Paul Stainthorpblog | Paul Stainthorp

This is the end: Jerome project

Paul Stainthorp — Mon, 01 Aug 2011 10:44:19 +0000

The JISC-funded Jerome project ended on 31 July 2011. Here are the final few project blog posts:

The Jerome search portal itself is [still] at http://jerome.library.lincoln.ac.uk/, and the open data APIs are all being documented on http://data.lincoln.ac.uk/ – we’ll not be switching any of it off any time soon

Subdomain dot something dot blah dot uk

Paul Stainthorp — Thu, 28 Jul 2011 10:49:00 +0000

The University of Lincoln has… rather a lot of web subdomains. Some might say too many. Our JISC funded Linking You project touched on this problem (assuming it is a problem), and then slowly—and wisely—backed away.

All of the following can by found using a Google domain search – each of these can be suffixed by “lincoln.ac.uk” to form a real domain name:

Disclaimer: I’ve no idea how many of these are current, official, or meaningful. However, here’s a humble proposal: if you want a new subdomain under *.lincoln.ac.uk, you have to have it tattooed on your arm first.

And I’ve not even got started on our own dirt – the University Library’s own little handful of subdomains.

Firstly, what the Library hasn’t got. There’s nothing to see at:

library.lincoln.ac.uk

(i.e. we’ve nothing at the ‘root’ Library subdomain. A couple of people have spotted this slight illogicality.)

Now what we have got, or have had in the recent past:

www.library.lincoln.ac.uk

…this points at our SirsiDynix HiP 3.08 library catalogue. Really, if anything, this ought to represent the overall web presence of the Library, with HiP relegated to something like catalogue.library.lincoln.ac.uk

jerome.library.lincoln.ac.uk

…the Jerome project.

blogs.library.lincoln.ac.uk

…which is defunct and redirects to the main blogs site.

eprints.library.lincoln.ac.uk

…a moribund, older installation of our EPrints Repository used for the 2008 RAE.

UKCoRR are getting social

Paul Stainthorp — Fri, 15 Jul 2011 13:22:59 +0000

This is a copy of a post that I wrote for the UKCoRR (UK Council of Research Repositories) blog, at: http://ukcorr.blogspot.com/

While UKCoRR’s “official” web presence is in the shop for repairs, we’ve been taking tentative steps to securing UKCoRR a space on some of the big social websites. In no particular order, we now have profiles on:

Facebook

Twitter (@ukcorr)

Slideshare

LinkedIn

Rather than obsess and worry about whether to engage with these (or any other social sites: Google+, anyone?), the committee are taking the time-honoured “just do it” approach, and ~~assuming~~ hoping that our fellow UKCoRR members—inherently social creatures all!—will naturally gravitate to using those sites with which they’re most comfortable.

…none of this is intended to replace in any way the existing tools for UKCoRR networking which have already proved themselves so useful: the events and the members’ mailing list.

Q. Where else on the open web should UKCoRR plant its flag?

Next up: news of what we have planned for the main UKCoRR web site.

Paul Stainthorp
UKCoRR Web & Publicity Officer

10 practical & accessible library technology blogs

Paul Stainthorp — Fri, 17 Jun 2011 20:48:15 +0000

Here are ten of the best practical library tech blogs that I follow. They’re all about technology (ish), but they’re not geeky or inaccessible. Most but not all, are written by people in of UK Higher Education libraries. In case you want to subscribe to them en masse, I’ve bundled them up into an OPML file which you should be able to import into a feed reader (e.g. Google Reader).

Q. Have you got a good library technology blog? Care to share?

Copac Developments
What’s happening behind the scenes at Copac
Electronic Resources Blog
Library Services, University of Huddersfield
eLibrary
eLibrary team, Birmingham City University
Fulup’s blog
A librarian at De Montfort University
Musings around librarianship
Aaron Tay, a librarian at the National University of Singapore
NewT Bham – where technology and libraries meet
New Technologies Group at the University of Birmingham Library
Phil Bradley’s Weblog
Internet consultant and (2011) CILIP Vice-president
ResourceShelf ResourceBlog
“We find the sources; you get the credit!“
“Self-plagiarism is style” – Dave Pattern’s blog
Library Systems Manager at the University of Huddersfield
UoL Library Blog – develop, debate, innovate
University of Leicester

Where are we with the VRE?

Paul Stainthorp — Wed, 30 Mar 2011 12:39:40 +0000

(Taken from: http://vreproject.blogs.lincoln.ac.uk/)

The VRE project at the University of Lincoln is looking at building, from scratch, a lightweight, modular, loosely-coupled online environment which will allow academic staff, students & external researchers to collaborate on research projects using a ‘toolkit’ of re-usable applications (calendaring, document authoring, web publishing, rights management, etc.)

We’re installing and trialling a couple of applications which could provide the framework of the VRE itself:

Ojax++

Open Atrium

And we’re looking at a mixture of existing and new web applications and initiatives (shared calendars, RefWorks, the Google Docs API, the Repository, WordPress) to provide the constituent applications of the VRE.

Maths ‘n’ Stats support centre website

Paul Stainthorp — Tue, 07 Dec 2010 13:10:26 +0000

I’ve been working on a little website for the University of Lincoln’s resident statistician, John Flynn, to promote to students (and their lecturers) the services of the Lincoln Maths and Statistics Support Centre.

It’s [yet another] WordPress site on the University’s blogging / self-publishing platform, ‘themed’ with the University’s new-ish CWD (Common Web Design) template.

The support centre itself operates out of the GCW University Library (“Learning Development” suite) three days a week, and helps students with assessment worries and analysis for project work. Related: sigma – Centre for Excellence in Mathematics & Statistics Support.

The website is at: http://mathsandstats.blogs.lincoln.ac.uk/

I’ve also added a widget to the Library ‘tab’ on Blackboard, which displays links to the [currently] 4 pages on the Maths and Stats website. This I created using the site’s RSS feed (it has the WordPress ‘RSS Include Pages‘ plugin activated) – fed through Feed2JS to turn it into JavaScript-within-HTML tags – then embedded within a Blackboard HTML widget. Easy peasy.

Jings: RefWorks

Paul Stainthorp — Tue, 12 Oct 2010 17:43:45 +0000

For more than a year, I’ve been meaning to resurrect my website of tips & tricks for reference management. I finally got around to doing so today, with a new video tutorial about sending references to a RefWorks account from the University of Lincoln Repository.

You can see it at – http://refworks.blogs.lincoln.ac.uk/

Last July, inspired by my colleague (CERD Technology Officer) Joss Winn‘s collection of Google Search Tutorials, I began creating my own screencast videos, with the intention that they would “build up over time into a collection of useful video tutorials to help [people] use RefWorks personal bibliographic management software“.

I still think there’s real potential in creating short, single-issue video tutorials, published in blog form, to address RefWorks / bibliography management FAQs. So I’m now going to attempt to keep on top of it and add a new video every week. I’m creating the screencasts using TechSmith Jing software, and the site itself is running on WordPress (on the University of Lincoln’s own blogs service, at: blogs.lincoln.ac.uk).

Jing (and the associated screencast.com website) makes it reasonably easy to create screencasts with audio, and to embed them in any web page (including a WordPress blog post)…

…and you might assume that six or seven years of presenting live radio would make easy for me to knock off professional-sounding voiceovers straight into a headset mic. Yes; you might very well assume that.

The first six tools for practical Library 2.0

Paul Stainthorp — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 14:32:28 +0000

The_first_six_tools_for_practical_web_2.htm

A list of six free Web 2.0 tools and technologies that may be of use to libraries. Adapted from a post on the University of Lincoln’s library staff blog.

View this item on the University Repository: http://eprints.lincoln.ac.uk/2528/