L&LR staff blog

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?

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.

Somehow I missed this when it was first released. Which is a shame, because it’s very useful.

“The JISC Academic Database Assessment Tool (ADAT) aims to help libraries to make informed decisions [...] key service information for database and eBook content platforms.”

Compares platform features including authentication method, search functions, indexing, reference management compatibility, DRM restrictions, linking, and usage stats.

Link — http://www.jisc-adat.com/adat/adat_ebooks.pl

In which direction is the University of Lincoln headed over the next few years, in its relationship with technology, its provision of [access to] information [literacy], in its students’ expectations, and in its ability to meet and/or challenge that expectation?

And what will the University Library look like as a result of that direction?

I’d recommend that everyone with an interest in the immediate future of university education reads these | two blog posts. They are comments (by Joss and Sue, respectively, both of CERD), on two recent, overlapping reports:

• Bradwell, P. (2009) The edgeless university: why Higher Education must embrace technology. London: Demos
• Hughes, A. (2009) Higher Education in a Web 2.0 world. Bristol: JISC

Others will no doubt have already written or are composing their own analyses of the two reports, so I’m not going to (I don’t “do” reflective blogging). But I couldn’t resist a couple of observations about libraries and their place in the world envisaged by both reports.

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Disappointingly, the JISC document (HE in a Web 2.0 world) doesn’t explicitly mention the role of the university library at all. Perhaps that’s just an artefact of the way the report’s been written, but the Persecuted Librarian™ in me just can’t help but blame it on the usual invisibility of libraries in high-level debates about HE.

And, while the word ‘facebook‘ appears 12 times in the body of the report, ‘book’ (or even ‘e-book’ / ‘ebook’) appears not once, and ‘journal’ only in the context of blogging (i.e. a personal, rather than an academic journal).

Ok, so the Caxtonian walls that artificially divide knowledge into these mushed-tree-bound units may have crumbled a bit, but… really?

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The Demos report (Edgeless university) is more expansive: recognising the library’s role in supporting and scaffolding Open Access; “extending the ways that people can access material” (p.35). And there is an entire section (on p.44) dedicated to “Libraries 2.0“, which says:

“Simply storing information can no longer be their main function.”

Sidestepping the fact that storing information is rarely as ’simple’ as it might appear*, there’s a problem with the notion that we’ve already or nearly reached the stage where Google, the Open-Access (OA) movement, and the illicit digitisation & circulation of copyright-infringing material via the Internet can see students’ information needs met instantly, cheaply, and without any requirement for a “quaint” (p.27) – and expensive – library service to meet those needs.

That scenario – that universities no longer need access to library services to meet their raw information needs – just may well come to pass in some wholly-OA future utopia, but the idea that in 2009 we’re already at a point where anyone who wants reliable, ongoing access to a range of serious, scholarly journals doesn’t require “membership of an academic library” (p.26), just isn’t true, as any student, in almost any academic discipline, should be able to attest (well, to be fair, you don’t need a library as long as you’re prepared to pay large credit card bills for the purchase of individual e-journal articles at £20 a pop).

Unpleasant a truth it may be for some, but the majority of scholarly and professional information sources are not yet free and openly accessible online.

But here’s where the ‘simply storing…‘ quote is right on the money: even if we can’t abandon our traditional acquisitive function, we must give equal attention to convincing the University of the value of the other, less-well-appreciated aspects of our role. Limitless information only really becomes educationally useful if it’s possible to subject it (or the students as they access it) to the processes of highlighting, filtering, interpreting, assessing, comparing, contextualising, (re-)presenting, annotating, supporting, troubleshooting, and helping.

And, what’s more, we need to start making sure now that the University is aware that sort of stuff is exactly what we’re good at. If and when the day arrives that readers’ information needs are sated entirely by the Internet for free, there will be if anything an even greater need for the guiding hand of the information specialist.

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*The same section of the report imagines a hypothetical university asking why it needs a library “just to buy licences so users can access work online” – well, in part it’ll be because purchasing and maintaining access to licensed subscription content is an expensive and complex business, and you’re gonna want someone who knows what they’re doing to handle it for you – and if it’s not going to be your library, you’ll only have to develop the expertise elsewhere.