L&LR staff blog

I’m at Birmingham City University on Monday for mashed library event No.3, a.k.a. #Middlemash.

I’m giving a lightning talk in the morning covering the work we’ve done on using RefWorks to create new-book RSS feeds; I’ll also be trying to raise interest around Joss’s and my project to develop Wordpress MU as a platform for a devolved union catalogue.

You can follow Monday’s discussions on Twitter, if you’re so inclined (hashtag #middlemash).

Attention Inter-library loan users! Our new system will go live Monday 7th December 2009. There will be some changes which you will be guided through when you access the LLR portal page. In the meantime if you want to keep your past inter-library loan history please ensure you have printed it off/saved it by the 7th December 2009!  It will be unavailable after this date.  Any Inter-library loan applications on the new system will be retained.

Watch out for further blogs and information in the LLR centres.

To help promote off-air recordings to Health and Social Care staff and students,  Kevin has set up an area on Blackboard where we can list recent  programmes recorded.  Each item shows the programme title and brief summary of the content, with the title acting as a hyperlink to the library catalogue entry.  The collection includes both DVDs of television programmes  and audio CDs of radio transmissions.

Started in April 2008, the transfer of off air recording videos to DVD is now completed wth the successful transfer of the award-winning Three Colours Blue / Trois Couleurs: Bleu (1993) starring Juliette Binoche.  Now students and staff will be able to enjoy watching films, documentaries and lectures in a more modern format on PCs in the library or wherever. Another notable benefit of the project is that DVDs take up three times less space than a video, thus creating much needed room in the library.

Many thanks to all those who helped this project reach completion, especially Phil, Alice and Cherie.  The next phase would be to stream the many hundreds of DVDs onto the network, although this is dependent on the University’s server capacity being increased.

I made the (deceptively long) journey over to the city campus of the University of Wolverhampton yesterday (18 Nov 2009) for the concluding JISC MOSAIC project event. I was without an Internet connection all day so wasn’t able to waste time contribute to the backchannel by tweeting from the event, so here’s my writeup.

Interlude 1: what’s all this about?

MOSAIC stands for ‘making our shared activity information count‘ (but took its name from an earlier project with the acronym TILE. Lots of TILEs = a MOSAIC. Geddit?). It’s being funded by JISC, and it’s “investigating the technical feasibility, service value and issues around exploiting activity data”. For ‘activity data’, read (in the main) library book-circulation data. Say the JISC:

“MOSAIC aims to build on [the TILE project] by aggregating library activity data from several institutions and making it available for re-use and experimentation. The Talis podcast with Dave [Pattern, University of Huddersfield] provides further background.”

I.e., if lots of university libraries shared their anonymised circulation data in a common format, what Web2.0-type-o’-magic could we build on top of that data, and how would it benefit our users?

We’ve been invited to contribute some of Lincoln’s own (anonymised) Horizon circulation data to this project. I’ll write more about our own involvement in a future blog post.

After introductions, we were welcomed to Wolverhampton by Fiona Parsons (Director of Learning Centres at Wolves, and vice-chair of SCONUL), then talked through the project’s progress-to-date by David Kay of Sero Consulting Ltd, the lead institution in the project. There was discussion about some of the challenges that have faced institutions wanting to contribute their own activity data – in particular, the difficulties involved in extracting the data from different models of LMS, and institutional concerns about privacy, utility, cost, and the ownership and re-use of ‘their’ data*.

The keynote presentation came from Paul Miller of Cloud of Data Ltd - ‘Activity data and the global information economy: the who, what, when, where, how, why of an emerging future’. I hope Paul (or the MOSAIC project team) will put his slides online soon – it’s well worth a read.

In the meantime you might like to look at Paul’s blog: http://cloudofdata.com/

Next came coffee and the first of two breakout sessions. In a group with Ken Chad, Jill Griffiths (MMU), Alex Parker (So’ton University) and a guy from Wolverhampton**. The breakout session was titled ‘Being Practical’ and we were tasked to come up with real-life use-case scenarios for one or more different types of HE library user.

We focused on the undergraduate, and spent a bit of time discussing students’ trust in the reading materials given to them by their institution, students’ reading behaviour and information literacy, how improvements to library processes (including considerations of VfM) impacted on the student experience, how to ’sell’ the utility of library usage data to universities, and particularly students’ motivation to read in particular ways.

This led us to what was meant to be our use-case scenario, which we were a bit nervous about, so we rather tentatively posed it as a question instead! (I’ve had to rephrase it from memory below because I left our original notes in Wolverhampton, but this was the gist…)

Interlude 2: our use-case scenario: “Read Your Way to a First”

Can we use library activity data to learn anything about the reading behaviour of students who get higher degree classifications that we could use to inform the reading behaviour of all students?

Obviously, there are some huge questions and potential dangers hidden behind that innocuous question, and a hypothesis (i.e., that there’s some relationship between your reading behaviour and the degree you end up with) that would have to be tested first. It sparked some lively discussion in the run up to lunch, as did the other groups’ use-case scenarios for undergrads, researchers, academic staff, library directors, and developers of web applications for libraries.

Over lunch (good sandwiches; always important) most people sat down to watch a pre-recorded slideshow presentation with voiceover from an absent Dave Pattern about how Huddersfield are really using real circulation data to really improve their students’ experiences of the library. (It’s an adaptation of a similar presentation I saw the flesh-and-blood D.P. deliver at last year’s Mash Oop North event.)

I recommend you take a look at his presentation - it’s only 17 minutes long and it’ll be time well spent…

After lunch we ran through a series of ’perspectives on the problem space’ – some excellent and genuinely thought-provoking presentations from Mark van Harmelen, Ken Chad, Paul Walk, Jenny Craven & Jill Griffiths of MMU, and Helen Harrop of Sero, which led to some equally thought-provoking discussions.

Once the presentations are available online, I’ll post a link.

At about 3:15pm the group broke up for tea and started another breakout session & discussions - unfortunately I had to take this opportunity to go and tackle the M6.

Interlude 3: what next for us?

 As I said, I’ll blog more about how Lincoln can and will [fingers crossed] contribute some of our own anonymised Horizon circ. data (also, I hope, some e-resource usage data) to this project before 2009 is out. In the meantime, the data’s still out there, just waiting for someone to come along and build innovative library services on top of it…

Ten useful links:

1. About the event at Wolverhampton
2. MOSAIC – JISC project page
3. MOSAIC  web pages (SERO)
4. Free book usage data from the University of Huddersfield
5. Talis podcast with Dave Pattern on sharing usage data
6. MOSAIC data wiki and an API
7. The MOSAIC developer competition, the results and Alex Parker’s winning entry
8. Paul Miller’s Cloud of Data blog
9. Dave Pattern’s presentation
10. #jiscmosaic thread on Twitter

* I’d argue that it’s not libraries’ data at all. It’s our users‘ data; we’re just keeping it safe for them.

** Sorry! I hadn’t had coffee when we did introductions.

An image which I deposited to test a new ‘post to blog’ feature in the University of Lincoln Repository (http://eprints.lincoln.ac.uk): this feature has been developed for the University by EPrints services and uses the XML-RPC publishing protocol.

View this item on Lincoln’s IR: http://eprints.lincoln.ac.uk/2037/

The Inter-library loans service is changing!

We are currently in the process of updating our Inter-library loans software which will mean a few changes in appearance and in the way you place requests.

The new service should be in place soon so watch this space for more updates and information. 

 
Most of the Acquisitions Team will be attending training in the new software next week (18th & 19th) so there will be a limited Inter-library loan service on Wednesday 18th November.

The Hull LRC team celebrated Dave’s 40th birthday a week early with a lunchtime buffet last week as the man himself was taking this week off – obviously planning enough time to recover from the rest of his birthday celebrations.  Happy birthday Dave !

Yesterday, I spotted (thanks @calire) that Google books have created a page that lets you browse their available magazine titles.

I can’t resist a free journal.

So I copied-&-pasted the entire page into MS Excel, used a handy function to extract the underlying URLs from the hyperlinked titles, did a bit of search-&-replace to make the list fit EBSCO’s data structure, and hey presto!

87 magazines from Google books on the E-journals A-to-Z

Image: a Google magazine, yesterday.

I also did a bit of bodging with EBSCO’s custom notes to pull in the journal cover images (c.f. what I did with ScienceDirect).

The whole thing will need re-creating every so often, but it’s only a 10-minute job.

Thank you, Google.