L&LR staff blog

Joss Winn from the University’s Centre for Educational Research & Development has already explained how to generate some code which creates a dynamic list of an author’s publications, drawing on an RSS feed of items in our Repository, for embedding in another webpage (e.g.  a staff profile page on the University’s website).

(Upfront, I’ll say this – I agree that it would be much better if we could do this with one click of an ‘embed my list‘ button. Until that day arrives…)

But: there’s a problem with the RSS feeds that come out of the EPrints software:

The items in the list don’t appear in any particularly logical order, and the order can’t be changed. (In fact, they’re displayed in reverse order by the date they were added to the Repository, which has its own internal logic, but makes no sense ‘in the wild’.)

To compound this problem, the actual date of publication is buried rather deeply within the item description, e.g.:

Neary, Mike and Winn, Joss (2009) The student as producer: reinventing the student experience in higher education. In: The future of higher education: policy, pedagogy and the student experience. Continuum, London, pp. 192-210. ISBN 1847064728 (In Press)

The challenge is to extract this date of publication and use it to re-order the items in the list.

I’ve used Yahoo! Pipes to do this, by:

1. Copying the description into a new field.
2. Using the following Regex to isolate and extract the date of publication: ^.*\((\d{4})\).*$
3. Re-ordering the field by this date (in reverse order).

You can find the Pipe at: http://pipes.yahoo.com/lincoln/eprints_sort2

(Image: screenshot of the Yahoo! Pipe)

The final enhancement – I added user-input fields to allow you to use the Pipe to create a feed for any author (forename/surname), which can be further refined by adding an extra keyword (we’re using additional keywords, added to the EPrints record, as a secondary hack to distinguish between multiple authors with the same name!).

Once the Pipe has run, you can grab the RSS feed and pass it through Feed2JS in the usual way.

This isn’t particularly satisfactory in the long run, in that it relies on a lot of external services over which we have no control, but it’s a useful hack for now.

I attended the first 2010 meeting of LiSN this morning at the Lincolnshire Archives, attended by representatives from 8 library/information services from across the county. Substantive discussion topic was “how we market our services”; we also discussed some planned improvements to the LiSN website. If you have any ideas about what should appear on the LiSN site (currently at www.lisn.org.uk), then I’d be very interested in hearing them.

I spent Friday at Leicester University at the meeting of UKCORR (UK Council of Research Repositories).  Presentations about Journal ToCs, SHERPA ROMEO, CADAIR among others were all very interesting but it was even more useful to discuss issues with other people in same position as us.  REF, implications of mandate and, especially, eTheses seem to be common concerns to everyone.  Most repositories seem to be heavily dependent on library skills, and the more deposits are mandated, the heavier the burden of review becomes.  A copyright workshop at the end of the day was an excellent forum in which to compare policies and workflows. 

The fabulously hard-working Gareth Johnson twittered and blogged the proceedings as well as forgoing his lunch to give us a guided tour of the David Wilson Library.  It’s wonderful to see what 32 million pounds looks like.  I particularly liked the ‘help zone’, and the information screens which give computer availability throughout the building as well as streaming local news and weather alongside library news!

Thanks to Leicester and Northampton for their joint hospitality, and to the officers of  UKCORR which has no budget so runs on goodwill; luckily there doesn’t seem to be a shortage of this.

As always, if you are curious about the repository, please ask me!

Bev!

Congratulations to Chris Leach, who has just been appointed as Systems Librarian.  Chris will continue to work with Pam, Niki and Di on matters to do with the library management system, and will also continue to support Architecture for the moment.

Ian, Philippa and I visited the Aldham Robarts LRC at LJMU on the 4th Feb.  The LRC has recently benefitted from a major refurbishment which was designed around a new University service model, which brings together all standard student-facing services in a newly converged department -  Library and Student Support.  Students can now visit any of the three campus LRCs to get help, information and advice about any aspect of student life, as well as to access standard library resources. 

The ground floor of each LRC contains a student support zone, which is made up of a Welcome Hub and a Transactions Desk.

Staff at the  Welcome Hub provide a reception service,  answer general circulation and IT enquiries, and book appointments for students needing specialist help (eg. welfare, careers, employabilty, library subject support and specialist computing support).  There are a number of small meetings rooms available for students to meet  support staff.

Welcome Hub

Transaction Desk

Staff at the Transactions desk provide help with all aspects of student administration, including coursework submission, enrolment, timetables, module registration and student finance.

The refurbished ground floor contains flexible group study areas and printing facilities. 

Philippa and Ian in the first floor printing centre

Flexible group study area

The first floor has also been refurbished and contains collections, group and individual study areas, and bookable group rooms.  The upper floors will be refurbished at a future date.

All loans of print materials are self service, including reservations, which students collect from the short-loan area.

Self-service reservations

LJMU customer services staff have offered roving support for the past three years.  The rovers wear a sash or tee-shirt to identify themselves to users.

A Rover in a tee-shirt!

The basement at the Aldham Robarts LRC houses special collections and archives, which in general are based around the theme of popular culture.  The collections include the Ray Coleman Archive, containing taped interviews used by Coleman in his biographies of Brian Epstein and John Lennon; and the John Savage Archive, which is the largest collection of punk-related material in the world.

We are looking forward to returning to LJMU, when the refurbishment of the upper floors has been completed.

Over the past year (and increasingly frantically over the past few weeks), I’ve been working to liberate a small amount of the Library’s recent book-circulation data, as part of a national project (“MOSAIC – Making Our Shared Activity Information Count”) investigating the possibilities around exploiting “user activity data” within university libraries.

I’m immensely relieved that we’ve finally managed to make some of our data public, under a Creative Commons licence, via the Repository at: http://eprints.lincoln.ac.uk/2164/

“The University of Lincoln collected one academic year’s worth of its own library book circulation data (“user activity data”) for the JISC-funded MOSAIC project, which set out to investigate the technical feasibility, service value and issues around exploiting user activity data. Data was collected for the period 1 September 2008 – 31 August 2009. Lincoln’s data was processed according to a data schema common to all participants in the MOSAIC project; any data that might be used to identify an individual library user was removed or anonymised.”

"Libraries as Books" by Dave & Bry (flickr)

The MOSAIC project (background: here and here) set out to collate book circulation and other library usage data – all homogenised and appropriately anonymised – from 9 separate universities; in order (in part) to demonstrate how the innovative use of that data could be used to add value to the library user experience.

Thanks are due to the MOSAIC project team (especially Helen Harrop for her patience and Dave Pattern for his guidance!), to colleagues in ICT for their recent invaluable assistance in getting at our data, and finally to everyone in L&LR who’s been involved – particularly to Chris Leach.

So, now the data’s out there… who’s going to make use of it?

Congratulations to Lesley Thompson who becomes Library Officer (job-share) in the evening team as of this evening (3rd February). Recruitment to the post of Library Assistant (job-share) (evening team) that Lesley has vacated will begin shortly.

Joss has beaten me to blogging this, so rather than think for myself I’m just going to quote him in full.

Yesterday, I submitted a proposal to Talis under their Incubator fund. If successful, I would have the pleasure of working with Paul Stainthorp, E-Resources Librarian at the University of Lincoln, and Casey Bisson,  Information Architect at Plymouth State University. The bid is to develop an idea which I’ve posted about before, based on Casey’s work on Scriblio and our adventures with WordPress MU, in particular, JISCPress.

Anyway, rather than re-iterating the bid here. You can read it in full by clicking here.

Comments are very welcome. Thanks.

The 1 to 1 Learning Development sessions are now being held in the meeting room on the ground floor of the Library on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays from 11-12. The 15 minute sessions are drop-in only and they’re aimed at undergraduates.

We’re advertising the service on its own Portal page (under Library Services); we’ve put copies of the leaflet on the ground floor, second and third floor desks and we have a portable sign which we’ll  keep in the meeting room and put out first thing on Monday, Wednesday and Friday mornings.

Judith and Marishona

There will be no Admin Office cover on Wednesday 27 January due to annual leave.  If you wish to contact the admin team, a voicemail message can be left on Sally’s number (01522) 886427. You can also email libraryadmin@lincoln.ac.uk and we’ll respond as soon as we can.  Thanks.