sector as in other sectors. Given the installed base of intranets in the UK it is also surprising that there is no 'intranet conference' event even though intranet management does feature in events such as Online Information [7]. Most countries in northern Europe have an intranet conference [8], often with several hundred delegates, so why there is no equivalent in the UK is a mystery.

Intranets Are Different

All too often an intranet is regarded as an internal web site. The reality is that about the only commonality between an intranet and a web site is the use of web browser technology. Many very successful intranets do not even use a web content management application but instead are based on Notes technology or portal applications. Intranet content contribution is usually highly distributed, with individual members of staff publishing content direct to the intranet perhaps only a few times a year. This means that the web content management system has to be highly intuitive, and enable Word documents to be rendered into clean HTML code to create web pages. The teams supporting public web sites are using the systems every working day, working often in HTML and having a much more limited range of content to cope with. Many of the problems that arise in keeping content current on an intranet are a result of staff having to use a complex Web publishing system that was specified for Web site management and not intranet management.

Another factor to be considered is that increasingly intranets are federated applications [9]. This is often the situation in HEIs where each department wants to have its own intranet, and on top of all these individual intranets there is some form of top-level 'corporate' home page and navigation. Often there is no central coordination of these intranets, and so each adopts some or none of the visual design standards of the HEI.

As far as enterprise applications are concerned, intranets are different because they are not based on business processes or work-flow. Finance, registry, personnel and most other applications support well-defined processes, usually within a specific department, and where the content requirements are usually specified in database terms. Anything approaching text content is usually relegated to a single field in the database. Intranets exist because there is a substantial amount of information in any organisation that is not based on business processes and cannot be managed within a formal database structure, such as policies, procedures, campus maps, events, staff notices and hundreds of other information formats produced by every department and location within the organisation.

As a result the intranet becomes an information dumping ground. Under-resourced intranet managers do not have the resources to maintain content quality, and so multiple versions of documents with no visible ownership or provenance proliferate. Employees leave or change responsibility but the intranet is based on a 'file-and-forget' principle and no effort is taken to ensure that document ownership is transferred to another member of staff. Very quickly the information architecture of the intranet, based usually on the structure of the organisation at the time of the last WCMS (Web content management system) deployment, is not fit for purpose. The decision is taken to implement a search engine, and only then does the scale of the problem of information decay become apparent. It can also be an interesting exercise to search for 'Confidential' and see just how many documents are returned!