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.

Alison Sharman will leave the department at the end of August to take up a post at the University of Huddersfield. Alison has worked with us for 16 years, we will be sorry to lose her and we wish her well in her new role.

We will not be replacing Alison. The ASL B&L Faculty team will cover Alison’s subject-specific responsibilities as follows, with the help of ASL colleagues from other teams who will help out where necessary. Her non-subject-specific duties will be redistributed as indicated.

Helen will be responsible for: the MSc HRM (Hull and Lincoln); MSc Commissioning; IMDP; and PhD training.

Lesley T and Martin will be responsible for: the IMMP; FT UG Business; FT UG European Business; and FT UG Management.

Research workshops in September will be covered by Daren, Katie and Marie. RefWorks workshops in September will be covered by Judith and Lesley T. The PG research student enrolment event in September will be covered by Judith with Oonagh as back up. Lesley T will take over membership of the British Business Schools’ Librarians’ Group (BBSLG). Marie will take over the co-ordination of the British Library trips. Paul will take over membership of the Lincolnshire Information Services Network (LISN).

(With apologies to Christian Bök for the title.)

I’m going to the long-anticipated Mashed Library 2009 (“Mash Oop North“) tomorrow at the University of Huddersfield.

If you want to follow the action from afar, here’s what one of the organisers (guess who?!) has suggested in a post on the event blog:

If you’re wanting to keep track of what’s happening on the day, there’s a few things you can keep an eye on…

Twitter

The hashtag for the event is #mashlib09 and you can keep track using Twitter Search or Twitterfall.

Ideas from the event

We’ll be encouraging delegates to publish their ideas under a CC Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 licence and you’ll be able to see them all via this RSS feed.

Ian’s Text Wall

Ian McNaught, who works at Huddersfield Uni, has developed an experimental SMS Text Wall which we’ll be playing around with at the event. It currently works with Firefox, Safari and Chrome.

Videos

We’re hoping to video all 6 of the opening sessions. Unfortunately we’re not able to stream them live but we’ll try and make them available to view online as quickly as possible. (If any delegates have experience of putting video online, please make yourself known on the day!)

There’s also the useful Mashed Library Ning site at: mashedlibrary.ning.com

I’m very much looking forward to tomorrow’s event, mainly because last year’s (the inaugural, held in London) was so interesting, and also because this year I’ve got the chance to talk about a couple of the mashup-inspired things I/we’ve got in the pipeline. Also because of this, and due in no small part to this.

I’ll be tweetin’ wi’ t’ best of ‘em on the day, and I promise a full writeup (plus slides from my two ‘lightning talks’) when I get back.

The University of Huddersfield have made their circulation usage and recommendation data free and reusable for the benefit of other libraries. Library systems manager, Dave Pattern, envisions a “book recommendation service that makes Amazon’s look amateurish”, made possible through more and more libraries doing the same.

Dave asks:

“whether or not you can augment this with data from your own library. If you can’t, I want to know what the barriers to sharing are. Then I want to know how we can break down those barriers.”

When you write a blog post, you can enter any number of tags. You’ll see the ‘Add new tag’ field underneath the main ‘Post’ window.

Tags are a really useful way of informally grouping together several blog postings covering the same subject(s), using [usually] one- or two-keyword phrases, so that readers of your blog can quickly view a list of entries which relate to the one they’re currently reading.

When you start to type in the ‘Add new tag’ box, Wordpress will give you suggestions from its database of existing tags. If you click on one of Wordpress’ suggestions, then hit ‘Add’, your posting will be tagged with that word. You can add as many tags as you like to this box, separated by commas.

Popular tags are displayed on the front page of the blog in a Tag Cloud – kind of a ‘what’s hot on this blog’ feature. The size of the text in the tag cloud relates to the number of stories tagged with that word or phrase.

Allowing a large number of users to tag stories on a web site, and using the “wisdom of the crowd” to create a useful, democratic, non-hierarchical keyword structure, is often known as folksonomy – from folk+taxonomy.

Yes, all very Web2.0.

Please do go ahead and add tags to your own blog postings – they really add to the usefulness of the blog as a living repository of information about L&LR.

Some useful links from the ever-useful Wikipedia (yes-I-use-it-but-don’t-tell-the-students):

• Tag (Wikipedia)
• Tag cloud (Wikipedia)
• Folksonomy (Wikipedia)
• Tags and tag clouds (LibraryStream)
• Tag clouds (Stephen Abram’s blog)
• Live cloud of subject terms in Horizon (University of Huddersfield)

Paul

Welcome to the third edition of the Learning Resources staff newsletter. Many thanks to all who entered the competition to name the newsletter. We had many responses, even the Vice Chancellor entered into the spirit of things. The winner was ‘The Buzz’ entered by Alison Sharman and she wins a bottle of wine for her effort.

• Read on…

Welcome back to the second issue of Learning Resources Update.The main aim of this newsletter is to improve communication and anyone who wishes to contribute may do so.

• Read on…