Posts Tagged ‘LNCD’

Changes to the lncn.eu URL shortener

Posted on January 31st, 2013 by Paul Stainthorp

A new version of “Linking You” (lncn.eu), our home-grown URL shortener, has just been launched by ICT services/LNCD.

Features of the new lncn.eu include:

  • Links can now only be created by University of Lincoln staff and students – you have to be signed in to create short URLs. (The links themselves remain publicly accessible.) This change has been made to prevent misuse of the service. There are plenty of public URL shorteners if you can’t sign in to use lncn.eu.
  • Once you’re signed in, you can see a list of all the short URLs you’ve already created.
  • If you’re using the lncn.eu API to create short URLs, or using lncn.eu in a Twitter client (e.g. Twitterfeed) you now need to use an API key to validate your requests.
  • You can now easily specify a custom URL when you minify a URL (e.g. http://lncn.eu/ezproxy). Click on the “Options” button to access this feature.
  • It’s still possible to minify URLs including a wildcard – this is a bit of a hidden feature, but very useful. To use this feature, replace the wildcard part of the original URL with {{x}} – for example, you could minify the long Amazon search URL:
    • http://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=sr_adv_b?search-alias=stripbooks&unfiltered=1&__mk_en_GB=%C5M%C5Z%D5%D1&field-keywords=&field-author=&field-title=&field-isbn={{x}}&field-publisher=&node=&field-binding_browse-bin=&field-subject=&emi=&field-dateop=&field-datemod=&field-dateyear=&sort=&Adv-Srch-Books-Submit.x=0&Adv-Srch-Books-Submit.y=0
  • …it would then be possible to link to books on Amazon, by ISBN, using the URL format: http://lncn.eu/dmvx/XXXXXXXXXXXXX – where the Xs are any ISBN. Examples:
  • Finally, there’s an upgraded browser bookmarklet for the service. The look and feel of lncn.eu has also been updated to the newest version of the University’s Common Web Design (CWD).

From the ‘old’ lncn.eu:

Screenshot of old lncn.eu

To the new:

Screenshot of new lncn.eu

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Orbital notes, 24 May 2012

Posted on May 24th, 2012 by Paul Stainthorp

The Orbital project team met today (24 May 2012) and agreed the following:

  • Documentation
    • User documentation will focus on the “why”s of Research Data Management, rather than being a point-and-click guide to the Orbital UI (which should not require detailed explanations).
    • JW will create a changelog (human readable text file) for each major release of Orbital, so that documentation for each feature is review if that feature is updated.
    • PS will lead on writing documentation (as HTML pages, stored in the GitHub repository), with documentation for release v0.N completed and available by the launch of v0.N+1
    • PS will email colleagues from the Library and Research/Enterprise for assistance on writing documentation.
  • Training
    • JW will invite Melanie Bullock and David Sheppard on to the Orbital working group. He is meeting Annalisa Jones to discuss RDM training for staff.
  • Releases/development
    • Orbital v0.1.1 (including bug fixes) met all of the initial ‘minimum viable product‘ requirements specified by Dr Tom Duckett, and also includes the basics of project administration.
    • v0.2 will include improvements to the file upload/management, project management, and license management interfaces, as well as clearer distinction between language files and operating code.
    • NJ demoed the current version of Orbital to Siemens staff. He now has access to Siemens machine data for testing within Orbital.
    • The group discussed the LNCD plans for internal servers/private cloud, and about the disk space requirements and costs.
  • Integration
    • The current version of the DMPOnline tool has been installed on a test server. The group discussed our approach to integration between external tools/software (such as DMPOnline, R, Gephi) and Orbital.
    • NJ is going to email Adrian Richardson at the DCC to ask when the DMPOnline APIs will become available.
  • RDM policy
    • JW presented the draft policy to the University RIEC committee. The committee have been asked to send comments to Joss. (One comment at the committee meeting was that our having a policy too geared around the requirements of the Research Councils may not be appropriate for Lincoln, which generates a lot of non-RC income. However it was noted that the good practice specified by the RCs is good practice for management of all research data, whatever the funding source.)
  • Conferences and meetings
  • Data Asset Framework survey
    • The group discussed the recent DAF survey which we conducted at the University of Lincoln.
    • JW will convene a sub-group to consider the responses in detail, and plan follow-up interviews.
  • Business case
    • JW is currently gathering costs for long-term data storage. This will form the first strand of the Orbital business case, which will be presented to University SMT (along with the agreed RDM policy) in September 2012.

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On open data licensing and sustainability

Posted on May 17th, 2012 by Paul Stainthorp
Last week I attended a free ‘licensing clinic‘ in Birmingham, organised by the Discovery programme – mainly as a means of kick-starting my brain into considering the copyright/licensing issues around the CLOCK project. Here are my notes.
  1. The Jerome project addressed licensing in April, 2011, and the situation hasn’t really changed for us: we’re still intending to expose as much of our bibliographic data as possible using a properly open licence such as CC0.
    • “The licensing of data is an interesting one, since we run into a whole bunch of questions around who actually owns the information in our catalogue. Since it’s all factual information (and you can’t copyright a fact) then surely it’s a free for all – except that EU law introduces a curve ball in the form of database right. Broadly speaking this provides specific protection for collections of records, but not the records themselves.”
  2. Ed Chamberlain and the COMET project also addressed licensing and the ownership of MARC records: work that we should revisit.
  3. The JISC Open Bibliographic Data Guide (obd.jisc.ac.uk) provides very clear advice and information useful in creating an open data business case. E.g.:
    • “[…]if we presume that the rationale for publication is to ensure the widest possible dissemination then adoption of a generic open data license (such as Open Data Commons or CC0) is the most effective way to make the set of potential uses unambiguous. Restrictive licenses are counter-productive[…]“
  4. There is some very helpful guidance coming out of the Discovery project around building a business case for open discovery. This was summarised at the recent Discovery programme meeting (also in Birmingham) by David Kay –
    • N.B. I’ll revisit this in a future blog post. I’m getting almost surprisingly interested in the problem of ‘selling’ the idea of open bib data to an institution, and I’ve found the Discovery work on business cases increasingly useful.
  5. At Lincoln in March, 2012, we had a very useful visit from Sander van der Waal of OSS Watch where we discussed the University of Lincoln’s approach to openness (Open Source, Open Access, as well as Open Data). Joss Winn is following this work up with the University’s IP manager with a view to writing a University policy on open licensing of our IP.
  6. Related to the ‘business case’ aspect is the work of LNCD (and also discussions I’ve had with Ed Chamberlain recently) about how to ensure sustainability of open services in a technical sense – what sort of systems architecture and processes do we need in place, and how do we work with university ICT support departments to ensure that projects become institutionally-supported services when it’s important for them to do so?
  7. At this, Birmingham event, Chris Banks of the University of Aberdeen presented about the benefits and challenges of sharing from a library director’s perspective. I was particularly interested in the metaphor of “metadata as currency”: how are aggregators creating value based on the mass accumulation of metadata, and how are they selling that value back to libraries? See Chris’s blog for more. Aberdeen are clearly doing a lot around the analysis of e-resources usage and relating it back to their library strategy / information literacy, etc.
  8. Paul Miller (Cloud of Data): one key quote “amateurs tend to do a better job of aggregating content than institutions” (e.g. collections of images on Flickr). This may be in part because individuals don’t have the same risk-averse approach, but whatever the reason
  9. Barrister Frances Davey gave us a quick run-through of IP law as it relates to data. Key quote: “the legal repercussions of publishing data openly are pretty much nil“. Fear and uncertainty poisons initiative! Frances also touched on the business / reputation-management arguments for having an active approach to open data: people might well be getting bad copies of your data already (via screenscraping) – release it yourself and take control of the quality. Example of the British Library choosing a CC0 licence precisely because of the lack of an attribution clause – then any subsequent re-use is “nothing more to do with us”.
  10. Then, after lunch, copyright consultant Naomi Korn ran a workshop on the practical aspects of choosing a licence for your data. Naomi spoke about the need to start by deciding how open you want to be as an institution (noting that institutions with a dedicated © person tend to have a greater appetite for risk) – then consider whether you have the resources in place to get where you want to be. Key quote: “Let’s do some attribution mapping!” Some link from Naomi’s workshop:
  11. At the Birmingham clinic we also discussed the risks (including the risk of doing nothing) and benefits of taking an open approach. My contribution: open bibliographic data enables high-level services to be sold back to universities (c.f. Chris Banks’ notes on metadata aggregation, above). We shouldn’t be scared of this or see it as a reason to not open up our data (we can’t compete with those companies; we want their services and we’re prepared to pay for them!); but we can build lower-level, locally-relevant services as a result of releasing our own open data, and play on the web by web rules – if we don’t make our data open for re-use on the web, we can’t even have the conversation. Lincoln’s approach is entirely around open data as a means to an end: it’s the best and most natural way of sparking off new, innovative services based on unexpected combinations of our own and other people’s data.
    • The best example of this so far are the new data-driven staff profiles at Lincoln: but we’re going to need more and more convincing examples if we’re going to make a convincing business case.
  12. Final overall quote of the day: “Writing your own open licence is an unpleasant form of vanity“.

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1.8 million library loans from the University of Lincoln under CC0 – Copac Activity Data/SALT2 project

Posted on May 16th, 2012 by Paul Stainthorp

Today we published data on approximately 1.8 million items loaned from the University of Lincoln’s libraries since 2001. The data is available to re-use under a CC0 licence, and can be downloaded from:

We’ve done this as part of our involvement in the Copac Activity Data Project, a.k.a. SALT2. Along with data from the universities of Manchester, Sussex, Cambridge and Huddersfield, our circulation data will be used to power a ‘recommender API‘, which libraries will be able to use to build “People who borrowed X also borrowed Y“-type services. The API will benefit from the power of aggregated data from multiple institutions of different types, containing tens of millions of circulation events.

You’ll notice as well that we’ve chosen to host the data on our brand-new Orbital (v0.1) research data management application. Each dataset has a persistent citable URI. We’ll be keeping the data up-to-date, and generating a new activity data file from our library circulation logs shortly after the end of each academic year.

The data consists of a number of CSV files (one for each academic year since 2000-01, plus a huge file of all the data), containing the following fields:

Field index Field name Description
0 CREATE_DATE The date and time of the loan event, in the format: dd/mm/yyyy hh:mm
1 BORROWER_ID A cryptographic hash of the internal system ID associated with the borrower of the item, as used in the University of Lincoln’s library system.
2 WORK_ID A cryptographic hash of the internal system ID associated with the bibliographic work borrowed, as used in the University of Lincoln’s library system.
3 CONTROL_NUMBER The ISBN of the work borrowed (10 or 13 digits).
4 AUTHOR_DISPLAY The main author of the work borrowed.
5 TITLE_DISPLAY The title of the work.
6 PUB_DATE The publication year of the work in the form: yyyy

I’ll blog in detail another time about exactly how we created the data extracts. In short:

  1. There is a table in the SirsiDynix Horizon library management system called circ_tran which records every instance of item number X borrowed by user number Y at time Z. [#1]
  2. There is another table which provides a lookup between item numbers and the numbers of the bibliographic works of which they are a copy. [#2]
  3. Dave Pattern at the University of Huddersfield wrote a Perl script which scrapes all the bibliographic data (title, author, ISBN) for each work from our OPAC (Horizon Information Portal) and writes it to a text file. [#3]
  4. Developer, Jamie Mahoney of CERD/LNCD then stepped in, using some pretty heavy SQL on the original 3 data extracts, to:
    • Hash the internal Horizon user and work ID numbers to provide anonymity;
    • Convert the internal Horizon date and time stamps in extract [#1] from a version of Unix time into a readable datestamp (formula hint: cko_date*86400 + cko_time*60);
    • Used the item/work lookup table [#2] to pull in the bibliographic details for each loan in [#1] from the bibliographic table [#3] (an epic SQL JOIN query), removing items which are no longer represented in our library system;
    • Removed any items without an ISBN, which are of no use to the SALT recommender API;
    • Tweaked the punctuation and formatting;
    • Split the data into separate files for each year.

Once again, the data is at:

Thanks are due to Chris Leach and Dave Pattern for Horizon-fu, and to Jamie Mahoney for his patient wrangling of several millions of lines of data!

You can find out more about the Copac Activity Data Project/SALT2, at: http://copac.ac.uk/innovations/activity-data/

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Java, John and JournalTOCs

Posted on April 17th, 2012 by Paul Stainthorp

I heard recently that the ticTOCs journal tables-of-contents service will close down in the next month or so. ticTOCs was a JISC-funded project which hasn’t been developed for several years now.

Screenshot of ticTOCs

It’s effectively been superseded by the JournalTOCs service, “the largest, free collection of scholarly Tables of Contents (TOCs)”. The outgoing service has published some advice for users on transferring saved lists of TOCs between ticTOCs and JournalTOCs.

ticTOCs did have one particularly useful feature: a text file of all the TOCs it contained (at http://www.tictocs.ac.uk/text.php), which I’ve been filtering and using since 2009 to create a custom package of RSS feeds for upload to the e-journals A-to-Z at Lincoln.

While JournalTOCs doesn’t provide the same simple text list feature, it does have a fully-documented API. This is much more powerful and flexible for developers, but it’s not quite so straightforward as /text.php to create my list (a subset of all the feeds in JournalTOCs, matching only those journals to which the University has full-text access) using desktop tools and no programming.

A chance comment from a colleague at another university about Lincoln having “developers coming out of its ears“(!) inspired me to ask on the LNCD development group for help.

Dr John Murray of the Lincoln School of Computer Science responded, and very kindly supplied a Java program which I can use to identify which journals in our A-to-Z are represented in JournalTOCs, and so build a list of links to valid RSS feeds. Starting with a comma-separated list of ISSNs (which I downloaded from the A-to-Z), the program takes each ISSN in turn and makes a call to the JournalTOCs journals API. Depending on the data returned by JournalTOCs, the program records each ISSN as ‘VALID’ or ‘INVALID’ (i.e. no RSS feed available) in a new .csv file.

Thank you very much, John!

[Aside: to use John's code I had to learn how to compile and run Java programs on my laptop (running Ubuntu 11.10). For the record—and because I imagine it'll be useful again in the future—I first had to install OpenJDK 6 by going to the terminal and running the command:

sudo apt-get install openjdk-6-jdk

…then, once OpenJDK had installed, using the following command to select the correct version of Java:

sudo update-alternatives --config java

…before compiling and running the program itself.]

Once all the ISSNs had been checked against the API and the validated list constructed (this took ~5hrs to run!), I used Microsoft Excel to filter out only the ‘VALID’ ISSNs matched in JournalTOCs, and used Excel’s =LOOKUP() function to pull in enough information about each journal from our managed title list (previously downloaded), to create a custom upload text file.

Screenshot of the A-to-Z

The updated package of journal article RSS feeds is now available to view on the A-to-Z. We’ll review and re-generate this every few months, as we do with all custom and publisher-generated e-journal packages. At the time of writing, it contains just over 10,000 journal article RSS feeds, each one corresponding to one of our full-text journals. I’ve also added an orange RSS icon and link to JournalTOCs for each one, using the A-to-Z’s public notes feature.

So: which other library APIs will accept an ISSN as an input, and what other custom packages could I create using John Murray’s code in the same way?

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Latest steps in defining the business case for resource discovery

Posted on April 12th, 2012 by Paul Stainthorp

A quote from me on p.1 of the latest Discovery newsletter (April 2012), after the recent ‘Better Resource Discovery – Is there a business case?‘ workshop.

A similar user-centred approach is the driver at University of Lincoln, as explained by Paul Stainthorp, Electronic Resources Librarian: “We see the role of the student as collaborator in the production of knowledge and focus on improving the student experience through their active engagement.” Lincoln has an open development group which is committed to exposing library and other institutional data through APIs as the basis for agile and innovative development. “We are starting to see the results in terms of new cataloguing workflows, knowledge share, staff development, and new partnerships.”

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Leading Lincoln down the FOSS way

Posted on March 9th, 2012 by Paul Stainthorp

On Wednesday this week, LNCD/the Orbital project hosted a meeting to raise awareness of ‘open source’ among staff at the University of Lincoln. Joss Winn and Sander van der Waal (from the JISC-sponsored open source advisory body OSS Watch) both gave presentations on the recent ‘open’ theme of LNCD’s various projects (open access, open data, open education, open source) … and on the terminology, history, principles, benefits and applications of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) in Higher Education.

OSS Watch (oss-watch.ac.uk) are based at the University of Oxford and are funded to provide “unbiased advice and guidance on the use, development, and licensing of free and open source software”. LNCD’s work is informed by an open approach partly through a strong funder (i.e. JISC) preference and policy, but also because of the background of the people involved in LNCD.

Joss has written up the workshop—including the slide presentations—on the Orbital project blog. Joss will also be convening a follow-up meeting to discuss key points that came out of the morning, leading to a small group to develop and guide the understanding of open source at the University. It’s certainly clear that if we want to make the open approach anything more than a happy accident and to put LNCD’s work on a more sustainable and stable footing, we need to be clearer about [1] the business case for open source and open data, [2] the licenses we choose to apply to make our work open, and [3] the kind of support that staff want and need to produce work openly.

Related: Hacking the university, Joss’s recent case study for JISC on Student as Producer and Lincoln’s approach to openness.

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LNCD funding available: Technology for Education

Posted on January 31st, 2012 by Paul Stainthorp

From today’s internal communications email to University of Lincoln staff:

Small grants and student bursaries are available to [University of Lincoln] staff and students to support research, teaching and learning initiatives that explore, develop or critique the use of technology for education.

LNCD is a progressive group that includes educational developers, technologists, teachers, researchers and students, and was set up to support the objectives of Student as Producer through the research and development of technology for education.

Small grants and student bursaries are available from LNCD to support work that relates to the use of technology for education. For more details, see the LNCD funding page. The next deadline is February 28th.

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CLOCKmakers wanted: Lincoln needs web developers!

Posted on January 24th, 2012 by Paul Stainthorp

(I promised you an awful clock-related pun in every CLOCK blog post title, and by crikey I’ll deliver one.)

Lincoln needs web developers! As well as the full-time developer we’re recruiting to the Orbital project team (still open for applications – just!) we’re now looking for willing and talented people to fill two part-time web developer posts for our new CLOCK project.

In a nutshell:

  • The University of Lincoln, working in consortium with Cambridge University Library and Owen Stephens Consulting, has been awarded £49,877 by JISC to investigate ways of driving innovation in libraries’ interactions with Open Bibliographic Data, through a project we’re calling CLOCK (Cambridge-Lincoln Open Catalogue Knowledgebase).
  • These new developer posts will include a significant amount of working with library data-exchange formats, web standards, and Linked Data, including contributing to the development of a sector-wide data.ac.uk service.
  • The role requires extensive knowledge of the web and its attendant technologies and the software development and analytical skills to put this knowledge to good effect. The postholder should have demonstrable experience as both a producer and consumer of RESTful web services.
  • You can apply online via the University’s jobs website
In a second nutshell:
  • Closing date is 2 February 2012
  • Salary: grade 6 (from £25,251 pro rata)
  • There are two part time posts available (0.4FTE each – i.e. approx. 2 days a week)
  • Posts are fixed term until 31 July 2012
  • Based at our lovely Brayford Pool Campus in Lincoln city centre

This is an opportunity to work alongside a range of interesting people from the University Library in Lincoln, from Cambridge University Library, and from the national Discovery programme, as well as a growing ‘cross-project’ pool of developers in LNCD, our agile open-source ninja webdev hothouse. “If we were to summarise our technologies and interests I guess they would be #agile, #opensource, #opendata #LAMP, #php, #codeigniter, #mongoDB, #OAuth, #APIs, #HTML5, #CSS3, #github and moving towards #RDF and #LinkedData. Just seeing these hashtags listed together should cause your heart to beat with excitement :-)“

If you have any questions about the role please get in touch!

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Library tech vendors! Want to sponsor DevXS, a student developer event in Lincoln in November?

Posted on September 13th, 2011 by Paul Stainthorp

DevXS is a free developer conference/hackathon for undergraduate and postgraduate students in the UK.

Organised jointly by DevCSI and LNCD, it’s taking place in Lincoln on the 11th, 12th and 13th of November, and we’re looking for sponsorship!

Confirmed sponsors already include Amazon Web Services and Xirrus. If you fancy getting your name in front of 200 of the brightest young developers in the country, then all the details are on the DevXS website.

Oh, and if you’re a student and you’d like to attend DevXS, registration is now open. Here’s who’s coming already.

Developers Unite!

DevXS is a developer marathon spread across three days, where students from across the UK and beyond are encouraged to team up and build cool things that contribute to university life.

DevXS is about students sharing their ideas, mashing up data and building prototypes that improve, challenge and positively disrupt the research, teaching and learning landscapes of further and higher education.

We’re going to award prizes to the best ideas, prototypes and collaborations and there are going to be developers from universities around the country hanging around to help you out.

Sound awesome? Register now.

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