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CLOCK and a summary of 2 other Discovery projects

Paul Stainthorp — Thu, 17 May 2012 13:44:48 +0000

Ed Chamberlain, who is on the CLOCK project team as a researcher, is involved in two other projects under the Discovery strand: OEM-UK and Open Bibliography 2. We’re looking for ways in which CLOCK can re-use data, code, processes and ideas from these projects (and elsewhere) – also what CLOCK could offer in return.

Notes:

Open Biblio project over the last few years; aim to aggregate large amounts of bibliographic data for scientific discovery.
Data collected from Cambridge University, the BL, PubMed and held as RDF, used to power an open catalogue called “Bibliographica“.
Problems around scaling the data/system led to the current JISC-funded Open Biblio 2 project (in the meantime, Cambridge and the BL had started to publish their data openly).
Open Biblio 2 started looking at a NoSQL approach (CouchDB, Lucene/Solr) – eventually settling on Elastic Search.
The approach of Open Biblio is to build bottom-up, community tools: BibServer and BibSoup (“Like Wikimedia for bib data”). Raises interesting questions about data quality in an open community-driven system.
Also looking at JSON as lightweight way of sharing bib data: emerging BibJSON convention for representing bibliographic record as a JSON object (Ed wrote a MARC-to-BibJSON-parser in Perl). N.B. BibJSON is not a million miles away from the JSON that Jerome spits out! There are three hack days taking place next month in London to look specifically at BibJSON.
Open Biblio 2 is also looking at JSON-LD (JSON for Linking Data), a ‘real’ JSON standard which does a lot of the things that RDF does.

tl;dr = use their JSON standards and BibSoup as a data source.

The second project, OEM-UK (Open Education Metadata UK), based at the IoE in London, is focusing on cataloguing workflows.
Data from the IoE’s SirsiDynix catalogue, plus EPrints is drawn into a Drupal framework; forms to create data (autopopulation of forms); “cataloguing the Drupal way”.

Thought from Andrew Beeken: could we replicate this approach, using WordPress custom post types to store and display structured content? Shades of the OPACPress project which Joss Winn and I proposed—but that was not funded—several years ago.

Some evidence that this approach is capable of speeding up the cataloguing process considerably: the more data you put in the faster it gets! Ed has some screencapture videos from OEM-UK showing workflow, including grabbing data via Zotero.

td;dr = OEM-UK are also successfully disrupting cataloguing workflows.

Imminent domain

Paul Stainthorp — Fri, 04 May 2012 21:57:18 +0000

With various new services arising out of the ongoing Library ICT systems review, we’re amassing a nice little collection of library-related 2nd-level subdomains. Here’s a list, which I’ll edit as they become live.

http://library.lincoln.ac.uk/ (i.e. the ‘bare’ library subdomain: this isn’t used at the moment, but we intend that it will become the Library’s ‘root’ web presence)
http://www.library.lincoln.ac.uk/ (currently used for our SirsiDynix Horizon Information Portal OPAC, which we intend to move to catalogue.library… in order to free up www for our web pages hosted on WordPress)
http://catalogue.library.lincoln.ac.uk/ (the future home of the library catalogue)
http://findit.library.lincoln.ac.uk/ (a launch point for our new Discovery system, still to be announced, ~~and with a name yet to be decided!~~)
http://lists.library.lincoln.ac.uk/ (Talis Aspire reading lists, currently being developed)
http://archives.library.lincoln.ac.uk/ (Axiell Calm archives and special collections software)
http://jerome.library.lincoln.ac.uk/ (Jerome is our innovation platform and a home for experimental search services, being re-developed as part of the CLOCK project)
http://auth.library.lincoln.ac.uk/ (OpenAthens LA v2.1 authentication software)
http://proxy.library.lincoln.ac.uk/ (EZProxy authentication software)

We also have two core systems which aren’t on the library subdomain:

http://eprints.lincoln.ac.uk/ (the Lincoln Repository on EPrints – it’s appropriate that this isn’t on library, as we’ve always managed the Repository as a shared/collaborative project between CERD, ICT services, the Library, and the Research Office)
http://ill.lincoln.ac.uk/ (CLIO inter-library loans software)

Developing the UKCoRR website

Paul Stainthorp — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 15:27:37 +0000

I was at the University of Nottingham, yesterday, for the annual face-to-face meeting of the UKCoRR committee. (Unfunded as UKCoRR is, all other committee meetings—we have one every couple of months—are teleconferences using Powwownow. But it’s immensely valuable to get together in person at least once a year.) Amongst other things, we discussed the recent survey of UKCoRR members, and the next members’ meeting, planned for January 2012.

My #1 priority as UKCoRR ‘Web & Publicity Officer‘ is to upgrade the group’s website (www.ukcorr.org).

The old website – graciously funded and hosted by the CRC at Nottingham for the past n years, is beginning to show its age. I’m copying over all the content to a WordPress site hosted at the University of Lincoln; as soon as it’s the equal of the ‘old’, current site, we’ll transfer the *.ukcorr.org domain over, and take it forward from there.

You can see the (extremely very much still in-development) new UKCoRR website, for the time being, at: http://ukcorr.blogs.lincoln.ac.uk/

Alright stop: collaborate and LISN

Paul Stainthorp — Wed, 16 Mar 2011 10:59:48 +0000

Yesterday the University of Lincoln hosted the latest meeting of LISN, the Lincolnshire Information Services Network of libraries and information providers from all library sectors (academic, school, public, specialist) operating in Lincs.

“LISN (pronounced listen) has been in existence since August 1998 when a group of (mainly) college and university librarians decided to network on a formalised basis. LISN is a group which meets to share staff expertise and resources between its members and therefore by extension all members’ users.”

My particular and long-running task in LISN is to make something of our website. I’ve recently re-created the site using WordPress, hosted here at the University; the group’s web domain (www.lisn.org.uk) is now pointing at the new site. Now I need to apply a decent WordPress theme and visual style; also to develop the site content: the group has agreed that it’s going to be kept small and perfectly formed(!), but there is some more information about the member organisations that needs to be incorporated.

A screenshot of the new website, pre-visual makeover:

(And yes, I’ve used the title of this blog post before. So sue me.)

I’m all about the Web

Paul Stainthorp — Thu, 13 Jan 2011 21:29:34 +0000

I’ve started to use the links feature of this WordPress site to keep a record of my presence on a whole range of other external websites, blogs, wikis, and social networking sites, which I’ll add to as I register a new account (or remember existing registrations).

You should be able to view the list of links on the right-hand side of http://paulstainthorp.com/

22 links and counting. I’ve tried (and been reasonably successful so far) to use the same account name (pstainthorp) for all my registrations.

Q. Where are you on the Web? How do you keep track?

Maths ‘n’ Stats support centre website

Paul Stainthorp — Tue, 07 Dec 2010 13:10:26 +0000

I’ve been working on a little website for the University of Lincoln’s resident statistician, John Flynn, to promote to students (and their lecturers) the services of the Lincoln Maths and Statistics Support Centre.

It’s [yet another] WordPress site on the University’s blogging / self-publishing platform, ‘themed’ with the University’s new-ish CWD (Common Web Design) template.

The support centre itself operates out of the GCW University Library (“Learning Development” suite) three days a week, and helps students with assessment worries and analysis for project work. Related: sigma – Centre for Excellence in Mathematics & Statistics Support.

The website is at: http://mathsandstats.blogs.lincoln.ac.uk/

I’ve also added a widget to the Library ‘tab’ on Blackboard, which displays links to the [currently] 4 pages on the Maths and Stats website. This I created using the site’s RSS feed (it has the WordPress ‘RSS Include Pages‘ plugin activated) – fed through Feed2JS to turn it into JavaScript-within-HTML tags – then embedded within a Blackboard HTML widget. Easy peasy.

Old site, new site

Paul Stainthorp — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 15:09:55 +0000

I’ve decided to start maintaining again my personal website, mainly as a register of all the little bits of work I get involved in. This does mean it might not always make fascinating reading (unless you’re transfixed by digital library management and development…), but at least I’ll have a permanent record of things to refer back to.

My original website was a series of plain HTML documents; now instead of maintaining my own installation of WordPress I’m using the University of Lincoln’s (i.e. my employer’s) WordPress MU / BuddyPress server at blogs.lincoln.ac.uk, but mapped to my own domain. This way I can participate in the social-networking features of BuddyPress, while still maintaining my own, personal online presence outside the University.