I can safely say that my interview technique needs some work.  Jeremy Paxman can relax.  For now.

In actual fact the SDF did not prove to be the easiest environment to interview academic staff as they were scurrying from workshop to workshop and not terribly amenable to interrogation during tea break.  I did manage to get some recorded material that should still serve as a useful starting point but I do need to think a little more about the questions.

Anyway, here is

My very first interview…

NB.  The lady in this interview HATES Wikis!

      

I’ve just had a very short but interesting meeting with a fast-talking chap from CISCO who is meeting various folk from around the university to discuss potential partnership opportunities.

Mike is bringing CISCO’s networking expertise to education and described the company’s vision of using computer technology and the internet to engage young learners in a more personalised manner than is currently facilitated by traditional, class based education.  I was immediately struck with potential synergies with PC3 (see previous post)

Also, CISCO have recently acquired WebEx Connect which the website describes as “the foundation for a comprehensive collaboration strategy that delivers instant collaboration for your employees and an extensible development platform for you.”  It certainly sounded like it might be highly relevant for PERSoNA and Mike will arrange a demo for us shortly.

      

I have to say that I really enjoyed the Staff Development Festival.  It got me away from my PC, interracting with folk from all over the University face to face and I can catagorically say that the current generation of social networking tools don’t even come close to this more traditional form of interraction!  The permenant stand in the marquee gave us a presence throughout the fortnight and I’ve had the opportunity to speak with a wide range of people from different faculties.  There was, however, variable interest from day to day with the Research Day, as one might expect, being the busiest but I was a little disappointed with a comparative lack of interest on the Carnegie Research Institute Day.

I’ve been given some full text papers to deposit and will follow up on contacts made to secure more still; a lot of interest also in a repository of Learning Objects and we should be able to get some good quality LO content over the next few weeks.

It was very useful also to get to know colleagues from the University Research Office in a less formal setting - previous contact has mainly been in meetings or via email.  Our stands were adjacent (for synergy!) and Babita has agreed to join me in advocacy presentations to faculty staff over the coming months which I think will be extremely useful in helping to get our message accross - and B is, no doubt, more familiar than I with the bureaucratic idiosyncrasies of the Leeds Met research community.

It’s now of pressing importance that metadata schema and taxonomical structure are stable so that we can start uploading content without undue fear of it being dislodged.  Unsurprisingly the academic in the street has not expressed a particularly strong view and this comes very much under a librarian’s remit - Wendy and I will sit down next week with two colleagues and I’m fairly sure we’ll be looking at Library of Congress Subject Headings as the main organisational structure; I’ve already added a skeleton taxonomy based on the top level of LoCSH which is now sitting alongside JACS and Leeds Met faculties (N.B. one of the features of the node based classification in intraLibrary is that an object can be classified under multiple taxonomies)

There are also work flow issues to consider and you would, perhaps, want a professional librarian/cataloguer to ensure consistency of classification, especially under the LoCSH so may be we’d ask an academic to classify just under faculty and then send the object to a librarian’s workflow for more accurate classification under LoCSH before it is published to the library.

And then there is the manner in which I am currently using intraLibrary’s collections for content by faculty - I originally adopted this approach as Mike T suggested it would be the easiest way facilitate a demo browse tree in his modification of the search interface but we now need to decide whether it would be more appropriate for faculty to go in a metadata field - probably not; it’s not a simple DC field that would be much use for external system searching and using collections in this way probably means we could lose the faculty classification hierarchy altogether and facilitate a more transparent workflow (using collections) to ensure objects are easily identifiable by faculty which is only really useful to us in any case.

In outline then, MIGHT it look like this:

The only taxonomy in intraLibrary is LoCSH; collections stay as they are now, one for each faculty and one for ALL Learning Objects (i.e. they go in one collection and are not distinguishable by faculty)

When an academic uploads a research paper (a challenge all in itself!) they need to specify a collection (i.e. a faculty) as part of the workflow, enter very basic metadata (title, author[s]) and upload; they DON’T classify - it is then passed to a librarian who augments metadata appropriately and classifies it under LoCSH before publishing it to the library.  (N.B. what if faculty names change and these collections are set in stone?)

When someone uploads a Learning Object they need to specify the Learning Object collection as part of the workflow, enter very basic metadata (title, author[s]) and upload; they DON’T classify - it is then passed to a librarian who augments metadata appropriately and classifies it under LoCSH before publishing it to the library.

…all of this for the meeting next week.

Well, I’ve set my stall.  Almost.  A couple of Innovation North tablecloths, posters, leaflets and my brand new recoil stand.  Adjacent to the University Research Office for synergy.  It’s missing something though, je ne sais qua…it needs someone with a bit more artistic flair than I…

One activity that I intend to carry out during the Festival is ad hoc interviews with a cross section of colleagues about their understanding and use of web 2.0.  I plan to be relatively informal - grab a digital recorder and wander around with my mic like John Sargeant - then I can edit the results and post on here as a podcast; though I will also try to apply the principles of IPA and extract some meaningful data that we can then use as a springboard for more detailed exploration.

Leeds Met is a University of Festivals, we are often told, and the next fortnight will be the Staff Development Festival which will provide a unique opportunity to promote The Repository.  And I’m going Scuba diving, albeit in a swimming pool.

All the repository pieces are now in place and I intend to demo the search interface and the repository proper, presenting it as a semi-blank canvas that now needs to be painted upon by the University community.  I’ve already had some feedback from Jonathan Long, Director of the Carnegie Research Institute and a member of the consultancy group who would like a search to return formal Harvard references for each item emphasising that one of the reasons for setting up the repository is to increase the number of citations - the interface is just ‘out of the box’ at the moment and returning results in the manner of the IRISS interface - I’ll gather input over the next fortnight and Mike should be able to do some customisation when we have a clearer idea of what people want.  I might even have a go myself although, with no knowledge of php, I can’t make head nor tail of the site files, my web skills having stalled at basic HTML, CSS and (very basic) Java Script.  Mike has already added browse functionality which is, for the moment, based on faculty structure - I’ve set up a collection within intraLibrary for each faculty and it is these that Mike is using to generate the results although it should also be possible to use metadata fields - I think we will map DC ’subject’ onto LOM ‘keyword’.  It might be tricky to incorporate numbers of records after browse links and I’m waiting to see what Mike has to say on this.

Anyway, for now, I have 5 citations per faculty which is adequate for initial demonstrations and I’m working on some full text content - several of the citations I’ve uploaded are RoMEO green/yellow so it’s just a matter of getting hold of author versions.

As for promotional material, I’ve ordered a big purple recoil stand similar to that for the Library and I’ve three info sheets to print up in quantity:

The Repository is an introduction to the project and to IRs specifying our dual remit for the Leeds Met repository.

Open Access: What’s in it for you? emphasises the evidence that OA increases citation (using a graph from Steve Lawrence’s seminal article Online or Invisible? (2001) which is a bit out of date but by far the clearest visual representation I have been able to find.)

And

Copyright presents a very simple flowchart of the (self)-archiving process.

I shall also try to put together a narrated presentation to run when I’m not there.  A couple of lap-tops and we’re away!

Incidentally, here is a link to the search interface:

http://repos-dev.leedsmet.ac.uk/main/index.php

(Currently only accessible from a Leeds Met IP)

The Repository is really starting to take shape; the search interface has now been installed on a development server (as discussed previously, we are using the IRISS SRU client) and is returning very satisfying results on my test content. Now we can start adding the extra functionality (browse, advanced search) - well Mike T can at any rate, and my more technically inclined colleagues - and then to customise the look and feel, though Mike has already added an enormous Leeds Met Rose!

Ongoing development of the interface will also feed into PERSoNA - in a meeting today with John and Mike, Wendy and I discussed one initial approach being to embed the search box/additional search functionality from the interface into a google app (feeding into Leeds Met’s developing partnership with Google) or some kind of generic plug-in or widget. I’ll try to expand on this at some point on PERSoNA News and ask for some pertinent blog input from John and Mike.

And I’ve uploaded my first research paper! A colleague in the library has a paper published in the Reference Services Review - which is a subsiduary of Emerald - and RoMEO green; Do Academic Enquiry Services Scare Students? (This link to the Emerald full text, not the author’s version in The Repository.)

At the moment I am very much focussed on the Staff Development Festival in September and have also been uploading citation information for demonstration purposes - I hope to use the Festival to encourage folk to supply full text copies of their research papers which can then be uploaded in line with publishers’ copyright transfer agreements and we can finally start building that representative body of content. I’ve set up a basic taxonomy within intraLibrary based on Leeds Met faculties and intend to upload 5-10 citations per faculty which I’m linking through to publishers’ abstract pages where possible. This should give us the opportunity to review metadata and get a preliminary idea of the workflow as well as illustrating to people why they might want to release copies of their work from behind subscription barriers (look, there can be links to your work all over the web but you can’t get any further than the abstract without a subscription fee.) The final choice of taxonomy should also be informed by demonstrations to academic staff - we already know that the steering group does not want to base it on faculties as the major organisational structure.

Mike has said that he can do some very preliminary customisation of the search interface before the festival to illustrate how the external browse functionality might work - this will be based on the taxonomies as they currently appear within intraLibrary and, given the short amount of time, will be for demonstration purposes only and probably won’t return dynamic results but should give people the opportunity to visualise the interface and comment on its development.

A fortnight’s leave away from the repositorysphere I found takes some adjustment and though I didn’t go anywhere near cyberspace for 8 whole days I did need something to wean me off as the rain lashed against the Cornish countryside.

Wikinomics: How mass collaboration changes everything is an insightful read, much of which is relevant to repositories, EMERGE and JISC in general. Some of it isn’t; like Boeing building their jets collaboratively and a gold mining company putting their trade secrets into the public domain and apparently crowdsourcing for insights on where to sink their next shaft. It worked. Spectacularly. And I’m struggling to encourage comment on my blog but then I’m not offering thousands of dollars in prize money!

The link above is to the book on Amazon; since coming back online I’ve also been looking at the website http://www.wikinomics.com/

For the record, holiday reading also included the wonderful Notes from an Exhibition by Patrick Gale and the slightly heavy going Headlong by Michael Frayn which I did enjoy in spite of my lack of knowledge of art history (my enjoyment was augmented, incidentally, by being able to easily access reproductions of the Dutch materpieces mentioned on…the world wide web!)

Now about that prize money, where’s the project budget?