Posts Tagged ‘engineering’
Posted on May 4th, 2012 by Paul Stainthorp
At the request of the School of Engineering, we have added a new citation output style to the ‘University of Lincoln Specific‘ list of styles preferred and/or supported at the University of Lincoln.
The IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) citation reference style is a broadly-recognised format for writing research papers in technical fields, including computer science as well as engineering.
It’s now available to select within RefWorks’ “Create Bibliography” menu, as well as in the Write-N-Cite application. The list of Lincoln-specific output styles now consists of five options:
- APA (American Psychological Association) style, used by the subject of psychology.
- Harvard (University of Lincoln) – a generic version of Harvard created by the Library which you may have to modify using the Output Style Editor to meet the preferred referencing style for your course;
- IEEE, commonly used in engineering;
- ISO 690 numeric style, which is permitted as an alternative to Harvard by some subjects;
- MLA (Modern Language Association) style, used in some humanities subjects.
For help with referencing style and with using RefWorks, contact your subject librarian or email: RefWorks@lincoln.ac.uk
Tags: APA, bibliographies, citation, citation style, engineering, Harvard, humanities, IEEE, MLA, numeric, output style, psychology, referencing, RefWorks
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Posted on December 1st, 2011 by Paul Stainthorp
This week sees the formal two-day launch event for the JISC Managing Research Data programme 2011–2013 (the programme which is funding Orbital). It’s being held in the National College for School Leadership, next to the University of Nottingham’s Jubilee Campus.
Unfortunately, after schlepping it from the furthest fringes of Lincolnshire (and then having to go back home for the evening), I was only able to attend a couple of hours of day 1. But it was worth it.
I arrived just in time for a workshop about a number of research data management tools developed/provided by the Digital Curation Centre (DCC). Dr Mansur Darlington, who’s acting as external assessor/consultant to the Orbital project, was also in this workshop and contributed greatly to the discussions. (My Orbital colleagues Joss Winn and Nick Jackson attended the [parallel] workshop on various JANET, Eduserv and UMF SaaS/cloud storage services.)
Slides from this workshop will be posted online. When they’re available I’ll link to them here.
The tools being discussed were:
1. DAF – the Data Asset Framework (www.data-audit.eu)
- A methodology for identifying gaps in an institution’s data management practices; designed to help institutions ‘clarify their thinking’ around how they manage research data.
- N.B. We are already planning to use this methodology within the user requirements analysis workpackage of the Orbital project.
- DAF arose out of recommendations made in the JISC/UKOLN Dealing with Data report (2007): initially the Data Audit Framework, the name was changed because ‘Audit’ was felt to be off-putting, and not an accurate reflection of what DAF is for – now DAF = Data Asset Framework.
- “It’s worth looking at the four DAF pilot implementation projects” (carried out in 2008), because there’s likely to be one that has subject-relevance to your #jiscmrd project. The pilot projects found that most HEIs were at a very early stage (lack of RDM infrastructure; an emphasis on needs-scoping).
- (N.B. the ERIM project at the University of Bath [engineering] used DAF but found it rather daunting and “stopped halfway down the page”(!): since then it has been condensed from a 60-page handbook into a shorter implementation guide. However the Dublin Core-based metadata requirements for datasets in DAF are still rather complex – one suggestion is to “ask fewer questions about more things”: the University of Northampton did something like this; running their own tailored ‘mini-DAF’: broadly following the DAF methodology, but tweaking it to meet their own end and the available resources.)
- Key points:
- Speak to lots of people in as many different roles as possible.
- Use a variety of datagathering techniques (desk research, questionnaires, shadowing researchers, etc.)
- Ask the DCC for tips!
- A freely-available benchmarking tool, designed to help institutions assess strengths and weaknesses in their RDM infrastructure. Developed out of the IDMP: Integrated Data Management Planning toolkit and support project.
- Based on a ‘three legged stool’ model’; i.e. a successful RDM infrastructure will be based on three stable ‘legs’: technical infrastructure, appropriate resources (e.g. staff & skills), and commitment from the institution. An imbalance in any of these ‘legs’ leads to unstable RDM. The tool helps institutions to identify short ‘legs’ and plan to improve them. Identifying these imbalances can also be helpful in providing evidence to your institution that further investment needs to be made in a particular area.
- CARDIO is still effectively in beta, with some tweaks still to make (and perhaps a lack of documentation?) – however some institutions have already found it useful.
- How it works… a co-ordinator registers with the system and initiates the CARDIO assessments. (“If the scale and nature of your research data holdings isn’t known, run a DAF assessment first.”) CARDIO emails participants and asks them to rate a series of statements relating to their institution’s RDM infrastructure. Only once someone has entered their own ratings are they able to view what other people have put. Takes from 30-60 minutes for a full assessment, though it is possible to target shorter sets of questions at particular groups. CARDIO then automatically generates a [customisable] PDF report complete with charts/visualisations of the data.
- A shorther, nine-question ‘mini-CARDIO’ is also available: see the latest issue of JISC Inform.
- A practical, browser-based tool which allows researchers to create and store Data Management Plans (DMPs) for research projects – increasingly, research funders explicity require a DMP (e.g. the Wellcome Trust’s policy on data management).
- Funder- and institution-specific guidance is provided through the website, along with help (“pointers”) on filling in a DMP. Completed plans can be exported in a number of formats.
- Researchers may also be interested in the JISC guidance document, How to develop a Data Management and Sharing Plan – complementary to DMP Online.
- The impression I get is that DMP Online is a tool which will be of practical, day-to-day utility to researchers/groups engaged in funded projects (and to the research offices that support them), whereas the other two tools (DAF/CARDIO) are perhaps aimed more at institutions starting out on the road to developing institutional RDM policies & systems, and/or looking to improve on current practice.
- Some interesting discussions in the workshop:
- Can DMP Online be ‘scaled up’ to work at the level of the institution, rather than the individual researcher? (A couple of projects—at UCL and Oxford—are already looking at extending the toolkit to form a more institutional service.)
- If DMP Online (or other similar tools) make it easier for academics to routinely create DMPs by copying/pasting boilerplate text, is there a danger that writing a DMP becomes a box-ticking exercise (less meaningful/less useful for funders if less consideration given by the researcher)?
- “Who is qualified to peer-review DMPs!?”
More information and help on using all three of these tools can be got by emailing: info@dcc.ac.uk
Then: a cup of tea, a quick catch-up with some colleagues, and to the road/rails again. I’ll be back tomorrow for day 2.
Tags: #jiscmrd, asset, audit, CARDIO, DAF, data management, DCC, Dealing with Data, DMP, DMP Online, Dublin Core, engineering, ERIM, events, IDMP, JISC, JISC Inform, Joss Winn, Jubilee Campus, launch, Liz Lyon, Mansur Darlington, National College for School Leadership, Nick Jackson, Nottingham, Orbital, pilot, programme, projects, research data, research funding, tools, UKOLN, University of Bath, Wellcome Trust
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Posted on November 29th, 2011 by Paul Stainthorp
Yesterday I was at Clare College, University of Cambridge for a meeting organised by USTLG, the University Science & Technology Librarians Group. The group—open to any librarians involved with engineering, science or technology in UK universities—has meetings once or twice a year. The theme of yesterday’s meeting (free to attend, thanks to sponsorship from the IEEE) was data management, with an implied focus on research data.
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:
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…
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:
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:
(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.
Tags: #jiscmrd, #OrbitalMRD, Arcadia, Cambridge, Cambridge University, Cambridge University Library, Clare College, CUL, DaMSSI, Darwin, DCC, Digital Curation Centre, engineering, genomics, Gillespie Conference Centre, Hawking, IEEE, IEEE Xplore, Incremental, information literacy, Joy Davidson, Laura Molloy, Newton, Orbital, Rachel Berrington, RDF, research data, researchers, Rutherford, science, SCONUL, skills, support, technology, University of Glasgow, University Science & Technology Librarians Group, USTLG, Wikipedia, Yvonne Nobis
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Posted on November 11th, 2011 by Paul Stainthorp
The Library now has full online access to the IEEE / IET Electronic Library (IEL), on the IEEE Xplore platform. Folk in the schools of Computer Science and Engineering can start celebrating …now!
You can search and view more than 3 million documents available through the IEEE Xplore digital library, which provides access to the world’s highest quality technical literature in engineering and technology. (The IEEE Xplore platform also provides access to a small number of additional journal subscriptions for engineering, as well as the full text of the VDE VERLAG Conference Proceedings.)
University of Lincoln students and staff can access IEEE Xplore via the University Portal, at:
If you’ve not used the IEEE Xplore platform before, there’s an online help site, self-paced tutorials, and individual user guides – alternatively, contact your subject librarian for advice.
Tags: CompSci, computer science, conference papers, e-Library, engineering, IEEE, IEEE Xplore, IEEE/IET Electronic Library (IEL), IEL, Library news blog, Lincoln School of Computer Science, new databases, School of Engineering, VDE VERLAG
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Posted on October 27th, 2011 by Paul Stainthorp
We have a new structure in ‘my bit’ of the Library, and I’ve got a new boss. Dave Masterson has taken up the brand-new post of Head of Electronic Library Services (HELS), with responsibility over all technical, electronic, systems, and acquisitions/cataloguing services in the Library.
(Diagram of the new Library structure. The new HELS is in blue. My [very small] team and I are in yellow. N.B. that the new HELS post also has dotted-line responsibility for the work of the Academic Subject Librarian for computer science/engineering subjects.)
Congratulations, Dave!
Tags: acquisitions, ASL, cataloguing, computer science, Dave Masterson, department, e-Library, engineering, HELS, hierarchy, jobs, library, staff, structure, systems, technical, technology
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Posted on September 9th, 2011 by Paul Stainthorp
In July, I blogged about our latest bid for JISC funding – this time for an project called “Orbital” to develop a university research data management infrastructure, piloted with the School of Engineering.
I’m delighted to announce that we were successful. The University of Lincoln has been awarded £241,500* funding for Orbital, under JISC’s Managing Research Data call. The project runs for 18 months, starting on 03 October 2011.
From the project proposal:
“The Orbital project will develop, test and implement a state-of-the-art research data management system, which meets both internal and external partner organisation’s requirements in terms of robustness and security. We will apply a proven approach to the management of institutional data, through the proposed use of
MongoDB (a very fast, flexible, schema-less database technology), to create flexible services for capturing, storing, preserving and sharing research data in real time across internal research groups and with external research partners via secure, public APIs. A personalised web interface for specific researcher profiles and a public discovery interface will also be developed.”
Joss Winn from CERD will be the Orbital project manager; I’ll act as “lead researcher”, working—alongside other staff from the Library, Research Office, ICT services and the School of Engineering—to conduct a literature review and examine existing guidance and practice, lead the user requirements analysis, and contribute to the implementation & evaluation of the project. We’ll also be appointing not one but two new developers to work on Orbital.
There’ll be a steering group consisting of senior staff from the VCO, School of Engineering, College of Science, Library, Research Office, and ICT. We’re also bringing in external consultancy from Siemens Industrial Turbomachinery Ltd, the Innovative Design & Manufacturing Research Centre of the University of Bath, and the UK Digital Curation Centre (DCC).
This is a hugely significant project for Lincoln (and the first funding awarded to a CERD/Library/ICT project since we established LNCD). What we’re doing here – it works. To my colleagues, and especially Joss: well done. Congratulations.
We’ll be setting up a project blog for Orbital, at http://orbital.blogs.lincoln.ac.uk/ – watch that space.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
*Yup. Nearly a quarter of a million quid. No messing, eh?
Tags: #jiscmrd, College of Science, DCC, engineering, funding, ICT Services, IdMRC, JISC, Joss Winn, LNCD, MongoDB, MRD, Orbital, project, research data, School of Engineering, Siemens, success, University of Bath, URO
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Posted on July 28th, 2011 by Paul Stainthorp
Just a note to mention that I’m named (along with a few other library colleagues) on our latest project bid to JISC under the Managing Research Data Programme (02) 2011-13, for an 18 month project, called “Orbital“, on establishing a suite of systems for managing the University’s research data, and working with the School of Engineering – an extension to the Repository project and Jerome.
Here’s the bid document.
Joss Winn has blogged about it as usual. If we’re successful, Joss will act as project manager. I’ll be “lead researcher”. Bev Jones (Institutional Repository Officer), Chris Leach (Systems Librarian), and Ian Snowley (University Librarian) are also named in the bid.
“Our proposed project is called Orbital because we’re intending to build services for managing research data that ‘orbit’ around Nucleus, the data store we built during the Total Recal and Jerome projects.
“Of course, we’ve set ourselves some new challenges with this project and much work needs to be done in all phases of the project, but having the experience of building web services around large institutional data sets, gives me the confidence that we can tackle what is a really important issue for us – for any university: managing a growing body of research data.”
Tags: Bev Jones, bids, Chris Leach, engineering, Ian Snowley, Jerome, JISC, Joss Winn, Orbital, repository, research data
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Posted on July 22nd, 2011 by Paul Stainthorp
These 14 full-text engineering journals from IEEE Xplore are now available from off campus. Lincoln students and staff can log in via Athens, using their university network\accountID and password.
- Automatic Control, IEEE Transactions on
- Circuits and Systems I: Regular Papers, IEEE Transactions on
- Circuits and Systems II: Express Briefs, IEEE Transactions on
- Control Systems Technology, IEEE Transactions on
- Energy Conversion, IEEE Transactions on
- Industrial Electronics, IEEE Transactions on
- Industry Applications Magazine, IEEE
- Magnetics, IEEE Transactions on
- Neural Networks, IEEE Transactions on
- Power Electronics, IEEE Transactions on
- Power Systems, IEEE Transactions on
- Signal Processing, IEEE Transactions on
- Smart Grid, IEEE Transactions on
- Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, Part B: Cybernetics, IEEE Transactions on
You can access the IEEE Xplore journals through the Portal and e-journals A-to-Z. (Or, you could try accessing them through the new beta version of the e-journals A-to-Z, launching soon.) If you need any more information about the IEEE Xplore journals, Judith Elkin is the subject librarian for engineering.
Tags: Athens, authentication, automatic control, circuits, control systems, cybernetics, e-journals, electronics, energy, engineering, full text, IEEE, IEEE Xplore, industrial, Judith Elkin, Library news blog, magnetics, neural networks, new databases, off campus, power, signal processing, smart grid, systems, technology, transactions
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Posted on May 20th, 2011 by Paul Stainthorp
This post follows on from my earlier authentication rant – here’s where I try and get a bit more constructive. Starting with the fundamentals:
IP authentication to electronic library resources… ‘s easy, innit? Nothing to worry about. We just give the details of our IP ranges to publishers, and they allow any computer with an address within that range (i.e., one of our on-campus computers or a mobile device connected via our wifi network) to access site content which is otherwise restricted: for example, a full-text PDF journal article.
Some notes:
(Thank you to Elif Varol for chasing down some of these details across the Internet, and to @aekins and others who supplied their expertise via Twitter and email.)
- There are a few different ways of expressing IP ranges (‘notations’); a publisher may specify we give them our IP range(s) using a particular notation:
- The standard dotted quad notation a.k.a. dot-decimal notation, made up of four eight-bit numbers (octets), generally expressed as decimal numbers, separated by full stops:
- Full range e.g. 204.245.240.0-204.245.240.255
- Range within the last octet e.g. 204.245.240.0-255
- Wild card within the last octet e.g. 204.245.240.* (N.B. these first three are all equivalent to each other.)
- Ranges and wild cards within higher octets e.g. 204.245.[8-11].* (The square brackets aren’t always necessary.) Some publishers will not accept these more complex ways of expressing ranges, so we have to list each range separately using wild cards only in the last octet, i.e. 204.245.8.*; 204.245.9.*; 204.245.10.*; etc.
- CIDR notation (much less frequently asked for):
- e.g. 204.245.8.0/22 (Where /22 represents the number of most significant bits—i.e. counting from the left—which are common to both the top and bottom ends of the IP range. I’ve not expressed that very well, but that’s how my brain deals with it! In the above example, the range: 204.245.8.0-204.245.11.255 expressed in binary is: 11001100.11110101.00001000.00000000-11001100.11110101.00001011.11111111 (You can see that the 22 most significant bits [in red] are common to the top and bottom addresses of the range. There’s a useful IP-range-to-CIDR converter tool at: ip2cidr.com)
- But is it safe to hand out the details of our IP address ranges like this? I’ve certainly seen one ICT colleague’s eyelid twitch when I’ve mentioned this is what libraries do (and have been doing so for ages).
- Some university libraries route all of their web traffic through a small number of proxy servers, so that all users broadcast a handful of individual IP addresses – this reduces the complexity of the information they need to give out to publishers. Apparently (though no-one appears to want to give me a list), the University of Lincoln now has a single ‘apparent‘ external IP address for each University building (i.e. some 45+ buildings, not including agricultural buildings) and one for each wifi network. This ought to make it possible to associate usage with an individual building or group of buildings. Does anyone do this? Strikes me it would be very useful to be able to say, for instance, “X% of usage of ScienceDirect comes from within our Science building”. We have at least one resource where usage is restricted to within libraries only – luckily, we do know the ‘apparent’ IPs of our own buildings.
- Any change to a library’s IP addresses will have to be communicated to a large number of publishers. We have in our ERM spreadsheet an (almost-certainly incomplete) list of publishers who hold our IP ranges along with their contact details, so that we know who to inform if there’s a change… but this process worries me; it’s asking to have errors and inconsistencies introduced. I’d much rather register or publicise my IP ranges once and centrally (on the University’s own servers, or via a shared registry service like OCLC’s WorldCat Registry) and have all publishers pick them up from there.
- The vast majority of IP-authenticated resources perform this authentication automatically, but a tiny few oddities (including the handful of engineering journals we take via the IEEE, I think) seem to require that the user clicks on an explicit ‘authenticate via IP’ link first. Why?
- There’s an obvious problem for users who move between on-campus and off-campus computers (i.e., most users!); they will not get the same seamless access to restricted content, and some resources (e.g. Index to Theses) may only be available from within our IP range. How do libraries handle the transition between IP and other kinds of authentication for off-campus users? Through ‘user education’ (lovely phrase that, covers up all sorts of system difficulties!), or by trying to design a system that recognises the user’s location (“geoaware”) and routes accordingly to hide the transition? There was a useful JISC Publisher Interface Study (2009) which explored some of these issues
- Proxy tools such as the much-vaunted EZProxy or our own dear LibResProxy (which I’ve been informed are both actually ‘reverse’ proxies [edit: or possibly some other flavour of URL-writing proxy??] – my eyes started to glaze over at that point…) are a useful bodge for providing simple off-campus access on the same basis as on-campus IP lookup: effectively they ‘mask’ the user’s actual, off-campus, out-of-range IP with an in-range, institutional IP address by routing the user (who must log in to the proxy tool first) through a server on the campus network. Libraries that use EZProxy swear that it simplifies things greatly for the user, is very reliable, and reduces the number of support queries compared with e.g. Athens/Shibboleth… but at the same time, proxies seem to be looked down upon by the library/information ‘establishment’. I understand that they don’t offer the same opportunities as federated access for personalising the user experience; they can be slow, too. But my suspicion is that users will go for straightforward, predictable, reliable full-text access over personalisation, nearly every time.
- All of what I know about IP address authentication applies to IPv4. What, if anything needs to change to take account of IPv6?
Tags: authentication, CIDR notation, dot-decimal notation, dotted quad notation, engineering, EZProxy, fundamentals, geolocation, IEEE, IEEE Xplore, Index to Theses, IP authentication, IPv4, IPv6, JISC, libraries, LibResProxy, notation, notes, OCLC, on campus, proxy server, publisher, questions, reverse proxy, ScienceDirect, usage, wifi, WorldCat Registry
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