RepositoryMan

Mendeley Open Access Update

2012-01-05T12:08:00.002Z

In the last six months since I analysed Mendeley's contribution to Computer Science OA in June 2011, they appear to have increased their membership of that community by 37% and the ratio of full text documents to community members has increased from 0.66 to 0.71. The number of OA documents has increased by 47% to 11,757 and the number of OA active users (i.e. users who have made at least one document public through Mendeley's servers) has risen by 46% to 2,441 but still represents only 15% of the total membership of that community.

Congratulations to Mendeley - their service is obviously rising in popularity and hence in significance to the community. OA analysts will note that the increase in open access documents comes from increased membership, rather than a change in behaviour of the community.

Rethinking the Open Access Agenda

2011-10-26T02:21:00.001+01:00

I used to be a perfectly good computer scientist, but now I've been ruined by sociologists. Or at least that is what Professor Catherine Pope (the Marxist feminist health scientist who co-directs the Web Science Doctoral Training Centre with me) says. I am now as likely to quote Bruno Latour as Donald Knuth, and when I examine "the web" instead of a linked graph of HTML nodes I increasingly see a complex network of human activity loosely synchronised by a common need for HTTP interactions.

All of which serves as a kind of explanation of why I have come to think that we need to revisit the Budapest Open Access Initiative's obsession with information technology:

An old tradition and a new technology have converged to make possible an unprecedented public good. The old tradition is the willingness of scientists and scholars to publish the fruits of their research in scholarly journals without payment, for the sake of inquiry and knowledge. The new technology is the internet. The public good they make possible is the world-wide electronic distribution of the peer-reviewed journal literature and completely free and unrestricted access to it by all scientists, scholars, teachers, students, and other curious minds. Removing access barriers to this literature will accelerate research, enrich education, share the learning of the rich with the poor and the poor with the rich, make this literature as useful as it can be, and lay the foundation for uniting humanity in a common intellectual conversation and quest for knowledge. (see http://www.soros.org/openaccess/read)

BOAI promises that the "new technology" of the Internet (actually the Web) will transform our relationship to knowledge. But that was also one of the promises of the electric telegraph a century ago

From the telegraph's earliest days, accounts of it had predicted "great social benefits": diffused knowledge, collective amity, even the prevention of crimes. (Telegraphic realism: Victorian fiction and other information systems by Richard Menke.)

There has been much good and effective work to support OA from both technical and policy perspectives - Southampton's part includes the development of the EPrints repository platform as well as the ROAR OA monitoring service - but critics still point to a disappointing amount of fruit from our efforts. Repositories multiply and green open access (self-deposited) material increases; knowledge about (and support for) OA has spread through academic management, funders and politicians, but it has not yet become a mainstream activity of researchers themselves. And now, a decade into the Open Access agenda, we are grasping the opportunity to replay all our missteps and mistakes in the pursuit of Open Data.

I am beginning to wonder whether by defining open access as a phenomenon of scholarly communication, we mistakenly created from the outset an alien and unimportant concept for the scientists and scholars who long ago outsourced the publication process to a support industry. As a consequence, OA has been best understood by (or most discussed by) the practitioners of scholarly and scientific communication - librarians and publishers - rather than by the practitioners of scholarship and science.

We have seen that the challenge of the Web can't be neatly limited to dissemination practices. In calling for researchers open the outputs of their research, we inevitably argue with researchers to reconsider the relationship that they have with their own work, their immediate colleagues, their academic communities, their institutions, funders and their public. It turns out that we haven't been able to divorce the output of research from the conduct and the context of research activity. Let's move on from there.

In a recent paper Openness as infrastructure, John Wilbanks discussed the three missing components of an open infrastructure for science: the infrastructure to collaborate scientifically and produce data, the technical infrastructure to classify data and the legal infrastructure to share data - extending the technical infrastructure with a legal framework. I think that we need to go further and refocus our efforts and our rhetoric about "Open Access to Scientific Information" towards "Open Activity by Scientists" supported by three kinds of infrastructure:

Human Engagement
Methodological Analysis and
Social Trust.

The aim of open access to scientific outputs and outcomes will not occur until scientific practitioners see the benefit of the scientific commons, not as an anonymous dumping ground for information that can be accessed by all and sundry, but as a field of engagement that offers richer possibilities for their research and their professional activities. To realise that, scientists need more than email and Skype to work together, more than Google to aggregate their efforts and more than a copyright disclaimer to negotiate and mediate the trust relationships that make the openness that OA promises a safe and attractive, and hence realistic, proposition.

What I'm saying isn't new - there has been lots of effort and discussion about improving the benefits of repository technology to the end user/researcher, and about lowering the barriers of use. JISC have funded a number of projects in its Deposit programme, trying various strategies to increase user engagement with OA. As well as continuing to pursue this approach, we also need to step back from obsessing about the technology of information delivery, think bigger thoughts about scientific people and scientific practice and tell a bigger and more relevant story.

Using EPrints Repositories to Collect Twitter Data

2011-10-09T15:05:00.003+01:00

A number of our Web Science students are doing work analysing people's use of Twitter, and the tools available for them to do so are rather limited since Twitter changed the terms of their service so that the functionality of TwapperKeeper and similar sites has been reduced. There are personal tools like NodeXL (a plugin for Microsoft Excel running under Windows) that do provide simple data capture from social networks, but a study will require long-term data collection over many months that is independent of reboots and power outages.

They say that to a man with a hammer, the solution to every problem looks like a nail. And so perhaps it its unsurprising that I see a role for EPrints in helping students and researchers to gather, as well as curate and preserve, their research data. Especially when the data gathering requires a managed, long-term process that results in a large dataset.

EPrints Twitter Dataset,
Rendered in HTML

In collecting large, ephemeral data sets (tweets, Facebook updates, Youtube uploads, Flickr photos, postings on email forums, comments on web pages) a repository has a choice between:

(1) simply collecting the raw data, uninterpreted and requiring the user to analyse the material with their own programs in their own environments

(2) partially interpreting the results and providing some added value for the user by offering intelligent searches, analyses and visualisations to help the researchers get a feel for the data.

We experimented with both approaches. The first sounds simple and more appropriate (don't make the repository get in the way!), but in the end the job of handling, storing and providing a usable interface to the collection of temporal data means that some interpretation of the data is inevitable.

So instead of just constantly appending a stream of structured data objects (tweets, emails, whatever) to an external storage object (a file, database or cloud bucket) we ingest each object into an internal eprints dataset with appropriate schema. There is a tweet dataset for individual tweets, and a timeline data set for collections of tweets - in theory multiple timeline datasets will refer to the same objects in the tweet dataset. These datasets can be manipulated by the normal EPrints API and managed by the normal EPrints repository tools: you can search, export and render tweets in the same way that you can for eprints, documents, projects and users.

EPrints collects Twitter data by regular calls to the Twitter API, using the search parameters given by the user. The figure on the left shows the results of a data collection (on the hashtag "drwho") resulting in a single twitter timeline that is rendered as HTML for the Manage Records page. In this rendering, the timeline of tweets is shown as normal on the left of the window, with lists of top tweeters, top mentions, top hashtags and top links together with a histogram of tweet frequency on the right. These simple additions serve to give an overview of the data to the researcher - not to try to take the place of their bespoke data analysis software, but simply to help understand some of the major features of the data as it is being collected. The data can be exported in various formats (JSON, XML, HTML and CSV) for subsequent processing and analysis. The results of this analysis can themselves be ingested into EPrints for preservation and dissemination, along with the eventual research papers that describe the activity.

All this functionality will soon be released as an EPrints Bazaar package; as of the time of writing we are about to release it for testing by our graduate students. The infrastructure that we have created will then be adapted for other Web temporal data capture sources as mentioned above (Flickr, YouTube, etc).

Mendeley: Measuring OA rates

2011-06-26T17:44:00.001+01:00

Having talked about Mendeley's OA deposit rates in my last blog post, I thought it worthwhile to check how representative my chosen discipline (Computer Science) was. Rather than download the entire community for each other discipline, I have performed a quick and dirty sample of some of the available literature in each discipline using the search function. Each Mendeley search result offers the option of saving the PDF (if available) to your library, so it is a simple matter to wget some search results and grep for PDFs.

The table below shows the results of this procedure for 11 disciplines (two illustrative keywords each). The "available PDFs" column records the number of PDFs offered on the first page of the search results (each page contains 200 results); the total number of results shows the relative coverage of the topic in Mendeley.

Computer Science appears to be in the 5-10% range of OA (18 or 11 PDFs out of a page of 200 results) which does seem to be just about average. Social Science, Medicine, Health Science, Economics and the Humanities appear to have fewer PDFs and Maths and Physics appear to have rather more.

Search term	Discipline	Available PDFs	Total Results
chromatography	Chem	10	14260
crystallography	Chem	27	4921
JAVA	CS	18	848
software	CS	11	15185
geology	Earth	36	4180
hydrodynamic	Earth	40	2853
econometrics	Economics	13	565
microeconomics	Economics	5	88
biodiversity	Env	14	4668
climate	Env	14	13003
nursing	Health	6	10723
palliative	Health	6	1978
archaeology	Hum	6	1730
Foucault	Hum	11	248
algebra	Math	101	4424
cohomology	Math	171	525
cancer	Med	11	52315
pharmacology	Med	4	62285
quasar	Phys	127	556
telescope	Phys	101	2347
cognition	Psy	11	18805
schizophrenia	Psy	17	4055
criminology	SocSci	2	154
sociology	SocSci	2	2005

Mendeley: Download vs Upload Growth

2011-06-26T13:31:00.000+01:00

There was a lot of talk about Mendeley at OAI7 in Geneva, especially the news that in the first quarter of 2011 the number of articles downloaded for free jumped from 300,000 to 800,000. That's really good news, confirming Mendeley as a successful service in the Open Access domain. Having done an analysis of Mendeley's impact on Open Access (see Comparing Social Sharing of Bibliographic Information with Institutional Repositories) just under a year ago, I thought I'd repeat the analysis to see the extent of the impact of their growth on deposits as well as downloads.

Results: the number of members of the Computer Science discipline appears to be 2.2x larger than last August (increased to 74736 from 34230.) Of these, only 12102 appear in the Computer Science directory listing, whose contents are now filtered by Mendeley according to their "profile completion"; the gross number was kindly provided for me by Steve Dennis at Mendeley. This filtering takes care of the long tail of accounts that have never been used. Of the filtered users, 1676 are "OA active", having publicly shared at least one PDF document (up 21% on last August). The total number of PDFs shared by this group is 8014, up 16% on last August with 4.8 PDFs being shared per "active OA user" (down from 5.0 last August).

So a big increase in user numbers results in a small increase in publicly shared PDFs, confirming (I think) that Mendeley are not preaching to the choir, and are mainly attracting users who are not already "OA active". Users of Mendeley have clearly transitioned from "scholarly knowledge collectors" to "scholarly knowledge sharers". The challenge still remains how to change their behaviour from "scholarly asset maintainers" to "scholarly asset sharers".

Experimenting With Repository UI Design

2011-04-27T14:00:00.000+01:00

I'm always on the lookout for engaging UI paradigms to inspire repository design, and I recently noticed that Blogger has made some new "dynamic views" available. It provides a variety of smart presentation styles aren't a million miles away from the ones emerging on smartphone apps, combining highly visual and animated layouts.

So I've imported some repository contents into Blogger to get some hands on experience, and I'd be interested in any feedback on whether this looks useful or compelling.

The new blog is called Mike O'Lection - it's a little DSpace repository joke. .
New views

Sidebar: http://mikeolection.blogspot.com/view/sidebar
Timeslide: http://mikeolection.blogspot.com/view/timeslide
Mosaic: http://mikeolection.blogspot.com/view/mosaic (very Tumblr)
Snapshot: http://mikeolection.blogspot.com/view/snapshot
Flipcard: http://mikeolection.blogspot.com/view/flipcard

Original repository pages: http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/17386/, http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/21289/, http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/21622/, http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/21030/

These views suit various different types of material, but the constant theme that is emerging is that a good visual is pretty much de rigeur for any resource. This means that relying on the thumbnail image of an article's first page is not going to be a good strategy (hint: they all look the same.) I can forsee the need to extract figures and artwork from the PDFs and Office Documents uploaded to a repository.

(Over the next few days I hope to put some more examples on the blog to help get a better feel for how this will work. But I think I might make a bulk Blogger exporter for EPrints because manual cut and pasting is only enjoyable for a few minutes!)

Mobile Use of Repositories

2011-04-26T11:13:00.004+01:00

While looking at the impact of mobile devices on the development of the Web I found useful information in this March 2011 press release from web analytics company StatCounter, charting the rise of Android.

StatCounter data also pinpoints the rise and rise of mobile devices to access the Internet. The use of mobile to access the Internet compared to desktop has more than doubled worldwide from 1.72% a year ago to 4.45% today. The same trend is evident in the US with mobile Internet usage more than doubling over the past year from 2.59% to 6.32%.

I thought I'd see whether this behavior applies equally to repositories and so I had a poke around in the usage states for eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk and this is what I found:

53,285 PDF downloads from 27 March 2011 (4am) - 3rd Apr 2011 (4am).
Of these 33,304 are attributed to crawlers and 19,981 to real browsers.
Only 0.93% of the browser downloads occur on mobile devices (70% iOS, 22% Android, 7% Blackberry and 1% Symbian)

The use of mobiles that we are seeing for accessing research outputs in repositories is less than 1/4 of the general use of mobile Internet. An obvious reason for that is the unpalatable mixture of PDF pages and small devices, but popular applications like Mekentoshj's Papers and Mendeley for iPhone seem to indicate that an attractive mobile experience should be possible.
That implies that there's another exciting opportunity for repository developers to up their game!

Faculty of 1000 Posters - Still Looking for a Silver Bullet

2011-04-14T01:47:00.003+01:00

The F1000 Open Access Poster Repository was brought to my attention by a recent Tweet. I love repositories with posters in - they're copyright-lite and very visually attractive - and I've long advocated for more use to be made of these kinds of scholarly communication. With some success, I have pushed hard for the poster artwork to be made available online in all the conferences I have been involved in organising.

The Faculty of 1000 has a special relationship with some Biomedical conferences, inviting authors to upload their posters to the open access F1000 site. Perhaps this is an effective new way of gaining open access to specific kinds of early-report research material?

The F1000 posters site contains 909 posters. 649 of those are derived from 28 invited conferences (an admirable average of 23 posters per conference), and the remaining 260 posters are uploaded on an ad hoc basis from authors attending 148 other conferences (an average of 1.7 posters per conference).

While it is clear that the invitation approach is much more effective than the laissez faire approach, the huge size of biomedical conferences (often displaying several thousand posters over the course of four days) means that the overall success rate of this OA strategy is only 4.2% (a figure I reached by counting the total number of posters at a sample of 7 of the 28 invited conferences).

So, still no silver OA bullet!

I Won't Review Green OA, It's Spam - I DO NOT LIKE IT Sam-I-Am

2011-03-21T15:40:00.004Z

According to the Times Higher, Michael Mabe (chief executive of the International Association of Scientific, Medical and Technical Publishers and a visiting professor in information science at University College London) fears that repositories are essentially "electronic buckets" with no quality control. He also expressed doubts that the academy would be able to successfully introduce peer review to such repositories, partly because it would be difficult to attract reviewers who had no "brand allegiance" to the repositories.

Let's think about this....

Q: Who are the authors of papers?

A: Researchers.

Q: Who put papers in repositories?

A: The authors.

Q: Who review papers?

A: The authors of other papers.

Q: Where do they get papers to review?

A: From a URL provided by the journal editorial board.

Q: Who are the editorial board?

A: Authors of other papers.

Q: Just remind me what the publishers do?

A: Their most important job is to organise the processes that get the peer review accomplished by the other authors (see above).

Q: Where does the brand value of a journal come from?

A: It's a bit complicated, but mainly from the prestige of the authors on the editorial board and the prestige of the papers that the authors write. There is a default brand that comes from the publishing company that owns the journal, but of course that comes recursively from the brand value of all the journals that it owns.

Q: "Electronic buckets" don't sound very valuable, do they?

A: No they certainly don't - I mean, imagine the kind of material that normally ends up in a bucket! Who would want to peer-review that? But hang on - who stores stuff in buckets anyway? That's a bit of a problematic metaphor for a storage system! Try replacing "buckets" with "library shelves" and the statement becomes more accurate. What kind of material do you find on library shelves? Things that people might want to read. Things that people might want to review.

Q: But how would authors know what to review in a repository without the publishing company's branding?

A: I suppose an editorial board would send them a URL.

You Can't Trust Everything You Read on the Web

2011-03-11T18:04:00.005Z

Houston, we have a problem. It turns out that trusting repositories as authoritative sources of research information is all very well and good, except when the repository is an authoritative source of demonstration (fake) documents. Sebastien Francois (one of the EPrints team at Southampton) has just reported that Google Scholar is indexing the fake documents that we make available in demoprints.eprints.org.

So when your weaker students start citing

Freiwald, W. and Bonardi, X. and Leir, X. (1998) Hellbenders in the Wild. Better Farming, 1 (4). pp. 91-134.

you know that it's just a teensy misunderstanding, OK? But if anyone needs their citation count artificially boosting, I have a repository available to monetize.

Google, Content Farms and Repositories

2011-03-07T09:20:00.005Z

In recent news, Google has altered its ranking algorithms to favour sites with original material rather than so-called content farms that simply redistribute material found on other sites. Although users report satisfaction with improved results, this action has caused quite a furore with some genuine sites losing significant business as well.

I have been worried about how this would affect repositories, after all we technically fit into the definition of content farms: sites that exist to redistribute material that is published elsewhere. Bearing in mind that Google delivers the vast majority of our visitors to us, if the changes were to impact on our rankings, we might suffer quite badly. Now that there's been a couple of weeks for the changes to migrate around the planet, our usage stats point to business as usual.

First of all, downloads over the last quarter - no dramatic tailoffs in the last week.

And a comparison with last year (apologies the different vertical scale) shows year-on-year stability.

So good news there: our repositories haven't been classed as valueless redistribution agents. That would have been a bit of a blow to our morale!

The Missing Sixth Star of Open Linked Data?

2011-03-06T08:12:00.012Z

In my previous posting I proposed the idea of the 5 stars of open access. There is of course one feature that the original "taxonomy" misses out completely - repositories! Not just "my favourite repository platform", but the idea of persistent, curated storage. Consequently, my proposal for open access doesn't mention repositories - a bit of an oversight!

At the moment, the entry level to the 5 stars is simply "put it on the web, with an open license". Perhaps we should change this to "put it in a repository with an open license"; perhaps we could designate a "zeroth star" for "just put it on the Web". However, the Linked Data Research Lab at DERI already propose a no-star level, which involves material being put on the web without an explicit license.

You can get away with putting material on the Web without any concern about their future safety - but not for long, especially if you want to build services on top of that material.

Services like CKAN (Comprehensive Knowledge Archive Network, http://ckan.net/) are registries of open knowledge packages currently favoured by the open data community. This registry is built on a simple content management environment, and by November 2010 was already returning HTTP 400- and 500-class error codes for 9% of its listed data source URLs.

A more extreme example is seen in the UK, where police forces recently started to release data about crime reports. But "whenever a new set of data is uploaded, the previous set will be removed from public view, making comparisons impossible unless outside developers actively store it" (see The Guardian for more details).

Repositories have an opportunity to provide management, persistence and curation services to the open data community and its international collections of linked data. Whether our OA platforms are chosen (DSpace? EPrints? Fedora? Zentity?) is not the issue - it is the philosophy and practices of repository that are vital to the Open Data community, because the data is important and long-lived.

On the other hand, I have argued that reuse (and in this case retention) are the enemy of access. "Just putting it up on the Web" is an easier injunction than "deposit it in a repository" (especially if you haven't got a repository installed) and hence more likely to succeed. So we shouldn't put repositories on the Linked Data on-ramp (step/star 1), but if not there, then where should they go?

I would argue that by step 3 (using open formats) or 4 (adding value with identifiers and semantic web tech) the data provider is being asked to make a more substantial investment, and to boost the value of their data holdings. This seems to be an appropriate point to add in extra features, especially when they will help secure the results of that investment. So the 5 stars of Linked Data would mention repositories in Level 4, but the five stars of Open Access could do so in Level 1 because they are already an accepted part of OA processes.

I'm not sure I'm comfortable with mixing the levels - it makes for confusion. Wouldn't it be much better to have one set of processes that apply to all forms of openness - the basic principles of the Web? In my previous post I pointed out that you can add 5* links to 2* PDFs and spreadsheets, so I think possibly that the solution lies in the fact that the 5 stars are not sequential stages, but 5 more-or-less independent principles that each make openness more valuable and useful: licensing, machine readability, open standards, entity identification, interlinking. To which we could add "sustainability", making (see diagram above) is a constellation of linked data properties.

The Five Stars of Open Access (aka Linked Documents)

2011-03-04T10:55:00.007Z

Yesterday I was having a discussion about Scholarly Communications, Open Access, Web 2 and the Semantic Web with some colleagues in our newly formed "Web and Internet Science Research Group" at Southampton. As we were comparing and contrasting more than a decade's experience of open access/open data/OER/Open Government Data, we made the following observation: reuse is the enemy of access.

There have been efforts to replace PDF with HTML as a scholarly format to make data mining more easy, and movements to establish highly structured Learning Objects rich in pedagogic metadata to facilitate interoperability of e-learning material. (I have been involved in both of these!) But both have been ignored by the community - they are too hard, they fly in the face of current practice, they involve users learning new skills or making more effort. Some would argue that similar comments could be made about preservation and open access, or even just repositories and open access.

Although "reuse is the enemy of access" is quite a bold statement it's really just a reformulation of the old saw "the best is the enemy of the good". Attempts to do something with the material we have available are always more complex than just looking at the material we have available. Adding services, however valuable and desirable, are more problematic than "just making material available". In the repository community we've worked hard to help users get something for nothing (or something for as little effort as possible), and I'm proud that people recognise that philosophy in EPrints. But it's still a tension - you have to present Open Access as a bandwagon that's easy to climb on!

So I'm particularly impressed with Tim Berners-Lee's Five Stars of Linked Data as a means of declaring an easy onramp to the world of Linked Data, while at the same time setting out a clear means of evaluating and improving contributions and the processes required to support them. It allows the community to have their cake and eat it; to claim maximum participation (a bigger community is a more successful community) and appropriate differentiation (better value is a better agenda).

I think this approach would have served the Open Access communities (OA/OER/Open Data) very well (why didn't we think of it?) But it could yet do so, and so in the spirit of reuse I offer some early thoughts on the Five Stars of Open Access.

★ Available on the web (whatever format), but with an open licence
★★ Available as machine-readable editable data (e.g. Word instead of PDF page description)
★★★ as above plus non-proprietary format (e.g. HTML5 instead of Word)
★★★★ All the above plus, use open standards from W3C (RDF and microformats) to identify things, so that people can understand your stuff
★★★★★ All the above, plus: link your data to other people’s data to provide context i.e. link citations to DOIs and other entities to appropriate URIs (e.g. project names, author names, research groups, funders etc).

These are directly taken from Tim's document, with some subtle variations, and are intended for discussion. For a start, it shows that we haven't even got very far into 1-star territory, as we mainly fudge the licensing issue. (This comes from the fact that unlike data, our documents are often re-owned by third parties.) Pressing on, the second star is available for editable source documents rather than page images and this is also a minority activity. In our repository, there are 7271 PDFs vs 820 Office/HTML/XML documents. So a long way to go there. The third star seems even more remote (376 documents). And as for the fourth star's embedded metadata?

But the fifth star: this seems to be so valuable. If we could just get there - properly linked documents, no chasing down references, the ability to easily generate citation databases, easy lookup of the social network of authors. Sigh. What's not to like? And you can even add 5* facilities to PDF, so perhaps we will find some short cuts!

If we develop these five stars, it will help us to function as positive Open Access evangelists, while also promoting the future benefits that we would like to work towards. No mixed messages. No confusion.

Open Access - Who Calls the Shots Now?

2011-02-27T22:21:00.005Z

Three years ago on this blog (doesn't time fly!) I contrasted the efforts that librarians and academics could make in furthering Open Access. My argument (such as it was) focused on the relationships between the two communities, noting that when it came to research, librarians could only advise and assist but that academics could lead and command. Or at least in theory! In particular I backed the idea that change would come from senior managers in the academic world and from research funders. In the intervening time we have indeed seen a big increase in OA leadership in the form of mandates being adopted, but I wonder if the pace of change is not about to put even researchers in the back seat.

The Web was developed at CERN, in Switzerland, and took over the world in more than a geographic sense. It emerged from its home in a highly-funded, very collaborative, international research laboratory and carried the culture and design assumptions of its birthplace (open information exchange, minimal concern over intellectual property control, no requirements for individuals to monetize knowledge production) and stamped them on the rest of society, regardless of society's estimation of its own needs (for more, see the presentation The Information Big Bang & Its Fundamental Constants). One manifestation of the clash between the Web and "how society has historically operated" was the Budapest Open Access Initiative some ten years after the initial development of the Web.

The Web's culture of open information exchange has more recently had a very visible effect in the area of Open Government Data. A simple re-statement of the objectives of the Semantic Web as The Five Stars of Linked Data has powered a tremendous focus of activity in national and local government when allied with political agendas of Transparency and Accountability. Portals like data.gov.uk and data.gov provide access to "the raw data driving government forward" which can be used to "help society, or investigate how effective policy changes have been over time". In the UK, the Treasury's COINS database of public spending is one of 5,600 public datasets that have been made available as part of the initiative. In the US, the Open Government Directive requires each department to publish high value data sets and states that "it is important that policies evolve to realize the potential of technology for open government." Both US and UK government see the opening up of public data as the driver for political improvement, innovation and economic growth, with the Public Data Corporation as the focus of British development of an entire social and economic Open Data ecosystem.

Having watched Open Access lobbyists engage in political processes in the UK and US (with a handful of Senators, Congressmen and MPs sometimes for OA and sometimes against) it is rather a shock to see the President and the Prime Minister suddenly mandating a completely revolutionary set of national policies based on the technological affordances of the Web, and in the teeth of plenty of advisors' entrenched opposition. And rather a shock to realise that offices even more elevated than a vice chancellor are enthusiastically joining the world of open resources and open policies.

But data and publications are different things, and publications are privately owned by private publishing companies rather than stockpiled by the government. However, the decade of Open Access debate has shown that progress in OA (and OER and open data) is impeded more by individual and institutional inertia than corporate opposition. When the highest offices of government are confidently pushing forward a programme of open participation, will academics have the luxury of treading water?

How will our governments sudden enthusiasm for open data affect Open Access? Perhaps not at all. Perhaps Universities are too insulated from the administrative whims and shocks of Washington and Whitehall to be affected. (How many researchers have even heard of data.gov?) Even so, governments will indirectly cause a shakeup in the administration of public research funding, and the infrastructure needed for universities to adequately respond to the requirements of open funders will cause them to become more open themselves.

The public climate that informs the private OA debates and decisions in University boardrooms will change; pro-OA researchers and librarians will no longer be arguing from such a defensive position, not appearing as idealistic hippies. Even in the absence of direct government mandates, pro-OA decisions will be easier to support and less contentious to implement. The values of the research communities will change as public values and expectations change - when even governments become more accountable through open data, research communities that insist that their data and their research is their private property, for the sole benefit of the furtherance of their own careers, will soon appear old-fashioned and untenable.

So watch this space. It may be that Cameron and Obama will indirectly achieve what Harnad and Suber have been toiling for. I wonder what I'll have to say in another three years' time?

Rehabilitating The Third Star of Linked Data

2011-02-27T12:55:00.006Z

The mantra of open data is: put your data on the web / with an open license / in a structured, reusable format / that is open / using open identifiers / that are linked with other data.

The third step/star in this process is commonly explained as using CSV rather than Excel, (because the former is an open format, but the latter is a closed proprietary standard). You'll see this position stated at Linked Data Design at the W3C and sites all around the world are copying it.

We really need to think a bit harder about this: Excel's native format is an open standard, and although an XML encoding of a the complete semantics of a spreadsheet is hardly a straightforward thing to deal with, it is simple enough to extract data from. In particular, I don't see that it is significantly more difficult than dealing with CSV!

Once you've unzipped the Office Open XML data, you can iterate around the contents of the spreadsheet, or extract individual cells with ease. And without any .NET coding or impenetrable Microsoft APIs. Here's a simple example that lists the addresses and contents of all the cells in a spreadsheet.

<xsl:template match='/'>
<xsl:for-each select="/worksheet/sheetData/row/c">
<xsl:value-of select="@r"/> = <xsl:value-of select="v"/>
</xsl:for-each>
</xsl:template>

Of course it's simplified: i've missed off the namespaces, and strings are actually stored in a lookaside table and there are multiple sheets in a single document, but even so I'd rather wrangle XML than wrestle with CSV quotes any day.

Response to An Open Letter on OpenAIRE

2011-01-18T10:07:00.002Z

I hope that my friends and colleagues in the Open Access movement will forgive me for the following words, written in response to John Willinsky's blog post The Enlightenment 2.0: An Open Letter on OpenAIRE:

Oh punner! While you are Open,
Err on the side of caution.
O, pen airy words of knowledge
To fill us with a sparc of hope an' ne'er
Leave us Else ever 'ere.

I'll get my coat.

Visibility of OER Material: the Jorum Learning and Teaching Competition

2010-09-16T10:03:00.007+01:00

The recent ALT-C 2010 conference saw the final six winners in the Jorum Learning and Teaching Competition present their resources, and receive their prizes, with those taking the top three places announced at the gala dinner.

Louise Egan, JISC-Repositories Email

This competition was designed to promote people sharing learning resources, and that's fantastic. Since none of the six winners' resources are actually deposited in the Jorum repository (just metadata records with a web link to the actual location), this situation provides an interesting insight into the advantages of depositing material (or a reference to material) into a repository. Since copies of all the winners material reside elsewhere on the Web, can we find out which link gets the higher ranking: Jorum or the original university? Is there any consistent pattern that emerges? In the following breakdown I'll list the Google rankings of each resource when searching for the title of the resource.

First prize: The Molecular Basis of Photosynthesis

There are actually three places to find of this work: Jorum, the creator's personal website and a Cambridge support site which contains the original version of this resource (one that hasn't been split into separate sections).

Jorum: 3,4

Author: 6

Institution site (cam.ac.uk): 1,2

Second prize: The Open Dementia E-learning Programme: Living with dementia

Jorum: 3

Institution (scie.ac.uk): 1,2

Third prize: Making the Creative process visible

The home of this material is on Vimeo, although it is also referenced by the HEAcademy who sponsored the project

Jorum: 1,2

HE Academy: 3,4

Vimeo: 6

Fourth Prize: Ayo Gorkhali

Jorum: 3,4

Professional Society Page: 1,2,7

Fifth Prize: Interpreting Skills Map

Jorum: 3,4

Professional Society Page: 1,2

Sixth Prize: Plagiarism Tutorial

There are a LOT of Plagiarism Tutorials offered by Universities all over the world!

Jorum: 66

Institution: 89

So in some cases JORUM boosts the ranking, and hence the visibility, of an item, whereas in other cases it doesn't. Can we draw any general patterns from this small sample? To be honest, I don't think so! The range of institutions is too diverse. Some of the alternative locations are highly visible, so it is not surprising that Jorum is eclipsed by their ranking (e.g. Cambridge, very newsworthy Gurkhas international organisation). Some 49% of Open Jorum's records provide links to external sources rather than holding bitstream contents directly. It would be very interesting to see the bigger picture of OER visibility by undertaking a more comprehensive survey.

More on Mendeley and Repositories

2010-08-25T09:53:00.004+01:00

Yesterday's post Comparing Social Sharing of Bibliographic Information with Institutional Repositories created a few comments, so I thought I'd make some more observations from an outsider's point of view.

I think that Mendeley are a fascinating example of the Open Access problem. OA is about moving knowledge from researchers' private environments (their laptops, hard disks, CDs and filing cabinets) into the public space (repositories, websites, search engines). Mendeley's software spans both those environments - bibliography management for the desktop feeding researcher profiles and CVs on the Web.

As Victor Henning pointed, Mendeley are part of Cambridge's JISC DURA project, which aims to take advantage of Mendeley's position bridging the desktop/Web to try and encourage more public repository deposits. This is a very interesting proposition: maybe a users of a such a service will be more inclined to make their work Open Access? Perhaps the simple act of buying into the "Mendeley proposition" will cause them to be be more favourable to Open Access than they would otherwise have been?

From the outside it's difficult to understand the extent of Mendeley's penetration into a University. What is visible is the public profiles that Mendeley users have created. Although the Mendeley API doesn't allow searching for users, I have been able to identify 53 public profiles from the University of Cambridge through Google (and a lot of manual verification!) Incredibly, only TWO of those 53 researchers have any existing deposits in Cambridge's institutional repository.

This is potentially great news: Mendeley's software has gained takeup from users who aren't repository users. They aren't preaching to the converted, they are getting new users to work in the open, to start to make the transition from the desktop to the Web.

But the OA battle hasn't been won yet. Of those 53 profiles, 21 contain no publication information, and of the 32 list their publications, only 9 have made any of their publications open access through the Mendeley service (a total of 40 PDFs).

The social bibliographic approach that Mendeley are promoting is a promising way forward. It's offering people something that they haven't seen from the repository, but it's not a principally Open Access offering, and it's no silver bullet for providing open access. Commentators who have suggested that repositories are old-fashioned, and that everything can be solved by Web 2 solutions, are being over-optimistic. Repositories are hard work because changing researchers' working practices is hard work and I guess there's no single magic solution that's going to make that effort disappear!

Comparing Social Sharing of Bibliographic Information with Institutional Repositories

2010-08-24T08:38:00.002+01:00

Everyone seems to have been talking about Mendeley over the past year! They have won a string of prizes, most recently the Guardian "Activate Future Technologies" workshop award for the project most likely to change the world for the better. They have achieved these accolades by providing bibliographic database software for the desktop ("like iTunes for research papers"), coupled with a social web site through which researchers can share their bibliographic collections. They have been successful to the tune of 47,5671 users and 34,852,751 documents (according to figures on their home page), with some commentators suggesting that they may soon provide access to more bibliographic data than Thomson ISI!

Now a lot of these "documents" are private material that are just stored on researcher's desktops. I am not interested per se in which software is being used to manage private bibliographic metadata. But the extent to which the "social sharing" agenda is successful is obviously crucially important to the repository community - to what extent is research being shared publicly, and in particular, to what extent are full texts of scientific papers being provided as Open Access through Mendeley's site.

To investigate these issues, I took a snapshot of some of their user profiles. Mendeley have 33678 public Computer Science profiles listed, so I took a 10% (3423) sample of those. Of that sample, 2918 or 85% have no publications listed at all, while 6% have only 1 or 2. Just 2% have 10 publications or more listed. The whole sample has a total of 2317 publications listed, with 681 providing PDFs from the Mendeley website. If this sample scales up (and the method I used does not constitute a proper random or representative sample), then the computer science part of Mendeley would have about 23,000 publications listed, with just shy of 7000 full texts.

By contrast, our departmental repository (eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk) has about 15,500 publications listed, of which 7121 have public full texts. So, based on my quick investigation, it looks like that the part of Mendeley's social sharing site which deals with Computer Science (insert boilerplate text about disciplinary differences) seems to be functioning on a similar level to a dedicated departmental repository. They have more bibliographic records; we have more (just) records with public full texts.

The interesting contrast between the Mendeley approach and the repository approach is that the one starts with services on the researcher's desktop that are then used as the basis for offering open access, whereas the other starts with web-based open access that leads to desktop bibliographic tools. It might appear, if my partial and approximate study is anything to go by, that neither approach trumps the other in terms of open access outcomes.

The repository community should certainly embrace and work with services like Mendeley, but we should see them as complementary to our activities, not a replacement for them!

Visualising Repository Contents

2010-05-16T19:21:00.005+01:00

Repositories are great for acquiring material, providing access to that material and securing it for the future. There are also other systems that purport to deal with scientific and scholarly communication of one sort or another: journals web sites, Google, email, blogs, twitter, social networks.

Scholarly communication operates on a grand scale: we have monthly and quarterly issues of journals, annual cycles of conferences, three-year cycles of project management, decade-long cycles of employment and forty-year long careers. The published literature is vast, and growing at an alarming rate. Our informal electronic communications are even more prolific - with hundreds of tweets, blogs and emails to keep up with each day.

The problem with all of the systems that supposedly support scholarly communication is that they help us keep up with approximately 1 hour's worth of recent material - a couple of dozen emails or tweets, a page of search results, a single screen of professional social network commentary. What about making sense of that material in the context of the other 99.999% of the last decade's scientific discussion in that area? What we need is really good ways of visualising really (really) large amounts of material, and exploring it in real time, so that we can make sense of and contribute effectively to current discussions. Especially when we come to topics that are just outside our areas of expertise.

I have been really excited to discover Microsoft Labs' Pivot project (see www.getpivot.com), a system for interacting with huge amounts of visual data. You can see an example of using Pivot to view the contents of an EPrint repository below.

This example only demonstrates using Pivot with the outputs of a part of a single repository, so it's not exactly showing off "the grand scale of scholarly communication". But it is a compelling example of how our respositories might be able to show us the wood and the trees of scientific endeavour, both at the same time.

(This example was constructed by Jiadi Yao, the EPrints-sponsored postgraduate student from the Web Science Doctoral Training Centre. The rest of his time is spent in investigating the ways that social networks underpin citation networks.)

Repository Benefits (again)

2010-02-18T03:19:00.004Z

A well-respected colleague (who shall remain nameless) recently posted a Tweet which likened "repositories with end-user benefits" to "pigs with wings". Shome mishtake, shurely?

As part of my job I am course co-ordinator for the MSc in Web Science here at Southampton. Last week I ran an Industrial Liaison day for the course, at which the students made poster presentations of their work to the industry representatives. It was a fantastic time, and the attendees all commented on how stimulated they had been by the posters. Consequently, the secretary who had printed out all the posters was able to give me a ZIP file which I then uploaded to our teaching repository. (See http://www.edshare.soton.ac.uk/4790/.) Now I have a record of a key part of the event that I can share with the industrial delegates. It was quicker than me creating a bespoke website, or uploading them to my home page. Plus I can use it as a marketing and publicity resource for attracting other students. And the students are happy because they have learned that their contributions aren't just "marking fodder", but they have valuable statements to make to a public audience. Win, win, win.

Not so much pigs with wings as pigs with snouts: you have to sniff out the opportunities. Or even carpe suem!

How Repositories Can Contribute Linked Data

2010-02-12T17:24:00.009Z

I've been working a lot with our repository and Linked Data teams (thanks to Hugh Glaser, Nick Gibbins and Iain Millard) on the JISC dotAC project. One of the great things about that project has been the opportunity to really get our heads around the role of repositories in the Semantic Web and the Linked data world. Now that the project has finished, I've finally had the opportunity to sit down with Chris Gutteridge and braindump our understanding so far. The following is a description of how EPrints (v3.2 beta) exports its holdings as Linked Data. It all comes down to how it uses and resolves URIs. (Like it says at the bottom of this posting, please send us comments!)

We ASSIGN a URI to all the significant entities that the repository owns: specifically, eprint, document, file, user, and "subject taxonomy" objects.

These URIs will generally be of the form http://repository.com/id/type/id where type is eprint, document etc and idis unique within the scope of the repository.
The official URI of an eprint is of the form http://repository.com/id/eprint/id whereas the official URL of an eprint is of the form http://repository.com/id . The latter has historically been the URL of the eprint's abstract or splash page.
Where possible, resolving a URI will result in a "303 See Also" redirection to the URL of the most appropriate format export, based on content negotiation of available exporters (disseminators).
However, if text/html is deemed most appropriate for an eprint, it is redirected to the standard URL of the abstract page.
For a sub-object (e.g. documents and files of an eprint) the URI is redirected to the ancestor object.
Similarly, subjects redirect to the top-level subject.
Eprint and document objects have special "relationships" fields which allow arbitrary predicates/objects to be attached to the document/eprint.
Documents of format text/n3 and application/rdf+xml (which like all documents have their own URLs inside the repository) are linked to the parent eprint via an rdfs:seeAlso statement. This allows arbitrary triples to be associated with any eprint, irrespective of the repository schema.

We MINT (or COIN) a URI for entites whose existence we infer from metadata.

Where there is a high degree of confidence from the metadata that two entities are the same (e.g. two conferences, journals or authors) then they will receive the same URI.
These URIs will generally be of the form http://repository.com/id/x-type/id where type is e.g. event, organisation, person, place etc and id is unique within the scope of the repository.
The unique id is generally a hash generated from the metadata, unless a better value is available e.g. an ISBN.
In the case of a book or a serial we can confidently add an owl:sameAs to the URN
In other cases, a repository administrator can add a mechanical process for creating the sameAs using specialised knowledge to construct (or map) the metadata to an external URI. An example of this would be looking up an author's URI in a staff database based on an email address in the author metadata. Another example would be a DOI being constructed from a query to the CrossRef database.
(The reason for using an x-publication URI as well as the public URN is that it may be useful to provide a local resolution service for non-local entities.)
All x-type URIs redirect to an RDF+XML document, describing everything known locally about that entity. Content negotiation for other formats is not currently supported for these non-core entities.

A set of standard triples containing rights information about the exported metadata appears in every single RDF export, to facilitate linked data reuse.

Does this look sensible? Have we got it right? Please let us have any comments and feedback!

Starting out with Hypertext

2009-12-17T00:19:00.005Z

Hypertext taught me that learning is really fulfilling, it's what helped me to understand algebra and generally get gave me the confidence to succeed at school. And not a computer in sight!

I was about seven (it was 1971) at the time that I discovered "Tutortext: Basic Mathematics" in the village library. It was a volume from an American series of popular education materials aimed at those who "wish to learn ... and yet have to teach themselves". The educational method was devised by Norman Crowder, from the Educational Science division of US Industries Incorporated - an outfit that in retrospect sounds like a front for James Bond!

And well it might have been, because its unusual style seemed just as futuristic as one of Q's gadgets. Each chapter started with a page of explanation and a question with multiple choice answers leading to other pages; some of them explained where you had gone wrong, and one of them congratulated you on your progress and took you on to the next step. It all seems rather pedestrian now with our history of computer-assisted learning and personalised and adaptive hypermedia, but to me at the time it was just magic. It forced me to engage with the problems and consider my solutions and to seek the praise that the text meted out!

I have just managed to track down a copy of the book (from an Amazon reseller!) and it has provided me with a tremendous dose of nostalgia. Still, I might just give this book (copyright dating from the year before I was born) to my youngest daughter to see if it helps her.

HyperCard is Dead. Long Live HyperCard!

2009-11-30T10:44:00.003Z

I cut my professional teeth on HyperCard, writing VideoDisk XCMDs to allow a HyperCard stack to control a video presentation, back in 1986. Although I was a UNIX system programmer (cut me and I bleed regexp), it was Apple's HyperCard which best let me manipulate data for users.

And now it's back in the form of TileStack, a kind of re-imagination of HyperCard for a Web 2.0 environment. There have been other contenders (e.g Runtime Revolution) but they didn't have proper integration with the Web. Now I can write stacks (in a HyperTalk-like language) that use AJAX Web Services - XML, JSON the lot. I'm as happy as Larry!

The following embedded stack uses an idle handler to periodically make a Flickr API call and then set the icon of button n to media of item 1 of the items of JSONdata. I'd forgotten how simple this stuff was - come back Bill Atkinson, the Web needs you!

Evaluating Expertise Promotion

2009-11-23T16:59:00.010Z

I thought I'd look further at the issue of effective communication of research impact and expertise. The University of Southampton Communications team made a press release on the subject of "Brain-Computer Interfacing" earlier this term. It's obviously because they believe that we as an institution are good at it and that we have something to promote.

I thought I'd take a look at how effective our communication on the subject is, and as you can probably guess, this equates to how high up the Google ranking do we feature compared to other universities? This is a pretty good measure of the effectiveness of our research expertise promotion because anyone who wants to find an expert on a topic is going to start by looking on Google. I knocked together some scripts to look at how our institution fares in the competition for Google eyeballs (basic web analytics).

The screendump on the left shows the results of a Google query for "Brain-Computing Interfacing". All the results from universities are coloured in red, all those from publishers in green, those from news sources, magazines and blogs in blue and unclassified resources are grey. You can quickly see that there are a couple of university-contributed results right at the top, and then an increasing number further down. Those results with a silver background are from Southampton (yay!)

Clearly, Google looks for resources which are about "Brain-Computer Interfacing" and then ranks them according to their "impact" or "importance". Exactly how it does that (PageRank or Black Magic) isn't really my concern here; however it happens, Google controls the order in which these results are presented, and the effect is that if you appear near the top you are more likely to get visited. The script that I use to generate these annotated pages actually gets 500 results, but most people get 10 results per page and don't bother to ask for more than a single page.

To better compare institutions' effectiveness at promoting their research expertise, I distilled this page to a spreadsheet. Once it's in a data form, then the sky's the limit and I can visualise it in different ways (such as this map of global expertise in the area).

The spreadsheet (reproduced below as a table of institutions) shows me that Southampton comes out rather well in the area - we are the third institution named after Oxford and Gronigen, and that slightly further down the list comes a couple of papers from our Institutional Repository. This seems to be a good result - we can claim to be doing alright on this topic. But what about all the other areas in which we think we have some expertise? There are hundreds and thousands of keywords that we need to analyse to see the effectiveness of our communications overall. I think its time to scale up my scripts to get a bigger picture!

Institution	Country	Server	Title
Oxford	UK	www.robots.ox.ac.uk	Brain Computer Interfacing Project
Groningen	Netherlands	www.ai.rug.nl	Moving Thoughts - A Brain-Computer Interfacing Project at RuG
Southampton	UK	www.bci.soton.ac.uk	The Southampton BCI Research Programme
Ulster	UK	isrc.ulster.ac.uk	Home \| Brain Computer Interfacing and Assistive Technologies Team
Lausanne	Switzerland	infoscience.epfl.ch	Anticipation Based Brain-Computer Interfacing (aBCI) - Infoscience
U Twente	Netherlands	eprints.eemcs.utwente.nl	EEMCS EPrints Service - 11091 Brain-Computer Interfacing for .
Plymouth	UK	cmr.soc.plymouth.ac.uk	Brain Computer Music Interfacing Demo
Malta	Malta	www.um.edu.mt	Brain Computer Interfacing - Systems & Control Engineering ...
Carnegie Mellon	US	www-2.cs.cmu.edu	Classifying Single Trial EEG: Towards Brain Computer Interfacing
Southampton	UK	eprints.soton.ac.uk	e-Prints Soton - Brain-computer interfacing in rehabilitation
Southampton	UK	eprints.soton.ac.uk	Cognitive tasks for driving a brain computer interfacing system: a ...
Cardiff	UK	www.caerdydd.ac.uk	Brain Computer Interfacing
Rhode Island	US	www.ele.uri.edu	Brain - Computer Interfacing Mason P. Wilson IV URI department of ...
Hosei	Japan	ijbem.k.hosei.ac.jp	Brain-Computer Interfacing in Tetraplegic Patients with High ...
Colorado	US	www.cs.colostate.edu	Temporal and Spatial Complexity measures for EEG-based Brain ...
UC San Diego	US	inc2.ucsd.edu	"Gerwin Schalk, Ph.D."
Washington	US	www.cs.washington.edu	Dynamic Bayesian Networks for Brain-Computer Interfaces
Birmingham	UK	prism.bham.ac.uk	Kianoush Nazarpour Home Page
Glasgow	UK	www.dcs.gla.ac.uk	A Note on Brain Actuated Spelling with the Berlin Brain-Computer ...
Uni Saarland	Germany	psydok.sulb.uni-saarland.de	PsyDok - Brain Computer Interfaces for Communication in Paralysis ...
Essex	UK	cswww.essex.ac.uk	Feature Selection and Classification in Brain Computer Interfaces ...
U Freiburg	Germany	www.bmi.uni-freiburg.de	BMII: Ferran Galan
Kansas City	US	www.csee.umkc.edu	CIBIT Laboratory
Manchester	UK	mint.cs.man.ac.uk	Microsoft PowerPoint - LeslieSmith
Southampton	UK	www.bci.soton.ac.uk	The Southampton Brain-Computer Interfacing Research Programme - Aims
Brown	US	www.cs.brown.edu	Michael J. Black: Neural Prosthesis Research Projects
U Tuebingen	Germany	www.mp.uni-tuebingen.de	Institut fur Medizinische Psychologie und Verhaltensneurobiologie ...
Tsinghua	China	neuro.med.tsinghua.edu.cn	Invited Speakers
North Florida	US	www.unf.edu	UNF Webpage
UCL	UK	www.cs.ucl.ac.uk	"Presence: Research Encompassing Sensory Enhancement, Neuroscience ..."
Washington	US	www.cs.washington.edu	Pradeep Shenoy
Cardiff	UK	www.engin.cf.ac.uk	Cardiff University > School of Engineering > Research Groups > PhD ...
Carnegie Mellon	US	www.cs.cmu.edu	Automated EEG feature selection for brain computer interfaces ...
Ulster	UK	isrc.infm.ulst.ac.uk	About the Group - ISEL - Intelligent Systems Engineering Laboratory
Tufts	US	www.cs.tufts.edu	COMP 250-BCI Syllabus
Essex	UK	cswww.essex.ac.uk	AABAC Publications
Hosei	Japan	ijbem.k.hosei.ac.jp	Evaluation of a Robot as Embodied Interface for Brain Computer ...
Stirling	UK	www.cs.stir.ac.uk	Professor Leslie S. Smith: Research Home Page
New Jersey	US	embc2006.njit.edu	Blind Source Separation in single-channel EEG analysis: An ...
Pace	US	www.csis.pace.edu	www.csis.pace.edu/~ctappert/dps/d860-08/raghu.ppt
Plymouth	UK	www.tech.plym.ac.uk	BCI Papers
Bielefeld	Germany	ni.www.techfak.uni-bielefeld.de	Publications \| Neuroinformatics Group
Washington	US	ese.wustl.edu	EIT - Sample Web Page Template
Colorado	US	www.cs.colostate.edu	EEG Pattern Analysis
Columbia	US	www.bionet.ee.columbia.edu	Bionet Group @ Columbia University
Kent	UK	www.kent.ac.uk	Eleanor Curran - Kent Law School - University of Kent
Georgia State	US	www.cis.gsu.edu	EEG-based communication: a pattern recognition approach ...
TU Graz	Austria	bci.tugraz.at	Publications - Laboratory of Brain-Computer Interfaces
Northeastern	US	nuweb1.neu.edu	News
Cardiff	UK	www.engin.cf.ac.uk	Cardiff University > School of Engineering > Contacts and People ...
Plymouth	UK	cmr.soc.plymouth.ac.uk	Computer Music Research
UCL	UK	www.fil.ion.ucl.ac.uk	Journal Articles
Ulster	UK	www.infm.ulst.ac.uk	Final Year Undergraduate Projects 2008-2009
UC San Diego	US	sccn.ucsd.edu	"IN RECENT years, brain-computer interface (BCI) systems"
Ulster	UK	www.socsci.ulster.ac.uk	Slide 1 - Faculty of Social Sciences
Carnegie Mellon	US	www.cs.cmu.edu	Linear and nonlinear methods for brain-computer interfaces ...
New Jersey	US	embc2006.njit.edu	On-line Differentiation Of Neuroelectric Activities: Algorithms ...
Bielefeld	Germany	bieson.ub.uni-bielefeld.de	BieSOn - P300-based brain-computer interfacing
TU Graz	Austria	hci.tugraz.at	Publication list of Alois Schloegl
Uni Saarland	Germany	psydok.sulb.uni-saarland.de	Brain Computer Interfaces for Communication in Paralysis - Eingang ...
Essex	UK	dces.essex.ac.uk	Selected Publications
Brown	US	www.cs.brown.edu	Michael J. Black: Neural Prosthesis Research Projects
UCL	UK	www.gatsby.ucl.ac.uk	Stationary Subspace Analysis
Colorado	US	www.math.colostate.edu	Curriculum Vitae: Michael Kirby (Professor) Co-Director Pattern ...
Oxford	UK	users.fmrib.ox.ac.uk	Reza's Homepage : Resume
Ulster	UK	isrc.ulster.ac.uk	Contact \| VGandhi
TU Graz	Austria	www.igi.tugraz.at	"Seminar Computational Intelligence E, SS 2007"
North Carolina	US	catalog.lib.ncsu.edu	NCSU Libraries - Toward brain-computer interfacing / edited by ...

PS It did occur to me after I had published an earlier draft of this post that I should also have checked the results for "Brain-Computer Interface". It turns out we come further down the league-table for this variation on the phrase (7th institutional position rather than 3rd) but that this phrase is much less-commonly used. As long as potential funders, students and media researchers know which phrase to use we should be alright. Otherwise, we will have to become a bit more canny about our use of synonyms. (I'm not sure whether it's significant that an EBay sponsored link appears only on "Brain-Computer Interface"!)

Life is a Conference (Oh Chum)

2009-11-16T21:42:00.007Z

Since EPrints has now celebrated its 10th birthday** I have been chewing over where this decade of repository activity is leading us. Bigger repositories? More repositories? Faster repositories? Better repositories? Well, yes to all the above, but collecting, curating and sharing data/documents seems to be only part of the picture.

At the same time, I have become a director of the Web Science Doctoral Training Centre at the University of Southampton. Its five year mission (no, really, it's there in the EPSRC grant letter) is to build up a cohort of interdisciplinary scientists who can understand the impact of the Web on our society - its economic activity, political exchange, social interactions, scientific knowledge transfer - and predict the future benefits and downsides of different kinds of Web technology.

For the last few days I have been trying to pull some of these pieces together: the Web, the Social Web, the Data Web, repositories, open access and open science. In recent years, the community has built a Web infrastructure for e-research that handles research outputs, research data, research process and workflows. This infrastructure has many desirable properties - it is dynamic and persistent and supports managed curation and auditable provenance.

One thing I believe is missing from the picture at the moment is research people, research careers and research meetings. Researchers engaged in human-oriented research activities, rather than research artefact and research experiments. Research after all isn't just about individual scientists turning dials on a piece of laboratory equipment, but about many individuals debating and evaluating their ideas in scientific discourse and scientific debate. Part of that discourse and debate happens through journal publications, but much of it happens in conferences and workshops, through face to face interactions. The proceedings of these meetings become part of the literature, and so part of the personal, dynamic, face-to-face engagement is captured for posterity, but the questions and answers, the ad hoc discussions, birds of a feather sessions and arguments over dinner - all the normal human interactions that generate inspiration as well as larger scale knowledge transfer - have not been captured.

Except that they are starting to be exposed beyond the boundaries of the conference meetings by microblogging services. The low barrier to communication afforded by a Twitter client on a smart phone means that ideas, controversies and emerging consensuses are broadcast beyond the immediately present delegates in a meeting. These communications are not edited, published and catalogued for posterity (and are only searchable for a short time), but they do (potentially) increase the efficiency of the meeting.

A decade ago, the only way to facilitate social networking in the research world was by face to face meetings; flying hundreds or thousands of people half-way across the world for a week in order to be able to talk to each other (or perhaps even to listen to each other). This is still the way by which much research business is conducted, despite being more aware of the environmental consequences of our conferences. There must be a better way.

Twitter, blogs, web, phone, email, papers, workshops, meetings, projects, texts (SMSes) are all ways of mediating engagement between knowledge generating people. In point of fact, conferences are not very efficient engagement mechanisms - most sessions are full of people doing email. Virtual conferences (whether held in Second Life or a rather more prosaic video/audio conferencing environment) also have shortcomings in fostering participation and engagement.

We need to redesign our social interactions to make them more pro-human, pro-diary, pro-budget and pro-environment. We need to use technology not to ape our large-scale face-to-face meetings (using enormous video walls of dozens and hundreds of virtual delegates), but to support us as we try to achieve scientific debate and argument with loose synchronisation across a dynamic community of individuals spread over a number of years.

It's ironic that a university is supposed to be a community of researchers, but none of us know what our neighbours do until we accidentally meet them at a conference on the other side of the world. This is no longer acceptable as the importance of interdisciplinary research increases! Let's instead use technology to improve the social transfer of our knowledge capital with our international research community and our institutional research community too!

I believe that's where our infrastructure needs to grow - supporting our research engagement as well as managing our research artefacts.

** Technically, it is 10 years since Stevan proposed EPrints at the first OAI meeting in Santa Fe at the end of October 1999. We will have a more tangible anniversary in June 2010, celebrating 10 years since the first release of the software at the second OAI meeting.

"Getting" Twitter

2009-11-13T16:14:00.015Z

Recently I sat in on a demonstration of Twitter to a University research group that included our PVC for research. Because of his presence I was quite self-conscious about justifying the Web tools I normally take for granted, and although the demo itself was fine, it didn't seem to answer the question "is this really useful or just some gratuitous teenager technology?" I have always claimed that twitter is a fantastic tool for keeping up-to-date with the spread of ideas and debate in the community - lots of micro-comments keep me in the loop about which speakers have raised what issues at which conferences, even when I can't travel and engage directly. However, I have been worried recently that the twitter output that I see has been less technical/academic/professional and more personal/informal/gossipy. So I thought I would do a quick investigation to see if there is any evidence to support my positive experience of twitter. I chose to look at Twitter activity surrounding CETIS 2009 as several of my Twitter contacts had mentioned it in the run-up to the conference.

The CETIS conference (http://wiki.cetis.ac.uk/Conference_2009_Programme) is run by the JISC Centre For Educational Technology and Interoperability Standards, and attracts many people from the E-learning community. It took place at Aston on 10th and 11th November 2009, attracting 146 delegates according to the open list on the conference website.

Over the period that the conference had been mentioned (from the afternoon of Nov 5th up till midnight on Nov 12th) 566 tweets were sent by 89 separate contributors. The large majority of these (440, 78%) were sent during the conference sessions, with 255 (45%) on the first day and 185 (33%) on the second day. Outside the conference hours, 32 (5%) were sent in the break between the two days of the conference, 57 (10%) were sent before the start of the conference and 37 (7%) were sent after the end of the last session.

How many of these tweets are merely "backchat" or "electronic gossip" and how many of them are broadcasting helpful information? I used the twitter API to download all the tweets and individually categorised them as "informational" or not. An informational tweet contains some information about the conference that is useful to an external viewer (a non-delegate such as myself). It may contain a quote from a speaker, a URL to a relevant resource, or a brief (microsummary) of an issue raised. By contrast, an example of a non-informational tweet may be a complaint about the wireless network, a comment about the quality of the food or a message of thanks to the organisers. This categorisation requires some judgement on my behalf, but the criteria are resonably straightforward and repeatable.

The distribution of tweets over time can be seen in the following figure (click to see a bigger version), which also shows how the number of "informational" tweets (red) compares to the total number of tweets (blue). In total, 324 tweets (57%) were in the informational category.

During the conference sessions, the informational tweets account for most of the Twitter activity (307, 70%). In other words, the effort expended in twittering during conference sessions is not wasteful and distracting effort from engaging with the conference agenda. It is mainly valuable to an outside observer - which I would claim extends the impact and influence of the conference beyond the cohort of local delegates. Of course, this works best if the tweets can refer (and link) to a rich set of online resources to direct observers to.

Back to my obsession with showing that Twitter isn't just an electronic stream of gossip - the figure on the left shows how people break down into different Twitter categories: those who only twitter useful information (or did on this occasion), those who never twitter useful information (not useful to me anyway) and those who mainly or partly twitter useful information (those whose information rating were more or less than 50%).

But those who stick strictly to the facts don't provide the biggest chunk of information. This figure on the left shows the contribution of the various groups of twitterers to the total information content of the tweets: most of the useful twitter information is provided by people who mix "information" and "comment".

So perhaps I shouldn't get too worried by the criticism that Twitter is full of people telling us what they have for breakfast and what happened on their trip to work. Perhaps it is precisely those kinds of people who are more likely to let us all know what the key themes are emerging from that high profile conference that we couldn't attend.

Taking Communication Seriously

2009-09-04T14:14:00.003+01:00

Today, the BBC News website put a nice research story on its front page: "Quantum computer slips onto chips" http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8236943.stm . I followed it up because it is intrinsically interesting to me (quantum computing) but I am mentioning it here because it is an example of how the academic community fails to tell its story and how the many contributor's to an institution's web presence can fail to produce a coherent information resource.

The BBC Web page is based on a Brief article in the current Science magazine, written by a person at Bristol University. The BBC page links to the front pages of Science and Bristol University, and it mentions in the full text the name of the author. It doesn't link to the researcher's home page or mention the department or research group where this work happened, or mention any of the other authors.

The Science homepage doesn't mention this article, so an interested person (potential benefactor) has to click on the link to "Current Issue" and then search through the rather long table of contents to look for the author's name.

The Bristol homepage has a rather prominent link to its press release about the work (hoorah for the Bristol Marketing Unit!). It also links to the Science homepage, rather than directly to the article, but it also links to the department where the work was undertaken. Unfortunately, this page doesn't mention the research directly, and strangely spends the majority of its contents talking about the new buildings that it occupies rather than the research that it performs. Hmm.

Returning to the Bristol home page, clicking on the "Contacting people" link allows me to search for the author's surname. This takes me (indirectly, through two further links) to the author's home page which lists his contact details, some currently funded projects (unlinked) and a metalist of "Selected publications" ie query links to 4 external digital libraries. There is a prominent link to his research group page, which totally fails to mention the research which took me there in the first place.

So I haven't found out any more about the research and the work that the research team is undertaking. I am going to have to take the old fashioned route and email or even phone the corresponding author and ask him my questions.

BTW, the author has no publications deposited in the Bristol Repository, but he is a physicist depositing in arxiv, so I shall be alright if my questions are entirely academic and answerable from the literature. What I am exercised about is the enquirers who aren't academics - potential students, funders, benefactors, industrial contacts, journalists - all of those whom we are looking to impact with our work.

BTW (2) I am not looking to bash Bristol about this. Exactly the same is true of Southampton and of my own department. It's difficult to get right, unless everyone involved (especially the academics) are aware of the problem.

Institutional Visualisation

2009-07-02T15:00:00.006+01:00

I've been working on the problem of showing the spread of research on a particular topic across the institution. The aim is to enable the repository to show the contribution of the various schools, groups and individuals in areas of strategic interest, and to allow the repository to play an active part in research management.

There many standard techniques for plotting the magnitude of the contributions of individual authors, the relationships between co-authors (social network) and the patterns of co-operation between departments. Many of these visualisations are in the form of networks of nodes and arcs, produced by sophisticated layout algorithms which are difficult to control and difficult to interpret.

What I need to show my managers is a simple diagram that allows them to see the familiar structure of the university together with the dynamic and changing nature of the contributions in question. The image on the right shows an example of one such diagram that I am trying out. It shows the different layers of the university (the mega faculties in the centre, the 21 schools in the middle layer, and the various research groups as small stamps in the outmost layer). This diagram actually shows the relative research contribution of different schools and research groups to the topic "Renewable Energy", where dark colours mean more relevant outputs in the repository. (For the curious amongst you, "FESM" is the Faculty of Engineering, Science and Maths", so it is hardly surprising that it has the lion's share of contribution to the topic. But the value of the diagram is in its ability to show up activity where we hadn't expected it - in this case in the School of Biological Sciences.)

What surprised me was that I had to create this diagram by myself. There are no models, maps or diagrams of our institutional structure - even the so-called "org chart" is just a table in a Word document. Looking around other universities, I can't see any charts or diagrams that are meant to act as a model of the organisation. I can't believe that they don't exist. Can anyone point me to some?

(Technical background: I created the basic diagram in Excel using an "Exploded Doughnut" chart. I then saved that to PDF, imported the PDF into Illustrator and exported that into SVG, where I added some JavaScript to allow the diagram to shade itself according to the list of schools and research groups passed in as a CGI parameter. A repository export plugin passes the organisational affiliation data from a set of eprints to the SVG diagram.)

Hardworking Repositories: The Global Picture

2009-06-26T11:36:00.003+01:00

To round off the picture of hardworking repositories (ie repositories which receive regular daily deposits) here is the global top ten repositories listed with the number of days in the last year in which deposits were made. The data is obtained from the Registry of Open Access Repositories.

ORBi (University of Liege, Belgium)	311
IR of the University of Groningen (Netherlands)	301
KAR - Kent Academic Repository (UK)	286
University of Southampton: School of Electronics and Computer Science (UK)	271
UBC cIRcle (University of British Columbia, Canada)	269
LSE Research Online (London School of Economics, UK)	260
EEMCS EPrints Service (School of Electronics and Computer Science, University of Twente, Netherlands)	260
LUP: Lund University Publications (Sweden)	259
UPSpace at the University of Pretoria (South Africa)	257
University of Tilburg (Netherlands)	256

There are all sorts of caveats attached to this list! Firstly, I removed two entries because they were not "institutional" but "national" in scope. Secondly, I left in two "departmental" repositories (ECS and EEMCS) because - dammit, if a department can achieve regular deposits then so should a whole institution! Thirdly, this table depends on OAI harvested data from ROAR - if there are any problems with the OAI feed then it will affect the analysis. And perhaps most importantly, this table does not take into account the types of deposit that were made on the days in question. They could be research articles, research data, teaching material, holiday photographs, or bibliographic records sans open access full text. So for example, the UBC repository is mainly composed of student theses and dissertations.

As I have said in the last two postings in this blog, this list simply reflects how much deposit usage the repository is getting on a daily basis and it deliberately factors out the number of deposits in order to smooth over the effect of batch imports from external data sources. The emphasis is on finding a simple metric to highlight embedded usage of a repository across a whole institution.

Hardworking Repositories: Comparing UK & US

2009-06-24T07:41:00.005+01:00

To go with the list of UK Repositories, here are the top 10 most hardworking US repositories, based on the number of days deposit activity that they achieved in the last year according to ROAR.

RIT Digital Media Library	253
Georgia Tech's Institutional Repository: SMARTech	252
ScholarSpace at University of Hawaii at Manoa	248
NITLE DSpace Service: Middlebury College	245
Trinity University	239
AgSpace: Home	234
Florida State University D-Scholarship Repository	231
eScholarship@Amherst	231
DigitalCommons@Florida Atlantic University	230
eCommons@Cornell	227

Once again, congratulations to those on the list. The methodology for drawing up this list was deliberately devised to promote daily engagement rather than numbers of deposits, in order to try and factor out bulk imports from external data services.

(I am slightly hesitant about publishing this list, because I am less familiar with US repository scene than with that in the UK. That means that I have difficulties in sanity-checking the list - in particular, the Middlebury College/Trinity services seem to be registered with the same host, even though their front ends are delivered from different host names. Do they genuinely count as separate repositories?)

These two lists (US/UK) do show some apparent differences in practice. If the headline numbers (days on which deposits are made) are subdivided into three categories (few deposits 1-9, medium 11-99 and high 100+) then it appears that the UK repositories are dominated by medium deposit days, and the US repositories by few deposit days.

Is this difference significant? Is it an artefact of the workflows and processes of the repository software platforms (the UK table is dominated by EPrints, the US table by DSpace)? Is it due to the different sizes of the host institutions? Or does it show a genuine difference in practice in terms of individual self-archiving vs proxy deposit? There needs to be some more analysis.

Hard Working Repositories

2009-06-23T16:37:00.003+01:00

There are lots of ways to measure the productivity of a repository, but in Size Isn't Everything: Sustainable Repositories as Evidenced by Sustainable Deposit Profiles I argued for counting the number of days per year that deposits had been made into the repository as a way of capturing its 'vitality' and 'embededness' and so highlighting repositories with broad-based researcher adoption.

Based on that metric, here is a top 10 list of the hardest working institutional repositories in the UK (data taken from ROAR).

Repository	Days of Activity (/365)
University of Kent	286
London School of Economics	260
University of Southampton	243
University of Huddersfield	227
University of Lancaster	222
Open University	219
Bournemouth University	207
University of Strathclyde	204
Loughborough University	204
University of Hertfordshire	204
University College London	199

If you factor out weekends, Christmas/Easter breaks and other public holidays there are about 233 days that a UK University is open for business. So congratulations particularly to Kent, the LSE, and my colleagues in the library at Southampton whose repositories are working unpaid overtime!

Getting Metadata from the Semantic Desktop

2009-06-19T16:54:00.003+01:00

In my last post, I discussed the metadata infrastructure that underpins the Macintosh desktop environment. In addition, thanks to some handholding from Chris Gutteridge, I've just configured the builtin Web server to download the documents themselves or metadata about those documents (in RDF, generated dynamically from the mdls command).

I've now got a pseudo repository on the desktop that contains all the source versions of my PowerPoint and Office documents, together with metadata about them. There are visualisation, search and editing services provided by the desktop and a Web dissemination system cobbled on the side.

I've also got a real repository on a server that contains the source and preprocessed versions of my Powerpoint documents, together with some metadata about them. There are visualisation, search and (planned) editing services provided by the repository's Web dissemination system.

Can these two work efficiently together, so that the conjunction of the desktop and the repository are greater than the sum of the components? Or is this just an exercise in reinventing the wheel just to make a point? I hope the former...

The Desktop Repository that's Already There

2009-06-14T08:42:00.003+01:00

It's really time I acknowledged Peter Sefton who's doing a lot of work on Powerpoint and slide bursting for the Fascinator Desktop, part of his project to bring open HTML formats to the desktop. Peter visited Southampton earlier this year, and inspired me on the topic. I'd just got knocked back on a JISC proposal for looking at repository - desktop integration, so it was great to talk to someone else who wanted to do something in the area. We both seem to be goading each other on at the moment and we've been tweeting and emailing each other, but I've not given him his due credit in this blog so far.

I've been surprised to see how much of the infrastructure for a desktop repository is already in place in the operating system that he and I use (Mac OS X). The Mac already has a process that extracts metadata and data contents from each file into a central database (see mds(8) in the Unix manual pages); this process is alerted to update the database every time a new file is created or an old file is changed. There is an interface for querying the database (Spotlight), either looking just for matches of the contents, or for complex boolean queries based on the metadata and contents. There is also a sophisticated framework for generating and caching previews and thumbnails (QuickLook). A system that provides data and metadata handling in a centralised database with querying and visualisation facilities all sounds very repository-like to me. And in case you think that I'm overegging this pudding, here's a list of some of the common metadata that OS X will allow you to query (not including media-specific metadata):

Audiences	The intended audience of the file.
Authors	The authors of the document.
City	The document’s city of origin.
Comment	Comments regarding the document.
ContactKeywords	A list of contacts associated with the document.
ContentCreationDate	The document’s creation date.
ContentModificationDate	Last modification date of the document.
Contributors	Contributors to this document.
Copyright	The copyright owner.
Country	The document’s country of origin.
Coverage	The scope of the document, such as a geographical location or a period of time.
Creator	The application that created the document.
Description	A description of the document.
DueDate	Due date for the item represented by the document.
DurationSeconds	Duration (in seconds) of the document.
EmailAddresses	Email addresses associated with this document.
EncodingApplications	The name of the application (such as “Acrobat Distiller”) that was responsible for converting the document in its current form.
FinderComment	This contains any Finder comments for the document.
Fonts	Fonts used in the document.
Headline	A headline-style synopsis of the document.
InstantMessageAddresses	IM addresses/screen names associated with the document.
Instructions	Special instructions or warnings associated with this document.
Keywords	Keywords associated with the document.
Kind	Describes the kind of document, such as “iCal Event.”
Languages	Language of the document.
LastUsedDate	The date and time the document was last opened.
NumberOfPages	Page count of this document.
Organizations	The organization that created the document.
PageHeight	Height of the document’s page layout in points.
PageWidth	Width of the document’s page layout in points.
PhoneNumbers	Phone numbers associated with the document.
Projects	Names of projects (other documents such as an iMovie project) that this document is associated with.
Publishers	The publisher of the document
Recipients	The recipient of the document
Rights	A link to the statement of rights (such as a Creative Commons or old-school copyright license) that govern the use of the document.
SecurityMethod	Encryption method used on the document.
StarRating	Rating of the document (as in the iTunes “star” rating).
StateOrProvince	The document’s state or province of origin.
Title	The title.
Version	The version number.
WhereFroms	Where the document came from, such as a URI or email address.

That's a pretty impressive list, and it is fully typed as well, so dates are dates and numbers are numeric, meaning that you can do proper range searches not just text matches. Still, the Mac implementation has enough limitations to mean that we haven't yet thought of it as a repository

it's a proprietary system. You can't access the thumbnails or export the metadata.
there isn't any way of manually entering or editing the metadata - it's all automatically extracted from the file contents by the ingesters/importers
there isn't any particularly useful way of displaying the metadata, apart from in the Finder's "Get Info" box or on the commandline (using the mdls program).

Issues (1) and (3) just reduce to coding better applications. There are a number of Finder replacements, but none of them really take the metadata seriously. There are also a number of tagging applications that have emerged in the last year or so, but they use a very narrow range of metadata. Someone could add a faceted browser interface to the Finder, or integrate some more explicitly bibliographic metadata into the Apple infrastructure.

Further reading around shows that issue (2) is also surmountable; extra metadata can be attached to a file through the use of the Mac filesystem's extended attributes. As well as the Title and Author information that the Microsoft Office importer produces, extended attributes with names like com.apple.metadata:kMDItemPhoneNumbers are inspected when the file is indexed. The value of that attribute is an "OS X Property List value" i.e. a number, boolean, date, string or array stored as binary or XML.

This looks like a very useful platform on which to build the researcher's desktop repository; a few added user-centric applications for browsing and editing metadata, together with some software to synchronise the desktop repository with the institutional repository (something like Time Machine) and we would have a very powerful system indeed.

Now I really do have to get on with that marking!

More on the Desktop Repository

2009-06-12T14:46:00.007+01:00

I've done some more experimentation on the Desktop Repository idea - strangely coinciding with another 100 exam scripts appearing on my desk to be marked.

Firstly, I've tried to have a go with moving the PowerPoint image data back to an EPrints repository. Each slideshow appears as a separate eprint record, with each of the individual slide images appearing as a separate subdocument, with its own metadata (title/caption etc). A document search allows individual slides to be selected on a specific topic from across all the slideshows. They can then be viewed or exported, and my previous comments about creating new slideshows apply as before.

Secondly, I've been thinking about how to manage individual slides out of the context of the PowerPoint slideshow wrapper that they were created in. Either a new document format has to be created, or I just use a singleton slideshow object (i.e. a PPTX file with just one slide in it). I think that the latter will be easier to handle, because the problem of how to discriminate between an n-slide slideshow and a 1-slide slideshow is easier to solve than the problem of how to manage a whole new document format!

Thirdly, a colleague of mine (Dave Challis, the webmaster here at Southampton) is creating some software for manipulating OpenOffice XML files so that a repository (such as EPrints) can use PowerPoint packages much more easily. The aim is to have Perl and Java modules that will enable collections and sets of repository items to be easily rewritten as slideshows; and if those items are individual slides in the first place (see above) then the ability to conjure slides between slideshows is guaranteed.

This is all a bit of a step back from the truly desktop repository, but EPrints does give me a framework to deal with structured data and metadata. The desktop itself is great at dealing with files, but delegates all of the complexity of those files to applications. The file system has facilities for storing metadata (see the BSD xattr command), but very few commandline tools for managing and manipulating it. So I'll use EPrints to give me some experience with handling large collections of personal data, and then see how far I can push those capabilities back to teh desktop.

Must dash, I have some marking to do.

Special Issue of the New Review on Information Networking

2009-06-11T08:37:00.004+01:00

The New Review on Information Networking seeks original manuscripts for a special issue on Repository Architectures, Infrastructures and Services to appear in Autumn 2009.

The aim of this issue is to further our understanding on how repositories are delivering services and capability to the scholarly and scientific community by marshalling resources at the institutional scale and delivering at the global scale.

Considerable progress in this area has been achieved under the "Open Access" banner and this special issue aims to explore the technical aspects of facilitating the scientific and scholarly commons: open access to research literature, research data, scholarly materials and teaching resources.

Topics for this special issue include (but are not limited to):

Repository architecture, infrastructure and services
Repositories supporting scholarly communications
Repositories supporting e-research and e-researchers
Integrating with publishing and publishing platforms
Repositories and research information systems
Integrating with other infrastructure platforms e.g., cloud, Web2
Integrating with other data sources, linked data and the Semantic Web
Scaling repositories for extreme requirements
Computational services and interfaces across distributed repositories
Content & metadata standards
OAI services
Web services, Web 2.0 services, mashups
Social networking, annotation / tagging, personalization
Searching and information discovery
Reference, reuse, reanalysis, re-interpretation, and repurposing of content
Persistent and unambiguous citation and referencing for entities: individuals, institutions, data, learning objects
Repository metrics and bibliometrics: usage and impact of scholarly and scientific knowledge

Scope of the New Review on Information Networking

A huge number of reports has been published in recent years on the changing nature of users; on the changing nature of information; on the relevance of current organisational structures to generations apparently weaned on social networks. Reading this mass of literature, far less digesting it, then assimilating it into future strategy is a Sisyphean task, but one ideally suited to this journal. Individual services from Second Life to Twitter will no doubt wax and wane but we shall seek to publish those papers which address the fundamental underlying principles of the increasingly complex information landscape which organisations inhabit.

Important dates:

Submission of full paper: 31st July 2009

Notification deadline: 1st September 2009

Re-submission of revised papers: 15th September 2009

Publication: Autumn 2009

Submissions and Enquiries

Papers submitted to this special issue must not have been previously published or be currently submitted for journal publication elsewhere.

Submissions should ideally be in the range of 3,500 - 4,000 words.

Submissions and enquiries should be made by email to the editor of this special issue: Leslie Carr, University of Southampton, UK (lac@ecs.soton.ac.uk)

A Desktop Repository

2009-06-09T16:26:00.006+01:00

You can tell that it's exam marking season, because I am obsessed by displacement activities. Further to my last post, I've managed to create a kind of pseudo-repository on my desktop (DeskSpace? EDesk? Deskora?)

iPhoto is managing collections of PowerPoint slides (actually 2549 slides from 109 slideshows which represents about 10% of the total number of slideshows on my laptop). Every slide is of course just an image of its original self (iPhoto is a photo application after all!) but courtesy of each image's embedded EXIF metadata I can search for slides that contained a particular phrase, regardless of the presentation in which they were originally stored. Then I can export that collection of individual images to an external program that uses the provenance metadata stored in the images to construct a new slideshow from the source components of the original PowerPoint files.

At the moment it's the kind of repository that Heath Robinson would sell you (a set of scripts more than a set of services :-), but I think that it ticks most of the boxes: there is an ingest procedure, collection management, browsing, searching, metadata, packaging formats and dissemination processes. And to accomplish some form of preservation I could even print all the slides into a very desirable coffee-table book or burn a DVD slideshow.

(The top image is a screendump from iPhoto showing slides from four presentations, the bottom image shows a new PowerPoint presentation made from slides containing the term "Open Access". The slides were identified in iPhoto but created from PowerPoint source files.)

This brings up some nice repository challenges

managing packages and components simultaneously, even when the components can't have an independent existence. Slides can't exist outside a presentation in the same way that paragraphs can't exist outside a document or cells outside a spreadsheet.
visualising huge amounts of data. Being able to scroll through dozens of presentations at once is incredibly liberating, compared to opening them individually and watching PowerPoint draw the slide sorter previews v..e..r..y.....s..l..o..w...l....y at a choice of three sizes.
PowerPoint, like RSS, is a rather nice packaging format that could be used much more often by repositories. How about saving your search results as a powerpoint presentation?

Managing PowerPoint? Repositories and the Office Desktop

2009-06-02T15:59:00.002+01:00

It turns out that I have 1009 powerpoint files on my laptop and I don't know what most of them contain, let alone know what I can reuse for any future presentations that I am planning.

I'd at least like an overview of all the slides in all those presentations, so that I can organise them. Then I'd like to compare all these slideshows, delete the duplicates, note the variations and evolutionary history between different versions of the same presentation, and between different presentations on the same subject. I'd like to trace the cross-pollination of slides between different subjects. Microsoft SharePoint has the concept of a Slide Library ("a secure, online repository in which PowerPoint presentations can be stored, worked on and shared") but expects you to do all the organisational work, whereas I want something that will help to apply some organisation.

Should I do this on my laptop? Or should I try and do this on (shudder) an environment that sells itself as providing content curation and management services? Oh all right then, I'll do it in a repository. But I don't think it's going to be easy - for a start we're talking about efficient user tools for ingesting, comparing, contrasting and refining 1,000 items.

Still, there's a basis to build from: SWORD and Microsoft Office Repository tools should help me to at least get all these items into the repository. Once we're there we can take stock of any low-hanging fruit (searching, reporting, cataloguing, thumbnail previews, exporting collections). I've already done some of the preparatory work on the laptop - using AppleScript to create preview images and textual contents of every slide of every presentation. Now I can package up all these things appropriately and see whether a repository actually gives me any added value.

Google Wave

2009-05-29T09:42:00.002+01:00

There's an urgent need to develop preservation / e-research / e-learning / rights management strategies for Google Wave.

There. That's my bid for some inevitable digital library memes.

Don't ever stop adding to your body of work

2009-05-27T12:32:00.003+01:00

I've just returned from the high octane, tech-frenzied social whirl that is Open Repositories 2009 (or #or09 to its delegates). It's a week full of diverse and diverging agendas (cloud this, desktop that, policy the-other) that make your head spin. There are new product announcements (EPrints 3.2 / DSpace 1.5 / Zentity) and new initiatives being explained (DuraSpace). And new demos of new features. It's normal to go to conferences to show off products that you've only just finished, hoping that the demos hang together. Now the Developer Challenge means that we're all there showing off things that we hadn't even started! It's mad, completely mad, and I wouldn't miss it for the world.

So I came back with a kind of tech-hangover - and spent a couple of days feeling the backlash response of "what does it all mean?" and "what is the point?" It's all very exciting, but are we actually going anywhere that we all want to be?

Surprisingly, the cure came in the form of a Presidential address reported in the Washington Post. Under the headline "Don't ever stop adding to your body of work" Barack Obama talked about the need to keep on contributing to a lifetime of achievement. I'm a sucker for a good metaphor, and I read this as a message to institutions and faculty about using a repository to reify their contribution to science and scholarship, to manifest their body of work.

That is what building a body of work is all about - it's about the daily labor, the many individual acts, the choices large and small that add up to a lasting legacy. It's about not being satisfied with the latest achievement, the latest gold star - because one thing I know about a body of work is that it's never finished. It's cumulative; it deepens and expands with each day that you give your best, and give back, and contribute to the life of this nation. (Barack Obama delivering the commencement address at Arizona State University.)

This is what repositories are really about: making the abstract concrete and fleshing out CVs. Collecting evidence of intellectual creativity, supporting research activities and profiling the emergence of innovative individuals, collaborations and communities. Evidence that spans whole careers and beyond.

This was also the message of David Schulenberger's closing keynote at the SPARC Digital Repositories meeting in November 2008: the job of the institutional repository is to tell the story of "what we've achieved" to its faculty and its institution's funders and supporters.

Back at home, this is why we keep doing what we doing. Not just so that we can play with new development features, but so we can get a job done. So that we can build the infrastructure of our institutional memory, we can tell our institutional story and we can provide a platform for our future institutional success.

That's me done. I'm back to hacking shell scripts and XML.

A Distilled Guide to EPrints v3.2

2009-05-22T09:01:00.001+01:00

Having spent an entire morning talking about new EPrints features at OR09, I thought that it would be great to have a really (really) condensed version of the talk as a public guide to how EPrints is evolving. I spent my last day in Atlanta reducing the presentation to just 9 pages - if you don't include the title and acknowledgements. The result is a brief account of all the features that make EPrints a serious repository platform: effective data model, flexible storage options, choice of APIs, support for the researcher's tasks, and reporting usage, impact and research information.

I'll try and update this as v3.2 develops; please let me know what other information you would like to see!

Thanks for a great Open Repositories experience in Atlanta - see y'all again soon!

A Distilled Guide to EPrints v3.2

View more OpenOffice presentations from lescarr.

PhD studentship in Digital Rights and Digital Scholarship

2009-05-15T15:31:00.002+01:00

EPrints Services are funding a PhD studentship in Digital Rights and Digital Scholarship at the EPSRC Web Science Doctoral Training Centre at the University of Southampton.

The Web has had a huge impact on society and on the scientific and scholarly communications process. As more attention is paid to new e-research and e-learning methodologies it is time to stand back and investigate how rights and responsibilities are understood when "copying", "publishing" and "syndicating" are fundamental activities of the interconnected digital world.

Applicants with a technical background (a good Bachelors degree in Computer Science, Information Science, Information Technology or similar) are invited for this 4-year research programme, which begins in October 2009 with a 1-year taught MSc in Web Science and is followed by a three year PhD supervised jointly by the School of Law and the School of Electronics and Computer Science. The full four-year scholarships (including stipend) is available to UK residents.

EPrints Services provide repository hosting, training and bespoke development for the research community and are funding this research opportunity to promote understanding of the context of the future scholarly environment.

Further information:

EPSRC Web Science Doctoral Training: http://webscience.ecs.soton.ac.uk/dtc

EPrints Services: http://www.eprints.org/

Enquiries should be addressed to Dr Leslie Carr (lac@ecs.soton.ac.uk) in the first instance.

Repositories and Research information

2009-05-14T16:06:00.005+01:00

I've just spent three days in Athens at the euroCRIS meeting, discussing the relationship between repositories and Current Research Information Systems. The idea behind a CRIS (plural CRIS, not CRISes) is that it forms a cross-institutional information layer that aggregates information from the library (publications), human resources (personnel and organisational structure), finance department (projects and grants), estates management (facilities and equipment) and external sources (funding programmes, citation data), and so integrates at some level with the set of services provided by a repository.

The CRIS initiative comes out of an administrative background (starting in 1991) and so predates repositories and exists tangentially to them. A CRIS is typically concerned with repository metadata (how many papers? which publishers? written by whom?) but not its data contents. So my concern was that the repository should not be sidelined or marginalised, but instead the repository should be seen as a mature partner in the aggregate of information services provided across the institution. The experience gained in the UK's recent research assessment exercise (documented in Institutional Repository Checklist for Serving Institutional Management) has very clearly been that the library, through the repository, provides enormous experience in dealing with bibliographic information, ensuring quality and basic auditing capability on claims of authorship and publication. Treating the repository as a superfluous adjunct to an administrative catalogue is to miss the benefit that a managed repository has to offer.

At the meeting many universities from across Europe spoke of how they were trying to make the two systems work together in one form or another. In some ways, the innovation is not technical, but simply in the concept that institutional information should not be siloed, but that it can be shared between administrative domains for the benefit of the whole institution.

On the technical side, CERIF (Common European Research Information Format) is the data sharing and interoperability standard that euroCRIS are promoting. Now on its third major iteration since 1991, it models many of the entities found in the research environment, particularly people, institutions, projects and research publications, patents and products. The standard is expressed in the language of the relational database, with individual tables defined for each kind of entity. Its particular novelty is that that roles like "author" or "project manager" are relationships between independent entities (people, publications or projects) rather than attributes of those entities, and that all relationships are constrained to an explicit time-period.

These requirements are straightforward to satisfy in EPrints - each new entity type (e.g. project) is just an extra dataset with an independent metadata schema and its own workflow and display rules. So an EPrints repository should be able to take on a useful role within a CRIS environment, deployong its comprehensive set of services for ingesting and managing project and personnel data, as well as research publication data. What is not yet clear is whether EPrints should be a helpful adjunct to, a useful component of, or a competent replacement for a CRIS.

That dilemma will be partly solved by the new JISC R4R (Ready for REF) project, whose aim is to investigate the use of CERIF as a mechanism for exchanging research information between universities (e.g. supporting the movement of staff throughout their careers). R4R, which is a joint activity between the Kings College, London and the University of Southampton, is focusing on the transfer of research information in the context of the forthcoming UK Research Excellence Framework (REF) activities.

In the meantime, there is a lot of interest in this area: the report on Serving Institutional Management that I mentioned above was the most-downloaded item of the OR08 conference.

Batch Updates

2009-05-07T01:16:00.003+01:00

I've been taking advantage of the new ISI license to import citation counts into our school repository.

Now we have Web of Science and Google Scholar citation counts listed for matching eprint records, you can search for eprints that fall into a citation range (e.g. 10 or more) and you can order search results by either type of citation count.

Now I'm being asked to provide reports of h-factors and citation averages and community normalised bibliometrics. What larks! I've had to draft in Perl assistance to write the necessary scripts.

But what it's taught me is that we're still missing out on an awfully big proportion of our school's research outputs - and we're an engineering school, not a humanities school. So I'm looking to add a THIRD source of citation data - the ACM Digital Library. The ACM run many of the journals and conferences that our researchers publish in - journals and conferences that ISI don't index. And then there's Scopus - that would potentially be a FOURTH citation data source. It looks like we'll need to have a separate "evidence of impact" dataset in the repository.

Integrating all this extra data has been made very easy by some developments from Chris Gutteridge and Tim Brody. Firstly, the EPrints import framework now supports an update option that allows you to merge new data with existing records. Secondly, the Microsoft Excel exporter (which is so useful for generating complex reports and charts) now has a matching importer. Combine these two features together and you can use all the user interface features of a spreadsheet to do large-scale, batch data amendments outside the repository environment and then commit the updates to the repository. This is great for spotting and fixing metadata errors.

Repository as Platform? Or Product?

2009-05-05T01:16:00.003+01:00

Is repository software (DSpace, EPrints, Fedora) a platform to build on, or a shrinkwrapped product to unpack and use? There are at least two answers to this question, and each software has to try and strike the right balance for its intended community.

I note the results of the recent DSpace community survey, that shows that 80% of repositories use the default metadata configuration, 78% have made at most "minor cosmetic" changes to the configuration and 62% use no addons beyond the distributed core code (stats, SWORD, google indexing etc).

This seems to support the view that if you come up with a new feature but it isn't a standard part of the core repository then it won't be used. It's a challenge for repository software designers, and for repository projects. For example, how do you make the repository user interface pleasing and useful to artists, engineers, teachers and researchers all at the same time.

Answers on a postcard, please!

Radio EPrints

2009-04-28T15:50:00.003+01:00

I have just found out that UMAP 2009 is publishing MP3s of all its conference abstracts before the conference starts. I'm going to keep a weather eye on how this goes, because the organisers clearly think that this is a way of getting the message out about their work.

This isn't particularly new: in the 1980s the cool Mac crowd were using HyperCard to record Usenet messages to listen to in the car. But when proper conference organisers (rather than maverick geeks) start to invest the effort to do it for their conference, then it is more serious. After all, these guys have a conference to organise!

Is this the right time to take the step and do similar for our repositories? Record summaries, commentaries or adverts for each of our papers / lectures / reports ? Why not have an "elevator pitch" to advertise important work? There must be all sorts of opportunities for syndicating audio content, and mixing it up into academic playlists.

There's an app for that

2009-04-22T00:09:00.006+01:00

I bought an iPhone last year to replace my six-year-old cellphone because (a) I needed to use it for work and (b) all the other mobile phones I looked at were so complicated that I had to ask my teenage children how to work them.

But the iPhone isn't being advertised on the basis of its design or on its ease of use. Instead Apple are churning out advert after advert about all the applications that people have written for the device. The phone-as-a-platform for useful little 'apps' seems to be a winning story, and I have seen rabid anti-Apple friends and colleagues being won around to buying one on this basis.

Apple's slogan is "there's an app for that" - whether you're trying to find a local restaurant, go bird watching, get directions, authorise a visa transaction, print shipping labels, rent an apartment or buy a textbook. And they don't even mention the word "phone" in their ads any more.

You can probably see where I'm going with this - the repository as a platform, a locus for useful services, an environment for innovation. I've said it before - we need to cram a lot more interesting and useful services into our repositories - stuff that will pique the interest of researchers and users, not just digital librarians and developers. Apparently not everyone goes faint at the thought of preservation, APIs and service oriented architectures.

So I was delighted that Adam Field came up with a new EPrints export plugin today that helps me to show off the contents of my repository. Called the DocumentGrid it simply displays a linked table of thumbnails for the records in a collection or in the results of a search. It is really simple and it took him about twenty minutes to write, but it is one of those really useful functions that I find myself needing. It answers the question "show me what's in your repository", or "let me see what's in that collection". It's useful, and it's eye candy at the same time.

Let's have some more of these! Half the stuff for the iPhone is eyecandy, or only useful in really specific circumstances, so I don't think we should be afraid of making things that aren't profound and respectable and adaptable. Of course people want to show off their work - and not just in CVs. There should be tons more apps that help researchers to look good and show off their stuff.

This one is available for download at the EPrints distribution repository: http://files.eprints.org/443/

EPrints and its Development

2009-04-17T18:30:00.008+01:00

I'm in the process of writing a paper about the first ten years of EPrints (yes, it'll be 10 years old at the end of October 2009), and I've been trying to put together a comprehensive overview of the internal construction of EPrints as it stands in 2009. What you might call an "architecture diagram for users".

Stung into action by John Robertson's recent blog entry on repository developments which mentions only a few of the ideas that we are working on, I thought it might be a good idea to share a draft version of this diagram.

The PDF linked from this posting shows my understanding of the internals of EPrints, highlighting the bits that we are working on at the moment in the version 3.2 development track.

Some more details about the 24 new features planned for the next release of EPrints can be found on the EPrints Wiki. Presentations and demos will be forthcoming at Open Repositories 2009, ECDL, OAI6, Sun PASIG and all good repository workshops in your area :-)

Cloud, Web, Intranet and Desktop Connectivity - repository data can now be stored in the cloud, on the web, on an intranet storage service, on a local disk or on any combination of the above. Also, the contents of the repository can be mounted on the user's desktop as a 'virtual file system'.

Desktop Document Support - thumbnails and embedded metadata extraction is provided for Microsoft Office documents. Media copyright checklists are generated for PowerPoint slideshows to assist Open Access clearance for lecture slides. Complex thumbnails are now supported, such as multi-image thumbnails for a slideshow or an embedded FLV clip of a video.

Research Management - Support for new kinds of administrator-defined data objects with project, organisation and people datasets as standard to provide compatibility with Current Research Information Systems (CRIS). Citation reporting will use ISI's Web of Science as well as Google Scholar.

Preservation Support - Preservation Planning Capabilities embedded in the repository using PRONOM and DROID.

Improved EPrints Data Model - as well as eprints, now files, documents, users and all data objects have persistent URIs and arbitrary relationships between them. RDF export plugin provides linked data capabilities, and a new REST interface provides an API to all EPrints data.

Improved Interoperability and Standards - SWORD 2 (v1.3 Specification), new OAI-ORE Import and Export Plug-ins, RDF plugins improved to provide better support for W3C Linked Data, CERIF support for Current Research Information Systems and enhanced Compatability for DRIVER project systems.

Miscellaneous Improvements - there are more enhancements to repository administration and improvements to the way that abstract pages are generated. IRStats/EPStats are better integrated with EPrints distribution. Autocompletion/Name Authorities have been added for Institutions and Geographical Places (both with geolocation data). Enhanced User Profiles allow for more CV-relevant information than just publication lists. User-defined collections provide "shopping trolley" functionality for ephemeral compilations as well as persistent collections. A Scheduler / Calendar for planning for embargoes, licenses, preservation activities, periodic maintenance activities etc. Quality Assurance Issues can be manually raised and resolved. PDF coverpage capabilities will be provided as standard.

Google and Repositories

2009-04-17T09:41:00.005+01:00

Continuing yesterday's comments on the effect of Google PageRanking in resource discovery, there is an added Google effect that compounds the problem of discovering resources in repositories. Google doesn't treat each resource separately, but instead it aggregates all the resources from a single site, showing only the top two resources from that site no matter how many should appear.

For example, if I search for the terms "ontology" and "hypertext" directly in our school repository, 8 articles are returned. If I do the same search in Google, then our repository appears gratifyingly at the top of the list of results, but only TWO of those items are listed together with a discrete link to more items from this site.

So, not only is your article in competition with all other web pages on the planet, it is doubly in competition with other articles in your repository which could deprive it of its rightful place in the rankings.

This means that we need to think about redesign our repository pages to link to "other related work" that the visitor may not have seen represented in Google.

PageRank and Repositories

2009-04-16T11:20:00.003+01:00

I commented before on the big impact of Google on repositories, and the way that overwhelms all other form of access to repository contents. Today I've had a look at the log files for our EPrints server to find all the web requests referred by Google (for any kind of page - abstract or full text or collection list). As a result of a conversation with someone on the topic of search, I wanted to check the "tenacity" of the Google enquirers. Since before the advent of the Web it's been common knowledge in the Hypertext research community that people tend not to scroll and click more than they have to when navigating an information system.

It would be nice to think that repository users (whoever they are) carefully looked through all the relevant and useful results returned by Google; but practical considerations mean that their investigations are more limited. In fact, 78% of our Google referrals came from the FIRST results page of a Google query.

This means that it is really important to make sure that your repository pages get a good PageRank - there are only ten opportunities for your content to appear in front of most Google users. If your paper happens to fall in at position 11 you have a much reduced chance of being found.

Repository as a Trusted Intermediary

2009-03-29T08:43:00.005+01:00

The idea of a trusted intermediary that makes content both durable and usable with a "chinese menu" of added-value services is my new favourite definition of repository. These words come from the DuraSpace project's midterm report, and although they were not penned with repositories per se in mind, I believe that they provide an excellent description of their rationale ie to increase trust in material created in

a random place on the Web.
my rented niche in the Cloud
my departmental filestore
my own desktop.

So I am particularly pleased to congratulate the JISC EdSpace team on their recent upgrade to the EdShare learning resource repository at Southampton, because they have helped deliver on the first bullet point - adding trust to web resources.

I have been using EdShare to distribute material from the modules that I teach. Much of this material consists of PowerPoint lecture slides that I have created, but a significant proportion of it is material available on the open Web - perhaps other people's slides, papers or reports from their own web sites.

In the past I have had two choices: either deposit a link to the web page or deposit a copy of the web page. The former is a lightweight solution and obviously the right "Web thing" to do when you just want to provide a URL pointer to someone else's resource. But the latter is the right "repository thing" to do in terms of making a safe and durable copy. Except that I don't automatically have the right to clutter up Google space with ad hoc copies of the same material and reducing their Pagerank. So most of the time I have settled for "just linking", at the price of accepting that some of this material will move or disappear before I teach the topic again. In the words of Humphrey Bogart, I know that I'll regret it -- maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon, and for the rest of my course.

Now EdShare lets me have my cake and eat it. I can deposit and disseminate a link to the external material (as before) but the repository will make a dark copy and start serving that if the original disappears. Essentially they treat important material that I find on the Web in the same way that they treat important material that I move into the repository. Both get managed, indexed, thumbnailed and subjected to the normal range of repository services.

So I'm delighted that I can now do the right Web thing and the right repository thing at the same time.

Why I Need Trusted Storage

2009-02-26T09:43:00.005Z

Yesterday I went to the Apple Store to get my laptop hard disk repaired for the FIFTH time. Each time the data has been unrecoverable - or worse - partially recoverable. Each time I have lost material that was not backed up and each time my different sets of historical backups were recovered but only partially integrated with each other. After all, each fatal disk crash knocks a week out of your working life, what with trying to extract anything important from the smoking remains of the still-spinning disk, taking the machine to the repair shop, waiting for them to repair it, working on another system, getting email sorted, getting your old machine back, restoring the operating system and applications and then trying to copy all your old backups onto the new disk. The effect is that each subsequent crash has confused my backups / restores to the point where I have folders within folders within folders of different sets of partially restored material and I no longer know what has been restored where.

How could I possibly get into such a lunatic state, I hear you ask. Is this man the worst kind of professional incompetent? Everyone knows you have to back your stuff up. Why doesn't he just buy a big disk and use Time Machine? These are good questions. I ask them of myself all the time.

Our school systems team disavow responsibility for all laptops. We are literally on our own if we dare to have mobile machines.
When I started on this voyage of data loss some three years ago, Time Machine wasn't invented.
Disks that you buy for backup are just as likely to go foom as your own personal laptop disk. My main coherent, level 0 backup on a LaCie Terabyte disk just stopped working one day, just when I tried to restore my work.
Large disks are forever being used for other urgent purposes. Students need some space for something. A project needs some temporary storage. You need to be able to transfer a large amount of data from one machine to another. It gets difficult to manage the various assortments of undistinguished grey bricks that build up in your office. Which one has the old duplicate backup on it that is no longer necessary?

There are lots of other mitigating circumstances with which I won't bore you, but what I would like to lay down are my beliefs that (a) backup management is a complex task that requires serious attention and preferably support from professionals who can devote some attention to it and (b) it is never urgent enough to displace any of the truly important and terribly overdue academic tasks that you are trying to accomplish TODAY so you don't get sacked.

I've had a lot of time to reflect on this since my laptop started plunging me into regular data hell, and the idea of trusted storage for me isn't just about having files that don't disappear. It's about having an organised, stable, useful, authoritative picture of my professional life - research and teaching - that grows and tells an emerging story as my career develops. That's mainly what has been disrupted - I can pretty much find any specific thing that I want by grep/find or desktop search. But the overall understanding of what I had and what I had been working on has been disrupted and damaged and fragmented.

So an intelligent store should help me understand what I have - a bit like the way that user tools like iPhoto help you understand and organise thousands of images. It should be possible to get a highly distilled overview/representation/summary/visualisation of all my intellectual content/property/achievements as well as a detailed and comprehensive store of all my individual documents and files.

I guess you can see where I'm going with this. I've gone and got the ideal desktop storage and the dream repository all mixed up. Well perhaps I have - but why not?

Anyway, all's well that ends well. My colleagues all clubbed together and got a terabyte Time Capsule for work, that is run by a sympathetic member of the systems team. And Apple just phoned up to offer me a brand new 17" MacBook Pro in exchange for my broken old one.

Still, I'd really like to make my data store intelligible as well as safe!

DuraSpace: High Hopes or Crying Wolf

2009-02-25T07:55:00.007Z

I promised that I would try to keep informed about DuraSpace, and so I was pleased to read the DuraSpace midterm report to Mellon. (Note to Mellon staff: please don't scan these reports without OCR'ing them. It's frustrating not being able to Google them!)

As I said previously, I'm a big fan of the DuraSpace agenda. My distillation of DuraSpace goals from the report's opening paragraph is to provide a trusted intermediary that makes content both durable and usable with a "chinese menu" of added-value services. Now this isn't really specific to the cloud - but that seems in keeping with the report because it frequently refers to "third party storage solutions" rather than "the cloud".

So the DuraSpace agenda could apply as much to the Web, or any other information environment, as it does to the cloud. Which in itself seems to be a good thing, and proves the worth of the open repositories community (go repositories!)

Except that we're still trying to consolidate and prove our worth in the web environment. Have we got a huge community of end-users who are all cheering for repositories and swear by their functionality? Exactly how long is our chinese menu of appealing and valuable services? It may be a bit of a hobbyhorse of mine (sorry about that) but let's make sure that we deliver on repository value and usefulness in the Web, on the desktop and also in the cloud.

Otherwise someone is going to accuse us of crying wolf - quick! come and look at the value proposition of repositories in the cloud! We've already alerted people about value and the web till we're blue in the face. Can we really tick that one off? Have we delivered? Do people trust us? (Have people heard of us?)

I haven't suddenly gone all anti-repository - I believe that we are genuinely seeing some really interesting repository services starting to emerge from a variety projects. But they are not mainstream yet, and they are not common experience. We still need to work harder on creating value for end users as well as repository managers and repository developers.

Let's do it in the cloud - but lets work really hard at articulating the benefits that the cloud end user will enjoy stop relying on general talk about value-added services. We need to Think. Specifically. Make a clear offering to our users - or would-be users. I think researchers/end-users will forgive us for not having finished implementing something yet, but they won't forgive us for a lack of imagination.

Fifteen Years After The Fact

2009-02-24T11:19:00.004Z

Thanks to Colin Smith for pointing out this new discussion from The Council of Editors of Learned Journals on the future of the journal in which they propose the following four principles.

Journals must pursue interoperability with the other online tools that are shaping the techne of scholarly practice

Journals have opportunity to reframe their role in the academy as curators of the noise of the web.

Electronic journals will have the opportunity to expand their curatorial mandate include different forms of publication.

Broadening the community of participation.

I was expecting to be disappointed - this set of blogged responses of journals to a web-based future expends 3400 words failing to mention open access or repositories. But then in principle #3 they went and completely exceeded my expectations by proposing a model of scholarly publication that genuinely fits in with the web.

It is contrary to utility, in the world of web 2.0, to maintain exclusive publication rights on an article. Exclusivity of publication places a text in only one domain. Yet non-exclusive text gets reproduced and recopied, circulated around the internet, and rapidly floats onward to mimetic influence in other cultures, excerpted and referenced. For every web 2.0 author, non-exclusivity and easy republication is ideal. For every would-be-idea-of-influence in the age of web 2.0, easy reduplication is crucial.
Exclusivity has been the format followed by most online journals, which seek to mimic in form the traditional journal: one essay, neatly formatted, looking as professional as possible. Exclusive re-publication suggests the old model of authority, and is superficially reassuring to editors without actually promoting the real functions of the journal: disseminating ideas and establishing the authority of the journal-as-canon and disciplinary metric.
Significantly more desirable would be setting a different precedent: for all disseminated forms of the text to advertise the article's accreditation as having been curated by inclusion in the journal-as-stream. (the text might end with, for instance, "please recirculate with this citation: by-Professor-Bonnie-Wheeler, SMU, 2009; officially tagged in 'Arthuriana,' [link] May 2010") Advertising the link between article and journal in many reproduced/cross-referenced copies would function both to the benefit of the article and the prestige of the journal.
Again, if the dissemination model is followed, the journal homepage need not include reprints of the articles themselves: merely links to the original blogspace or university-housed-pdf or slideshow where the material was originally posted, with all of its links, illustrations, video, and wallpaper as the author originally presented it. The journal's role is reduced to curation, not to presentaiton. Not having a use for a graphic designer, typesetter, or illustrations layout person, the journal's workflow will be considerably reduced.

This isn't exactly a new model - syndicated scholarly dissemination based on links and certification - but I didn't expect to hear a council of learned journal editors proposing it in my lifetime! The times they are a-changin! Or perhaps, the web is finally changing us all.

The Cloud, the Researcher and the Repository

2009-02-21T08:23:00.021Z

There's currently a lot of buzz about DuraSpace, the DSpace and Fedora project to incorporate cloud storage into repositories. I wasn't able to catch their webinar on Thursday, but I'm keeping my ear to the ground because it sounds like a very positive agenda for repositories in general to adopt. I hope this is a good opportunity to make a few remarks about the work that EPrints is doing that also might make cloud services accessible to repositories and users of repositories.

Moving your data into the cloud is a bit like moving your stuff into an unfurnished apartment. You get an awful lot of space to put things, once a month you have to pay the landlord, and you end up with absolutely nothing available to help you to organise and look after your things. You have to put your clothes, DVDs and crockery in a big pile on the floor unless you get some furniture in. But cloud 'furniture' comes as downloadable instructions on how to take three planks of wood and craft something that functions almost the same as a coffee table. In short, it's a great place for highly competent DIY enthusiasts with time on their hands. The EPrints team have been working on projects that might help researchers looking to take advantage of the cloud's benefits, without being put off by its lack of home comforts.

We've previously announced that Dave Tarrant has extended EPrints to use cloud storage services as part of JISC's PRESERV2 project (preserv.eprints.org). The new EPrints storage controller (debuting in EPrints v3.2) allows the repository to offload the storage of its files to any external service - cloud storage, local storage area networks or even national archiving services. The repository can mix and match these services according to the characteristics of each deposited object - even storing each item in several places for redundancy or performance improvement.

That tackles the technical part of the problem - how to join up repositories with the cloud, but it doesn't have much to say about how to better engage data-rich-users with the cloud (or with the repository come to that). As part of the JISC KULTUR project (kultur.eprints.org), Tim Brody has been looking at the problem of user deposit for lots of large media files. Not petabyte large, but gigabyte large. Even at that scale, the normal web infrastructure fails to deliver a reliable service - connections between a web browser and server just time out unexpectedly and silently - which makes it unpleasant for an artist who is trying to archive their career's-worth of video installations to the institutional repository. It's also really tedious even if you try to upload 100 small image files to the repository through the web deposit interface.

The solution that Tim has come up with is to allow the researcher's desktop environment to directly use EPrints as a file system - you can 'mount' the repository as a network drive on your Windows/Mac/Linux desktop using services like WebDAV or FTP. As far as the user is concerned, they can just drag and drop a whole bunch of files from their documents folders, home directories or DVD-ROMs onto the repository disk, and EPrints will automatically deposit them into a new entry or entries. Of course, you can also do the reverse - copy documents from the repository back onto your desktop, open them directly in applications, or attach them to an email. And once you have opened a repository file directly in Microsoft Word (say) then why not save the changes back into the repository, with the repository either updating the original document or making a new version of it according to local policy? Or for UNIX admins, you can just set up a command-line FTP connection to the repository and relive the glory days of the pre-Web internet. And who knows, perhaps there will be demand for a gopher interface too?

Now perhaps if you put the desktop front-end together with the cloud back-end, the repository might be able to offer institutional researchers a realistic path to cloud storage. For the researcher who is tempted by the expansion capacity that the cloud's metaphorical unfurnished apartment offers them, the repository could offer a removal van, a concierge, a security guard, a cleaner and an expandable set of prefabricated cupboards and walk-in wardrobes. Not naked cloud storage, but storage that is mediated, managed and moderated on the researcher's behalf by the institution, so that they have the assurance that their data is not stranded and susceptible to the irregularities of cloud service provider SLAs. In other words, a cloud you can depend on!

The above paragraph sounds a bit hand-wavy, and to be honest we need to get some proper experience of this with real researchers before we can be confident that it is a viable approach. Desktop services have already been built on top of cloud storage - JungleDisk for example is a desktop backup and archiving service, but it still requires the user to have their own cloud account. Hopefully, a repository can take away all the necessity for special accounts, passwords and storage management from the user and provide them with a whole host of extra, valuable services.

Perhaps that's where the challenge lies. Repositories need to commit to providing really useful services to all their users - cloud users (or potential cloud users) are not a new breed, even if they do have exacting requirements. So having taken care of the infrastructure that seemlessly connects repositories and clouds, lets make sure that we keep on innovating in the user space. Backup, archiving, preservation and access are a good foundation, but they are only the start.

There will be a demonstration of this work and other features of EPrints 3.2 at Open Repositories 2009 in Atlanta, Georgia on May 18th-21st. Make sure you come along because it's going to be a really exciting conference, whether or not it is cloudy :-)

EPrints Evaluation - assessing the usability

2009-02-18T23:35:00.010Z

Andy Powell has been looking at repository usability on his blog, and his latest posting uses a paper in the ECS school repository as an example. He makes some very good points to which I ought to respond.

First, Andy comments on the URL of the splash page.

The jump-off page for the article in the repository is at http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/14352/, a URL that, while it isn't too bad, could probably be better. How about replacing 'eprints.ecs' by 'research' for example to mitigate against changes in repository content (things other than eprints) and organisational structure (the day Computer Science becomes a separate school).

This is certainly a point to consider, but there are two approaches to unchanging cool URIs. One is to try to make the URI as independent of any implementation or specific service as possible - "research" instead of eprints.ecs. Unfortunately, there are some things that are givens - we are the School of Electronics and Computer Science and ecs.soton.ac.uk is our subdomain. We can't pretend otherwise - and we do not have the leeway to invent a new soton.ac.uk subdomain. We are very aware of the impermanence of the university structure (and hence the URL and domain name structure). Five years ago the whole University was re-arranged from departments into new amalgamated schools. Luckily, we and our URLs survived unscathed. Even worse, last year the University's marketing office almost rebranded every official URL and mail address from soton.ac.uk to southampton.ac.uk!

The ultimate in insulating yourself from organisational changes is to adopt an entirely opaque URI such as a handle. The alternative is to admit that you can't choose a 100% safe name, and have policies and procedures in place to support old names whatever changes and upheavals come to pass. For example, our eprints service itself replaces an older bibliographic database called jerome, whose legacy URIs are redirected to the corresponding pages in eprints. That is the approach that we take with our services - adapt, change, move and rename if necessary, but always provide a continuity of service for already published URIs.

The jump-off page itself is significantly better in usability terms than the one I looked at yesterday. The page <title> is set correctly for a start. Hurrah! Further, the link to the PDF of the paper is near the top of the page and a mouse-over pop-up shows clearly what you are going to get when you follow the link. I've heard people bemoaning the use of pop-ups like this in usability terms in the past but I have to say, in this case, I think it works quite well. On the downside, the link text is just 'PDF' which is less informative than it should be.

The link text is a bit curt: it should say "View/Open/Download PDF document"

Following the abstract a short list of information about the paper is presented. Author names are linked (good) though for some reason keywords are not (bad). I have no idea what a 'Performance indicator' is in this context, even less so the value "EZ~05~05~11". Similarly I don't see what use the ID Code is and I don't know if Last Modified refers to the paper or the information about the paper. On that basis, I would suggest some mouse-over help text to explain these terms to end-users like myself.

Author names are linked to the official school portal pages externally to the repository. Presumably keywords should be linked to a keyword cloud that groups all similarly-themed papers. The ID Code and Performance indicators are internal, and should be low-lighted in some way. The last-modified information refers to the eprint record itself, and so the label should be mae more informative.

The 'Look up in Google Scholar' link fails to deliver any useful results, though I'm not sure if that is a fault on the part of Google Scholar or the repository? In any case, a bit of Ajax that indicated how many results that link was going to return would be nice (note: I have no idea off the top of my head if it is possible to do that or not).

The Google Scholar link failed to work on this item because the author/depositor changed the title of the article in its final version and left the original title in the eprint record. I have revised the record and now the Google Scholar link works properly. (The link initiates a search on the title and first named author.)

Each of the references towards the bottom of the page has a 'SEEK' button next to them (why uppercase?). As with my comments yesterday, this is a button that acts like a link (from my perspective as the end-user) so it is not clear to me why it has been implemented in the way it has (though I'm guessing that it is to do with limitations in the way Paracite (the target of the link) has been implemented. My gut feeling is that there is something unRESTful in the way this is working, though I could be wrong. In any case, it seems to be using an HTTP POST request where a HTTP GET would be more appropriate?

You are right to pull us up on this. ParaCite is a piece of legacy technology that we should probably either revise or remove. The author left the University several years ago. I will check to see what genuine usage it is getting.

There is no shortage of embedded metadata in the page, at least in terms of volume, though it is interesting that <meta name="DC.subject" ... > is provided whereas the far more useful <meta name="keywords" ... > is not.
The page also contains a large number of <link rel="alternate" ... > tags in the page header - matching the wide range of metadata formats available for manual export from the page (are end-users really interested in all this stuff?) - so many in fact, that I question how useful these could possibly be in any real-world machine-to-machine scenario.

We should definitely add a meta entry with the unqualified keyword tag. The large number of exports are for bibliographic databases (BibTeX, EndNote and the like), metadata standards (METS, MODS, DIDL, Dublin Core) and various services (e.g. visualisations or mashups). The problem with that list is that it is undifferentiated and unexplained - it should at least have categories of export functionality to inform users. As for the large number of <<link rel="alternate" ...> tags, I'm not sure I understand the criticism - will they bore the HTML parser?

Overall then, I think this is a pretty good HTML page in usability terms. I don't know how far this is an "out of the box" ePrints.org installation or how much it has been customised but I suggest that it is something that other repository managers could usefully take a look at.

I am happy to have received a "Good, but could do better" assessment for the repository. This is a configured EPrints repository, but not a heavily customised installation, so it shouldn't be too different an experience for other EPrints 3 repositories.

Usability and SEO don't centre around individual pages of course, so the kind of analysis that I've done here needs to be much broader in its reach, considering how the repository functions as a whole site and, ultimately, how the network of institutional repositories and related services (since that seems to be the architectural approach we have settled on) function in usability terms.

I agree with this - repositories are about more than individual files, they are about services over aggregations of documents - searches, browse views of collections. We need critiques of more of a repository's features - perhaps something that SHERPA/DOAR could implement in future?

It's not enough that individual repositories think about the issues, even if some or most make good decisions, because most end-users (i.e. researchers) need to work across multiple repositories (typically globally) and therefore we need the usability of the system as a whole to function correctly. We therefore need to think about these issues as a community.

This is a key point that we need to bear in mind. So is it possible to be more specific about the external players in the Web? What services exactly do we need to play happily with? Various commentators have mentioned different aspects of the Web ecology - Google, Google Scholar, RSS, Web 2.0 services, Zotero etc. Can we bring together a catalogue of the important external players with which a repository must interoperate and against which a repository should be expect to be judged/accredited?

Repository as Blog?

2009-02-17T12:39:00.002Z

As ever, it's the people who are closest in proximity to you that get to talk to you the least.

Simon Coles, an chemistry researcher with his own EPrints development team works in an adjacent building to me, and today I managed to have a technical discussion with him and his team for the first time in about a year!

Simon does a lot of really interesting innovation in the area of the scientific information environment, and he runs a national scientific information service which gives him a really pragmatic attitude to what actually works in practice and what is simply a good idea. He runs the eCrystals data repository that shares scientific metadata and data on crystallography experiments.

One of his team's recent developments has been the scientific data blog - the use of blogging software to act as a laboratory notebook, describing experimental procedure with attached data files. As he described the ideas, and their implementation as a piece of blogging software, it occurred to me that a repository could appropriately provide this kind of service, after all, a daily posting of text and data files sounds very like an eprint consisting of an extended abstract with uploaded documents.

Of course, "To a man with a repository, everything looks like a deposit", but which sounds most likely? A blog environment that curates scientific data files? Or a data and document curation environment that provides a blog style-interface?

What you'd need to add to a repository (apart from some bespoke deposit interfaces) is the ability to create the document that you are going to deposit within the workflow itself. In the page where you are invited to upload a document, you should also have a Rich Text Editor (like blogger) so that you can type the document in.

That's a project for another day. After a truly exhausting time at #dev8D my repository developers need to charge their batteries :-)

How EPrints Might Support Copyright for Teaching Materials

2009-02-15T06:59:00.006Z

In yesterday's posting I mentioned the notion of a copyright audit for teaching materials that incorporate images and content produced by other people. It's a very current topic for the teaching and learning community, and one that has been discussed extensively in the context of the EdSpace project.

So I thought I'd knock up some extra document metadata fields to allow sufficient information to run with this idea. I've just added a text field to record the identity of the copyright holder, a URL field to store a reference to where the media had been sourced from, and a pick list for the author to declare whether it was his/her own material, whether rights had been bought, or permission obtained, whether the item was in the public domain, or whether the copyright status was 'uncleared' or 'unknown'.

To recap: this is in the context of a set of lecture notes that have incorporated third party pictures and images. The repository has "burst out" all these images from the slideshow and recorded them as separate (but related) documents, with their own metadata for cataloguing purposes.

Now that the metadata is recorded, this can be used as the basis for a workflow, so that the public access status of the slides can be made contingent on the correct permissions being obtained for all the embedded items. Or alternatively, in the case of problematic items, the repository can create a 'copyright free' version of the slideshow by pixelating, graying out, or simply removing the original image. Or, the author can be allowed to deposit the slideshow into the repository, but the EPrints QA audit system can be used instead to provide warnings and reminders to get missing permissions.

To re-iterate. This is not about Open Access to self-authored, self-deposited research materials! This is about Open Educational Resources, which may incorporate third party materials and which the authors may worry about making public.

Repository managers may be looking at this and thinking that I've just made the process of sharing information much more complex. But there are lots of ways of simplifying this - you could just resort to a tick box for the powerpoint that says "I have checked all the resources below and declare that copyright permission has been obtained for all of them".

Microsoft Office at #dev8D

2009-02-13T16:16:00.003Z

I joined my colleagues Chris Gutteridge and Dave Tarrant (aka BitTarrant) at the JISC Developer Happiness (#dev8D) event in London this week. At least, I came to the tail end of the event after I had dispatched some JISC bids! It was a great time, with lots of food for thought. During the closing Repositories session the discussion touched on the role of the repository in mediating between desktop documents and the world of the web (1.0, 2.0 and the cloud). In particular, one of the Fedora developers suggested that the repository could expose new "endpoints" (i.e. points of access) for the kinds of complex documents that were normally encountered as a take-it-or-leave-it package. Documents like Microsoft Word files, which are now stored as explicit bundles of text, media, metadata and relationships.

This fits into so many of my soap boxes - providing more value for end users, supporting desktop activities, taking advantage of the new Office openness - so I got really excited about the possibilities. At the end of the session I sat down with Chris and we (i.e. he) started implementing an EPrints service to do that. If the wireless network hadn't gone down, he would have finished before the conference dinner. However, he did finish and refine it the next day during the repository briefing sessions.

The image on the left shows what happens when you upload a Word 2007 document. Firstly, the Dublin Core metadata (author, title etc) of the document is applied to the eprint record itself (aka automatic metadata extraction). This has obvious advantages because it means that if you want to create a sensible, standalone record then you might be able to get away with just uploading the document and not filling out any extra metadata. If you can then look up the author and title in Web of Science you really might not need to fill out any extra metadata at all. That would be nice!

Secondly, each of the images is extracted as a separate document in their own right. That means they get their own metadata and URLs and you could download and reuse individual figures without downloading the whole document. (In the image I have shown the figure captions as part of the metadata, but I cheated by cutting and pasting them from the original.)

Another example is a record for a PowerPoint document shown here. By bursting out all the images used in the slideshow, the repository has automatically created a catalogue of media resources which could be used in a copyright audit to check that it is safe to make this teaching resource Open Access.

Since each media resource is a separate entity - and its not just limited to pictures and videos, it could be embedded spreadsheets and other complex documents - it is linked internally to a specific slide entity, so it would be easy to make a rather more sophisticated table of slides and resources.

And once you have all the slides listed for an individual slideshow, then the repository can make a page that views all of the slides from all of the individual Powerpoints. Or just the ones from a particular project. Or just the ones from a particular research group.

So I think that there's a lot of mileage in this approach, especially when you combine it with SWORD and allow the Office application to automatically save the Office document into the repository in the first place.

Repository meets the Semantic Web. Semantic Web Acquits Itself Well

2009-02-01T19:39:00.005Z

I am helping to organise the Web Science 2009 conference in Athens in March, and I am putting the conference papers in a repository to generate all the paper lists for the schedules etc.

This is a new conference for an emerging discipline and it seems particularly important to be able to give an impression of the breadth of the community contribution. An obvious way to show international contribution is to plot the conference contributors on Google Earth. That's a fairy standard EPrints export demo, but I just need to know where all the contributors are (their latitude and longitude).

It's easy enough to import the affiliation, country and email for each author from the conference submission system (EasyChair) into the repository (EPrints), but there's no central service that will give me the lat/long of a university. Wikipedia has them, but there's no easy way to go reliably from the entered Affiliation data to a Wikipedia University entry. The best way that I found was to use each author's email address (or part of it!) to do a semantic web search of DBpedia for matching Universities, look up the city that the University is located in and find out the latitude and longitude of that city. It's all automated in SPARQL, so it's pretty efficient (now that I've learned about DBpedia and SPARQL that is!) It may have been just as quick to do it by hand from Wikipedia, but where's the fun in that?

Copyright? Got Chirpy

2009-01-30T16:56:00.002Z

At Friday morning's IR steering meeting the topic was copyright policy, and I was prepared to bale out early using marking as an excuse. However, to my enormous surprise the 90-minute discussion was gripping, inspiring and useful. I think that we have found a way to talk positively about copyright within the institution's mission and business objectives! Hurrah!

Using the EPrints Commandline Toolbox

2009-01-28T10:49:00.004Z

The so-called "EPrints Toolbox" (bin/toolbox) allows the administrator to access/change data in EPrints from the command line. It is useful for people like myself who aren't Perl programmers (the shame!)

I haven't had chance to use it much, because it turns out I can often do what I want through the batch editor, but I found it very useful this morning to update some publication data.

The background is that I am helping run a conference (WebSci09), for which all the submissions have been handled by a web service called "EasyChair". I scraped all the submission data for the accepted papers and posters from the EasyChair web pages and turned them into an EP3 XML file which I then imported into an existing, subject-based EPrints repository. A few days after having done that, I realised that it would have been nice to import the affiliation and location data that EasyChair maintains for each of the authors. So I added "location" and "affiliation" text subfields to the creators compound field in the eprints dataset, ran "epadmin update_database_structure" to make the database tables sync with the updated config definitions, and then used the scraped data to run a sequence of commands like the following:

/opt/eprints3/bin/toolbox devel modifyEprint --eprint 106 << \EOF
 <eprint>
 <creators>
  <item>
     <name><given>Leslie</given><family>Carr</family></name>
     <id>lac@gmail.com</id>
     <affiliation>Department of Computer Science, Gadget University</affiliation>
     <location>Japan</location>
   </item>          
 </creators>         
</eprint>            
EOF

That works for me because I am a dyed-in-the-wool shell programmer, but you can invoke toolbox functionality from the web via CGI scripts - if you set up the appropriate security regime first (CGI toolbox is disabled by default because it is very dangerous to let all and sundry on the web have edit access to the database!)

I see that toolbox isn't documented in the wiki yet, and we've not had that much experience using it here at Southampton, but the range of facilities is shown below. Note that when you try to modify an eprint, the modification is happening field by field, so you don't need to add a full eprint record, but you do have to provide the entire contents of a field.

    toolbox *repository_id* [options] getEprint --eprint eprintid
    toolbox *repository_id* [options] getEprintField --eprint eprintid --field fieldname
    toolbox *repository_id* [options] createEprint < data
    toolbox *repository_id* [options] modifyEprint --eprint eprintid < data
    toolbox *repository_id* [options] removeEprint --eprint eprintid
    toolbox *repository_id* [options] addDocument --eprint eprintid < data
    toolbox *repository_id* [options] modifyDocument --document documentid < data
    toolbox *repository_id* [options] removeDocument --document documentid
    toolbox *repository_id* [options] getFile --document documentid --filename filename
    toolbox *repository_id* [options] addFile --document documentid --filename filename < data
    toolbox *repository_id* [options] removeFile --document documentid --filename filename
    toolbox *repository_id* [options] idSearchEprints < data
    toolbox *repository_id* [options] xmlSearchEprints < data

If you prefer to do this via the Web, I did successfully access the toolbox functionality in JavaScript (well, the jQuery library) like so:

jQuery.post("http://repository/cgi/toolbox",
  {verb: "getEprint", username: "admin", password: "whatever", eprint: 358},
  function(xml){ alert(xml); }
  );

Repositories vs Learning Object Repositories

2009-01-27T09:10:00.009Z

I got into a bit of an argument on the JISC-REPOSITORIES list yesterday, about whether general repositories (EPrints, DSpace, Fez etc) could take on the functions of a bespoke learning object repository (e.g. Intralibrary). My position is that a general repository is made to be adapted - you should be able to change the schema and the services to adapt to local requirements, but the contrary position is that a learning object repository is just too different and specialised.

We'll see. The EdSpace project at Southampton is running a learning resources repository based on EPrints, but they are experimenting with the nature of a learning object repository by introducing open access practices and sensibilities rather than keeping learning behind institutional firewalls. They are building something interesting (which shows signs of being effective as well) but they certainly wouldn't claim to be trying to replicate a learning object repository.

However, the discussion got me thinking about the limits of plasticity inherent in an open source repository such as EPrints (or DSpace etc).

The out-of-the-box, vanilla repository provides various services to support certain agendas (say open access, preservation and scholarly collections). However, it comes with lots of configuration options and customisation opportunities to extend that basic functionality. You can change the look and feel of the user interface, or the schema for the metadata or the services that are applied to the repository holdings. There are configuration options, APIs and plugins that you can use to adapt the repository to your local requirements, and every institution has its own list of extras that the repository just has to handle - whether it is journal workflow management, scientific data archiving or RAE evidence gathering. You can do any of these things as long as you have sufficient technical assistance to hand. And sufficient time. Otherwise, you just have to live with the generic experience. The diagram (above and to the left) makes it plain that the more you want to extend the boundary of your repository, the more effort you are going to have to put in.

In theory you can adapt your repository so far in the direction of any particular agenda that you could encompass all the needs and requirements of users concerned with that agenda. However, that may require an awful lot of effort - or just more understanding and insight than you have time to achieve. Bigger institutions will obviously be at an advantage here!

That may be where you turn to the open source community, so that others may help you to add the facilities that you want (see diagram to the left). But what has tended to happen in the repository community is that these out-sourced, open-source developments proceed independently of each other, so that it can be difficult to have a Basic Repository + Education module + Research Management module that work happily together.

It's hardly controversial to conclude that the facilities that you can add to a repository are always going to be constrained by the amount of technical resource available to you. This does put some constraints on the amount of the terrain (agendas and services) that your repository's perimeter can encompass. So perhaps a way forward is to cheat by redefining the problem in terms of something that the repository can already do. I've already mentioned that EdSpace are getting results by making the "educational resources" problem look more like "Open Access + preservation". This approach seems to be working in other areas as well - scientific data (eCrystals), archiving fine arts (KULTUR). Still, there remain interesting challenges for making a single repository "all things to all men" - whether they are physicists, chemists, engineers, social scientists or sculptors.

"Some things to all men" we can obviously do straight out of the box.

More Repository Value for users - making PowerPoint files from RSS feeds

2008-11-30T20:34:00.020Z

Executive Overview: I tried and failed to find some existing user desktop applications that could work with repository collections; in the end I had to write some simple programs to demonstrate the kind of thing that can be achieved with a repository, some content and Microsoft Office. The screendump on the left is an example. Scroll down for some more examples from EPrints and DSpace.

Since my previous posting about Repository Value, I have been very aware that all my examples were focused on the web, and that the services and widgets that I described were for web page authors to use on web pages. In fact, many of them might be better used by web admins and web developers than rather than academic users and researchers themselves.

Although we live in a Web-dominated world, most of my colleagues do not use the Web to originate material. Work is found on the web, but created on the desktop (or laptop), and consequently the tools and services that people are mainly familiar with are those of the desktop, rather than webtop. Cloud computing may be the way of the future, but currently services like Google Docs gain a lot of attention but few users according to a recent report by ClickStream Technologies.

So I particularly wanted to find some good old-fashioned desktop applications that could do useful work with material in repositories. Something that could take a collection of material from a repository and synthesise a useful overview document that describes it, or disply it in a slideshow. And most importantly, it had to be something that could be used by a highly educated but non-technical researcher. Or even an extremely clever but technically incompetent professor. Not a software developer!

I looked at different ways of using Microsoft Office, but it doesn't schlep material from the Web very well. Word can read in individual web pages, but collections are represented in a group of pages which are difficult to handle without programming. I had some previous experience with forcing Adobe Acrobat to create a slideshow from a repository, but that was too fiddly. I had some success playing around with the Firefox "Scrapbook" extension to grab all the linked pages from a collection as a single (humongous) web page, but I couldn't find a way of doing anything productive with that page.

The fundamental problem is that repository web pages (as displayed by DSpace, EPrints, Fedora, Digital Commons or anyone else) are too complex to interpret without creating a bespoke application that is tailored to datascraping each kind of repository (and each version of each kind of repository.) So to have any chance of broad-spectrum success, I needed to find a simpler format to work with that is supported by all repositories.

Luckily, RSS is just such a format. Repositories use it to describe lists of recent deposits, or lists of items in their collections. Previously I was investigating it for Web-based services, but now I want to use it for a desktop based-service. Which, to be honest, pretty much means Microsoft Office. Other productivity suites exist, but if you want to target as many repository users as possible then Microsoft Office is a pragmatic first step.

So, does Office have any built-in facility for reading RSS files? Unfortunately it doesn't. I seem to be out of luck with finding an off-the-shelf application that everyone has access to. I'm just going to have to make something myself.

But despite not having an RSS capability, Office has something almost as good - an open data format. I might not be able to get PowerPoint to make a slideshow directly from an RSS feed, but I can knock up an application to make the slideshow for me. And I don't even have to be a Microsoft developer to do it - because it's an open format I can just use whatever tools I am most familiar with.

A Microsoft Office 2007 file (or Office 2008 if you are on a Mac) is actually a Zip file containing a collection of XML files. Like a "web page" some of those files are content files (each slide in a PowerPoint slideshow is a separate XML file) and some are stylesheets (each slide layout is a separate XML file) and some are media files (images and videos). I wrote two shell scripts to create the appropriate XML and media files to (a) create a new slideshow with just a title slide and (b) add a new slide onto the end of a slideshow. I then wrote some XSLT to turn an RSS feed into a shell script that successively calls those two commands. Each slide in the slideshow has a title, description and image taken from the corresponding item in the RSS feed. The slideshows are created with no styling, but opening them in PowerPoint allows a theme to be chosen for them with a single click.

The following examples show some of the slideshows I have made from repository material.

	These are my latest papers and posters from the ECS EPrints repository at Southampton University. Note that this example (like the ones below, but unlike the example at the head of this post) has had a "Theme" applied by PowerPoint.
	These are recent items deposited in the JISC KULTUR project repository.
	This is from a photo collection at Demetrius, the DSpace repository at the Australian National University.
	These items aren't from repository at all - they are from the ECS Press Release feed. After all, there's more to the web than repositories, and there's also more to lecturers' sources!

This is some partial success - I have had to write some programs rather than use readily-available applications. On the other hand, these rough-and-ready demos could be turned into a web service quite easily - go to a web form, paste in the RSS feed URL and download a PPTX file. (Of course, I'd have to debug them first. And re-implement them in a rather more robust environment.)

But there's a lot more that could be done. For an example of the sort of well-thought-out service that operates in this space, have a look at the New England Journal of Medicine's Image Library service. You provide some query terms, and it returns all the figures from recent NEJM articles that match your query. You then choose the relevant ones, press a button and it turns them into a PowerPoint slideshow for you, with all the necessary citation information (and licenses) attached. Imagine if OAIster could provide that for you, based on all the articles on any subject in all the repositories in the world...

Here are a few other ideas off the top of my head.

Most powerpoint presentations that are created are variants on a previous presentation. Gradually a presenter's message evolves over time, and their presentations reflect that. A repository not only allows the author to keep track of his/her previous presentations, it could track all the variants of each slide and allow the author to recombine them in new ways. It's very common for me to search through a dozen PowerPoint files on my laptop, to find a particular version of a particular slide that explained a point with just the right emphasis to a particular audience. Let the repository find all the individual slides that mention a particular phrase and allow me to choose le slide juste.

Or let the repository ingest process extract all the images in a presentation and determine the source and verify the rights clearance.

Or the next time I have to do a presentation to potential students, or potential funders, let the repository copy my basic set of core slides, and update it with new slides from the latest research repository feeds and the latest press release feeds.

Watch this space!

Addendum to Repository Rats and other wildlife

2008-11-20T13:17:00.002Z

Another thing that characterises me is that I'm located in a single department and deal with only a pair of focal disciplines - Electronic Engineering and Computer Science. Most repository managers cover an entire institution, or in the case of a subject repository, the whole world. By contrast I'm very parochial and limited in scope. (I'm thinking of herds of majestic wildebeest sweeping across the Serengeti vs territorial animals like bears and robins.)

	Global	General
ECS
Soton	x	X
arXiv	X
Wisconsin	x	X

Repository Rats and Other Wildlife

2008-11-20T08:15:00.007Z

Dorothea (cavlec) is well-known for coining the term "repository rat", and documenting the frustrations that go with that role. Kudos to her for identifying and speaking out about the experiences of the role, and for further characterising the activities and limitations of a repository manager in her blog piece Meet Ulysses Acqua.

I don't think that Dorothea's intention was to impose a one-size-fits-all characterization of all repository-workers - rather to see a fair representation of her own experience when others seemed to be ignoring it. I don't feel as if I am a repository rat exactly because my activities seem to have few rat-like characteristics, and many of my repository colleagues don't seem to be rats either. But my colleagues aren't exactly like me either. I seem to occupy a particular niche in the repository ecology, and they too are adapted to their own environments. So on the plane back from SPARC DR2008 I started to wonder about the different characteristics of that ecology, and the kinds of animals - rat and non-rat - that had evolved within it.

Solitary or social	Some animals hunt in packs, co-ordinating their activities (lions, raptors), where others operate by themselves (rats, squirrels).	Do you work with a teams of subject librarians, or are you left to work by yourself?
Wild or domesticated	Some animals fit into and contribute to human organisations (dogs, horses), whereas others operate on the edge (cats) or totally outside the structure (foxes, wolves).	Are you involved in institutional committees, consulted by management and is your repository a core service?
Hunter or scavenger	Some animals actively search out sources of food for the kill, whereas others eat whatever is left around, or whatever is offered to them.	Do you search out material that is suitable for deposit by looking through Web of Science or by interviewing faculty?
Preener or sloven?	Some animals preen themselves (birds) or others (chimpanzees) obsessively.	Do you have strict QA standards that you apply to depositors' material?
Valued or vermin	Many animals are known as hoarders or collectors of food. Some are pampered (hamster), persecuted (rat) or tolerated (squirrel).	How do you feel about your role? This is more about professional esteem, than observable traits.

(I don't claim that this is a comprehensive view of the repository world - to be more general I could have started out with the essential question "Do you have a backbone?" )

How do I fit in this taxonomy? I operate alone with no assistance in managing the repository content or policies. Thanks to our de facto mandate I don't need to actively chase material, I just wait for it to be deposited into the repository. Up to this point I haven't done much QA, I have let our library colleagues do this for the important records. I am involved in the departmental infrastructure. So that makes me solitary/scavenger/domesticated/sloven. My colleagues in the library who run the institutional repository are social/hunter/domesticated/preeners - perhaps? And Dorothea - well, I think that she is social (she works with a team of librarians on different campuses) / hunter / preener / wild*. Expressed in tabular form, this looks as follows (I have thrown arXiv in for good measure):

	Solitary	Wild	Hunter	Preener
ECS	X	-	-	-
Soton	-	-	X	X
arXiv	X	X	-	x
Wisconsin	-	X	X	X

I will leave others to come up with animals with the appropriate characteristics. The lesson that I want to draw out is that there is variety in the repository kingdom. Even in the four repositories above we have all possible combinations of solitary/wild. The hunter vs preener columns look more correlated - perhaps you don't go to the effort of hunting for material and then not bother doing QA on it. And conversely, if you wait for material to drop into your lap you are less likely to care about its condition. (arxiv scores a 'half' on the preener scale because SPIRES provides a feed of "corrected" references for published material.)

So in conferences and community activities, messages that go down well with repository managers who have ticked the 'domesticated' box are going to irritate the 'wild' ones and vice versa. Those giving authoritative conference messages need to realise that they aren't speaking to a monoculture! That may be a lot to ask at the moment - they are still coming to terms with the existence and possibilities of repositories and the role of repository managers. A finely nuanced appreciation of the variation of the species is some way off yet.

So I hope Dorothea will forgive me for avoiding the "rat" identity - it is not out of a lack of solidarity with her difficult position or an appreciation of the hard work that she does. I'm just a manager in a different set of circumstances.

And the real reason that I avoided matching animals to the different repository roles? The only domesticated, non-social, non-hunting, non-preening animal I could think of while on the plane was a rabbit. And I just can't abide the thought of being known as a "repository bunny".

* Wild? She was absolutely livid!

The Value that Repositories Add

2008-11-18T19:39:00.007Z

One of the things I failed to do during the Evidence of Researcher Engagement meeting was to give a presentation that I had been working on for over a week. The discussion just ran away with me! So I have been persuaded to post it to the Web to try and get the message "out there".

A repository should be able to provide lots of benefits to its users. In particular, it should make things more valuable when they are deposits than when they are just files on a laptop or on a web server. This presentation is written to inform researchers of the kinds of things that should be able to do with their material in repositories. It starts off with the basic functions that are provided FOR THEM (wide access, persistence, backups, bibliography pages, administrative reports etc) and then tackles the kinds of ways that researchers can take advantage of the material FOR THEMSELVES.

This is not a complete list - I would love to have lots more suggestions and examples - and in some ways it is a bit optimistic. No repository will do all the things that I have listed - but it shouldn't be too hard for any repository to provide some of these services.

Leverage: The Value that Repositories Add

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: institutional self-archiving)

The other thing that I failed to do was to attract many visitors to the EPrints table during the sponsored breakfast. I was convinced that my brilliant marketing idea of a platter of Apple and Raisin fritters would get people lining up to read my leaflets, but unfortunately the quality of the rest of the breakfast buffet was just so great that I couldn't compete. Oh well, onwards and upwards!

Evidence of Researcher Engagement - stories, narratives and anecdotes

2008-11-18T19:18:00.003Z

On the evening before the SPARC Digital Repositories conference I hosted a meeting to discuss the evidence of researcher engagement from individual testimonials and anecdotes. That seems to have been a bit of a theme throughout the conference: Jennifer Campbell-Meier spoke about gathering stories about repositories as a means of advocacy in the new horizons panel and Bob Witeck spoke about the importance of stories in marketing open access to faculty and management. I hope that we're going to be able to start up a central place for collecting personal testimonials about repository benefits under SPARC's auspices. The idea is that a repository manager or subject librarian can have somewhere to go and look for success stories as told by faculty and researchers from particular disciplines. (Do you wake up in the morning, dreading an advocacy meeting with the Chemistry Department? Why not download a couple of repository testimonials from the chemistry page on repositoryluv.com!) More on this later!

Unlikely Heroes?

2008-11-16T15:20:00.004Z

On the shuttle bus from Dulles to Baltimore yesterday there were a load of people heading for a large (30,000 delegate) neuroscience conference. They all introduce themselves and their research to each other, and then they turn to me. I hate that kind of situation - being confronted with hard scientists. You see there's the researcher pecking order that has to be upheld and it roughly tallies with the Impact Factor of your discipline's major journals. So biomedicine is up there at the top, and computer science is, well, you see, we are a conference discipline. That doesn't even register.

So I tell them that I'm heading to a small workshop in Baltimore on Digital Libraries (SPARC DR2008). "Really?" is the polite response. "Yes," I venture "it's all about ways of providing open access to your research." Instant kudos. "Wow, that's brilliant. We so need that." And then come the stories of how they still have to fall back on their grad school library facilities when they are now independent researchers in other institutions with their own students.

And I am the hero on the bus! Still, it's been a long flight and there's two hours to go until I get to my hotel and so I fall asleep. When I wake up it all seems like a dream.

Someone Stop Me!

2008-11-11T02:50:00.002Z

I had a meeting with some representatives from other Schools last week - they wanted to deposit some Masters theses in a repository but they were hindered from doing so by the policies of the respective services. The long and short of it was that I volunteered to set up a demo repository to allow them to get their documents housed somewhere safe, but also because I know that we need somewhere to store four years of our school's masters and undergraduate dissertations. We'll use the demo to make a business case to the university to extend the "institutional repository umbrella" while we're getting some experience with the issues.

Anyway, I set up the repository over the weekend and deposited the first batch of 100 dissertations, and - this is my point - it just feels so GOOD to be in control. I don't know if other repository managers get that feeling too, but when you get to make all the metadata decisions and press all the import buttons and BANG you've got a new batch of stuff all sitting pretty then I get a warm glow. Is this wrong? It's the same feeling as home baking, except that the cakes disappear by the morning whereas the dissertation are still there!

It's certainly more satisfying than setting exams, which is what I was supposed to be doing.

Repositories Making Life Easier For Faculty?

2008-11-07T00:03:00.004Z

Could it be that repositories will help make life easier for faculty? "Pull the other one" I hear the repository-weary skeptics cry. "We've heard it before!"

Well, if there's one chore that academics are bad at - aside from depositing items in to repositories - it's keeping our web pages up to date. About 1/3 of our lecturers at ECS don't have working home pages - and neither did 20% of CS professors at MIT the last time I checked against the internal staff list. And those who do have working pages seem to keep them several years out of date. Certainly mine had its last major update three summers ago!

Now the school provides me with a set of official portal pages which are generated by its internal databases, but they are a bit, well, impersonal. If only there was a way to keep my personal pages updated as effortlessly, but in a way that didn't look too corporate and databasey. I'm caught between regularly-updated/dull and individual/bespoke/stale.

I think that the answer (or something like it) may be found at PageFlakes. It's a personalised content aggregator that is typically used for pulling together news feeds from a variety of sources (CNN, Yahoo, Youtube etc) but with luck, if you can find the right set of information feeds about YOU and YOUR SCHOOL then PageFlakes can do a very passable job at creating a home page about you.

The example page that is illustrated above (the actual URL is http://www.pageflakes.com/lescarr/25235060) is formed from an RSS feed from my school press releases, a feed from our student bloggers and two feeds from two repositories - the researchy repository which gives the latest set of papers/presentations that I have written and the materials that I have most recently made available for my teaching. It also has a short description and photo that I put in by hand. All in all that makes a good current description of my status - research outputs, teaching outputs, student activity and school activity.

Because the repository has created preview images of all the documents it holds, that makes the RSS feeds much more visual and interesting (and personal) than a simple table of contents. It feels like a home page, rather than an aggregation of syndicated content.

I know that all the cool dudes discovered PageFlakes 18 months ago, but I'm quite jazzed about it as a vehicle for personalised repository content. And I do think that as institutions get to grips with marketing themselves through the web, the repository can have a role as a content provider for building rich media Web content for widgets, mashups and all kinds of social network applications.

Without getting too carried away, the repository will start to make my online life easier by managing all my research and teaching material, so that I can use it to create a bespoke web presence - my home page.

More Things to Do With a Repository Feed

2008-11-05T10:30:00.003Z

Yesterday I blogged about using an RSS feed to create an interesting visualisation
of a collection of items from a repository.

The image on the right is taken from another demo page that was put together using the Widgetbox service. You simply have to paste in the URL of the RSS feed that you want to use, make a couple of selections about the colour and size of the widget and then it provides you with a bunch of HTML that you can copy and paste into your web page. It will even add the widget directly to your blog or Facebook page automatically.

Other services like Yahoo Pipes are good at combining, filtering and generally tweaking RSS feeds, so you could even create a federated widget.

Visualising Repository Contents

2008-11-04T07:32:00.004Z

Those who have followed this blog will know that I'm a sucker for a good visualisation that provides a helpful way of displaying and accessing the contents of a collection or a whole repository.

So I read with interest about cooliris, a convincing and polished implementation of the displaywall metaphor that works on media resources described in RSS feeds. Using XSLT I turned the XML export of an EPrints search result into the required MediaRSS format (making use of the eprint item thumbnails) and embedded it into a web page as a demo. The results are best viewed in their installable full-screen viewer rather than the web page-embedded Flash program, especially if the feed extends to thousands of objects!

This technique is obviously best for visually attractive items, rather than a wall full of text-based journal articles, and would probably form an accompaniment to a collection listing, rather than replacing it.

Patterns in Repository Access

2008-10-26T10:37:00.002Z

The clocks have gone back this morning, and I was looking for something to do with my extra hour. Having tidied the kitchen cupboards, I thought I'd have a play with the Google Analytics result for our school repository.

I've only ever reported summaries of download data to our research committee - and that data is pretty constant at 30,000 full-text downloads per month, or a million papers every three years. So I was interested to see how the daily pattern of repository accesses varies over the academic year, and how that variance itself seems to repeat every year. The image attached to this posting shows the daily downloads (recorded by Google Analytics) plotted over the last year (October 27 2007 - October 26 2008) in blue, with the previous year's data also plotted in green.

The rapid oscillations are the weekly rise and fall - a peak on Mon/Tues followed by a gradual, slight decline over the week and a slump on Saturday (to around 1/3 of peak levels) with a slight rise on Sunday. Invoking Excel on the Google Analytics results, and ignoring weeks with public holidays or traditional staff vacations (where access levels are significantly lower and patterns of attendance are less predictable) the general pattern for the remaining 58 high-activity weeks' access is Monday 18%, Tuesday 18%, Wednesday 17%, Thursday 17%, Friday 16%, Saturday 7%, Sunday 8%.

What surprised me was how much the gentle falls and rises over the academic year seem so similar on both curves. The places where the match is less than exact correspond to the start of the graph (there is no data for Oct-Nov 2006) and to Easter in each year (mid March in 2007 and early April in 2008).

I'm not sure that there's a moral to this posting, apart from the fact that there seems to be a hidden regularity in the repository downloads. I must set a student to investigate!

Data Access in Repositories - Don't Overlook What We Already Have!

2008-10-21T14:17:00.004+01:00

Dorothea Salo's latest blog entry takes EPrints and DSpace to task for not being able to help users analyse (query, slice-and-dice, facet, analyse, number-crunch, mash-up) data files.

You can already do that, at least you can in Microsoft Excel anyway. As an example, I chose a data file that is already in the MINDS reporisoty (DSpace) and one that is in my school repository (EPrints) and created a new spreadsheet on my desktop that referenced data ranges in both of the archived data sets. I have put it on the Web so that you can check it out yourselves.

The screen shot shows the new spreadsheet that calculates the average publication date of the 2900 records in the ARCL WSS dataset, and the count of the number of data points in A Longitudinal Study of Self Archiving .

The Excel cell reference syntax isn't very pretty - it is a backward compatible munging (that's a technical term) of a URL into a UNC syntax. (And by the way, the munging was done automatically by Excel 2008 on a Mac.)

=COUNT('http:[//eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/13906/3/TIMINGS.xls]a.txt'!B2:J1617)
=AVERAGE('http:[//minds.wisconsin.edu/bitstream/handle/1793/23529/ACRLWSS.Resource.2007.xls]ACRLWSS.Resource.2007'!$H$2:$H$2940)

It is an interesting issue, to think what the data-oriented functions are that a repository can provide. However, we should not overlook the functions that we already have! And in the future, I would hope that URI-based data reference will become common-place in all our desktop applications.

Repository Benefits - Expertise Finding

2008-10-15T09:09:00.004+01:00

The UK's continuing focus on research assessment has led some repository managers to offer the repository as the key means of gathering evidence of research outputs for their institutions. The experience of those repository managers has been distilled into a set of recommendations for repository management.

A notable consequence of our obsession with research assessment is an enhanced role for research management within the institution. Suddenly all the senior managers want to know how best to capitalize on our existing strengths to make the most of future funding and publishing opportunities. And that means knowing what our strengths are. And that means knowing what our researchers do. And how they work together to do it best. And that's where the repository comes in - capturing our institution's intellectual outputs and providing services over them.

So my boss has asked for our repository to provide an Expertise Finder - for him to be able to find out what groups of people are working together in any particular area.

As it turns out that was quite easy to do as the repository already creates "communities of practice" focused around each person -the screendump on the left is taken from my school publication page. The cloud of names shows all of my co-authors, and the size of each name is related to the number of times they have written a paper with me.

All we had to do was put that functionality into an export plugin so that the authors from any set of papers can be visualised in the same way. That way you can find out who is involved in a specific topic like "Web Science" by doing a search for "Web science" and exporting the results as an "author cloud". You can try it out on our repository.

Now he wants this as a network diagram so he can see the relationships between the named authors, how they fall into subgroups who work together, and which people link up the different groups. I think we'll have something developed soon, and I hope that it'll be useful to other repository managers!

A Present for Open Access Day!

2008-10-14T18:47:00.004+01:00

Here's a present for Open Access Day 2008 - a handy patchwork quilt made from the top 150 Open Access resources on the Web!

Well, it's not really a quilt - it's a web page. But it is lovingly stitched together from thumbnails of the highest ranked web pages that Google returns on the subject of Open Access. However involved you are with open access and institutional repositories, I bet you haven't seen a lot of this material.

Click on the image to the left (a thumbnail of the whole quilt) and it will take you to the quilt page. There, each resource is represented by a clickable thumbnail that will take you to the real page. Of course, you can get much the same result by doing a Google search for Open Access, but it's not as jolly and cheerful.

Ho ho ho! Happy Open Access Day!

Top Gear, Top Blokes

2008-07-21T15:21:00.006+01:00

Fans of the BBC's Top Gear show are having to wait 21 years for studio tickets as the waiting list is now over 336,000 people long, according to Autoblog.

Mind you that's nothing compared to the 100 year wait that institutional repository fans might have to endure to reap the benefits of the ROAD project's latest experiment. In a stunt very reminiscent of the Top Gear program, Stuart Lewis and his team of repository torturers are going to stuff a million items into the ingest interfaces of DSpace, EPrints and Fedora repositories. If this really were "Top Gear", two repositories would explode and the winner would be Stuart Lewis with a wallet of rewritable DVDs. Since this isn't "Top Gear" all that will happen is that some of the repositories might slow down unacceptably and will need to have their storage or metadata modules re-engineered to work efficiently at this scale.

But what's the 100 year wait about? That's how long it would take for an Institutional Repository working at full efficiency to accumulate a million items, given that the average institution has about 1000 academics who each deposit a research or teaching output around once a month (or 10 times a year given time off for vacations and admin). That makes about 10K items per year, 100K items per decade or a million items per century accruing to your repository. And given that most IR's aren't operating at that level of efficiency yet, the Repository Managers of the next century can safely drink a toast to the ROAD team for setting their minds at ease.

Open Access: Nurture? Or Nature?

2008-07-10T09:39:00.004+01:00

In the aftermath of the announcement about Nature depositing author postprints into PubMedCentral, I tried to use papers from Nature as an example for some EPrints sessions I am running at an Open Access workshop at the International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) in Trieste. This morning I was trying to find some papers for the delegates to practise depositing into an EPrints repository, and I have discovered that you need an ICTP library password to be able to download Nature PDFs - there isn't a blanket IP subscription. Fair enough, I have no problem with how they manage their subscription. However, it turns out that if I go to Nature.com's front page, I am forbidden from seeing the picture of Nature magazine's current front page! Literally I get the normal web page with a hole in it - and a request to type in my subscription password.

This is the difference between what I see from my home institute and at ICTP.


With Subscription	Without subscription

Now, I don't really think that Nature is trying to withhold a commercially valuable image from dirty-rotten-internet-freeloading-scoundrels. I am sure that it was just a mistake in translating company policy into HTML code. But I the fact that such a mistake is possible is evidence that Nature is genuinely conflicted between subscription access thinking and open access thinking. This is what my friend Stevan Harnad has recently pointed out - on the one hand Nature is offering something positive for OA, but on the other hand they are still restricting OA. On reflection and on balance, it would be better for them to give us what we cannot take for ourselves (permission for immediate OA) rather than giving us what we could have done anyway (deposits in PMC and repositories).

Some have suggested it is rather churlish or ill-mannered of Stevan to point this out, and that we should be grateful and just shut up. I don't agree. We still want Open Access to Research Outputs, not a 6-month intellectual headstart for paying customers.

Inspirational Teachers

2008-06-26T21:22:00.003+01:00

I listened to John Willinsky give an inspirational keynote at ELPub 2008 this morning. He banged the drum for Open Access and announced an OA mandate for the Stanford School of Education. According to the story, he was describing the Harvard mandate to his colleagues in a meeting and they instantly voted to adopt a similar mandate themselves. Way to go!

However, the message that I shall take home was his discussion of the connection between "public" forms of knowledge and "highly authoritative" forms of knowledge. He gave the specific example of the links made between between Wikipedia and the Stanford New Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ie opportunities where a general and democratic information resource links back to a resource which is written and governed by domain experts. A really very good thing, according to Willinsky, who believes that the sustainability of the entire research infrastructure is based on its perception as a Public Good, one that is open and encourages the participation and engagement of its sustaining community.

In other words, the fact that many non-researchers seem to be downloading papers from our repositories shouldn't be seen as a suspicious thing. "Things on the Web are just downloaded by teenagers and pornographers" according to some colleagues who are less than Web-friendly! "If a download isn't attributable to someone in a University then it shouldn't count - it's obviously a mistake or being read by someone who can't possibly understand it." That's the attitude.

But perhaps not. According to Willinsky, our (Higher Education's) ongoing existence as a part of society depends on us acknowledging that less esoteric forms of debate and knowledge do exist (public forums and websites) and that we should expect and encourage the public to refer to our work, and link to our work and even read our work.

And I think that if repositories have a role in making collections of research material accessible, then perhaps we should be thinking about how to make them a bit more accessible to the public, in helping us become inspirational teachers with half an eye to the rest of society.

Repositories Should be More Like Email (apparently)

2008-06-25T11:09:00.004+01:00

See below of a summary of an interesting JCDL 2008 paper that adds to the "repositories - they're all wrong" debate. Cathy is well-known (and, I think, well-loved) from the hypertext community for her ethnographic studies of information handling, and here she reports on a small scale study of the information management practices of research authors as they go about the task of writing papers, and the implications for repositories. The paper is noteworthy because it highlights the role of email as a personal archiving solution and argues that any repository platform will need to do better than email in a range of criteria to gain user acceptance.

Well, it's a new target for repository developers, and perhaps a new marketing slogan to look forward to (EPrints: Sucks Less Than Hotmail).

From my experience, the paper rings true in its description of ad-hoc and distributed author processes, but it is focused on a small group of Computer Scientists all of whom use LaTeX and BibTeX, so I don't know exactly how applicable its message is across the whole institution.

Marshall, C. C. 2008. From writing and analysis to the repository: taking the scholars' perspective on scholarly archiving. In Proceedings of the 8th ACM/IEEE-CS Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (Pittsburgh PA, PA, USA, June 16 - 20, 2008). JCDL '08. ACM, New York, NY, 251-260. doi: 10.1145/1378889.1378930.

(For those without subscriptions for the ACM Digital Library, Google Scholar will point you at a preprint available at tamu.edu.)

ABSTRACT: This paper reports the results of a qualitative field study of the scholarly writing, collaboration, information management, and long-term archiving practices of researchers in five related subdisciplines. The study focuses on the kinds of artifacts the researchers create in the process of writing a paper, how they exchange and store materials over the short term, how they handle references and bibliographic resources, and the strategies they use to guarantee the long term safety of their scholarly materials. The findings reveal: (1) the adoption of a new CIM infrastructure relies crucially on whether it compares favorably to email along six critical dimensions; (2) personal scholarly archives should be maintained as a side-effect of collaboration and the role of ancillary material such as datasets remains to be worked out; and (3) it is vital to consider agency when we talk about depositing new types of scholarly materials into disciplinary repositories.

The Bits I Underlined

Furthermore, from the point of view of the researchers and scientists themselves, institutional archiving arrives on the scene late in the process; the deposit of publications and datasets is an afterthought to the actual work, the research and writing. What would make archiving more integral to the entire process? What does scholarly archiving look like today from the scholar's perspective? How can normal collaborative interactions be used to improve repository quality?

I make an effort to focus closely on the practices and artifacts relevant to maintaining personal archives and contributing to institutional repositories.

Second, participants feel that versions record the development of ideas, a trail that may prove important. But how important? Much of the history and provenance of an idea can be reconstructed from communications media like email, especially when it is combined with intrinsic metadata such as file dates. Thus benign neglect coupled with imaginative interpretation will get you pretty far in reconstructing a publication's history.

What is most apparent throughout this discussion is that personal archiving is a side effect of collaboration and publication: for example, if email is used as the mechanism for sharing files, it also becomes the nexus for archiving files. If one's CV is the means by which a public list of publications is maintained, it is also used as a pointer for oneself to the most authoritative version of a publication. Personal archiving can be both opportunistic and social: participants talked about tracking down public versions of their own publications to reclaim copies of lost work.

Email is cited as a good permanent store for three reasons: (1) it is easy to browse chronologically, which makes retrieval easy and lifts the filing and organizing burden; (2) intrinsic metadata supports the reconstruction of context (for example, who made particular revisions and why); and (3) email is usually accessible from any web browser. If email is used as an archive, some care must be taken to ensure everything that is important is actually in email. Some archival material is normally in email (reviews, for example) and no extra effort needs to be expended to make it part of the record. Other types of artifacts‚ (run output, for example) must be put into email deliberately. Email is a sufficiently good archive that some participants made the effort...

It is easy to see how email provides just enough mechanism to fulfill the minimal version of these requirements. Any CIM infrastructure must beat email along all of those dimensions if it is to be adopted in email's stead

Publishing - A One-Word Oxymoron?

2008-06-24T12:07:00.001+01:00

Why do they call it "publishing"? Wouldn't it be much more accurate to say "I've just had a paper privatised?"

Just thinking aloud.

Negative Click Repositories

2008-06-11T21:50:00.003+01:00

The topic of "negative cost" repositories has been doing the rounds in the blogosphere. Chris Rushbridge has rebadged it as the negative click repository on the grounds that there is a positive cost associated with setting up and using a repository. I think I would rather talk about value or profit - the final outcome when you take the costs and benefits into consideration. Do you run a positive value repository? Is it frankly worth the effort? Are your users in scholarly profit, or are you a burden on their already overtaxed resources?

Chris quotes from Cavlec's (imaginary) repository apologist who attempts to defend a very high-cost, low-benefit repository. But he then goes on to treat that passage as if it were a factual evaluation of a real repository, a damning piece of evidence on the fundamental uselessness of repositories. It isn't! Ulysses Acqua is a straw man and his repository is a caricature of a real repository. I certainly don't accept that he describes my repository and I can easily answer yes to many of those questions. So while I'm not complacent and I recognise that there are many new services I want my repository to offer, I think we're not doing too bad on the value scale already, thank you very much.

Negative click/positive value. It's a nice rhetorical stance and a useful banner to rally the troops to, but let's not flagellate ourselves unduly. Let's recognise where good value exists and promote it! Lets foster new services around the material that repositories capture, manage and expose. Otherwise we'll just give up and run to the next bandwagon which will always sound more enticing because it has less experience with dealing with real practice!

Anyway, I think that I am in violent agreement with Chris, so to show solidarity I will do what he asked and list some positive value generators: publicity and profile (CVs, Web pages, displays, adverts for MScs/PhDs/staff), community discovery, laptop backup and asset management.

Even Simple Services can be Annoyingly Complicated

2008-06-08T16:31:00.009+01:00

I know I've mentioned this before (on this blog and elsewhere) but I think that displays are important. Whether it's bibliographic displays of papers for CVs and online bibliographies or whether its very visual galleries, slideshows and montages of papers, presentations, posters, images and videos then a core part of the academic life is "showing off" the things you have done, and telling stories about them. Hopefully, your repository can help you with these displays.

In a previous blog (Cobbling it Together) I described a quick and dirty way of making a slideshow from a set of documents in a repository by using Acrobat to do all the heavy lifting. Several months later I created a slideshow a different way with the EPrints ZIP exporter and the Mac's iPhoto slideshow software. Both of these methods required quite a lot of manual labour to provide an end-to-end service. Now mediated deposit is one thing, but mediated use is quite another, and so I have been trying to find an easier way to produce a good looking slideshow with EPrints.

We have done various experiments with the display side, and that turns out to be quite easy. Whether it is with Flash, or a 3D renderer, or an external Graphics environment you can build interesting displays, assuming you have the right data files. The problem is getting the right data files! Quite often the items you most wish to show off are the most visual ones - posters or presentations, rather than papers. This means rich media, which almost certainly means commercial desktop presentation programs like Microsoft Powerpoint or Apple Keynote. Now, repositories make every effort to create previews and thumbnails of ingested documents, but this is mainly limited to images, videos and PDFs. Office documents have to be downloaded and opened in their native application to be able to view their contents.

When I was managing the OR08 repository, I encouraged authors to send in the source of their presentations and the poster artwork. Many sent me PDFs only, some sent me PDFs with the original PowerPoint, and some sent me the PowerPoint files only. For that last group I made sure that I manually converted the document into PDF (using PowerPoint 2008 on the Mac). The repository automatically created preview files for the first page of the PDF files, so each presentation ended up with a preview image of sorts. (Previews are actually created in three sizes by default by the open source Ghostscript interpreter.)

The problems that I have are that (a) previews aren't made of PowerPoint documents unless a derived PDF version is supplied and (b) the previews are relatively low-resolution and (c) the creation process not reliable. Of the 144 PDF documents in the OR08 repository, about 10% have no preview because the conversion process failed. Of the remainder, a further 10% have an inaccurate preview (missing fonts, incorrect geometry, badly positioned graphic components). To produce a full-screen slideshow of posters, what is really needed is high fidelity, high quality (200dpi) images of the documents. Even when the preview-generation software is changed to increase the resolution, this does not fix the 20% of previews that do not pass the expected quality threshold. And, of course, it still requires the human depositor to submit a PDF document to make the Office original 'previewable'.

The best results I have obtained for generating previews have been from using bona-fide PowerPoint to create PDFs and Acrobat (or the Mac's "Preview" program) to create images from those PDFs. Since Office is a personal desktop piece of software, it can't really be used in the context of a server and the Microsoft documentation advises against it since various functions try to communicate with the user's desktop environment. This seems to preclude having an preview generation service tucked away in the repository software.

I've been experimenting with Chris G to find a manageable way to handle the production of high quality viewable PDF and preview images for Microsoft Office documents. It's not finished yet, but we're getting there. Parts of the process are in place, but they're all in pieces on the kitchen floor (metaphorically speaking). What I'm trying to do is document our experiences here, and in particular, why the whole charade is looking very different to the neat little repository service I imagined at the start.

Basically, whatever we try it involves running Office on someone's desktop, and that means transferring files from the repository and back again. We looked at file sharing technologies (e.g. SAMBA or WebDAV), or file transfer protocols (e.g. FTP or EMAIL), but we had problems because our server is behind a firewall and none of our user desktop machines are allowed there. Our initial expectation was that the repository would initiate and control the production of previews using some kind of push technology (e.g. messages or drop folders). In the end we settled on the new EPrints REST API and allowing the user/client/service to control the choice of items which require previews.

I've ended up using Automator on a Mac to control the use of Word, PowerPoint and Preview to process Office and PDF documents. Later I will investigate using .NET to control Office and Acrobat on a Windows desktop. At the moment it is happening on a physically separate computer, although we might look at virtualising the process and running it on the same machine as the repository.

This process is Automate-d but not completely automatic, because user tools are involved. Every so often when a Word document opens up, Word puts up a dialog box to ask me whether I want to trust its macros. Or when it tries to save to PDF I get a message warning me that a footer is out of a printable region. Also, Automator is wont to crash after processing about 50 documents. This means that it took about 4 days elapsed time to convert 60 powerpoint and 100 word documents in to PDFs and thence to 200dpi PNG files. If I had been constantly in the office to give it the total 10 minutes attention it needed, the whole process would have taken about 2 hours. Still, a "slightly hands on" process is better than "no process at all" becasue I need those files. And I hope that I'm only going to have to process this backlog once any way!

Now that I've got the new files on my desktop computer, I can put them back using the REST API, but how does the repository know that they are preview files? The automated built in previews are stored in a separate place in the repository; third party services can access them but there is no public API to create them or update them. Also, only preview images are handled, not PDFs. So the files that I have created aren't stored as 'repository backstage previews' but as independent documents within the original eprint that have a specific relationship (mechanicallyDerivedVersion) to the original Office document.

This means that any eprint which contains an Office document may now acquire a number of service-generated additional documents. At the moment, EPrints doesn't use them in its internal processes (for providing thumbnails on abstract pages), but export plugins can treat them how they like. The only thing that EPrints understands is that if a document changes (is updated, or deleted) then all of the documents that were mechanicallyDerived from it must be deleted. The assumption is that the 'preview' has been rendered obsolete or out-of-date by the changes/deletions and it is the responsibility of whatever third-party service that created the documents to recreate them.

My 'slideshow' exporter can now look for all the PowerPoint documents it wants, and then use any image file that is mechanicallyDerived from them. Job done! The "preview" semantics of the derived files are only understood by the third party plugins that create and use them, but their temporary and dependent relationship to the other documents are understood by the repository core. As we refine this process we will doubtlessly add something like a derivationRelationship to the mix, so that we can tell our thumbnails from our MD5 signatures.

The main shift in expectations remains that "preview generation" (something that was an automatic, internal service) is being supplemented by an external, partially manual (handheld) service. Sometimes, it seems, the services that a repository takes credit for are actually provided by human cranking the handle on other pieces of software! I've just had exactly this discussion with Bill Hubbard, and it's making the boundary of my repository architecture diagram look very fuzzy!

Friday Afternoon Features

2008-06-06T16:53:00.003+01:00

I can now keep up with the latest repository submissions from my mobile phone! Yes, in a fit of Web 2.0 experimentation, Chris and I connected eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk to Twitter so that every time a new publication goes live it sends out a tweat to the eprintsecs user which I am now following.

Repository Deposits Double in the UK

2008-05-15T15:56:00.005+01:00

The graph shows how monthly UK institutional repository deposits have doubled in the last 18 months. Each repository was receiving an average of 40 deposits per month in October 2006 and is now receiving about 80 deposits per month in April 2008.

The data is taken from ROAR and is corrected for some obviously anomolous activity and for some missing deposit data. Further investigation is required to check whether the trend applies to all repositories or whether it is driven by a small number of better preforming repositories. Work is also required to determine seasonal variations and also to understand longer-term trends.

Institutional Policies and Institutional Managers

2008-05-11T06:59:00.002+01:00

It's not often you get to high-five your institution's chief librarian, but the moment seemed to demand it on Friday morning.

Attending the Repository Steering Group meeting was Bernadette Kelly, the Service Manager of the business unit (ISS) that is responsible for all computing, data and communications facilities for the University. Her responsibility is the delivery and sustainability of core information services that are required for the University's business - particularly the finance and management administration systems. She has been responsible for the repository for a while, but it has rather been eclipsed by other more mainstream applications. In fact, there was supposed to be a technical support team being built up for the repository, but several years ago all bar one of it members were assigned to the rollout of an important Management Information System, and they have never been assigned back! (This singular and wonderful trooper is Adam White who joined the EPrints Southampton team straight from graduating from a degree in Computing.)

Bernadette came along because of the tension between the use and the resourcing of the repository. It has gained a very high profile internally because of its role in generating the University's submission in the national Research Assessment Exercise, and it looks increasingly likely that the repository will form a platform for the University's ongoing management of research intelligence. The trouble is that this role is just not in keeping with a 1-man support team and we have all been worried about what would happen if Adam fell under a bus, or worse, got a better paid job with a competitor institution!

I think that it's fair to say that ISS have been supportive of the repository from the get-go and in fact the initial rollout was commended by the Vice Chancellor as an excellent example of inter-service collaboration between ISS, the Library and my school ECS. But even so, their natural and professional instincts are not in favour of home-grown, open source solutions. So there has tended to be somewhat less than a wholehearted enthusiasm for its future.

I think that a historical problem has been that ISS have listened to us talking about Open Access, scholarly communications and research quality assessment to other audiences, and they have never seen our ambitions as part of their core mission. So on this occasion we had the opportunity to talk business to them. We talked about the role that the repository has been adopting in gathering and marshalling intelligence about the University's main business products (research outputs and teaching interactions) and about our vision for addressing key current business concerns by enhancing our international profile (Google), increasing revenue (by advertising courses to potential Masters and Postgrad students on repository pages), addressing engagement with industry (similarly by focused advertising in the repository) and delivering research intelligence on citation impact and Pagerank) to staff and their managers.

There was definitely a lot more enthusiasm as we talked and I think that ISS have moved from seeing the repository as Yet Another Service That Needs Resourcing From Their Overburdened Budget to An Important and Productive Business System That is A Nett Contributor to the University. This is definitely a good result, so as the meeting broke up I took the opportunity to register my excitement with the aforementioned high five.

And it's another example of the need to be able to talk different languages to different people if you really want to offer "a set of services" to the whole institution. Management and admin are a hard-to-ignore part of an institution, but there's a certain amount of worry in the repository community that we will lose our way if we become a "tool of the management" rather than focusing exclusively on supporting grassroots researchers. I take the opposite view - an institutional repository will never be more than a localized library contrivance unless it seeks to serve the concerns of the institutional managers as well as the institutional researchers.

I believe that this position is supported by the experience of a handful of repositories that have participated in research assessment in the UK. All the presenters at the OR08 discussion on Research Assessment Experience came to the conclusion that the hard work involved was more than compensated for by the increase in profile and respect that the repository and the library achieved. I gave the same message in a recent talk on using a repository for research assessment at the Beyond the RAE 2008 meeting at Kings College, London in April 2008.

We will explore these issues further at the forthcoming ELPub workshop on Repositories that Support Research Management at ELPub 2008 in June. Part of the workshop will be commenting on the checklist for serving institutional management that came out of the OR08 discussions.

Cloud Computing and Cloud Thinking

2008-04-23T03:49:00.004+01:00

Hello from the 2008 Web Conference in Beijing! Yesterday I took part in the Web Science workshop on Web Evolution and spent my evening uploading all the presentations to the Web Science EPrints repository and feeling a bit like Cinderella while my senior colleagues from Southampton went to a reception hosted by Microsoft. While I was uploading a 15Mb PDF over a very slow connection I took the opportunity to have dinner in the hotel's Brazilian restaurant. Several Caipirinhas later I returned to finish off the repository management tasks in much improved humour:-)

Today is the first day of the main conference, and the keynote speech was given by a Chinese VP from Google on "Cloud Computing". He covered all the basics about Cloud Computing and particularly about Google's internal cloud infrastructure and their cloud-based user applications. Now I'm very interested in Cloud Computing as a Computer Science Researcher and Lecturer, and I'm looking at including it in my teaching and in my work. Hurrah for David Flanders and his Fedorazon project who are giving us advice about running EPrints in the Amazon cloud.

However, it also seems to me that all this hard work and infrastructure is just moving our current working practices from our laptops and workstations to yet another exciting new platform. Instead of having my files stored on an identifiable piece of hardware in a known location, they are now stored somewhere unknown and unknowable, but invisibly managed, replicated and always available. This might offer various advantages, but it is a fairly superficial change in my working life.

What I'm really interested in is not a shift in technology, but a shift in human behaviour. Not cloud computing but cloud thinking. Encouraging researchers and scholars to move their ideas from the private and inaccessible domain of their laptops or workstations or manuscripts or CD-Rs into the public domain of the Web to increase the efficiency of the research process and to improve the sum total of human knowledge. Just putting documents or data in the cloud doesn't make it any less private. Moving all of research into the cloud wouldn't increase the sum total of disclosed human knowledge - and that's what I think is really important.

It's all part of the Open Access ideal - don't withhold your intellectual capital unnecessarily. And cloud computing (like service oriented architectures and any other platform infrastructure) may be a useful step in the right direction, or it may be a complete red herring.

Beware What You Wish For

2008-04-19T16:23:00.004+01:00

Now that our repository has been upgraded to EPrints 3.1, the repository technical support team (that's Chris) has agreed that the repository management (that's me) should be allowed to have control over the new web-based management tools. In theory, I had the right to this level of control before, but in practice it meant logging into the command line of an infrastructure machine for which I wasn't supposed to have login access. This was part of the management/technician rift that made us put as much repository administration as possible into the web interface of 3.1.

Still, now it's actually arrived, I've realised that all the excuse making and prevaricating that I did before just won't work. The magic words "Oh yes, I need to get the web programming team to look at that" is something that has saved me a lot of work in the past. Now the game is up, my cover is blown and I'll just have to do it myself.

The first thing is to fix the citation styles (we have the italics in the wrong place, and book sections aren't flagged as such). I've got a nice email from Pauline Simpson on the topic somewhere. Then alter the QA audit to ferret out never-published papers. Then update the by-group view pages and their sub-orderings. Then I can take a look at the new tagcloud view-by-keyword styles and the new community of practice co-author listings.

Wish me luck. I hope I don't press the wrong buttons!

Georgia State vs The Publishers

2008-04-16T21:51:00.003+01:00

Apparently Georgia State University has been providing teaching materials to its students without getting the necessary copyright clearance. See the publishers' press release for one side of this story.

I really shouldn't raise my head in public about this lawsuit, because I try to keep quiet about non-OA issues in case I confuse the issues. However, what stands out to me in the above document is something commonly seen in the Open Access debate: publishers glorifying their role. Here's a quote:

“University presses are integral to the academic environment, providing scholarly publications that fit the needs of students and professors and serving as a launch pad from which academic ideas influence debate in the public sphere,” said Niko Pfund, Vice-President of Oxford University Press. “Without copyright protections, it would be impossible for us to meet these needs and provide this service.”

The inference to be drawn from the above paragraph is the obviously false "without copyright protections there would be no scholarship". I suggest the following translation into more grounded reality (copy editing services provided free on this occasion):

“University-based publishing companies are part of the academic food-chain, selling scholar's publications to needy students and professors and serving as one of the channels from which academics' ideas influence debate in the public sphere,” said Niko Pfund, Vice-President of Oxford University Press. “Without copyright protections, it would be impossible for us to meet our needs and provide this business.”

Cow Tipping and All That Jazz

2008-04-13T13:46:00.002+01:00

Last week (being the week after That Conference) I was able to escape the country and visit fellow blogging repositarian Dorothea Salo in Wisconsin. Despite warnings of freezing weather and record-breaking snowfalls, I arrived at Dane County airport to the very English sight of grey clouds and heavy drizzle. Dorothea introduced me to Kristin Eschenfelder who is a researcher in social informatics and we all spent a very pleasant evening talking social epistemology and information flows in open source software networks and at Indian restaurant.

The following day I had the pleasure of sitting in on a MINDS management meeting (MINDS is the DSpace Institutional repository of Wisconsin University). Despite the fact that Southampton and Wisconsin have different educational and funding contexts at the national level and different university structures and management at the institutional level, it was very clear that the challenges and activities of repository management are identical for host and guest. There really ought to be an international repository managers organisation, independent of the software platforms and the agendas. Neither of us was able to be at the Repository Managers session at OR08 (Dorothea didn't have the funding to attend the conference and I was too involved in conference administration during the event) but I hope that there might be some movement towards that in the aftermath of the conference.

Then it was on to Chicago (even more rain) where I had been invited to speak about EPrints at a CARLI meeting (Consortium of Academic and Research Libraries in Illinois), alongside Tim Donohue (DSpace Committer) and Sarah Shreeve (IDEALS repository manager). Together with Dorothea, Tim and Sarah have been developing BibApp - a bibliography managing application that works alongside repositories. BibApp was one of the finalists in the OR08 Developer Challenge, but this was my first chance to get a close-up look at the software. Previously it had been DSpace-specific software, but in its latest version it integrates with EPrints via SWORD. It contains some potentially very useful functionality for librarians - it extracts lists of publishers from authors' bibliographies and alerts them to those that have the most permissive Open Access policies as stated in the ROMEO database. The intriguing thing from my POV is that BibApp is deliberately implemented as a separate application that works alongside repositories, but how much of it can be achieved inside a repository? What is the best location for repository-enhancing functionality? Where are services located, and who takes responsibility for them? More of this later I think!

PS If you're wondering about the title of this post, Cow Tipping is a rural Wisconsin pass time and All That Jazz is a song from the musical "Chicago".