Posts Tagged ‘project’

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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The data! The data!

Posted on October 3rd, 2011 by Paul Stainthorp

The Library Impact Data Project (LIDP), which ran from February-July this year, and in which the University of Lincoln took part, has now released a subset of the library activity data used in the analysis (which, you’ll remember, showed a statistically significant correlation across a number of universities between library activity data and student attainment).

Lincoln’s data is included in the release, which is available for re-use under an open licence, from:

http://eprints.hud.ac.uk/11543/

This data set is made available under the Open Data Commons Attribution License
http://opendatacommons.org/licenses/by/1.0/

The data contains final grade and library usage figures for 33,074 students studying undergraduate degrees at UK universities. More information on the data, and how it’s been generalised in order to preserve students’ anonymity, on the LIDP project blog.

  • There’s also a detailed report about the statistical breakdown of Lincoln’s own share of the data (this wasn’t published as part of the project reports, as it was down to each individual institution whether to make it public or not) – I’ve made the report available here [PDF].

The LIDP blog also contains information about the project ‘toolkit‘, developed to assist other institutions who may want to test their own data against the LIDP’s hypothesis, here and here.

Thanks again to Graham, Bryony and Dave at the University of Huddersfield for inviting Lincoln to take part in the project, and for their help along the way!

On to the next one…

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Over the moon: Lincoln awarded £240k JISC funding for Orbital MRD project

Posted on September 9th, 2011 by Paul Stainthorp

Satellite City

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?

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This is the end: Jerome project

Posted on August 1st, 2011 by Paul Stainthorp

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

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

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QR code project: first meeting

Posted on February 17th, 2011 by Paul Stainthorp

We’ve made a start with our ‘QR codes in the Library‘ project. By the time of the Library staff away day in July, we’re going to produce a report examining the uses to which QR codes are already being put in academic (and other libraries), and making recommendations for their use in the Library at the University of Lincoln.

Notes:

  • We may deliver our presentation on the staff away day in the form of a QR code treasure hunt (with a prize, of course)… in addition to a set of questions for library staff to consider.
  • Elif Varol will liaise with ICT services: what plans do ICT have for the use of QR codes in the wider University?
  • Marie Nicholson will carry out a review of literature relating to QR codes in libraries, which we’ll record in this shared RefWorks account.
  • Chris Leach will look into QR code reading software and hardware (i.e. stand-alone readers).
  • …and I’ll approach one or two university libraries who make use of QR codes in their day-to-day activities, to ask about the possibility of visiting them before July.

We’re going to meet once a month; I’ll blog everything here.

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Jerome: it’s official!

Posted on January 18th, 2011 by Paul Stainthorp

I’m beyond delighted to be able to announce that our bid to the JISC to fund Jerome was successful. ‘Un-project’ Jerome will become Project Jerome on 1 February, 2011. Expect activity on the Jerome blog to speed up significantly after that date!

You can read the successful bid online. Thanks are due: to the JISC themselves, to Joss Winn for his beyond-value bid-writing expertise, and to the Jerome un-project team (esp.NJ+AB) for all their un-work so far.

Champagne And Fun

“Jerome began in the summer of 2010, as an informal ‘un-project’, with the aim of radically integrating data available to the University of Lincoln’s library services and offering a uniquely personalised service to staff and students through the use of new APIs, open data and machine learning. Jerome addresses many of the challenges highlighted in the Resource Discovery Taskforce report, including the need to develop scale at the data and user levels, the use of third-party data and services and a better understanding of ‘user journeys’. Here, we propose to formalise Jerome as a project, consolidating the lessons we have learned over the last few months by developing a sustainable, institutional service for open bibliographic metadata, complemented with well documented APIs and an ‘intelligent’, personalised interface for library users.”

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