L&LR staff blog

As threatened, I was at BCU in Birmingham a week ago (30th Nov) for #middlemash. The morning after the official mashed library Pre-conference Networking Activity (PNA), a good few of us met on the train up to Perry Barr railway station near the campus.

One of @chriskeene's slides.

I’m not going to do a chronological write-up of the day (you can find other people’s here, here, here and elsewhere): instead here are five disconnected #middlemash-related statements…

1. I gave a presentation in the morning.

I’ve tidied up the slides a bit from the version created on the day (which were a bit last-minute), and added captions. Also, here’s the latest list of examples of subject feeds created using RefWorks:

Faculty of Agriculture, Food & Animal Sciences

• New books for Biological Sciences
• New books in the Holbeach LRC (Food Manufacture / Agriculture & Environment)

Faculty of Business & Law

• New books for the Lincoln Business School

Faculty of Health, Life & Social Sciences

• New books for Forensic Science
• New books for Psychology
• New books for Social Sciences
• New books for Social Work
• New books for Sport, Coaching & Exercise Science

2. I wave my hands around a lot when I speak.

3. Twitter got some serious hammer.

(Image: word cloud of #middlemash tweets, created using www.wordle.net)

Owen Stephens (OU) has already noted on his blog that this was one of the most ‘tweeted’ conferences he’s been to; it certainly felt that Twitter played an important fuction as a backchannel / reporting tool / way of opening up the discussions to people who couldn’t attend in person.

• Here’s a feed of #middlemash tweets
• I also like this – ranked list of hardcore tweeters (fifth!)

4. You can do good, practical stuff on the day.

At the first two Mashed Library events, I found it difficult – and a little bit intimidating – to get involved in the practical mashing activities. I tend to find I only start to have usable ideas several days after the conference ends.

So I was pleased that, suitably inspired by Tony Hirst’s Yahoo Pipes walk-through, I managed to take an idea that came up in conversation with Jo Alcock and turn it into something practically useful, there and then.

The idea was this:

It would be useful if subject librarians could be automatically notified about the existence of new editions of books on reading lists in their subjects.

The practical solution was ready-made, in the form of this pipe which makes use of OCLC’s xISBN web service.

So, mid-mash, I added an extra button to my existing new-book feed pipe, which takes the working ISBN for each book and throws it at the xISBN pipe – the result is a list, in RSS format, of all related versions of any particular book. Anyone can subscribe to this feed and – here’s the killer bit – be notified when a new edition (and thus a new ISBN) is added!

I can see this being a really useful addition to any bibliographic service, especially for the subject librarian or interested academic.

Gives…

I’m going to try and tweak this to make it prettier, then I’ll blog more substantially.

5. A summary of each of the presentations is on the #middlemash blog

Quite a few of the presentations are on slideshare, too.

[cetsEmbedRSS id='http://middlemash.wordpress.com/feed/' itemcount='5']

Next stop – hopefully – Liverpool in early 2010.

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).

It appears that the campaign to increase our RefWorks reach is having a positive effect (graph for impression only; no numbers):

N.B. #1 – the total number of RefWorks accounts in current use – i.e. our ’share’ – has doubled since last year, thanks to a relatively huge number of new accounts created this year.

N.B. #2 – we have a number of loyal RefWorks users who’ve been with us from the beginning!

Thanks to Stephanie RefWorks-COS for sharing these additional stats.

Kudos to Social Work (i.e. Kev!), for being the first to use one of my formatted RefWorks books feeds in anger – see below a screenshot of Kev’s Social Works new books feed embedded into a live Blackboard site using feed2js (click for bigger):

If you have created your own feed, could you please:

1. Let me know.
2. Consider using Google FeedBurner to allow email subscriptions [which has worked well at Holbeach]; also to create a sensible feed URL à la http://feeds.feedburner.com/SWNewBooks
3. Add the feed to this UL wiki page?

And to see how ingesting an RefWorks feed into a VLE (Moodle, in this case) ought to be done, you might want to take a look at these videos on Owen Stephens’ TELSTAR project blog.

“TELSTAR is working on three main types of integration between the RefWorks reference management software and technology enhanced learning at the Open University.”

I’m writing this here because Julian asked for a reminder on how to do it (I had to remind myself first!) and thought a permanent record in the blog would be more useful than an ephemeral email.

Also: I’ve an idea that it may be useful to combine this with my process for creating new book feeds from RefWorks ==> Blackboard-site booklists as a replacement for the defunct Amazon building block.

So, here’s how to create a RefWorks account attached to a Blackboard site: this uses a Bb building block called ‘RefWorks Bridge‘.

Step 1: creating a RefWorks account within Bb

1. Log into Bb and navigate to the site.
2. From the ‘Tools’ menu, click on ‘Site Tools’.
   
3. Scroll down and click on the link to ‘RefWorks – bibliographic management software’.
   
4. A new window will appear. After a few moments you should see a ‘RefWorks Login’ screen.
   
5. Under the heading ‘Please select a RefWorks account to link to’, select ‘Create a new account’. Don’t try to use your existing personal RefWorks account! It will break your normal Portal/Athens login to RefWorks.
6. You should now see the standard RefWorks ‘congratulations’ message, telling you that you’ve created a RefWorks account attached to the Blackboard site. You can begin to use this RefWorks account as normal. The next time you go through ‘Site Tools’ to RefWorks, it should log you straight in to this account.

Step 2: locating the username & password for your RefWorks account

1. Within your new RefWorks account, go to the ‘Tools’ menu and select ‘Update User Information’.
   
2. Make a note of your login name (it will begin with the letters BB-).
3. Create a new ‘Read-only Password’ for this account and make a note of it.
4. Select your ‘Type of User’ and ‘Area of Focus’, then hit ‘Update’.
   

Step 3: displaying the RefWorks account to students

1. Go to a content area in your Blackboard site (e.g. ‘Learning Materials’).
   
2. In the top right, click on ‘Edit View’, the use the ‘Select’ drop-down menu to choose the option ‘Link to RefWorks database’ – hit ‘Go’.
   
3. After a few moments, you should see the ‘Link Refworks Database’ screen. Complete this form using the login name and read-only password from the previous step. You will also need to complete the ‘Course Document Title’ and ‘Text for Database Link’ fields – these determine what text will be displayed to students in Blackboard. Next, hit ‘Submit’.
   
4. Blackboard will display ‘Link to RefWorks database successfully added’. Hit ‘OK’ and switch back into ‘Display View’.
5. You will now see what your students will see – a Bb content item which links through to a RefWorks database.
   

I’ve shown a couple of people this idea that Julie and I have been developing for Holbeach – that of using RefWorks to manage a new-books list for the relatively small number of new titles that we receive each year at the campus LRC – and that can be embedded into Blackboard or a subject web page.

The advantage of using RefWorks (apart from the fact that many L&LR staff are reasonably familiar with it) is that the RefWorks shared folders do most of the work for you.

If people like it, there’s no reason you can’t start using it straight away. I’ve already a trip planned to Hull next month to see if it’ll work for colleagues there.

First, here’s the end result: http://feeds.feedburner.com/HolbeachLRC

Now, here’s how it’s done:

• Every time Julie gets a PO slip back for an order she placed, she logs into her RefWorks account, searches our catalogue for the book, and imports it.
• Julie has created a RefWorks folder called ‘Holbeach new books‘, and shared it publicly. All newly-arrived titles are added to this folder on import.
• This is the clever bit – RefWorks allows you [PDF, p.4] to make the contents of a shared folder available as an RSS feed. Here’s the feed for the Holbeach new books folder. You can treat this like any other RSS feed – follow it in Google Reader / wherever, embed it into a web page using Feed2JS, etc.
• But… it’s not very pretty.
• So, in comes Yahoo! Pipes. I’ve created a pipe which takes any RefWorks shared-folder RSS feed with books in it (not designed to work with journal articles or other items – perhaps that’s phase II). This pipe, which you can find at – http://pipes.yahoo.com/lincoln/newbooks - does the following:
  1. Looks for, and extracts a valid(ish) ISBN from each RefWorks item;
  2. Creates a new link to our catalogue which looks up this ISBN for each item;
  3. Displays a book-cover image from Amazon.co.uk matching that ISBN (with a link back to Amazon through our affiliate scheme), next to a description of the book (manually added to RefWorks), and an extra link back to the original item record in RefWorks (marked by the RefWorks icon: ) – I’ve just added that last element, today, because I think it’ll be useful to give students & staff the option to take each item and export it to their own RefWorks account. Also to give credit where credit’s due, and recognise that RefWorks is the source of the information!
• The ‘prettified’ RSS feed from Yahoo! Pipes is then fed through Google Feedburner, in order to give it a stable, sensible URL, collect stats on subscriptions and hits, and to allow email subscriptions.

Couple of slight problems / areas for development: we’re finding it necessary sometimes to ‘tweak’ the ISBN before it can find an Amazon cover image. Maybe with a better use of regex in my pipe, that wouldn’t be necessary? Also, at the moment Julie is manually adding the paragraph description to each item after import. I’m sure that somewhere out there exists a source of book descriptions / reviews that I could pull in automatically (hello, library mashup fans?!) – that would streamline the process a bit.

Following up on my last RefWorks post.

On Monday I had a phone conversation with Stephanie Faulkner, client services manager for RefWorks-COS. We discussed my desire to increase our ‘reach’ (currently 5.6% of the University are active users), and Stephanie went through some ideas, based on what the top 50 worldwide RefWorks-using institutions have found successful.

I’d appreciate your comments on these 10 ideas:

1. Let’s aim at getting 10% of the University (c. 1100 people) active on RefWorks by the end of the coming academic year - according to Stephanie, big U.S. schools have no problem achieving that, with smaller specialist institutions getting even wider reach. Should we also set ourselves a more ambitious target for – e.g. – H,L&SS, where there’s already more of a culture of using ref. management software?
2. Over the outgoing year, we had 1,739 hits on RefShare – obviously more people than expected are using RefWorks to share their references with others (it’s not a feature that I tend to dwell on in training, but there’s clearly huge potential for use by lecturers, research groups, and for student group work). Let’s capitalise on this evident interest by using RefShare ourselves (*ahem*) and by selling it a bit more in training.
3. We could make use of RefWorks’ own recorded webinars, YouTube, and more of our own screencast content to provide alternatives to face-to-face training.

4. Stephanie shared some in-depth usage stats with me – figures that aren’t available through the standard admin interface. More than 1,000 new users joined RefWorks last calendar year at Lincoln – and nearly a third of those accounts are still being used. By all accounts, that’s a very good rate of adoption and of retention. And 2009 looks like it’ll be better still – 876 new accounts already, with good repeat usage, and we’ve not even hit the Octover/November ‘peak’. The faculties need to know that the demand exists out there amongst their students – is now the time for us to propose that all level 1 students should be taught it?
5. Or, how about approaching the S.U. and/or student reps to see if they’d be willing to act as on-the-ground advocates for RefWorks?
6. The ability to attach documents to items in your RefWorks account. I’ve actually been sitting on this new(ish) feature of RefWorks for some time, because of copyright concerns – which I’m fairly sure now are groundless. Assuming that is the case, I think we should launch the RefWorks Attachment Feature at the start of semester A 09/10. If nothing else, perhaps we’ll be able to revitalise a few lapsed users by drawing their attention to a new & useful tool.

   RefWorks users now have the ability to organize and store images and documents within their personal database. This new feature allows users to attach non-bibliographic information to their references, much like attaching files to an email message. The incorporation of this feature allows users to upload files to existing references stored within their RefWorks database.

7. Would all L&LR staff be willing to put a hyperlinked RefWorks ‘ad’ in their email signatures – perhaps just over the course of a short blitz campaign? This is one technique that’s led to uptake in account creations elsewhere. 
   

   (Image: fairly poor example of email signature ad campaign!)

    

8. Similarly, RefWorks will create for us (given a couple of weeks’ notice) a custom, hperlinked University of Lincoln banner ad to appear at the top of our users’ RefWorks accounts – where currently RefWorks advertise some of their own new features. I think this is a good opportunity – so what feature should we advertise? 
   

   (Image: advertising space...)

    

9. Nearly there… RefWorks have announced (though only to administrators, and on their Facebook group) that they’re developing a new, improved interface, to be launched at the end of 2009. Apparently it will provide a cleaner, more modern look & feel, easier menu options, buttons for key features, and area for institutions’ own promotion. The new interface has apparently been developed through an “extensive review process with a combination of criteria including a thorough analysis of user workflows, a collection of user surveys, and end-user review sessions for design validation” and will run alongside the ‘old’ (i.e. current) version of RefWorks for an “extensive period, allowing ample time for transition”. Here’s another perfect opportunity for us to promote RefWorks and maybe attract some new users.
10. Finally, your own idea(s)……………………………… please leave comments below!

I’m pleased to announce that our subscription to RefWorks has been renewed for the 2009/10 academic year.

This year, for the first time, Library & Learning Resources are taking full financial responsibility for RefWorks, over from the Centre for Educational Research & Development. The University owes significant thanks to CERD for supporting access to RefWorks for our staff and students thus far.

This change in financial arrangements does mean that we (L&LR) have even more stake – literally – in RefWorks’ success. So, the start of a new academic year is the perfect opportunity to redouble our efforts and make sure the University is getting the most out of an indispensable tool.

~~~

A note on usage: in December 2008, I roughly calculated that approx. 4.3% of the total University (staff and students) were active RefWorks users.

• In August 2009, this is up to 5.6% (612 accounts active in the last six months, out of a total University population of 10,981).

In December, I noted a shift toward a greater number of undergraduates using RefWorks, and a rebalancing of the faculties. Examining the same data (User Type and Focus Area) this month, we can see that:

• The proportion of undergraduate RefWorks users continues to rise: up from 39% to 51% – i.e. more than half of all users are now undergrads, which is great.
• Business & Law again are the biggest growth area in terms of faculties – now 19% of users are from B&L, up from 11%. Health, Life & Social Sciences are still the largest group of users (though this group will contain some people who are now officially part of the new Agriculture, Food & Animal Sciences faculty).
• I’m particularly pleased that we even now have some RefWorks users in the Lincoln School of Theology & Ministry Studies - hitherto unrepresented.

Here are the graphs.

Graph: RefWorks users by type.

Graph: RefWorks users by faculty.

~~~

So: ideas for encouraging/promoting/developing RefWorks use in your own faculty or subject area, at the campuses, or generally? What could we do this year to get RefWorks usage up to – say – 10% of the University, and/or to shift the balance of usage to better reflect the relative sizes of the faculties?

~~~

Here’s one thing I’ve been working on that I think has potential: short, single-issue video tutorials (created with Jing) addressing RefWorks FAQs, in the form of a blog.

• Link: http://refworks.blogs.lincoln.ac.uk/

Picture: Leicester City Centre, this morning.

Or possibly the Simpson Desert, by tensaibuta, on Flickr.

35°C is too hot for me.

I’ve spent this morning in the city, first for a meeting with people [librarians, VLE people, and lecturers] from Leicester College, who are shortly to start delivering a UoL foundation degree in Food Manufacture (Bakery).

We discussed appropriate resources for the students (inc. ScienceDirect, Mintel, e-books, RefWorks) which they’re going to expose to the students via their Moodle VLE; we talked about creating a physical and virtual induction and support materials; and they were kind enough to take me down to see their bakery suite, which was empty and undeveloped the first time I saw it and is now a hive of building activity ready for September.

After that, I went around the corner to the University of Leicester for a chat with Gareth Johnson (aka @llordllama), who’s an information librarian and manager of the Leicester Research Archive (LRA), their repository. I always enjoy talking to people at other institutions involved in repository work – it’s a great social leveller! No matter what the type, size, or prestige of the university, a lot of the problems are the same.

I also got a behind-the-scenes tour of the impossibly smart David Wilson Library: chaises longues and all.

I’ve been in the EMMTEC building over lunch, demo-ing various bits of technology along with C.E.R.D. colleagues, to the accompaniment of egg sandwiches ‘n’ crisps. JB, AH, SW and JW were showing off:

• Best practice in design of online learning material
• Blackboard
• Turnitin
• The Institutional Repository
• The Virtual Horse
• PebblePad

I was there to flog RefWorks.

I probably spoke to more than a dozen people in the end; they had some very interesting questions. We discussed referencing styles (the Library’s version of Harvard; specialist styles for certain subjects; customising an output style; provision for particular journals & publishers), the use of Write-N-Cite, subject-specific training and the takeup across the various departments, the best time to introduce RW to undergrads and to PhDs, browser compatibility issues, converting databases between RW and other reference management packages, RefWorks’ plans for future development, and using RefWorks to support specialist kinds of [group] research.

It was well worth 2 hours of my time.