Digital Developments at LSE Library

The Potential for Digital Data from Social Media

noreply@blogger.com (john southall) — Wed, 24 Apr 2013 11:13:00 +0000

One of the challenges of research support is to keep up to date with the impact of digital technology - and in particular 'social media' on research methods.Whilst there is great deal of research now being conducted into the influence of social media on Society, there is also a growing interest in how they may be used as a tool in harvesting good quality research data.

I recently attended a workshop organised by the National Centre for Research Methods at the Royal Statistical Society in London. 'New Social Media, New Social Science - Blurring the Boundaries' was an event that offered delegates the opportunity to look at some of the issues involved. This was a culmination of a year long series of events, workshops and podcasts as part of Networks for Methodological Innovation. The project is now winding down but there are plans to keep collaborations going and maintain the network that has been developed as much as possible.

The presentations I attended fell into a number of key areas;

The ethical foundations of using Social Media; is it encouraging participation or exploitation; the need for strong advocacy of ethics committees; the commercial sector as a driver of social media data and the backlash of public scandals,

The impact of 'Big Data'; working with 'byproduct data' ; mistaking volume for quality; Stapleton's Volume/Velocity/Variety definition; problematic sidelining of context and metadata; hybrid approaches (cross-referencing it with traditional sources),

Research opportunities; framing research around browsing habits; the goldmine of location data; mismatch of needs of academia and commercial social media owners; examples of successful tools like Mappiness (an app created by LSE researchers) and Tweetometer being used by traditional media outlets,

Visualisation; powerful tool for analysing social data; great potential for adding impact to findings; opportunities for identifying new connections; dangers of mistaking correlation for causation,

Interesting comparisons were drawn with past debates about the use qualitative data as a source of robust social research data. The need for attention to context and creation of metadata to ground the data was the same. There are also similar concerns about quality and verification and problems of re-purposing. However there were also unique issues highlighted. Use of this material is very much driven by the commercial interests developing the technology who have a great concern with novelty and innovation in how the platforms work. It was noted a number of times that research projects were developed around key elements of a particular form of social data, only to have those elements dropped from newer versions.

Most of these debates are ongoing but if nothing else they should make researchers aware of some of the issues involved in working with this kind of digital data. As investigative projects at the LSE continue to take an interest in this area - as a subject for study and as a tool - collections of data will naturally accumulate. It is therefore important that this data is properly preserved and wherever possible promoted and made accessible as research resources.

Using Data Collections to Support LSE Research Activity

noreply@blogger.com (john southall) — Tue, 09 Apr 2013 09:27:00 +0000

Researchers at the London School of Economics develop investigative projects across a range of the Social Sciences. The scope of some of this can be seen in the many digital deposits being placed in our repository LSE Research Online.

This represents the final steps of the research process and research data management. After all, the purpose of such management is to offer support and guidance to researchers and research centers, allowing them to take these final steps with a greater confidence and certainty. However the philosophy of research data management is that it should have an influence throughout the whole process of originating, creating and executing an investigative project.

As a consequence, one role of Research Support Services and the LSE Library, is to support academic research not only during the main course of investigation and reflection but also in its earliest stages. The development of data management guidance and training tailored to LSE researchers is currently in progress and will continue to address this. So see future blog posts! But another way this is addressed at the moment is through the provision of specialised digital data resources.

This range of resources is known as the Data Library and ranges from financial market statistics, census data, and geographic survey data to opinion polls, socio-economic statistics and qualitative data. In some cases this draws on archived data, freely available to academics from organisations such as the International Monetary Fund, Eurostat, the UK Data Archive, and the ICPSR. More importantly it also includes a large number of subscription only data collections that are licenced by the LSE and which would normally beyond the budget of most researchers. This includes collections like the Orbis global company database, the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research, Bloomberg Professional for commodity and market information and China Data online. Although some carry access or usage restrictions in general terms they are available to LSE students and staff to inform research activity. More background information is provided on the pages for the LSE Data Library and detailed information in the library companion for data.

Researchers can benefit greatly through a familiarity with many of these. In the same way that a literature review is a key stage in the development of a study, an evaluation of available data resources - or a data review if you prefer - is increasingly another important stage in shaping research questions and defining project goals. Some funding organisations, such as the ESRC, even expect evidence that such a review has taken place when researchers complete funding applications. Many of these are frequently updated as new data is deposited or made public. So regular checking of web pages or catalogue records is always a worthwhile activity.

The data collections of the LSE Data Library can be used to directly inform the analysis of research projects or shape methodology. Even so, they should be seen not simply as a technical resource to plug into a study but also as evidence of the support that is available for LSE research active staff. One aspect of the research data management programme that is growing and continuing to gain momentum within the School.

"...Error - Page Not Found". Citation and Digital Assets

noreply@blogger.com (john southall) — Mon, 18 Mar 2013 09:51:00 +0000

Those of us involved in the world of archived digital data and research support are drawn to anything that makes resources more ‘discoverable’. After all there is little point preserving published articles, theses or the underlying raw data, if they cannot be found by researchers with an interest in using them. However the challenge is to use a system that not only works when first created but that also has some longevity or perhaps even permanence

A common problem has been for web resources to be lost when URL based identifiers – i.e. location not object based systems - change or when the redesign of webpages have unintended knock-on effects. Broken links and reports of missing web pages is all too common a problem.

Those involved with the DataCite project are mindful of this issue and of the ephemeral nature of web based discovery tools. Their solution is to use a ‘Digital Object Identifier’. This is part of a system that has been developed to provide a stable link to resources, such as research data. This stability means they are usually referred to as persistent identifiers.When used in conjunction with a mandatory set of metadata to describe a data collection a stable and persistent citation is possible. In practice this means a catalogue record may be assembled in line with whatever local conventions have already been established. All that is then necessary is for the DOI to be added.

The use of the system is well established in publishing and is supported in that arena by CrossRef. This ongoing development means DataCite can make use of an existing well supported system, whilst also seeking to tailor it to the kind of digital objects increasingly created and shared at a pre-publication stage of research. So whilst page locations or catalogue records may change or be lost, citation will still be possible as long as the DOI character string appears in a new record or URL. A typical example may be seen in this record for e-coli genomic data.

Using DOIs in this way offers the opportunity to not only add a greater degree of permanence to citations but additionally;

Create an added incentive to archive and make available research data,
Give greater recognition to creators of research data,
Act as a seal of data quality or validation,
Improve the linkage between published material and its underlying raw data,
Track the use of digital data that has been made available for re-use.

The attention being given within the academic community to ideas of impact, research data management and institutional repositories makes the role of citation even more important. A report on citation for data generated by public health research, commissioned by the Wellcome Trust, provides a useful analysis of many of the debates and current mechanisms. Ultimately using DOIs is an essential element in any infrastructure aimed at supporting research data management.

DataCite regularly holds workshops to promote and develop the use of DOIs in the digital realm. Further background information and video tutorials are available in partnership with the British Library.

Open Education Week 2013

noreply@blogger.com (Natalia) — Tue, 12 Mar 2013 10:42:00 +0000

It's Open Education Week 2013! This week we're focusing on raising awareness of the open education movement and the possibilities it brings to broadening access to teaching and learning. Open education means free and open access to educational resources - increasing access to education and knowledge.

Here at LSE Library, we support the Open Education movement via our collection of Open Educational Resources (OER) held in our bespoke learning repository LSE Learning Resources Online. LSE Learning Resources Online is a dedicated collection of LSE Open Educational Resources (OER). OER are digital educational materials made freely available online, intended for re-use by teachers, students and researchers. OER promote universal access to education and showcase LSE teaching and learning activities.

LSE Learning Resources Online contains LSE open educational resources such as lecture slides, handouts, videos, podcasts, workbooks, teaching projects, reading lists, learning objects, assignments, tests or whole courses. All resources are licensed under a Creative Commons licence and allow re-use with attribution and sharing under the same terms.

For futher information on Open Education Week, see the links below:

Open Education Week 2013: http://www.openeducationweek.org/

LSE Learning Resources Online: http://learningresources.lse.ac.uk/

OpenCourseWare Consortium: http://www.ocwconsortium.org/
UNESCO definition of OER: http://www.unesco.org/new/en/communication-and-information/access-to-knowledge/open-educational-resources/

Coursera: https://www.coursera.org/

Happy Open Education Week!

Image credit: http://www.openeducationweek.org/aboutoe (CC-BY)

CKAN - a portal for research data management?

noreply@blogger.com (john southall) — Wed, 27 Feb 2013 17:12:00 +0000

The rapid expansion of projects looking at research data management within Higher Education has resulted in many pilot projects and archival initiatives. There is a concern on the part of many institutions that they develop a mechanism for storing and then making available research data which is most appropriate to their particular needs. It was with this in mind for my work in RDM at the LSE that on 18 February 2013 I attended a workshop on the Comprehensive Knowledge Archive Network (CKAN) project in London.

CKAN is a data management system that bills itself as ‘the world’s leading open-source data portal platform’. It allows the storage and cataloguing of a diverse range of data types as well as providing additional tools to publish and share. It has been very successful at a national level having been adopted for use by branches of the UK and US governments as well as many others. This JISC sponsored workshop ‘CKAN in an Academic setting’ aimed to present the progress of a number of projects that have tested CKAN as a solution to the needs of institutional RDM.

After an introduction by Simon Hodgson of JISC, the event was led by Joss Winn of Lincoln University. The ORBITAL project they have developed there assessed the needs of data management in terms of what support structures already existed and what was needed to create a unified service suitable for all staff. Joss supplied a great many interesting points on the usefulness of CKAN for them which included;

Lincoln abandoned developing a system from scratch when they realised CKAN was well advanced with over six years development,
Its open source nature gave it flexibility for future development to meet the needs of their situation, It was a very effective data store, repository and discovery tool package,
Activity around the creation and development of data was captured well,
It allowed tracking of data from deposit right through to publication,
Additional tools such as data visualisation could be added where the nature of the data warranted it.

The real turning point for the ORBITAL project in assessing the suitability of an academic CKAN was when it became plain it could be applied to research data during a project. Ingest can be carried out automatically at a number of stages with no need for a project to be formally completed. In this way CKAN offered a mechanism that seemed to fit in with the existing processes behind academic data creation.

This presentation was followed by one from Simon Price of Bristol University, who discussed how the http://data.bris.ac.uk/ project used CKAN. A key point he made was that there was already a number of exiting data repository projects in place at Bristol and CKAN had to accommodate them. In addition it had to;

Act as an effective deposit interface,
Function as an internal publishing mechanism,

Function as a public data catalogue under the control of a ‘data steward’,
Be able to potentially handle thousands of files and in a wide range of formats,

Allow development of apps for teaching,
Allow development of methods to promote datasets for teaching and research.

One key area Data.bris has been innovative in, was to devise an approach using multiple models of access. This was developed on the basis of consultation with researchers at Bristol concerning what would be most suitable for their needs in creating data as part of academic research.

The rest of the day was spent in sessions where groups considered the needs of particular players in RDM in considering CKAN; data creators, data managers; IT developers; funding representatives and so on. This allowed us to see the range of concerns and also the overlap of interests. As one would expect there were gaps in some of the requirements. For example it was noted the typical user group model is currently not well suited to academia. Even so a new model is in development which will allow more granular ownership and authorisation of records.

However the event was concerned with a general introduction and consideration of CKAN. While there were some concerns voiced about data security and transparency of responsibility this was not really the forum to deal with these in detail. A mailing list has been set up to facilitate future discussion of this sort (CKAN4RDM). If nothing else it is interesting to note the event was completely sold out and that delegates attended from all parts of the UK.

UKCoRR Annual Meeting: November 2012

noreply@blogger.com (Natalia) — Mon, 26 Nov 2012 09:34:00 +0000

Yvonne Budden (Chair) opened this year's meeting by reflecting on the key milestones of 2012: UKCoRR receiving the UKeiG Jason Farradane Award award, REF, Finch, OR2012, RCUK OA policy, new committee members and Open Access week. Upcoming issues were also highlighted including the implementation of the RCUK OA policy, Green vs. Gold OA transition, reporting on OA outputs and the need for a mechanism to identify RCUK compliant journals.

Here's an overview of the day:

UKRepositoryNet+

Andrew Dorward and Pablo de Castro discussed UKRepositoryNet+ (RepNet), a JISC funded project designed to create services to strengthen UK repository infrastructure and continuing to encouraging access to OA content based on technical services and enhancements. Potential services planned by RepNet include:

Using CrossRef and FundRef to automatically complete metadata gaps across IRs
Lobbying CRIS providers to create SWORD endpoints
Supporting NAMES and ORCID interoperability
Working with RIOXX on metadata guidelines, particularly for funding information
Aggregation to tag repository metadata to encourage consistent Google indexing of IRs

Pablo de Castro's discussion of RepNet use cases under investigation can be found here.

IRUS-UK

Ross MacIntyre (Mimas) gave a demonstration of IRUS-UK, a project that falls under the RepNet umbrella and emerged as a result of PIRUS2. IRUS-UK is a national aggregation service that will collect COUNTER-compliant article-level usage statistics across participating UK IRs. This works by adding a tracker to an IR which then sends download statistics to IRUS-UK on a daily basis. The project will serve to illustrate the usage of UK IRs by displaying comparable usage statistics and enable cross-institutional benchmarking. Ross emphasised that IRUS-UK statistics contain less detail than, for example, IRStats installed on a local system and should only be used as an indicator at this stage. IRUS-UK statistics can be harvested back to IRs via SUSHI, displayed in repository records and downloadable in various formats.

We installed the IRUS-UK tracker in LSE Research Online this month (we're on EPrints 3.3) and our statistics are beginning to appear on the portal. The portal will be available for all members of participating institutions and will be searchable at various levels.

RCUK Open Access Policy

Gerry Lawson (NERC) discussed the RCUK OA policy - to be implemented by 1 April 2013. The key points from this session included the familiar discussion that RCUK prefer Gold OA (which must be CC-BY) because access is faster but Green OA is possible where that option exists. It emerged that there has been discussion with some publishers who consider CC-BY to be a heavy requirement. However, it was clear during the Q&A session that there is concern in the IR community that the lack of regulations could lead to inflated APCs - as evidenced in the Nature APCs priced according to CC licenses.

All UK HE institutions should now know have been informed how much they will receive in their block grant, as outlined in the November RCUK press release, RCUK announces block grants for universities to aid drives to open access to research outputs:

'In the first year (2013/14), RCUK will provide funding to enable around 45% of Research Council funded research papers to be published using Gold Open Access growing to over 50% in the second year. [...] Universities will receive APC publication funding in proportion to the amount of direct labour costs awarded on grants that they have received over the three years from April 2009 to March 2012. '

Methods used to monitor compliance are yet to be announced.

EPrints REF Plugin

I presented on LSE's installation of the EPrints REF plugin. A full blog post and video of my presentation is available here.

Hydra

Chris Awre (University of Hull) presented on Hydra - a content agnostic, open standards based, scalable repository software. The 'one repository to collect lots of digital content' method seems increasingly appropriate as institutions continue to collect, share and preserve varied digital content. Hydra enables tailored views for various formats and its flexibility ensures the repository can expand and surface multiple item types with various access levels through a common interface. For example, exam papers may be placed behind an authentication layer and datasets records are displayed in a bespoke format. This type of granular security allows different levels of access for users and offers a solution isn't easily achievable in many repository systems.

The University of Hull Digital Repository uses Blacklight as its primary discovery interface and Fedora as its preservation structure. It also has the capacity to receive research records from a CRIS. LSE Digital Library uses Hydra, currently holding born digital archives and digitsed materials and we are considering how this could be extended to host and collect a range of future digital content.

Thanks to the University of Teesside for hosting and to the UKCoRR committee for organising a useful event. Full videos and slides can also be found on the UKCoRR blog.

Increasing full text deposit via Green Open Access: a case study

noreply@blogger.com (Natalia) — Thu, 18 Oct 2012 09:04:00 +0000

LSE’s Eric Neumayer recently increased his institutional repository full text count by 114%. Alan Bracey looks at how easy it can be to add papers to an institutional repository via Green Open Access.

At LSE Research Online, we hold both citation-only and full text records, and are always looking to increase our standing as a full text Open Access repository. But we also get requests from academics who would like to increase their full text content, and this happening more than ever with the spotlight on Open Access in higher education publishing with the release of the Finch report (more details here). As different publishers vary widely over their approach to Open Access, it can sometimes be hard getting hold of a version of a paper that we can upload to the repository. This is a look at what happens when everything goes right.

In June Eric Neumayer, head the Department of Geography and Environment at the LSE, contacted us about adding his full text publications to LSERO. I checked the policy behind each of his citation-only records - all 87 of them - to see what we would be able to add, and forwarded details. We then received 3 emails, with some 60 full text papers attached. After we’d begun adding these, we received more attachments, partly prompted by the release of the Finch Report.

We received 74 papers for LSERO in total: 2 book chapters, 68 journal articles and 4 monographs. We have added 64 items so far – the rest are temporarily embargoed by publishers, or pending copyright permission.

Of the 68 journal articles, the overwhelming majority were Eric’s final drafts (also called post prints or pre-publication copies). This went down the ‘green’ open access route, with publishers allowing us to add author’s refereed final drafts, sometimes after an embargo period has passed. In all, I sent out 9 requests to publishers for permission to add papers and book chapters – 1 was refused, 3 were granted, and we’re waiting to hear back about the other 5. Publishers that allow us to add their final published versions are few and far between, 5 of the papers that Eric sent us fell under this category.

What this demonstrates is how academics can deposit full text content in repositories such as LSE Research Online, providing:

The publisher in question has (at least) a Green Open Access policy, and lets everyone know
The academic in question has copies of their final drafts, and can get to them quickly and easily

In terms of making research widely available, it is better to have papers available in more places. LSERO is one of the best places to have them, as papers in the database are so well indexed by Google. The library’s new resource discovery tool Summon is fast establishing itself as one of the best ways for students and researchers to find electronic content. As Summon includes our repositories (LSERO and LSE Theses Online) in its results, full text papers added to our repository are now more discoverable than ever.

Eric has 149 records in LSERO, and 80% of these are now full text, which is the highest of any of our academics.

You can take a look at Eric’s LSERO page here.

And you can use the LSERO search to filter down to full text papers, as I’ve done here.

Download statistics: August 2012

noreply@blogger.com (Natalia) — Tue, 02 Oct 2012 13:57:00 +0000

We collect LSE Research Online download statistics on a monthly basis using both analog statistics from the server and Google Analytics. As of August 2012, LSERO holds 32,826 records with 6748 full-text items.

Key statistics for August 2012:

Total downloads: 91,961
Average downloads per day: 2,996

Top 5 requested papers:

Dodgson, JS and Spackman, M and Pearman, A and Phillips, LD (2009) Multi-criteria analysis: a manual. Department for Communities and Local Government: London. (1839 downloads)
Anheier, Helmut K. (2000) Managing non-profit organisations: towards a new approach. Civil Society Working Paper series, 1. Centre for Civil Society, London School of Economics and Political Science, London, UK. (1178 downloads)
Bowling, Ben and Phillips, Coretta (2003) Policing ethnic minority communities. In: Newburn, Tim, (ed.) Handbook of policing. Willan Publishing, Devon, UK, pp. 528-555. (958 downloads)
Marsden, David and Richardson, Ray (1992) Motivation and performance related pay in the public sector: a case study of the Inland Revenue. Discussion paper series, 75. Centre for Economic Performance. (780 downloads)
Coyle-Shapiro, Jacqueline A-M. and Shore, Lynn M (2007) The employee-organization relationship: where do we go from here? Human resource management review, 17 (2). pp. 166-179. ISSN 1053-4822 (741 downloads)

We often see familiar top papers in our most downloaded and perhaps our top climbers would be more illustrative of repository usage. Has any one done this using analog statistics?

Going up

We've also been working hard to increase full-text deposits and 1239 full-text items were added to LSERO in the period Jan-Aug 2012 – a 47% increase on the same period in 2011. This is due to a combination of requesting permissions from authors to add full-text papers from OA friendly publishers in bespoke mail merges. In addition, LSERO will be the main source of bibliographic data for the REF, and we work hard to contact academics with instructions on which versions can be added when we receive information about new outputs.

Shares

Inspired by various presentations at OR2012, we also installed AddThis share buttons to LSERO in July. Sharing, linking, tweeting records has proved to be popular with key academics and the usage stats since implementation in July 2012 look something like this:

Total shares: 172

Additional clicks: 92

Viral lift: 53% (Percentage increase in traffic due to shares and clicks)

That means almost two extra clicks to LSERO records per share.

What next?

As we currently only use analog statistics taken from the server to assess downloads, a development on my wish list is to install an IR stats package. I'm also looking forward to hearing more about IRUS at the next UKCoRR meeting. However, work on the REF2014 plugin continues. Expect to hear more on that here soon...

Demystifying Research Data: don’t be scared be prepared

noreply@blogger.com (Natalia) — Mon, 30 Jul 2012 11:16:00 +0000

I attended the JIBS/RLUK event, Demystifying Research Data, at SOAS on Tuesday 17th July. Aimed at liaison librarians with little experience in working with research data, this event offered an introduction to the key aspects of supporting Research Data Management (RDM) in libraries.

As a growing number of institutions introduce RDM policies, in part as a response to the EPSRC roadmap requirements, this event covered key elements of RDM, such as writing polices, setting up infrastructures and re-skilling librarians in order to enhance research data services.

My highlights of the day:

Michael Day (Digital Curation Centre/UKOLN) - Introduction to Research Data Management

Offered a good overview of RDM and the main driving forces and snagging points to be aware of when implementing research data services:

Data sets should be citable, re-usable and discoverable
Key requirements include setting up a robust technical infrastructure, introducing policies and training stakeholders
Data to be managed in a consistent and authoritative way and link back to research projects
Library roles in RDM: leadership, audit, access, preservation, citability, linking to publications, promoting data in teaching, CPD
Potential for reputational risks if research data is not well-managed

Mary Auckland's RLUK report, Re-Skilling for Research was also mentioned, namely in reference to its recommendations on research data management curation and subject librarians' skills gap.

Liz Holliday - University of West England’s Managing Research Data Project

Discussing the JISC funded project, Managing Research Data (MRD), at the University of the West of England, Liz highlighted how traditional library skills are applicable when working with research data. This included key tasks such as:

Writing policies, establishing user needs (think reference interview) and setting up workflows
Designing training
Advising on metadata standards, writing data management plans into grant applications
Managing and curation of research data

Rachel Proudfoot (University of Leeds) - The RoaDMaP Project

This session on the RoaDMaP Project discussed the University of Leeds' response to the EPSRC requirements, a key driver in implementing an RDM policy and triggering the formation of the Research Data Steering Group Chaired by Pro-Vice Chancellor for Research. This reinforced the importance of forming such a group in order to embed policies and work closely with major stakeholders.

In terms of infrastructure, RoaDMaP are trialling DataFlow but are keeping EPrints, their existing repository software, in mind. Rachel asked two important questions: is it better to build on existing services or does RDM require an independent platform? What is a trusted repository?

Although this event served as a good introduction to RDM, I would perhaps liked to have heard more detailed reports of setting up data repositories and the practical implications for librarians. On the whole though, an informative and useful day. Full programme and presentations are available on the JIBS events page.

Finch hasn't moved the goalposts

noreply@blogger.com (Dave Puplett) — Tue, 24 Jul 2012 16:52:00 +0000

"Information professionals invariably are not interested in economics. Unfettered access, as far as possible is the librarians aim; or at least, access that is determined by the librarian and not an external source."
This rather naive-sounding, Library-centric version of the world is how I saw the development of Open Access from a soon to-be-Librarian's perspective back in 2005, in my MA dissertation. Seven years later, re-reading my work I am struck by how it seemed to me at the time that many Librarians saw Open Access as a way to rebalance after the cost of serials had spiralled. At the time I was clearly more taken by what I saw as the intrinsic good of making research Open Access, which is unfettered access to publicly funded research. I still am.

Now we have the report of the Working Group chaired by Dame Janet Finch on Open Access, the recommendations of which the British Government seem likely to accept and implement almost in full. From the executive summary of that report:

'Implementation of the balanced programme we recommend will mean that more people and organisations in the UK have access to more of the published findings of research than ever before. More research will be accessible immediately upon publication, and free at the point of use.'

The response to the Finch report has been mixed. Many commentators would have liked to seen a more ambitious set of recommendations that gave power to academics and institutions rather than economically adjust the existing publisher-house led scholarly communications environment. As I've argued myself this is difficult territory for Librarians to lead opinion in.

This is difficult for those of us who've worked so hard to establish institutional repositories. Will Green OA collections wilt away in 2 years as Gold transforms the landscape? I think not, but what we should now see is a shift towards the majority of articles written off the back of UK funding becoming OA. I think we should embrace this as great progress. In the main, the report seems to have only disappointed those with a beef against publishers. I'll leave that debate to others - a good place to start would be the recent posts on the LSE Impact Blog.

The transition Finch proposes will surely be a long transition, and I imagine longer than the 2 years posited. It also does not mean that we need to hand over the keys to publishers and leave the goals of most institutional repositories to them (and their interests). Finch's report has some very clear recommendations:

'ix. the infrastructure of subject and institutional repositories should be developed so that they play a valuable role complementary to formal publishing, particularly in providing access to research data and to grey literature, and in digital preservation.'

I agree with all of that, as I think most repository managers would. Les Carr, in a recent blog post, has looked at Finch, and the response of funders and the academic community, and concluded:

"the RCUK response shows what the UK is actually really good at - pragmatism - and likely means an increased role for repositories and the emergence of a more balanced and thoroughly hybrid environment as the network of stakeholders all seek to come to a new equilibrium."

That's a sentiment I also heard from Chris Awre at OR2012. This report has made me think about the value we've built up with our own institutional repository, and where its value will lie in the post-Finch future. A big strength of LSE Research Online hasn't just been archiving research, it's been making it discoverable. Items in LSERO (Green OA or not) are simply easier to find, either at a local level through our Library-wide search tool, Summon, or through Google Scholar. There is no other database or system at LSE, or anywhere else, that can offer either of the following services that aid discoverabilty:

A home for Green OA copies of papers authored by LSE people that remain inaccessible or are hard to discover elsewhere
Co-location of references (and/or full text) of an author's (or the institutions) complete output

LSE Research Online's mission before Finch was to "be a complete database of research created at LSE. Our mission is to:

include citations to the work of all LSE academic and support staff
provide Open Access to full text research where permitted by publishers and copyright law
provide stable links to published items and items not held by LSE Research Online
be a reliable source of information on LSE research for all audiences
preserve research for posterity
openly share its information with internal and external services, such as LSE Experts and Google."

The Finch report helps us in our mission and I think the identity of our service will remain strong throughout the transition to Open Access. While the economic models of this long saga work out, I think Librarians and institutional repository managers can find plenty to motivate themselves to keep developing their services.

Part II: Open Repositories 2012, University of Edinburgh, 9-13th July 2012

noreply@blogger.com (Natalia) — Tue, 17 Jul 2012 10:42:00 +0000

This is the second and final part of my Open Repositories 2012 report, held at the University of Edinburgh, 9-13th July 2012. Thursday and Friday were heavily software user group-focussed and this post will mainly be of interest to EPrints users. I found these sessions particularly useful for picking up practical advice and tips in enhancing and embedding an EPrints repository.

Thursday

UGE1: EPrints User Group - State of the [EPrints] Nation

David Tarrant gave an EPrints update, the Southampton-based repository software twelve years old this year. This session highlighted the way in which EPrints technical development has changed from v. 3.2, which focussed on layers and storage to v. 3.3, with the EPrints Bazaar and 'one-click' plug-in installations. Earlier in the conference, I also discovered the Bazaar was an entry in the 2009 Open Repositories Developer Challenge - demonstrating how innovation driven by conference development sessions can change the way in which repository software is used day-to-day.
It was also noted that the EPrints team focus has shifted in recent years from project work to EPrints Services and providing hosted solutions. Finally, David pointed out the power of linking to repository records in as many places as possible and this network was a recurrent theme of the conference.

UGE2: EPrints User Group - Recipes from the Bazaar

This was an overview of EPrints Bazaar packages with Patrick McSweeney of EPrints. This included a demo of the OER EdShare package, which may well be useful in enhancing LSE Learning Resources Online. The new EPrints stats package, RepoStats was also showcased with features such as a front page with a general summary stats report, reports for individual authors, top publications list, export statistical data via XML.

Dave Puplett and I also shared our LSE Library's experiences of using the EPrints Bazaar. We've already installed the REF2014 plugin in order to manage reporting for the Research Excellence Framework and make use of the rich bibliographic records in LSE Research Online. We've also used the Tweepository for harvesting tweets with keywords such as London 2012 Mayoral elections and #arabspring. We wanted to emphasise how Bazaar extensions have enabled us to make significant service developments relatively quickly.

Friday

UGE3: EPrints User Group - Presentations from the Community (1)

Coming late to the game: how to create a totally integrated (!) repository system - Neil Stewart, previously of LSE Library and the Digital Developments blog, shared his experiences of setting up a repository system from scratch. City Research Online is an EPrints repository and integrated with the university CRIS system. This symbiotic relationship enables automated metadata transfer to free cataloguing time for making other service enhancements. City Research Online also uses the AddThis share buttons which generate an average of three extra hits to a shared record.

So, what did I think?

Attending #OR2012 was a great experience for a new repository manager. I learned more about developments in Research Data Management, managing name authorities and what makes a good Pecha Kucha. It was also a perfect opportunity to take a step back and think about the bigger picture, including how repositories must develop in light of the Finch report and changes in the repository landscape.

Cameron Neylon's keynote speech set the tone for a focus on networks, connections, linking and sharing. Although this wasn't particularly ground-breaking stuff, several speakers espoused the power of connecting, text mining, the semantic web and our access to the huge Twitter/LinkedIn/Academia.edu user base. Meeting other repository managers and developers was a valuable experience and I realised there are often solutions, however big or small, out there in the user community!

...and finally, Dave's reflections

This was my second OR having previously attended in 2008. There were some noticeable differences in tone and emphasis during the event this year compared to four years ago. 2008 had sections named 'legal' and 'Web 2.0', where 2012 had much more on data and preservation. Also the systems we're all talking about are also clearly much more mature.

Cameron Neylon's keynote left an impression on me when he talked about the benefits of scale in facilitating access to research. By sharing links across a network as broad as twitter you are making serendipitous discovery of research more likely, or 'manufacturing serendipity'. This reminded me of a few things I've heard before, including this.

I left the event with some tricky unanswered questions:

What is the role of the repository with Research Data?
When does a repository become a CRIS?
What's the difference between a repository and a digital library?

The last one is a biggie - lots of Library's represented at OR (LSE, University college Dublin, Cambridge, York) have services called a 'Digital Library'. How these develop as services alongside, or integrating with, existing repository infrastructure will be really interesting to watch.

I also wish I'd been a little less shy at the conference reception with it's Ceilidh, but instead I was the one taking pictures instead of dancing, as you can see from the picture at the head of this post.

Part I: Open Repositories 2012, University of Edinburgh, 9-13 July 2012

noreply@blogger.com (Natalia) — Mon, 16 Jul 2012 12:05:00 +0000

Last week I attended Open Repositories 2012 @ the University of Edinburgh. It was my first OR conference and I was engrossed in all things repositories for almost five days. Spending a week with repository managers and developers gave me the opportunity to make new connections in the community and gather lots of ideas to bring back to LSE. It was also great to speak to developers and hear ideas for the future technical evolution of the repository landscape. Here's Part I of my highlights:

Tuesday

Workshop: EThOS Interoperability: opportunities and challenges

This session was a good opportunity to hear the experiences of repository managers and developers currently working with the UK's national service for theses: EThOS. John Salter from the University of Leeds discussed his EThOS connector for EPrints which enables download of EThOS records via the webservice and automated creation of EPrints records using EThOS metadata. Details of the connector can be found on the EPrints wiki here and a Bazaar connector is expected soon.

This is exactly the kind of tool I've been looking for and hope to be putting it to use as soon as possible.

Wednesday

P3A: Research Data Management and Infrastructure (2)

Natasha Simons from Griffith University, Australia, shared experiences of setting up a research data management (RDM) system in order to capture, aggregate and disseminate research data. This included implementing a full RDM infrastucture, making use of an open source semantic web application - VIVO - to enhance discovery and feeding records through to Research Data Australia.

'Building an Institutional Research Data Management Infrastructure' - Sally Rumsey from the University of Oxford discussed the need for RDM to be a collaborative process across the institution driven by senior figures. The recent EPSRC policy framework on data management has also been a key driver in focussing minds on setting up and implementing a research data roadmap. Sally also emphasised the importance of reskilling subject librarians for RDM and providing a suite of training and support services. Oxford are currently finalising their research data management policy and are putting a technical services and infrastructure process in place to be managed by the library.

Anthony Beitz, in 'Institutional Infrastructure for Research Rich Data Management' explained how Monash University, Australia, focussed on selecting an RDM tool that was a good cultural fit for the institution. This, coupled with talking to researchers before choosing the system and building RDM into the researcher workflows, encourages uptake. Another key feature of promoting good adoption of RDM infrastructures, which are often expensive to plan, implement and roll-out, was developing a system for the community and promoting a sense of researcher ownership to encourage sustainability. Finally, deliver RDM value early and often.

For me, this session highlighted the similarities between setting up RDM infrastructures and implementing an institutional research repository. RDM and repositories share many of the features in setting up a successful system: strong advoacy, support from senior figures, providing training and integration with researcher workflows.

P5B: Name and Data Identifiers

ORCID Update and why you should use ORCIDs in your repository - Simeon Warner from Cornell University gave an ORCID update and discussed why providing unique IDs for authors is important: author recognition and disambiguation of common names. I was particularly interested in the free Tier 1 API that enables integration with your repository either by authors entering ORCID IDs when adding papers or for IDs to be entered as part of item metadata. This is then resolved with ORCID and additional profile data is added to a record. 300 institutions are participating in ORCID so far and the full system release is expected later this year.

We're very interested in name authority at LSE and have our own in-house system of unique IDs and authoritative versions of names so I'll be watching ORCID developments closely.

Read more about ORCID here.

I'll be posting Part II of my #OR2012 reflections tomorrow with EPrints user groups and thoughts from Dave Puplett. Watch this space...

Photo: Network (in glorious Helvetica) by futureshape

EPrints 3.3 Upgrade

noreply@blogger.com (Natalia) — Mon, 14 May 2012 11:00:00 +0000

Last month we upgraded all three of our LSE repositories to EPrints 3.3. LSE Research Online, LSE Theses Online and LSE Learning Resources Online, our new OER repository, are now running on EPrints 3.3.8.

REF plugin

A significant driver behind the upgrade was to install the REF2014 plugin, and to enable native support for REF reporting from LSE Research Online. Previously, we were providing REF publications lists to departments using an unwieldy spreadsheet and reports generated by our metadata specialist from the database. Testing the plugin is now in full swing – scoping its capacity for holding and exporting our REF2 data. A major first step in this process will be to create individual profiles for authors in order to add submission information.

EPrints Author Browse

Before the upgrade, we were using an in-house Name Authority-based author browse, enabling us to customise name sorting and display. We have now moved to the native EPrints author browse, making use of features such as the Display Name field, human-readable URLs and grouping of item types. However, we will maintain our Name Authority File, which will be invaluable when creating individual profiles for the REF plugin and to track authoritative versions of names alongside email addresses and unique IDs.

Look and Feel

Various aspects of the look and feel have improved in EPrints 3.3, including drop down menu bars and metadata entry usability. Improving the overall look and feel of our repositories is something I would very much like to develop, such as including key stats and visual representations of research on the front page to encourage browsing and discovery.

Bug fixes

We experienced problems with title look-up, RSS feed ordering, and recent additions appearing at the end of search results.

What’s next?

IR stats, share buttons and Scopus/WoK citation information are now high on our list of development priorities. I’m really keen to enhance the social element of our repositories and to build on the way in which LSE Research Online is a socially embedded tool rather than a static information management system. Our repositories are a major component in the dissemination and publicity of LSE academic research and the more we integrate social functionality into the system, the better.

Photo by ArtsieAspie.

Cambridge 2012: OER/OCW Conference Review - Day One, Monday 16th April

noreply@blogger.com (Natalia) — Wed, 18 Apr 2012 11:30:00 +0000

This week I attended the first day of Cambridge 2012, the open educational resources (OER) conference held by OCW Consortium and SCORE (Support Centre for Open Resources in Education). Held at Queens College, Cambridge, the conference combined OER12 and the OCW Consortium’s Global Conference. Sessions ranged from discussions of OER initiatives in UK HE institutions to the implementation of open education in Indonesia at a national level.

OER in Indonesia

Prof. Eko Indrajit (ABFI Institute Perbanas, Indonesia) opened the day with his keynote speech: Developing the Open Education Ecosystem. Describing the driving forces behind promoting open education in Indonesia, Prof. Eko Indrajit emphasised the following:

0.5% of Indonesian HE institutions are of a world class standard
Problem of limited access to quality resources
Access to education is low in certain geographical area
Resource limitations
Disparity in access to education across Indonesia

As part of the project to create the Open Education framework, APTIKOM Indonesia surveyed 350 Indonesian HEIs, finding that 43.26% of professors surveyed were prepared to make their teaching and learning materials available as OER – an impressive figure. The challenge is now to convert this willingness into resources. Initiatives are in place at a government level, by implementing various strategies to promote OER such as awarding an ‘A’ rating to HEIs that share resources and drawing up an e-learning and distance education decree.

OER in the UK

At the morning panel session, Open Practice in the UK, representatives from The Higher Education Academy, SCORE, Open University and an academic practitioner discussed UK policy for OER after three years of the JISC/OER funding programme. It was encouraging to hear that the main focus of the programme was to ensure OER has a direct improvement on the student learning experience. Although remixing, adapting and reuse of OER by teachers is an integral part of sharing teaching and learning materials, I agree that the emphasis of opening education should always focus on students.

During this session, Jonathan Darby from the Open University shared his experiences of the OU OpenLearn Project – with approx. 40m iTunesU downloads since its inception. The OU also saw a significant increase in applications – with many applicants having already accessed OpenLearn. Recruiting an applicant in this way costs just a quarter of the amount it would to recruit via traditional marketing. However, this session made it clear that the sustainability of OERs in the UK remains to be seen, with various audience members questioning the future of OERs without government initiatives and sufficient funding.

OER projects

I also went along to Patrina Law’s presentation A Bridge to Success, a project that repurposed OU OER for use in the US to improve college completion rates. Steve Stapleton’s presentation on U-Now – the University of Nottingham’s OER repository – was also useful. U-Now holds resources from 70% of departments, with some sharing nearly all of their teaching and learning content. Successfully embedding the repository at Nottingham was the result of a combination of top-down and bottom-up activities, including sign off from the Vice-Chancellor (with promotional podcast), the Director of Teaching and Learning approaching Heads of Departments and ground-level work with individual academics.

Developing an OER repository isn't just about getting content and sharing on the web, but making sure there's a need for it and getting the right people involved. Cambridge 2012 was a useful day and it was valuable to compare notes on best practice and share tips for institutional engagement with other OER advocates.

Can you use OpenURL to find the full text gaps that our Library subscriptions don't cover?

noreply@blogger.com (Dave Puplett) — Thu, 08 Mar 2012 17:30:00 +0000

My blogposts often come back to OpenURL - perhaps because I don't interact with it from an admin point of view, and also because I feel we under-use it.

During a meeting with Natalia and three Institute of Education Librarians (Bernard Scaife, Nazlin Bhimani and Frances Shipsey) an idea came to me about how to work out where we should prioritise our hunting for full text for LSE Research Online:

Query our 30000+ LSERO citations against our OpenURL service to find out how much full text we subscribe to or own.
Act on the evidence!

Prioritise the stuff we don't have full text access to for adding to the repository as full text
Consider subscribing to new journals relevant to LSE researchers

This is so simple I can't believe I didn't think of it before. Which also means that someone is bound to have though of this first! Anyone?

I know this puts the needs of LSE users about those of externals, but you may as well start somewhere, right?

UKCoRR Meeting: University of Portsmouth Library, 27th January 2012

noreply@blogger.com (Natalia) — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 10:32:00 +0000

Last week’s UKCoRR meeting in Portsmouth was my first and it opened, aptly, with a discussion of membership and the future direction of the organisation. As a new member, my main contact with UKCoRR has been via the mailing list and with those members I met at the RSP Autumn School. Gareth Johnson, Chair of UKCoRR discussed the difficulty of defining members – are we librarians, techies, researchers, information professionals? How should UKCoRR represent this group? Would it be a conflict of interest to accept funding from other bodies? I like the sound of the group taking more public positions and releasing statements on particular issues. Building closer ties with OER communities is also on the horizon, which is good news for this repository manager with an infant OER repository in need of some attention!

Yvonne Budden (University of Warwick) gave a 10 minute lightning talk on the strategic marketing project at WRAP (Warwick Research Archive Portal).This involved rebranding the repository and creating a core message for the service. The team chose ‘Highlight Your Research’ and paired this with a yellow-themed skin for their ePrints repository – to be launched in 2012. Following their initial marketing campaign, WRAP saw a 49% increase in deposits (500 items) in 10 months, although this did include a large import. I was particularly interested in the standardisation of communications for WRAP marketing materials, as the project resulted in a new set of documents and a clear communications plan.

Margaret Feetham (Southampton Solent University) won the admiration of the room as she described ‘running a repository on a shoestring’ without a FT or a PT official member of repository staff. Margaret outlined the challenges she faces including overcoming copyright issues and how support from academics doesn’t necessarily equate to full-text deposits.

Matt Smith from EPrints discussed the Shelves Project, the new functionality to create customisable lists of exportable ePrints records. This will be released as a Bazaar package and could be useful for creating bespoke publications lists for web pages or organising tricky working paper series.

Phil Barker (CETIS) discussed managing and disseminating OERs. Using MIT’s OpenCourseWare as an example, his key tips for creating popular and accessible OERs include hosting ‘linkable’ (tweetable?) content and course tasters in order to provide access to untraditional users without stretching VLEs. Difficulties include dealing with third party content and filtering for IPR issues. Phil also emphasised the importance of quality control and ensuring all items are clearly branded and include titles, dates and authors. Have a look at EQUELLA, HumBox and Oxford’s iTunes U for more…

Other presentations included Sara Gould (British Library) on the new EThOS membership model and progress so far, including enrichment of metadata and stepping up harvesting from institutional repositories. Marie-Therese Gramstadt (University of the Creative Arts) also reported on the KULTIVATE project and the resulting Advocacy Toolkit.

Bringing the emphasis back to Open Access - RSP Autumn School event review

noreply@blogger.com (Natalia) — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 12:26:00 +0000

The RSP Autumn School took place at Miskin Manor, Cardiff from 7th-9th November 2011. As I’m relatively new in post, it was encouraging to meet 40 or so RSP School participants with similar motivations to discuss OA advocacy, CRISs, scholarly publishing, tips for encouraging full-text deposit, the REF and repository technical developments.

Miskin Manor

Here are my highlights:

Closed Access Week? David Prosser (RLUK) discussed e-journal package deals and greater institutional access to ejournals. How do we convince authors to support OA who, as readers, have seamless access huge ejournal packages? However, as average RLUK member library purchasing power reduced by 16% in 08-09, leaving a shortfall of £400,000 for some members, it’s likely that we’ll see a drop in ejournal subscriptions. We need to take this opportunity to shift the focus to OA. David also recommends taking a pragmatic approach to OA advocacy – key drivers for authors should focus on self-interest i.e. increasing citation counts and the dissemination of research, rather than relying on altruism. During the Q&A, one participant suggested introducing Closed Access Week to demonstrate the value of OA in institutions.

Bibliometrics and data. Niamh Brennan (Trinity College London) discussed bibliometrics and gathering data about your institution’s research outputs. The key is to familiarise yourself with bibliometrics tools, gather data about outputs and tell a story with that data. It’s important to paint a picture: nobody wants to see raw data – your audience want a story, ideally with pictures. Demonstrate the relationship between publication performance and institutional reputation. Various tools were recommended for visualising statistics and data such as Google Fusion and Needlebase.

Strategies for embedding OA in institutions. Robbie Ireland (University of Glasgow) reported on the promotion of OA at Glasgow. More records were added to Glasgow’s repository, Enlighten, after the mini-REF call-out than following the OA mandate agreement in 2008 thus demonstrating the need to offer tangible reasons for academics to deposit in repositories. Endeavour, Glasgow’s repository for student work, is also an active approach towards integrating an awareness of OA to students early in their academic careers.

Bringing the emphasis back to Open Access. Bill Hubbard (Centre for Research Communications, Nottingham) asked if the focus on providing access to research has been lost as repository staff become more involved with additional initiatives such as RAE and REF reporting, OA to etheses, preservation, OERs, Open Data, OA grey literature and OA journal on-campus start-ups. Bill discussed the role a CRIS could play where repositories are seen as a vehicle for something other than providing access to research. One major benefit of implementing a CRIS is in offloading bibliographic work and making the repository full-text only in order to bring focus back to OA.

One of the main reasons I started working in repositories was for the IR USP: providing open access to research. Listening to the various arguments for OA at the RSP Autumn School demonstrated that there's much more to providing open access to research than simply repeating this ‘moral’ argument to myself again and again. OA has a strong message and we're appealing to strongly ideological people but we need to be pragmatic for OA to be integrated into the scholarly publishing workflow.

Why am I worrying so much about broken links? Or: Learning to pick my battles

noreply@blogger.com (Dave Puplett) — Wed, 05 Oct 2011 12:06:00 +0000

We have lots of links in our catalogue and in our repositories. Not all of these are links to content itself, but sources of information - websites, publisher sites, freely available government publications that we've catalogued and so on. Links to paid content should always work - but we control most of those with our content tracking systems, and users tend to spot broken databases quickly. It's these other sorts of supporting links that I'm interested in.

In bouts, usually about every 4 or 5 months, I get worried that a lot of these links could be broken, and that our catalogue / repository could have out of date metadata as a result. As a ~~virtuous and pure~~ (ok, ok) paid professional, I figure I should be worried about this, and have talked to colleagues about link checkers. It turns out that you are quite literally opening a can of worms when trying to get them to work with catalogues and repository. Simply put, we've not found a single tool that can help us effectively work out if our links are broken, or redirecting or whatever.

So what could we do?

1) We can try and prevent problems in the first place - no deep links etc.

2) We could put a button on each page saying 'report this link as broken'. That would certainly give users a chance to report them, but it's likely to be ugly.

3) We could decide we don't care. I tried this twice already, then 4/5 months passed and I got worried again.

4) We can leave it to Google. If links are only for supporting information, then we've tried our best and users will probably still find what we've attempted to point them to with a bit of work with a search engine.

It surprises me that Google, the company in the world who know the most about links - whose robots must follow broken links every second of the day - don't have their own link checking service, working on a Google Analytics type model. I suppose if Google know about broken links and don't care, why should I?

Resource Discovery Review

noreply@blogger.com (Dave Puplett) — Wed, 21 Sep 2011 16:05:00 +0000

I blogged a few months ago about a review I was about to undertake of resource discovery at LSE. That process is now pretty much complete, and the recommendations are shortly due to be seen by a group of senior library staff.

The intention was never to pick a product or to signal the death knell for any products that we always have, but to assess the evidence we have about how our users feel about things and to look at our collection needs are currently being serviced.

What did I find?

There are certainly areas we can improve. I summarised that we need to:

• Reduce the number of interfaces presented to users
• Significantly increase the amount of database content cross searchable at article / item level
• Reduce click-path from searching to viewing full text
• Improve usage of databases not currently cross-searchable
• Improve visibility of Archives records in the main library resource discovery tool

Some of these things came from student feedback, others from analysis of usage stats and others because of the case studies we've seen elsewhere. We haven't formally benchmarked ourselves yet, but there is enough evidence to suggest a trend out there that we're not yet a part of.

How can we do this?

I think there are several options. The technologies we already have are certainly serviceable, and perhaps we can get more out of them. However I'm recommending that we also look into the feasibility for LSE of some of the types of service we're seeing elsewhere, call it webscale, metasearch or whatever else.

I'm also keen to look into using OpenURL more, both to link references from LSE Research Online and to aid access to our rapidly expanding ebook collection.

Where do we go from here?

I think we have a good evidence base to move forward with. One word I kept seeing in countless reports on the subject or resource discovery and analysis of user requirements was simply 'convenience'. That will surely be a focus for whatever changes we make.

Readiness for REF event review

noreply@blogger.com (Natalia) — Thu, 08 Sep 2011 09:51:00 +0000

The RSP Readiness for REF event on 05/09/11 was aimed at preparing Higher Education institutions for submitting data required for the upcoming Research Excellence Framework (REF) 2014.

Richard Gartner (Kings College London) opened the day, giving an overview of the Readiness for the REF Project (R4R). A key objective was to harmonise data standards for the REF submission – a recommendation of the 2008 REF stakeholders' group. Additional aims also included:

Address issues identified by HEIs as they prepare for the REF
Create a community/repository model that supports the REF
Provide a standard data model for REF elements
Provide case studies of how this would work

Richard discussed the Common European Research Information Format (CERIF) standard and its suitability for use in the REF. Only 10-15% institutional CRISs are currently CERIF compliant, yet HEFCE cite a 25-30% saving for those using the standard (JISC 2011). This project also devised the XML schema CERIF4REF, and provided case studies of its use in several HEIs. A drawback of the R4R Project was that it was based on the RAE requirements and CERIF4REF will need to be revised for the REF.

Next, Keith Jeffery (STFC) discussed gathering and submitting data for the REF using the CERIF standard on a CRIS. The CERIF standard is well-suited to this role, as it can represent the level of complexity needed to accurately record the relationships that can exist within academic publications, i.e. funding staff, when staff were employed and various research projects and departments.

Dave Puplett and Neil Stewart (familiar names) related their experiences of running a ‘mini REF’ at LSE in early 2011. More on that here. The main difficulties encountered included managing communications within the School and the high quantity of materials submitted to LSE Research Online (LSERO) in a short period of time. Due to the speed with which many of these records were entered, potential problems included accuracy, duplicates and reporting back to departments effectively.

Neil also emphasised the danger of losing the open access focus of LSERO, particularly if the repository is seen as a metadata store for purposes such as the REF. This is something we need to keep in mind at LSE to ensure full-text access remains a high priority.

The afternoon session suggested ways that HEIs without CRISs can benefit from CRIS-like functions using repository plug-ins. Tim Brody demonstrated the EPrints REF plug-in and announced that a stable release of EPrints 3.3 will be available in the next week or so. The EPrints Bazaar included several CRIS-like features including adding metadata elements for Projects and Funders and the functionality to export as CERIF XML 2008. Tim acknowledged that this is not yet a fully formed answer to the REF but EPrints will be working on further tools to help with the process. DSpace and Fedora plug-ins were also demonstrated.

The event wrapped up with discussion in groups about the future applications of CERIF in CRIS and repository environments.

LSE Research Online material included in course reading list

noreply@blogger.com (Natalia) — Tue, 30 Aug 2011 15:16:00 +0000

A full-text article contained in LSE Research Online (LSERO) has recently been spotted on a course reading list. A visiting academic included a journal article via the LSERO record as essential reading on the course: Media and politics, 1890-c.1970/80 (UK, Germany and the U.S.).

This is great exposure for the repository and a good example of how the material is being used for teaching purposes. It's also encouraging to see an academic making use of the resources as essential reading and, as a result, engaging students with LSERO and LSE academic output.

I hope to see more examples of this is in the future as it's a practical demonstration of the value of openly accessible scholarly material to potential future researchers.

For those wondering, the reference is:

Casey, Steven (2005) White House publicity operations during the Korean War, June 1950 – June 1951. Presidential studies quarterly, 35 (4). pp. 691-717. ISSN 1741-5705

Thanks to Andy Jack for the tip off!

Joining LSE

noreply@blogger.com (Natalia) — Tue, 16 Aug 2011 11:17:00 +0000

I’ve been at LSE Library for almost a month now and it’s time I introduced myself. I am the replacement for Neil Stewart in the E-Services team and will be taking over the day-to-day management of LSE Research Online (LSERO). Previously, I’ve worked at Queen Mary, University of London Library and the Guardian and Observer Research and Information Department. This is my first professional post (see my thoughts on that strange phrase here) and I’m excited about getting involved in the digital developments here at LSE.

Having worked in various academic library departments in the past, including Electronic Services, I’ve already got my hands dirty working with e-resource access management, Shibboleth, the digitisation of the Guardian and Observer archive and plenty of cataloguing. I’m looking forward to working with LSERO and getting more involved in the field of open access.

Starting this role over the summer - during a period of relative calm at LSE Library - is great as it gives me the chance to catch up on everything already achieved by my colleagues before I arrived. See Neil’s post, Leaving LSE, for an impressive list of recent developments in LSERO.

One particular service I am keen to get moving is LSE Theses Online (LSETO) - our PhD thesis repository. From September 2011, LSETO will host all PhD theses and final electronic versions will be submitted directly to the library. A task ahead is promoting the benefits of the service to students such as:

Wide dissemination of work and high visibility in Google and Google Scholar, search engines & LSE website
Increases profile of early career researchers
Content is safely preserved and accurately described
Reduces chance of plagiarism as work is openly available
Usage statistics – demonstrable evidence of views and downloads of theses
High visibility of work can attract publishers

We’re also working to include LSE alumni theses, involving gaining author permissions and born-digital versions of those works. In addition, depositing LSE historical theses in LSETO is important - particularly in order to provide a broad representation of the School’s PhD research output. Digitising print theses currently held in our store is also on our agenda. The History of Thought at LSE project kickstarted this process and a list of landmark theses already digitised and added LSETO during this project can be found here. The move away from archival thesis storage in print form (according to the 2010 JISC/UCL report, 8 HEIs already no longer accept theses in hard copy) is a key way to encourage the use of a valuable LSE resource.

There’s plenty to do! I’m enjoying the role so far and hope to continue developing and promoting the repository. Next step: EPrints 3.3 - but that’s a whole other post...

Twitter > RSS > Yahoo Pipes > Library webpage

noreply@blogger.com (Dave Puplett) — Tue, 05 Jul 2011 12:41:00 +0000

At LSE we use Twitter a lot to communicate to our users. The short and timely nature of our tweets makes it a perfect news source for succinct information on our Library home page and our Catalogue. However, the natural RSS feed from twitter includes everything we tweet, including @ replies to people. These aren't quite as appropriate for displaying to all our users. I've therefore used Yahoo Pipes to try and solve this by stripping out the @ replies.

By taking the RSS feed:
http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/lselibrary.rss, and swapping the username for the User ID using
http://www.idfromuser.com/, I get a usable feed of: http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/36691271.rss.

My new shiny pipe does the rest, giving a new feed of:
http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=aa1cb0d342b5218e5e6349c960666110&_render=rss

Next step might be to clean the 'LSELibrary' from the start of the feed - we'll need to go and test this out now! Anyone else display an RSS feed of their tweets on a web page or catalogue?

OAI7 review

noreply@blogger.com (Dave Puplett) — Mon, 27 Jun 2011 11:31:00 +0000

I spent most of last week in Geneva at the 7th OAI workshop on innovations in scholarly communications. Having never attended OAI before, I wasn't quite sure what to expect, but the event surpassed my expectations. It is set up like a big collection of workshops rather than a conference, without keynote speakers or a glossy programme, and also attracts an impressive crowd.

The highlight for me was the very first session on 'Creating and managing OA Journals with OJS'. Inge Werner of Utrecht University Library described how their library supports the publication of Open Access journals for the university using the Open Journal System (OJS).

It's highly impressive that the library has taken on this role, and with a dozen publications running it certainly seems successful. OJS is completely open source and is used widely around the world.

The OJS system is also extensible using plugins giving users the ability to use Google Analytics, CrossRef, OpenURL and other tools. OJS is also compatible with SWORD for multiple repository deposit. The benefits of the OJS system were described as:

the only open source option for self publishing journals (commercial systems are available)
online peer review system is a huge timesaver
look and feel of journals can be tailored
one OJS installation can support multiple journal titles

Some issues were also highlighted:

back-end user interface is poorly designed
code is hard to customise
if supporting multiple titles some settings must apply to all journals

OJS seems a great option for publishing journals to a professional standard, and it was exciting to hear of a library taking on the technical support, giving their institution a viable route to open access publishing. Here are the slides from the session.

Other hightlights for me were hearing Niamh Brennan on repository harvesting in Ireland and Mark Patterson talking about the rapid growth of PLoS. Niamh showed the potential for collaboration between repositories where a common goal is shared, and Mark made a strong case for Open Access meaning both free access to materials as well as the right to reuse them.

The most provocative part of the event was hearing from Victor Henning from Mendeley. I heard him give two very similar talks at separate sessions, and both raised more questions than provided answers. Mendeley's interest in Open Access and repositories seems to me almost coincidental. They wish to inhabit the world of academics and researchers, and in order to do so, they have provided a medium for academics to share their papers. I may be missing something, but it seems Mendeley must be heading for a showdown with publishers at some point. Whether Victor, or the other people behind Mendeley, really want to see the research outputs of the world's universities openly available reamins to be seen.

OAI7, Geneva

noreply@blogger.com (Dave Puplett) — Sat, 18 Jun 2011 12:49:00 +0000

I'll be attending OAI7 next week. I've never attended this conference before, though I have been to the lovely city of Geneva a few times.

The programme looks fantastic - full of Open Access and Scholarly Communications luminaries. I'll be particularly focussing on the sessions about OA journal publishing. We've had some early discussions about the role of LSE Research Online as a hosting service for complete series or titles. We're aiming to experiment with some working paper series (LSE departments put these out prodigiously) as a starting point, and work from there. I'm hoping to learn more about the issues here.

There are also plenty of sessions on advocacy, and I'll be listening to William Nixon's presentation on 'advocacy through embedding: integrating repositories and research management systems' with serious interest.

Part of conference is the chance to visit The Globe at CERN. I can't pretend I'm not childishly excited about this part of the trip! Finally, the last time I was in Geneva we found a little bar that was playing Pixies songs. I hope it's still there, and that I stumble across it again.