Posts Tagged ‘Owen Stephens’

RefWorks UK users mailing list and meeting

Posted on October 4th, 2012 by Paul Stainthorp

A couple of weeks ago I attended the second group meeting of RefWorks UK users, organised and hosted by Richard Cross at Nottingham Trent University. This isn’t so much a writeup* as a list of links and a few notes. These meetings are completely informal. The “user group” (if it even really exists) has no privileged status in relation to RefWorks, is completely unfunded, and anyone is welcome to organise a meeting.

*You just had to be there ;-)

Possibly the most practical thing to come out of the meeting – we now have a JISCMail list for UK RefWorks users in libraries. It’s an open list; DMU‘s Amanda Poulton and I are acting as list owners for the time being. We already have 138 members(!)

You can post to the list (and subscribe) via:

“This list is an open forum for discussion of issues relating to the use of RefWorks reference management software by educational institutions based in the UK. Topics discussed will include technical configuration, administration, user-support, training, marketing and advocacy. Membership is open to all, but will be most useful to librarians in UK Higher Education.”

We were pleased to have several representatives from ProQuest/RefWorks-COS at the meeting. RefWorks also very kindly sponsored lunch and refreshments. They gave the attendees an update on recent developments in the RefWorks v2 interface, and also went through some highlights from the RefWorks product development roadmap – including plans for stabilising Write-N-Cite IV, and later an exclusive (genuinely – the first ever time it had been demo-ed in public in Europe) run-through of ProQuest’s plans for a brand-new, “next-generation” reference management and collaboration product – the ultimate successor to RefWorks itself. We’re not allowed to say too much about it at this stage… which is probably for the best, because unfortunately the presenters suffered from a very poor transatlantic phone line, and I missed most of the finer points of the demo :-(

Information Librarian Hannah Young from So’ton Solent University gave an excellent presentation of their myCourse reading lists project (http://mycourse.solent.ac.uk/readinglists). Working with Owen Stephens and building on the earlier TELSTAR project, this uses the RefWorks API and shared folder RSS feeds to integrate reading lists stored in RefWorks into their Moodle VLE (“myCourse”). This replaced Solent’s use of LearnBuild LibraryLink. Hannah’s presentation slides are here.

Later we split into two groups to discuss how we promote/support and (my group) manage and administer RefWorks. We discussed our own approaches to RefWorks’ administrative tools, usage reports; the use of RefShare, RefGrabIt and Write-N-Cite, and also strayed into support documentation: I discovered there’s a RefWorks LibGuide which we could re-use/adapt, at: http://refworks.libguides.com/

Finally, a discussion on possible RefWorks enhancement priorities based on our own concerns – are there common themes amongst UK customers? We came up with a few, including:

  • The ability to set a default display style for imported references;
  • Federated authentication as standard on all interfaces (RefMobile, WnC IV);
  • Integration with next-gen discovery environments;
  • “User voice”-type systems for capturing user ideas and turning them into development plans.

A couple more informal user group meetings are in the pipeline – in the meantime there’s the new listserv!

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Notes on last week’s KB+ meeting

Posted on May 8th, 2012 by Paul Stainthorp

As I start to understand the aims of JISC Collections’ KB+ (KnowledgeBase+) project a bit better, it’s starting to seem more and more relevant to the real-life problems of e-resources management. At last week’s meeting of the Technical Advisory Group, here were the things I found particularly interesting:

  • The proposed database model for journal package data, which does a neat job of distinguishing between the various ‘layers’ of ERM (in allowing data to be recorded separately for the issue, title, package and platform involved in a particular subscription deal);
  • The proposed links with the GOKb project in the USA, including the possibility (and it’s only a possibility at present) for sharing/co-designing data import processes; and the aims of the GOKb project itself in building and publishing collaboratively-maintained journal package data openly for the Kuali Open Library Environment;
  • The plans for live user testing of the first KB+ data release later in May, which will include e-resources librarians from 10 institutions getting their hands on the data and initial UI. This seems like a really useful and rare opportunity to do some near-real-world testing with groups of experts in the field of ERM. (N.B. this first group of 10 users doesn’t include the University of Lincoln – but I’ve asked Liam Earney if we could have ‘observer status’!);
  • The interesting questions (raised by Owen Stephens) around the complexities involved in representing overlapping journal package deals to e-resources managers – how will the librarians react to having their assumptions (and their mental model of what a journal ‘deal’ is) … challenged? My gut instinct is that we ought to want to know the underlying detail of multiple access rights in a single journal package – to dispel the ‘myths’ that might have grown up about our holdings over several years, even if it makes things look more complicated than we thought they were. (Naturally we need a way of re-presenting / simplifying this complexity to our users.)

I’ll continue to make notes about KB+ on this blog.

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Tick tock we don’t stop. Introducing CLOCK, a new JISC-funded resource discovery project at the universities of Lincoln and Cambridge

Posted on December 10th, 2011 by Paul Stainthorp

Cambridge CLOCKThe title says it all, really. 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).

CLOCK is a continuation of and elaboration upon the work of two recent JISC Discovery projects—Jerome at the University of Lincoln and COMET at the University of Cambridge—via a programme of development work shared between the two institutions, and with library consultant Owen Stephens. JISC were impressed enough with the work of both projects, and sufficiently interested in the potential for collaboration, that they encouraged our joint bid for follow-up funding.

Between now and the end of July, 2012, the CLOCK project will provide us with a framework to:

…[1] exploit through real-world applications the significant amount of data released openly by Cambridge University Library; [2] apply the Jerome database architecture, iterative development methodology, and API framework to a bibliographic dataset an order of magnitude greater than the University of Lincoln’s; and [3] to build and enable a new set of tools and demonstrator services which will enable the future development of public Open Bib Data web applications of practical utility to libraries and end-users.

You can read the full bid document, here.

I’m very much looking forward to working with Ed Chamberlain, Systems Librarian in the University Library at the University of Cambridge, along with Owen Stephens, veteran of a number of campaigns to open up access to library data, and Chris Leach (Systems Librarian) and Ian Snowley (University Librarian) from the University of Lincoln. Thanks are due to all of them for their help in writing the successful bid; to the Research & Enterprise Development office at Lincoln for their invaluable assistance in putting together the project budget; and to the LNCD group at the University of Lincoln for providing the kind of supportive development platform that makes these kind of projects possible.

Finally, a big thank you to Andy McGregor and the JISC Digital Infrastructure: Information and library infrastructure: Resource discovery programme, for this opportunity to further explore the blossoming environment of open bibliographic data/open discovery in libraries. If you haven’t done so already, you might like to take a look at the following websites:

As with all our projects, we’ll be blogging it comprehensively (so stand by for a steady stream of awful clock-related puns used as blog post titles). Although there’s little to see there yet, the CLOCK project blog is at: http://clock.blogs.lincoln.ac.uk/ – along with its own RSS feed RSS feed icon. Watch that space!

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It’s the end of Jerome as we know it (but I feel fine)

Posted on November 28th, 2011 by Paul Stainthorp

The University of Lincoln’s Jerome project finished in August with the successful release of more than 240,000 openly-licensed bibliographic records, available over developer APIs, and a joint hack day with Cambridge University Library‘s COMET project.

Now, encouraged by positive JISC feedback, both institutions—Cambridge and Lincoln jointly—have applied for follow-up project funding under the project title CLOCK. If our bid is successful, the new project will run between December 2011–July 2012, employing a web developer based at the University of Lincoln, and distilling the work of both institutions into the development of new innovative library metadata discovery services for the scholarly community.

You can read the project proposal for CLOCK at http://lncn.eu/ijt4 – the introductory section is below.

The University of Lincoln and Cambridge University Library both delivered successful projects (Jerome and COMET) for the JISC Infrastructure for Resource Discovery Programme in 2011. This is a proposal for the continuation of and elaboration upon the work of both projects, via a programme of development work shared between the two institutions.

Throughout both projects (COMET-Jerome), parallel approaches in technology and data structure were noted and commented upon. A ‘mash day’ workshop event held in Cambridge in August aimed to explore these differences as well as areas of potential synergy. Here project members identified several points of interest to take forward.

Both projects produced outputs of interest to researchers, students, librarians, developers, and designers of bibliographic discovery environments. The CLOCK project will harness the success of these two complementary initiatives and investigate new approaches to data creation and discovery in the library domain. In particular, it will investigate, propose, and develop new, web-based bibliographic tools/APIs which will make it easier for developers, academic libraries and library end-users (esp. researchers) to find Open Bibliographic Data and incorporate that data into systems and workflows.

This project is an opportunity to [1] exploit through real-world applications the significant amount of data released openly by Cambridge University Library; [2] apply the Jerome database architecture, iterative development methodology, and API framework to a bibliographic dataset an order of magnitude greater than the University of Lincoln’s; and [3] to build and enable a new set of tools and demonstrator services which will enable the future development of public Open Bib Data web applications of practical utility to libraries and end-users.

The project will be supported by library consultant Owen Stephens, who will help to put the work into a national context, relating CLOCK to the wider movement toward Open Bib Data and the work of the JISC Discovery initiative. It will take place in an environment (Lincoln/Cambridge) where a culture of developer inquiry and experimentation is encouraged and nurtured. It is also endorsed by senior library management at both universities.

Both universities are involved in complementary development work which will  both inform and be informed by CLOCK: at Cambridge, Ed Chamberlain is guiding the development of the JISC Open Bibliography 2 project; in Lincoln, Paul Stainthorp is lead researcher on the #jiscmrd Orbital project, which is investigating the management of research data, with some areas of overlap.

CLOCK will operate as part of the wider JISC Digital Infrastructure: Information and library infrastructure: Resource discovery, and support the recent concerted effort to move toward openly licensed library discovery in UK Higher Education and beyond.

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Rough notes from a JISC emerging bibliographic tools workshop, 5th October 2011

Posted on October 12th, 2011 by Paul Stainthorp

I was at Goodenough College in London last Wednesday, 5th October 2011, for a workshop organised under the JISC Discovery programme (discovery.ac.uk), to discuss approaches to publishing, managing, and using Open Bibliographic data (OBD) on the web. Here are some of the notes that I made on the day. I’ve left them rather rough because I don’t have time to bully them into proper paragraphs.

The workshop started with a general overview and discussion of the current picture of OBD.

  • We’re dealing with a growing number of technologies for open library discovery: Linked Data, BibJSON, OPDS (based on Atom), Lincoln’s NoSQL/API-centric approach, even SuperMARC(!?).
  • Few if any people have a good handle on all of these approaches, but we ought to be at least conversant with them.
  • We’re a room full of experimenters! But how can we communicate Discovery/OBD to others? How can JISC funding be used to support the work? We need to surface not only tools and data but also skills.
  • Possibility of looking to e.g. DevCSI/Netskills to help with addressing the skills gap. Are CompSci graduates being encouraged to exercise their skills in open/community development?

We then split into two groups to brainstorm “what’s interesting in bibliographic data at the moment?”: the two groups managed to fill around 8 flipchart sheets :-)

Photo of a flipchart covered in writing

A few quotes and themes I picked up on:

  • What will be the value of OA repositories in hindsight? Will it be open data (some are skeptical) or rather will it be their effect on the publishing industry?
  • A really useful application would be a fits-all API to identify possible identifiers within a record/page – ”I think this is an identifier, please tell me what sort it is” – which then leads into a web service to aggregate information about the thing itself (rights information, etc.) – jokingly called “Rate my Regex”! – some interest in this as a project.
  • Paul Walk: “Please an we have a day off from Linked Data!?“
  • Idea of the role of “data doctor/data wrangler” gaining some currency in institutions.
  • There are plenty of code libs for dealing with bibliographic data: pymarc, MARC4J, MARC::Record (perl). solrmarc.
  • Owen Stephens: “MARCXML is the worst of MARC combined with the worst of XML. It’s rubbish.“
  • A colleague of Peter Murray-Rust (sorry, I didn’t catch your name!). Citable data is not copyrightable. Java library containing ~20,000,000 open article records???
  • Mark MacGillivray[?]: “To most people, this [taps laptop] is just a plastic box full of magic.“

After lunch we split again, this time into three groups, each to consider a different aspect of managing Open Bibliographic Data; each to consider opportunities, costs, pitfalls, etc. relating to the technologies themselves as well as to the skills needed in exploiting those technologies:

  1. Transforming data
  2. Munging data (both groups 1. and 2. agreed that the two steps are really the same thing – just “more transformation” – also that ‘munging’ is an awful word…)
  3. Exploitation of data

I was part of the ‘Munging data’ group.

Challenges

  • Problems in the move from a unitary system to distributed data services – loss of control (quality of 3rd-party data can be a problem for the librarian mindset!), worries over sustainability of mashup-style approaches (c.f. dbpedia, BBC RDF, the now-defunct Talis Silkworm project). However, openness itself provides some guarantee against things becoming defunct (i.e. Open Source Software)_.
  • Need to think about the capacity (and the uneven geographic distribution) of local skills
  • “Any data is better than no data”. Use of third-party open data is not really a challenge for management any more (only cataloguers care!)? But still important are notions of provenance, attribution, putting power back in the hands of the end user.
  • We need to think at the citation level – is there a big difference between personal and institutional data?
  • Character encoding!

Gaps

  • Skills. Not enough developers. Unevenly distributed geographically. (Can we construct a course/curriculum for open community development skills?).
  • #ukdiscovery is somewhat distant from the mundane concerns of libraries. Ed Chamberlain is speaking to a group of cataloguers in Oxford about OBD – that’s the sort of thing we want!
  • Thinking about the role of CILIP and ‘professionalism’ – keeping [technical] skills up to date. Portfolios/competency framework approaches. Can we get a push from the top of the library profession?
  • Technology gaps, on the other hand, have mostly gone away. There are enough interesting and easy things to keep us busy without having to worry too much about the things that still don’t work. JISC can help to convince (smaller?) institutions that open development should be trusted.

Opportunities

  • Still attempting to overcome legacy licensing issues. Instead of concentrating on dealing with old data, why don’t we just take a “line in the sand” approach and make sure we’re being 100% open from now on. Do the OBD principles need to be extended?
  • Make use of feedback loops. Learn something about your data by feeding how it’s been used back into the system. Use this usage to inform your transformations.

</end>

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I’ve got to get to a library… fast!

Posted on October 11th, 2011 by Paul Stainthorp

Here’s a lovely little hack for displaying the contact details of our 5 libraries, neatly in a web page:

Map of the geo-lookup areas (approximate)

It uses Alex Bilbie‘s implementation of a geolocation/IP-lookup script to try and determine the nearest library to the person viewing the page, according to the following rules:

  1. If you’re on campus, then choose the library for that campus.
  2. If you’re within 20 miles of one of our three campus libraries (Riseholme, Hull, or Holbeach) then choose the nearest library.
  3. If you’re actually inside Chad Varah House, choose the Theology Reading Room.
  4. If none of these rules apply, choose the main GCW University Library.

We’ll be tweaking these ‘library lookup’ rules to get the best results. I’d also like to look at overriding the geo-lookup settings for logged-in users (displaying instead the library for their campus of study as derived from their profile). And what about displaying information about SCONUL Access libraries for distance learners, perhaps making use of Owen Stephens’ SCONUL libraries lookup script?

The page then uses the jQuery ‘accordion‘ widget to display the contact details for the chosen library, in a nice expandable format (i.e. you can click on the headings to display the details for a different library). It all degrades gracefully for browsers with less-than-impeccable support for JavaScript.

Neat, no? The code is on Github if you want to have a look.

Screenshot of the library contact page

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Options for reading list management: LIG

Posted on June 18th, 2011 by Paul Stainthorp

InnovationAt our Library Innovation Group (LIG) meeting this coming Monday (20 June), we’re going to be taking a fresh look at how we support the use of online reading lists in the University of Lincoln.

At the moment, we use a reading list product called LearnBuild LibraryLink, which integrates nicely with our Blackboard VLE and allows subject librarians to keep on top of multiple lists. However, it’s fair to say it’s not always the easiest software to use. Here are my instructions on maintaining reading lists in LibraryLink [PDF].

When I gave a presentation about our experiences of using reading list software at the second ‘Innovations in Reference Management‘ event last year (#irm10), Owen Stephens the event organiser liveblogged our situation quite nicely:

Paul reflecting that Lincoln only partially successful in implementing ‘reading lists’.

University of Lincoln – bought reading list system, funds were only available for short period, so had limited time to assess full requirements and how far chosen product met their requirements.

Successes:

  • filled a void
  • improved consistency
  • gave library an ‘in’ on launch of new VLE (Blackboard)
  • hundreds of modules linked in by 2000
  • students are using them – have usage stats from both LearnBuild and Blackboard
  • some simple stock-demand prediction

Unfortunately there were quite a few areas not so successful:

  • not intuitive; time-consuming
  • software not being developed
  • no community of users
  • competing developements (EPrints, digitisation, OPAC, RefWorks)
  • too closely linked to Blackboard module system
  • Subject libraries don’t like it, but lack of uptake from academics means that it is the subject librarians who end up doing the work.

However, unless library can demonstrate success, unlikely to get money to buy better system… So library putting more effort into make it work.

So: on Monday, I’m hoping to kick off a discussion by giving a quick run-through of the various online reading list management options available to UK Higher Education libraries. These screenshot slides (which are a visual aid / aide mémoire rather than a proper presentation) list the various products and approaches to reading list management. Some are commercial software projects; others are Open Source projects; still others are being developed in-house at various universities (and are not necessarily available for the University of Lincoln to use – e.g. the University of Huddersfield’s MyReading Project); there are a couple of wildcard solutions in there too.

Here are the slides:

Reading list management software – what are the options?

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Taking the register

Posted on May 23rd, 2011 by Paul Stainthorp

In talking about authentication issues, the notion kept coming up that single, central, shared registries of information about libraries (e.g. the WorldCat Registry) could be valuable in helping publishers to make it easier for users to navigate to subscribed content via their own institution’s login option(s).

This spurred me to thinking: in what central/shared registries are our library details held, and what use can I [and our students/staff] make of this information?

This’ll be one of those blog posts that I’m still adding to in a year’s time, as I remember more stuff. I’ve(And a passing thought – wouldn’t it be cool if there was a single über-registry for libraries that brought all of these details together using a single API? Anyone?)

The University of Lincoln has library information registered with:

1. ISIL – International Standard Identifier for Libraries

An ISIL is like an ISBN or ISSN for an entire library: a way of uniquely and unambiguously identifying “an organization, or one of its subordinate units, throughout its life“. We have an ISIL for each of our five libraries, assigned to us a year ago by the British Library (the UK national agency for the ISIL). We use them for RFID stock control; to associate a copy of a book with its home library. The ISIL standard is ISO 15511:2009. Our five ISILs are:

GB-UkLiUGCW University of Lincoln: Great Central Warehouse University Library
GB-UkLiUTRR University of Lincoln: Theology Reading Room, Chad Varah House
GB-UkLiURPC University of Lincoln: Riseholme Park Campus Library
GB-UkSnHOC University of Lincoln: Holbeach Campus Library
GB-UkHlHUC University of Lincoln: Hull Campus Library

2. LibraryThing local

LibraryThing local (www.librarything.com/local) is a user-maintained directory and “gateway to thousands of local bookstores, libraries and book festivals“. LibraryThing users can create and edit entries for individual libraries, browse libraries by geographical area (including via a nice Google Maps display), add libraries to a list of favourites, and subscribe to RSS feeds of library events in their area (e.g.). We don’t really make use of these features – we don’t run a lot of ‘public’ events at the moment.

We’ve had directory entries since 2009 for four out of our five libraries, which I’ve “claimed” using my own LT account – writing this, I’ve noticed that the Theology Reading Room doesn’t have an entry.

  1. University of Lincoln – GCW University Library
  2. University of Lincoln – Theology Reading Room [no entry]
  3. University of Lincoln – Riseholme Park Campus Library
  4. University of Lincoln – Hull Campus Library
  5. University of Lincoln – Holbeach Campus Library

3. OpenURL registry

Our OpenURL link resolver (EBSCO LinkSource) is registered with the OpenURL Router service, maintained by EDINA for all UK HE and FE institutions. The registry holds details of our base URL for constructing links, our preferred link resolver button image Find it @ Lincoln, and our authentication details (UK Federation scope and IP ranges).

Registry entry at:

Service providers can construct OpenURLs for our users with the base URL: http://openurl.ac.uk/

4. Talis Silkworm Directory

We have (had?) entries in the Talis Silkworm Directory (directory.­talis.­com) for all five of our libraries. This is (was?) a community-driven open directory of information about libraries, that powers (powered?) mashups like Philip Adams’ SCONUL Access libraries maps on the De Montfort University library website.

As you can probably tell from my present/past tense confusion above, I don’t know if this directory is still operational. I’d heard it was defunct some time ago, and it now appears that the directory.talis.com subdomain has been switched off.

5. Social networking websites

The GCW University Library has a page on Foursquare, the “location-based mobile platform that makes cities easier to use and more interesting to explore”. An interesting one this – it’s not a library-focused service, and not one we ‘control’ (though the official @unilincoln Twitter account is listed as ‘staff’), but probably the site that most of our users will interact with.

We also have a Flickr profile: I used it to upload a set of (mainly) historical photos of the GCW building, back in October/November 2008. I haven’t used it since. We’ve never bothered with specific Library accounts on Twitter or Facebook*.

6. UK Access Management Federation

We’re a member of the UK Access Management Federation: this controls all sorts of authentication to third-party electronic resources and comes with its own set of jargon:

7. WorldCat Registry

This is the newest one on me: although I think I remember someone from OCLC (Mark Allcock?) talking about it at the first UK Mashed Library event in 2008; it was only a Twitter conversation last week that promopted me to look at it in earnest.

Again, four out of our five libraries already have profiles (which I’ve now “claimed”). I’m still exploring the site, and I haven’t yet updated/registered all of our details, so I’m not entirely sure what benefits we can get from it – I’d appreciate any advice from WorldCat Registry old hands. I don’t understand how the WorldCat Registry relates to the WorldCat Affiliate Tools—if at all—either.

  1. University of Lincoln, GCW University Library
  2. University of Lincoln, Theology Reading Room [no entry]
  3. University of Lincoln, Riseholme Park Campus Library
  4. University of Lincoln, Hull Campus Library
  5. University of Lincoln, Holbeach Campus Library

8. Document supply (added 23 May 2011)

Owen Stephens suggested this one. We’re listed in the British Library’s Directory of Library Codes for document supply, where we have our own identifier (it’s HL/C-3). I’m sure my colleagues in inter-library loans won’t hit me for not knowing that off the top of my head.

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An elastic bucket down the data well (#rdtf in Manchester)

Posted on April 20th, 2011 by Paul Stainthorp

I was in Manchester on Monday for Opening Data – Opening Doors, a one-day “advocacy workshop” hosted by JISC and RLUK under their Resource Discovery Taskforce (#rdtf) programme. I delivered a five-minute ‘personal pitch’ about Jerome, open data, and the rapid-development ethos that’s developing at Lincoln.

Ken Chad is writing up a report from the day and Helen Harrop is producing a blog, both of which will be signposted from the website: http://rdtf.mimas.ac.uk/

The big data question

All the presentations can be viewed on slideshare, but there were some particular moments that I think are worth picking out:

The JISC deputy, Prof. David Baker was first up. His presentation, ‘A Vision for Resource Discovery‘ should be compulsory reading for university librarians. See, in particular, slides #6 (guiding principles of the RDTF), #8 (a future state of the art by 2012), and #11 (key themes).

Slide from David Baker's presentation Slide from David Baker's presentation Slide from David Baker's presentation

Following this introduction, there were three ‘perspectives’, short presentations “reflecting on the real world motivations and efforts involved in opening up bibliographic, archival and museums data to the wider world”: from the National Maritime Museum, the National Archives…

…and from Ed Chamberlain of (Jerome’s ‘sister project‘) COMET (Cambridge Open METadata), the perspective from Cambridge University Library on opening up access to their non-inconsiderable bibliographic data. N.B. slides #4 (what does COMET entail?), #9 (licensing) and—more than anything else—slide #16 (“beyond bibliography”).

Slide from Ed Chamberlain's presentation Slide from Ed Chamberlain's presentation Slide from Ed Chamberlain's presentation

The first breakout/discussion session which I sat in on looked at technical and licencing constraints to opening up access to [bib] data. This was the point at which the tortured business metaphors started to pile up. ‘Buckets’ of data. ‘Elastic’ buckets that can expand to include any kind of data. And (my personal contribution, continuing the wet theme): data often exist at the bottom of a ‘well’. Just because a well is open at the top, it doesn’t necessarily make it easy to get the water out! You need another kind of bucket – a service bucket that makes it possible to extract and make use of the water. Sorry, data. What were we talking about again?

Then a series of 5-minute ‘personal pitches’, including mine just after lunch. I didn’t use slides, but I’m typing up my handwritten notes on Google Docs and I’ll post them as a separate blog post when I get a chance.

David Kay (SERO), Paul Miller (Cloud of Data) and Owen Stephens delivered the meat of the afternoon session in their presentation, ‘The Open Bibliographic Data Guide – Preparing to eat the elephant‘. The website containing the Open Bib Data Guide (which has not been formally launched until now) can be found at: http://obd.jisc.ac.uk/

The site itself is going to be invaluable in hand-holding and guiding institutions through the possibilities in opening up access to their own bibliographic data (OBD). Slides from the presentation that are particularly worth noting are #8 (which shows the colour-coding used to distinguish the different OBD use-cases) and #14 (examples of existing OBD).

Slide from the OBD presentation Slide from the OBD presentation

Paul Walk’s presentation, ‘Technical standards & the RDTF Vision: some considerations‘, is the source of the slide which I photographed (at the top of this blog post). Paul talked about ‘safe bets’; aspects of the Web that we can rely on playing a part in allowing us to create a distributed environment for resource discovery: including “ROASOADOA” (Resource- / Service- / Data-Oriented Architecture), persistent identifiers, and a RESTful approach. See also this blog post.

In the second breakout/discussion session, we discussed technical approaches. One of the themes which we kept coming back to was that of two approaches (encapsulated by Paul’s slide) which—while not mutually exclusive—may require different business cases or different explanations in order to be taken up by institutions. We characterised the two approaches as:

  • Raw open data vs Data services
  • Triple store vs RESTful APIs
  • Jerome vs COMET (bit of a caricature, this one, but not entirely unjustified!)

I was gratified that Lincoln’s approach to rapid development and provision of open services was also referred to in non-ungratifying terms, as a model which could be valuable for the HE sector as a whole.

Finally, we heard what’s next for the #rdtf programme. It’s going to be rebranded as ‘Discovery‘ and formally re-launched under the new name at another event: ‘Discovery – building a UK metadata ecology‘ on Thursday, 26 May 2011, in London. See you there?

Ken Chad is writing up a report from the day and Helen Harrop is producing a blog, both of which will be signposted from the website: http://rdtf.mimas.ac.uk.

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