The meeting consisted of a series of presentations (plus a fantastic lunchtime diversion, below) with plenty of time for networking – there were about 40 people there, all with an interest in research data management – though interestingly, a show of hands suggested very few people were actively engaged in looking after their own institution’s researchers’ data.

As usual, this blog post has been partially reconstructed from the Twitter stream (hashtag #ustlg).

First up, Laura Molloy, substituting for Joy Davidson of the Digital Curation Centre (DCC), on a project called the Data Management Skills Support Initiative (DaMSSI), looking at the [shades of information literacy] skills needed by different people involved in the research data curation process. “DaMSSI aims to facilitate the use of tools like Vitae’s Researcher Development Framework (RDF) and the Seven Pillars of Information Literacy model” developed by SCONUL. Key question: how do you assess the effectiveness of research data management training?

Useful links:

• DaMMSI project website
• Final report and recommendations (PDF)
• JISC Research data management training materials (RDMTrain) programme
• Researcher Development Framework (RDF)
• SCONUL seven pillars of information literacy

Second, Yvonne Nobis of Cambridge’s Central Science Library talked about supporting researchers at Cambridge: data sharing and the role of librarians; including her project—funded through CUL’s Arcadia library staff research scheme—looking at the issues involved in curating not research data per se, but the software code and techniques used to analyse that source data. Key points: [1] there are disincentives (time, and lack of recognition within ones own field) to researchers’ spending time on code/software for research data manipulation. [2] But without that investment in code, the transparency–openness–replicability of computational-data science is at risk. [3] ”Librarians are missing a trick” by not engaging in research data software curation issues. Yvonne also talked about the work of the eScience Centre.

Links and articles…

• Yvonne Nobis’s Arcadia project
• JISC SWOP (SoftWare Ontology Project)
• Tsinoremas, N.F. et al. (2011) Data in Motion: a new paradigm in Research Data Lifecycle Management. Princeton Workshop, 18–20 July 2011
• Science (journal) special free online issue: ‘Dealing with Data‘ (February 2011)
• Wikipedia Gene Wiki portal – used for crowdsourced annotation of genomics data.
• Cambridge eScience Centre

Before lunch we also got a chance to inspect the USTLG’s brand new website (and smashing new logo), at ustlg.org

Then the highlight of the day… we were invited in groups over to go over to the adjacent University Library, where we were treated to a display and commentary on some of Cambridge University’s rare science manuscripts and early printed books. All laid out in a reading room were Isaac Newton’s notebooks containing his notes on the method of fluxions (i.e. early calculus), Darwin’s field notes from the Beagle, Ernest Rutherford’s lab diaries (still slightly radioactive! – “…not ever so, but Health & Safety made us do a risk-assessment…”), plus Prof. Stephen Hawking’s typed and ring-bound first draft of A brief history of time, along with several early printed herbals and a book containing the first known technical drawings (of machines of warfare). Inspiring stuff, and really quite brilliant of them to lay it out for us to see!

In the afternoon—not directly connected with research data, but certainly of interest to the engineers involved in the Orbital project—we heard from Rachel Berrington of the IEEE, about the work of the organisation and some of the planned developments to the IEEE Xplore platform: new journal titles in 2012, a mobile platform, the inclusion of CrossRef data, and new interactive HTML content.

Handful of interesting links:

• IEEE Client Services– training & promotional materials, administration tools, usage stats.
• Mobile version of IEEE Xplore
• The Engineering Libraries Division of the American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) – kind of a US equivalent to USTLG.

Finally, a useful presentation from Anna Collins, Research Data and Digital Curation Officer (good job title) for Cambridge’s DSpace repository. Anna spoke about the Incremental project, a joint exercise between Cambridge and the University of Glasgow, aimed at providing a best practice approach to supporting data management techniques amongst research communities. This is really good practical nuts & bolts stuff (e.g. when’s the right time to broach the subject of data curation with a PhD student? Too early, and they won’t care – too late, and the best you can do is help pick up the pieces!). I’ll be recommending my colleagues at Lincoln take a look at the materials on both institution’s websites. Top quote: ”be the boss of your hard drive”!

Links from Anna’s presentation:

• Incremental project website
• Research data support websites at Cambridge and Glasgow

(An aside: after the USTLG meeting had ended, I was lucky enough to get a quick tour of [about 1% of] the Cambridge University Library, along with a cup of tea in the staff room(!), thanks to a “badly-encoded” colleague. I won’t blog about it in any detail now—hopefully I should be back in Cambridge in January for another Orbital-related event—but it’s just a jaw-dropping library.)

The new USTLG website is at ustlg.org, and you can follow them on Twitter at @USTLG.

In attendance (for the record):

• Alex Bilbie (University of Lincoln)
• Ed Chamberlain (University of Cambridge)
• Nick Jackson (University of Lincoln)
• Chris Keene (University of Sussex)
• Phillip Heels (University of Lincoln)
• Tony Hirst (The Open University)
• Huw Jones (University of Cambridge)
• Chris Leach (University of Lincoln)
• Dan Sheppard (University of Cambridge)
• Paul Stainthorp (University of Lincoln)
• Owen Stephens (Owen Stephens Consulting)
• Laura Waldoch (University of Cambridge)
• Lihua Zhu (University of Cambridge)

Train mayhem aside (in the end the Lincoln contingent didn’t arrive until nearly midday), it was a really useful day and well worth doing. Particular thanks to Ed Chamberlain and his colleagues for hosting the event and for arranging the food and refreshments. Thanks also to everyone who travelled from afar for no other reason than they love a good mashup.

Typically, the ever-prolific Tony Hirst has already managed to write up not one, but two blog posts about ideas that came out of the day:

• Getting Library Catalogue Searches Out There…
• Open Data Processes: the Open Metadata Laundry (N.B. this one relates specifically to Jerome – in particular, our notion of ‘scrubbing’ dodgy MARC records by taking only the identifiers plus the bare citation-only fields, and using that minimal set to grab additional free and Open data from the web, automatically creating new full versions of records that are inherently Open. ‘Metadata laundry’, me like.)

Here are three more ideas/conversations we had in Cambridge that I thought were going somewhere interesting. Yeah, we might get around to actually doing these, sometime…

1. Using COMET data to enhance Jerome

Similar to the ‘metadata laundry’, above, and to the way Jerome already uses data from the Open Library, JournalTOCs, LibraryThing, etc., to enhance its book records with additional metadata. Jerome constructs a URL in the form http://data.lib.cam.ac.uk/isbn/_______, with the ISBN from the Jerome record dropped in at the end. COMET responds with a link to an open record in RDF and/or JSON, which Jerome gladly sucks in, adding any additional fields to its original source record. Enrichment ensues.

2. Using Jerome search to ‘skin’ COMET

I called this one ”Jerome Scholar” …we make use of the search aspects of Jerome (in particular, the speed of Sphinx, the ‘mixing desk‘ idea, the neat record presentation, to provide a really smooth way of interacting with the much more well-structured (hence “Scholar”) data that resides in COMET.

3. Using the differences between the two datasets to tell us something interesting

I have a notion that there’s something inherently useful about being able to compare two versions of a record for the ‘same’ object. If we could use Jerome+COMET to generate a web application/data feed – one that other discovery services could themselves consume, we’d have ways of ‘sparking off’ whole new avenues of discovery: from misspelled names, variant titles, different subject terms assigned by different cataloguing practices, etc. Like xISBN, but for non-standardised data(?). All right, that’s the fuzziest of the three ideas. And as the eminiently sensible Owen Stephens kept asking me, “…what’s the use case?”.

And then we went to the pub.

Priestner, A. and Tilley, E. (2010) Boutique libraries at your service. Library & Information Update, 9(6), pp.36–39

…which explored the idea of the ’boutique’ library service: autonomous, small-scale (probably), human-scale (certainly), highly personalised, user-centric, non-homogenous, quality-over-quantity. C.f. the ’boutique’ hotel.

Quite a few of the presentations from the symposium are online:

• Andy Priestner and Libby Tilley, ‘Exploring the boutique library model’
• Nicola Wright and Michelle Blake, ‘Postcards and more…’
• Tim Wales, ‘Can personalised be upscaled?’
• Chris Powis, ‘“All for one or one for all”: building relationships for learning and teaching’
• Chris Powis, ‘How can space be personalised?’
• Meg Westbury, ‘A voice in the wilderness: personalised library servies in a virtual environment’
• Emma Thompson, ‘“It’s all about you”: marketing personalised services to the University of Liverpool Management School’
• Libby Tilley, ‘Building for success: considering evaluation and impact’

I was there with my Jerome hat on (“radical personalisation”, remember?), combining my attendance with a meeting with Ed Chamberlain of the COMET project, but it was an event that was maybe aimed more at subject librarians, or library staff from small (campus, specialist) libraries. It wasn’t the sort of event I’d normally think of attending, and I was impressed by the enthusiasm and positivity of people’s ideas: it seemed like there’s a desire to celebrate what’s unique and worth cultivating in academic libraries, and which perhaps has been lost in recent years.

Twitter was getting a good hammering, as usual.

I’m not entirely convinced by the ’boutique’ idea as a workable model for academic library services… at my grumpiest, I’d characterise it as an unholy mixture of what we’re already doing anyway, what we could never possibly afford to do, and what technology will take care of with or without us… but it’s definitely a fresh way of thinking about libraries and how we might ‘sell’ them to our parent institutions.

In any case, I’m convinced just enough that I’m going to be putting forward a 1,000-word case study on how our own Holbeach Campus Library provides a personalised service to an less-than-usual group of library users, for possible inclusion in a forthcoming book on personalisation in HE libraries (to be published by Ashgate).

The ‘Personalised library services in HE’ blog is at: http://personalisedlibraries.wordpress.com/

See also Emma Cragg (Digitalist)’s blog post on the same event: “my default position has largely been to define [students] by their method of study; full-time, part-time or by distance. Now that we are all becoming more connected, more reliant on the Internet and used to the ease of access to information I think these boundaries are blurring“.

A couple of things have reminded me recently that it might be useful to describe how I use libraries.

Historical interlude: my first experience of libraries would have been in visting Cullercoats/North Tyneside Central public libraries in the ’80s. After moving down to Lincolnshire, I borrowed books from Horncastle public library (more on which later), and used my secondary school’s Jobson Library (named after local benefactor George Jobson).

As an undergraduate, I didn’t use APU’s university library all that much. I remember, vaguely, a library induction talk in a large lecture theatre. I used to cycle in to campus early and read their newspapers before my first lecture. Over three years, I might have borrowed a handful of books (not really course-related) and a few music scores. And occasionally used the study carrels to work on maths assignments, when I really needed to concentrate.

Overall, looking back, it was a bit of a missed opportunity. I didn’t understand the value of the campus library: at the time I was much more excited by our course lab and studio facilities, and by the Sinclair computing centre, which gave me my first taste of the Internet, email, IM, Yahoo! and Lycos, web design and HTML, and which stayed open until 9pm (I remember being surprised and impressed by that; just as I was by the first 24-hour garage I found in Cambridge. Such things did not exist in rural Lincolnshire).

After having worked as a librarian at the University of Lincoln for a few years, I made a slightly better stab at using the services of the Robert Gordon University’s Georgina Scott Sutherland Library while I was studying there for my MSc. Because Aberdeen is a long way away, I never actually visited the library in person (I still haven’t), but I made heavy use of both their e-resources and their postal loans service.

Now, in 2010, I regularly use the services of four libraries:

1. Horncastle public library, which is ten minutes’ walk from my front door. My children go there every week for storytime and activities. From time to time, I check my LibraryThing wishlist against the Lincolnshire County Council ‘Virtual Library‘, and reserve books to read on the bus. (What would be really nice would be if I could point my LCC library account at an RSS feed of my LibraryThing wishlist, and be alerted when a new title becomes available). And I’ve recently been getting into researching my family history, for which the public library’s online access to Ancestry is invaluable. Horncastle library has also been a great place to work ‘from home’ when the roads have been bad this winter. I’ll be pleased when they upgrade from IE6, though.
2. I’ve also joined Essex public libraries. I was tipped off about them by a colleague: they don’t require that you be resident in Essex to join, and they have a very good collection of e-books (Lincolnshire public libraries don’t do e-books, yet). I think I might also still be a member of East Riding Libraries, from when I lived in Beverley in the East Riding of Yorkshire.
3. As I mentioned last week, I often base myself in the British Library when I’m in London: because it’s so close to King’s Cross and St Pancras railway stations; because they offer decent, free wi-fi; because there’s always an exhibition to see; and because there’s plenty of coffee to hand.
4. Last but not least, the 5 libraries of the University of Lincoln – because that’s where I work.

Libraries I’d like to visit include the Ward Library, Henry Bloom Noble Library, and Castletown Library (all on the Isle of Man), the Lit & Phil in Newcastle, and Cambridge University Library.

Taken from: Chapman, J. (2009) Issues in contemporary documentary (with additional research by Kate Allison). Cambridge: Polity Press [Google book preview]

And:

Taken from: Chapman, J. (2007) Documentary in practice: filmmakers and production choices. Cambridge: Polity Press [Google book preview]