L&LR staff blog

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.

A short and sweet expiry date update:

I’ve updated all existing staff expiry dates to 31st August 2011, and amended the btype expiry table so all newly added staff’s expiry date will automatically default to that date from today.

Online (HIP) renewals are working again :-)

There is a problem with online renewals at the moment. The counter is changing when users try to renew but the date is staying the same.

The lack of this function is basically caused by a bug in HIP which causes problems when a My Account sub-tab is edited. The Sirsi-Dynix team are working on this and will contact me when a solution is found.

At the last meeting of the Staff Development Group it was decided that each session offered would be allocated a facilitator.

The session ‘Advanced Horizon Skills’ is on the list and can be faciltated by Pam Young and Niki Rogers, however, to be able for us to write out a session guide we need to know what people want in respect of ‘Advanced Horizon Skills’.

If staff could please email Pam and myself (PYoung@lincoln.ac.uk / Nrogers@lincoln.ac.uk) with any inclusions / ideas that you may have.

Regards

Chris L. and I have made a couple of changes to the way e-book links work on the public catalogue.

I’ve put a message on the public blog about the most obvious difference – MyiLibrary titles now open up in a new browser window – this seemed to be something that annoyed a lot of users (at least – a few Holbeach students complained about it…) because they couldn’t get back to the catalogue using the ‘back’ arrow.

Horizon now also handles the Athens authentication from MARC 856 $u in a slightly different way. We’ve made that change so that we can get the MARC records for the new ebrary e-books onto Horizon with the minimum of fuss, but it shouldn’t affect what users see when they log in to MyiLibrary (or ebrary) via HiP.

(You might spot that, since the change, links ro existing MyiLibrary titles in 856 are getting a double-dose of Athens authentication… this doesn’t seem to cause a problem [cue emails from Eduserv telling me why it's a terrible idea!] and Chris, Di, Bev, Jill and I will have a little project after Christmas to tidy up the existing MyiLibrary MARC records, to bring them in line with the newer ebrary records, and to put a stop to the duplicated Athens authentication within the links.)

I have to give credit here to Dave Pattern @ Huddersfield, who pointed the way forward to do this within Horizon(!) when we were chatting in London a week or so ago. Thanks Dave; works a treat!

8 week loan borrowers (staff; professors; distance learners; postgrad researchers; postgrad distance learners and work based learners) loans will start issuing for the Easter vacation on 6th February. Their due date will be 21st April.

Pam

You may notice a difference when running a Horizon report, or doing the notices, in that there are now only 6 locations where there were previously 13!  The redundant ones were deleted from the Horizon_test database last month, and following testing have now been deleted from the live database.

Hopefully this will make statistical reports more accurate, and searching quicker and less complicated.

Following discussions at Customer Service Group, and ratification by SMT, there is now a new borrower type available on Horizon of Postgraduate Distance Learner (PGDL).

This btype has privileges of 8 week loans on 20 items.

There are no borrowers in the PGDL category currently; and because this is not a btype that features in QLS, borrowers will have to be added manually.  If you are aware of a student who should be allocated this category please change their current btype to PGDL.

W elcome to issue nine of the Learning Resources newsletter “The Buzz”. Many thanks to all the contributors and keep your ideas rolling in!

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