On Friday I asked for advice on home networking. I am having some work carried out on my house, which has included converting a bedroom into an office. I currently use Powerline Ethernet to provide network access to my main PC, but realised that with other networked devices (including a wide screen TV and Blu Ray player, both of which have Ethernet ports in addition to desktop computers) I should really be thinking about including cabling to ensure that adequate and reliable bandwidth is available across my home.

In response I came across a discussion about the merits of Powerline networking (plugging a device into a mains socket) and a variety of useful links, including advice on techniques for installing such cabling.

My colleague Marieke Guy highlighted the importance of reliable home networking in a tweet in which she commented:

We have crappy cables & telephone lines all set up wrong. BB [broadband] constantly goes. Have someone coming round on Monday to rewire!

Marieke followed up the comment by herself asking for advice from her Twitter network:

Can anyone recommend any good UK suppliers of promotional materials for conferences etc. Quick turnaround & good value for money imp.

The query relates  to Marieke’s new role  as project co-ordinator with the Open Knowledge Foundation in which, as she described in a post on Redundancies and Pastures New, she will be working on their LinkedUp project supporting the adoption of open data by educational organisations and institutions.

The Home Worker’s IT (and other) Support is in the Cloud!

For both myself and Marieke we have been seeking for advice from our networks. For both of us the main network we will use for such questions will be Twitter, but we may also use other online networks such as Facebook and LinkedIn.

These online networks will be particularly important for myself and Marieke after we are made redundant on 31 July and are forced to leave the comfort zone of UKOLN and the University of Bath. Previously advice on networks and other technical issues would have been asked of our IT support staff, and questions about conference schwagg would have been the responsibility of our events team. But in just over two months we will no longer have access to such expertise within our host organisation – as we will no longer have a host organisation!

For both of us the online networks we have cultivated should prove valuable when we start work as self-employed consultants. Marieke already has several year’s experience of how her Ramblings of a Remote Worker blog has proved valuable in obtaining advice on home working, including use of a variety of Cloud services. The need to be able to make productive and effective use of online tools when there is no it-support email address available will be important for both of use after 31 July. Indeed as Marieke tweeted in Friday as part of the discussion about the importance of a reliable home network:

New job requires constant access as *everything* is stored in the cloud.

The advice received on home networking and sources of conference materials illustrates the importance of being part of a thriving online network, especially for those of us who will be moving from working within an institution to working from home. For us, the face-to-face connections we have with our colleagues and the informal networks we have with people we meet over coffee or at lunchtime will have less importance and the links with our online communities will grow in importance and value.

Growing Your Network

I touched on such issues when I gave a seminar for UKOLN colleagues back in December 2012. The talk, entitled Managing Your Digital Profile, highlighted the importance of professional networks such as LinkedIn and Twitter. However the slides, which are available on Slideshare) didn’t really suggest ways in which one could grow one’s professional community. In this post I’ll therefore provide six tips on use of Twitter:

• Ensure that your Twitter biography summarises your main interests and has a link to further information.
• Follow relevant hashtags and follow people who are posting tweets which are relevant to you.
• Favourite (i.e. bookmark) tweets, as that action can be visible to the Tweeter who may chose to follow you if your Twitter biography and recent tweets are of interest.
• If you are giving a talk at a conference, include your Twitter ID on your title slide. People are more likely to tweet this ID than, say, your email address. This will enable others to easily find out more about you.
• If you can help others by sending them a tweet, do so. Spending time in writing 140 characters to provide advice or support to others will demonstrate that you are willing to help others. People will be more likely to help you if they see this.
• Show your personality and not just your work interests. If you enjoyed Eurovision on Saturday night, you missed an opportunity to join in the conversation.

Who knows, the person who has added you to your Twitter network, perhaps because they too, liked Ireland’s Eurovision song, might be the person who can give you the advice you need on home working, conference schwagg or whatever advice it is you are seeking.

I should add that Marieke has written a blog post on What’s with the Wiring? in which she summarised the discussion about home networking from her perspective.

Earlier this morning I came across a news item on the BBC News which summarised a report commissioned by Which and the Higher Education Policy Institute (HEPI) on how “Students complain of ‘poor value for money’ courses“.

The opening paragraph provided a blunt summary:

Almost one in three first year students at UK universities say their courses are not good value, suggests a study.

The report was based on a large-scale survey of over 17,000 students, with 29% feeling that their courses were not good value for money, compared with only 16% when the study was carried out in 2006 (when the fees were only £1,oo0 per year).

What Is To Be Done?

What is to be done? The government response focussed on the presentational aspects:

A spokesman for the Department of Business Innovation and Skills agreed that “people must be able to make informed decisions about what and where to study.

“Institutions should explain to prospective students how their course will be delivered in order to help them make the right decisions.”

Yes, it seems the official response is to provide prospective students with a combination of factual information about the courses together with feedback from student satisfaction surveys. The good universities will, it seems, appeal to prospective students but those with poor rating will, presumably, simply fade away. This is how the market economy is now being applied to the higher education sector!

The Importance of the Online and Networked Environment

Other Relevant Factors Besides Contact Time

The news items focuses on a single aspect of the student experience, face-to-face contact time: “Students who received less contact time with tutors in the form of lectures, seminars and tutorials were three times more likely to say they did not think their course was value for money“.

I wonder, though, whether this emphasis is based on the experiences of those who commissioned the report and interpretted the findings. Looking at the Executive Summary of the report (PDF format) I can find no mention of the IT infrastructure which is used to enrich student learning experiences. Perhaps an awareness of the importance of e-learning was not appreciated by those who commissioned this report. And perhaps the student discontent isn’t primarily due to the changes in face-to-face contact time (perhaps students are happy to be able to develop their skills in using IT) but is based on other factors – such as the increase in student fees from £1,000 to £9.000 per annum!

Improving the Online and Networked Environment

The Institutional Web Management Workshop series, IWMW, was launched in 1997 to provide an environment for those with responsibilities for managing large-scale institutional Web services to share best practices and to develop their services in light of, initially, the rapidly changing technical environment and, over the past few years, the changing political and economic environment. This year’s event, IWMW 2013, will be held at the University of Bath on 26-28 June. The theme of this year’s event, “What next?” was chosen to provide an opportunity to hear about how institutions are responding to these uncertain times:

There are the ‘known knowns’ (such as, for example, the student fees which are now being levied and the growth in use of mobile devices), the ‘known unknowns’ (the implications of the increases in student fees and the implications of the patent wars taking place between vendors of mobile devices) and the ‘unknown unknowns’ which, by definition, are difficult to illustrate!

It would therefore be timely to summarise how the sector is making use of the online and networked environment in order to enhance the student experience and other key institutional activities.

Marketing and Communications

The news item emphasises the importance of student awareness of the University environment. I would agree that this is important. This is a reason why we invited Tim Kaner, Director of Marketing & Communications at the University of Bath to give a plenary talk on “Marketing 2.0” at the event. Another angle on such issues will be given by Dai Griffiths, Professor at the Institute for Educational Cybernetics at the University of Bolton. In his talk on “The University in a Bind” Professor Griffiths will describe how Universities are finding themselves subject to increasing financial, regulatory and marketplace pressures which are pushing them in a number of different directions. Consequently institutions are constrained in their ability to adapt or reinvent their identity. Dai will explore these contradictions at multiple levels and discusses the practical implications for the future of universities, and particularly for those with the profile of the Million+ Group.

At the IWMW 2012 event, held at the University of Edinburgh, Professor Ferdinand von Prondzynski, the Principal and Vice-Chancellor of Robert Gordon University gave a controversial talk in which he asked “Do Universities Really Understand the Internet?“. In the talk Professor von Prondzynski argued that many University home pages were dull and unappealing to potential students, and even went on to name and shame a number of guilty institutions (a video recording of the talk is available for those who would like to find out more!). This talk generated much discussion, with an acknowledgement by some of the truth of these remarks, but the defence being that senior managers and conservative policy groups were responsible for barriers to the development of more engaging institutional Web sites. At this year’s event Paul Boag, co-founder of the digital agency Headscape, will be developing this discussion in a talk entitled “Institutional Culture Is Crippling Your Web Strategy!“. As described in the abstract:

Most internal web teams in higher education agree their web strategy is being held back by the culture and organisation of the institution. Internal politics, devolved leadership and committee structures are incompatible with the fast moving nature of the web.

Unfortunately most web teams feel unable to bring about change. They feel like a small cog in a very big machine. In this talk Paul will challenge those pre-conceptions and point out that if you don’t change things nobody else will.

In another provocative talk, Ranjit Sidhu, founder of statistics into Decisions (SiD) will reflect on “9am, 16th August, 2012: ‘What the fcuk just happened then?‘”. The talk describes how universities around the country got a shock on the morning of 16^th August 2012 when the A level results came out. “The education market in the UK had significantly changed in nature and purpose” argues Ranjit, and he will explain the important of the Web in this changed environment.

It should be noted that the IWMW 2013 event isn’t just a series of plenary talks: amongst approximately 20 parallel workshop sessions there will be one on “Institutional Use of Social Media Services” which will provide an opportunity for Web managers to discuss how social media can be used to engage with students, share best practices and address the challenges posed by use of the Web as a communications channel.

The Changing Learning Environment

Beyond use of online technologies to enhance institutional marketing and communications activities and the need for appropriate institutional strategies to support their use, other talks at the IWMW 2013 will address developments which are particularly relevant for the learning experience.

In the opening plenary talk on “Open Education: The Business & Policy Case for OER” Cable Green, Director of Global Learning at Creative Commons will provide examples where institution, provinces / states and nations have built effective business cases for OERs (Open Educational Resources). He will explore how to build effective teams for institution / system-wide OER projects in a way that both builds high quality OER and takes institutions through the cultural shift to open.

In a talk entitled “Et tu MOOC? Massive Online Considerations“ Kyriaki Anagnostopoulou, Head of e-Learning at the University of Bath, will explore some of the opportunities and challenges MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) pose to educational institutions wanting to partake in such developments.

What Else?

I have highlighted five of the 13 plenary talks which will be given at IWMW 2013 and one of the 19 parallel sessions. Beyond the talks related to teaching and learning there are talks on use of the Web to support and enhance research activities, the User Experience, the Changing Technical Landscape and What Does the Future Hold?

The event costs just £350 which includes two night’s accommodation, lunch and a conference dinner and a wine reception at the Roman Baths. Bookings are open. I hope to see you in Bath next month where you can learn how to respond to accusations that higher education is failing to provide value for money!

View Twitter conversation from: [Topsy] | View Twitter statistics from: [TweetReach] – [Bit.ly]

The research … set out to quantify and qualify the economic effects of the £14bn spent on xxx in the UK every year. Using data from 17 countries over a 14 year period, Deloitte was able to demonstrate that, for every £1 spent on xxx, £6 was generated for the economy – something that amounted to a £100bn effect on the total GDP, and which led the report authors to write “We need to think differently about xxx – as an industry, important in its own right, but also as a fundamental driver of UK competitiveness” .

I read this in the 100th centenary issue of the new Statesman, a weekly left-of-centre weekly publication.

What do you think the subject is? I’ve obviously left out the key words, so try and guess before reading any further.

Might it be education or perhaps a specific aspect of education – further or higher? Maybe its concerned with research activities? Or perhaps it could be about the culture heritage sector? Or, in light of discussions about funding for public libraries, perhaps a campaigning body has provided an economic analysis of the financial benefits provided by public libraries?

In fact the missing word was ‘advertising’ and the study was commissioned on behalf of the Advertising Association. Yes, suggested the article, advertising could hold the key to getting the UK economy out of its current difficulties.

I read this article yesterday after attending an enjoyable Jorum Steering Group meeting in a sunny Manchester. During the meeting steering group members were asked to split into groups and provide a longterm vision for the future of Jorum, which will be fed into a forthcoming Jorum planning meeting.

The initial suggestions were very positive, based on a commitment to openness in higher education and the benefits which could be provided by a centralised service for the sector. However, perhaps due to recent scars, I suggested a less optimistic vision. Although members of the steering group might have liberal left-of-centre personal beliefs, such beliefs, and their application in an educational context, appear to be out-of-sync with the more general move to right.

Image from the New Statesman

Perhaps, I suggested, Jorum needs to be prepared to continue to be sustainable in a changing political and economic situation. One particular example I gave was that Jorum should consider the possibility of providing advertising as a means for generating income.

I was surprised to hear that this suggestion was felt worthy of consideration by others.

As Scott Wilson pointed out recently there probably isn’t an immediate need for Jisc-funded services to generate income in this way, since “HEFCE spending on Jisc core is down from £40.7m in 2012/2013 to £40.6m in 2013/2014“, currently a small amount although “According to the 2013 funding guidance letter, Jisc is expected to reduce the income drawn from HEFCE over the following three years (2014/2015 FY to 2017/2018 FY) as other funding mechanisms (such as subscriptions) come on line to replace it“.

Might this be a direction in which the sector moves? And although we might expect responses such as “I don’t like advertising on Web sites” and “there should be more funding for education” to be instinctively made, if the alternative is redundancies, might this be a preferred alternative?

I should add, by the way that the article in The New Statesman was a sponsored advertorial.

View Twitter conversation from: [Topsy] | View Twitter statistics from: [TweetReach] – [Bit.ly]

How do you assess the impact of digital content which has been published? This is a question which is very relevant in the higher education sector, where indications of success often cannot be reduced to financial indicators. It is a question which is particularly relevant to researchers who have an interest in understanding the ways in which social media can be used to maximise the impact of research papers and scholarly publications. This was a topic which was addressed recently at the UKSG 2013 conference. At the conference Mike Taylor gave a presentation on “altmetrics and the Publisher” in which he admitted the lack of consensus on the value of such approaches:

• they’re great for measuring impact in [the] diverse scholarly ecosystem
• Altmetrics are cheap gimmickry that encourage gaming the system, ie dishonesty.

A second talk entitled “altmetrics: What Are They Good For?” was given at the session by Peter Paul Groth. In his trip report Paul commented that “my main point was that altmetrics is at a stage where it can be advantageously used by scholars, projects and institutions not to rank but instead tell a story about their research“.

But there was also an awareness of the need to develop a better understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of altmetrics. We can see the importance of such metrics not only for researchers, but also for organisations which make extensive use of online technologies, through the example of W3C, the organisation responsible for the development of Web standards. In their recent weekly news digest they provided the following statistics:

Notably this week :

- over 900 stories about W3C on Twitter in 7 days.
- over 3000 mentions of W3C in 7 days.
- With 59840 Twitter followers, net increase of 521 followers in the past week.
- 19 posts that dlvr.it posted between Apr 14 – Apr 21 got 29.9K (+17.3%) clicks and reached 69.1K (+0.7%) connections. 

In light of my long-standing interest in metrics I felt it would be useful to explore metrics for blog posts and tweets.

Metrics For My Redundancy Blog Post

An Opportunity to Gather Evidence

Last Wednesday I noticed that on the day the “My Redundancy Letter Arrived Today” blog post was published my blog had received over 3,000 views (more than double the previous most popular daily visits). I realised that this provided an opportunity to explore one aspect of altmetrics: the impact of a blog post on a topic related to one’s professional activities. Since the post was published a week ago today this gives me an opportunity to collate the evidence using a variety of services and develop a better understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of such tools.

Importance of Metrics for Funders

In the past we have been asked to provide metrics related to the services we’ve provided to our funders. I recently updated the footer for blog posts, which previously included icons which facilitated ‘frictionless sharing’ to include a number of links to services which provide evidence of the extent of such sharing (although, as pointed by by Alun Hughes, who chaired the review of UKOLN and CETIS, the work of the review group was subsequently overtaken by internal changes within Jisc and the review was not concluded).

The Potential Audience for the Blog Post: TweetReach

In order to estimate the potential audience for the blog post I used the TweetReach tool to obtain estimates of the numbers of Twitter users who may have seen a tweet with a link to the blog post.

As can be seen the estimated reach at 08.30 today was 77,669, based on 50 of an estimated 145 tweets.

TweetReach also provided statistics on the size of the Twitter communities of those who have tweeted links. As can be seen had between 1,000 and 10,000 followers, followed by a significant group with between 10,000 and 100,000 followers.

TweetReach provides an indication of the total reach, with this potential reach being significant due to the numbers of Twitter users with large numbers of followers who included a link to the blog post in their tweets.

But, of course, many of the tweets will not have been seen – most experienced Twitter users will nowadays regard Twitter as a stream of information to be dipped into, and not as information which should always be processed.

The Tweeters and Retweeters: Topsy

The Topsy tool provides a greater focus on Twitter users who tweet and retweet links to the blog post (although I should add that such information is also provided by TweetReach).

From Topsy it seems that there have been 142 tweets which include links to the blog post.

As well as this headline figure, as illustrated, Topsy also provides a graph of mentions of the post over the past thirty days, as well as an archive of the tweets which contain the link.

Statistics for the Shortened URL: Bit.ly

Finally I should mentioned the statistics which are provided by the URL shortening service I use in Twitter: bit.ly.

By appending a + to a bit.ly URL you can get usage figures (by default for the past hour, but the information is also available for an extended period of time).

Looking at the statistics for https://bitly.com/17WfrgB+ (and selecting the global option) I find that there have been 1,090 clicks on the ‘bitmark’.

The bit.ly service also provides location information: over a third are from the UK; 12% from the US and since the majority (39%) are unknown this gives a long tail of other countries form which people have followed the link.

Summaries

This blog post has summarised findings from a number of Twitter analytic services which may be of interest to others who have a need to provide evidence which may help to understand the ‘impact’ of a digital resource.

However, as I have described in a post on Paradata for Online Surveys, I feel that it is important to document the survey methodology and to be open about implied assumptions as well as documenting potential pitfalls for others who may wish to replicate the findings or apply the methodology for themselves in their own context.

Blog Usage Statistics

The first potential pitfall to be aware of is that the blog usage statistics relate to the entire blog, and will include visits during the week to any of the 1,199 posts which have been published previously. The following table therefore gives the number of visits to the Redundancy blog post as well as the number of visits to the blog’s home page during the week (when the post was shown at the top of the page).

It therefore appears that there have been 6,386 views of the posts during the past week, with 1,056 views of other posts on the blog.

Referrer Statistics

How did people arrive at the blog ? Looking at the referrer traffic for the past 7 days for the entire blog we can see that Twitter and Facebook were responsible for delivering most traffic, and that these two social media service were roughly comparable.

However we need to remember that referrer traffic is only provided when a Web link is followed. If visitors arrive by following a link in an email message or dedicated Twitter client, no referrer information is provided. Aggregating the referrer views it seems that 2,043 came from an identifiable Web site, with 5,399 views of all posts during the week coming either from a non-Web source or, possibly, by an anonymous Web source (e.g. a user who visits sites using an anonymising tool).

A summary of the top three ways in which people viewed content on this Web site during the past week is summarised below.

Seemingly clear indication of the social Web in delivering traffic for, admittedly, a post with human interest. Such findings will not necessarily apply in other areas, but it seems to me that such small scale indications might be useful in identifying ‘weak signals’ which would be worth investigating further in other areas.

Does the 1-9-90 Rule Apply?

As described in Wikipedia:

In Internet culture, the 1% rule or the 90–9–1 principle (sometimes also presented as 89:10:1 ratio)^[1] reflects a hypothesis that more people will lurk in a virtual community than will participate. This term is often used to refer to participation inequality in the context of the Internet.

Does this apply in the context of engagement with blog posts, I wondered? In this context I used the following definitions:

• Lurker: someone who only reads a post.
• Contributor: someone who facilitates engagement with others by lightweight ‘frictionless’ sharing, such as a tweet, a RT, a vote on the blog post, a Facebook like or a Google +1.
• Creator: someone who create new content by submitting a blog comment or commenting on Facebook.

The findings are summarised below.

One observation I would make is that the tweets about the post are only included if they continued a link to the post. Since subsequent discussions were not included, due to the difficulties in finding such tweets, it seems that the Contributors count is understated. It therefore appears that the 1-9-90 rule may not be too far out in this case.

I’ll be the first to admit that the distinction between a contributor and a creator are somewhat arbitrary: someone who spend time in composing a relevant tweet in 140 characters (such as “A poignant, perceptive and yet defiantly uplifting post from @briankelly“) is clearly being creative. However posting a tweet will normally be a frictionless activity carried out in one’s current application environment, unlike posting a comment which is likely to involve following a link, clicking a button and filling in authentication details before creating the content. I’m therefore happy to propose this approach as a possible approach for monitoring the extent of engagement with digital content. Might this be an approach which others may be interested in helping to develop and refine?

View Twitter conversation from: [Topsy] | View Twitter statistics from: [TweetReach] – [Bit.ly]

I have just been given my redundancy letter – I was the first of many to receive a redundancy letter on what will be a very busy two days for the University of Bath’s HR department. After over 16 years at UKOLN (I started on 30 October 1996) my redundancy letter informs me that I will be leaving on 31 July 2013.

This is clearly a sad moment for myself and my colleagues at UKOLN. The decision to cease the core funding for UKOLN (and CETIS) – which was made in October 2012 but not unofficially announced until December – has had severe implications for us. At the start of 2013 there were 26 people employed in UKOLN but after 31 July, based on current funding estimates for the next financial year, there is likely to be funding for just 3.7 FTEs (although, due to people working part-time, there should be more individuals still based at UKOLN.

The definition of ‘decimate’ is: ”to destroy a great number or proportion of [Example]: The population was decimated by a plague.” With cuts of the extent given above it would not be an exaggeration to say “UKOLN has been decimated by cuts” :-(

Sadly, it seems that there is a growing tendency in the sector to refuse to acknowledge bad news. Stephen Downes highlighted this just before Christmas:

Two vaguely worded announcements appeared today on the UKOLN and CETIS websites. As cited by Brian Kelly, “In response to the Wilson review of Jisc, the organisation has confirmed that it will only provide core funding to the UKOLN Innovation Support Centre, up to July 2013 but not beyond.” Same deal for CETIS. (Note that I changed Kelly’s headline, contrary to my usual practice, because the phrase “looking ahead” seems to deliberately obfuscate the content of the messages.)

There’s a danger in making bad news invisible that the value which the organisation has been provided in the past is ignored. It was pleased to See how Stephen (an acknowledged elearning expert from North America) concluded his post be describing how:

I know it’s another country and all that, but let me be clear that to my mind UKOLN and CETIS have been two of the most important organizations in the world of online learning, period, and that should their funding be discontinued it would be a significant loss to the field.

This contrasted starkly with the view from Jisc in response to a question about redundancies:

This is about reshaping our approach to deliver for our customers, organising what we need to do and then populating it with people who can do it reasonably well. I expect the vast majority of the roles and the posts that we need in the new organisation to be perfectly capable of being discharged by people who are in the existing Jisc, and we are not in the business of disenfranchising the existing Jiscers, that’s not the purpose.

This feeling that we are being airbrushed from Jisc’s history was compounded recently when significant UKOLN intellectual work was labelled as being produced by Jisc in an article in a national journal.

The Change Curve

Shock, Anger

Yesterday myself and a number of my colleagues attended a half-day Change Management workshop. We were presented with a Change Curve, which is illustrated. Many of us identified with the emotions listed in the diagram, and I’m conscious that this post may well reflect the shape of the curve.

The anger is compounded by the significant role that JISC has had over an extended period. The Wilson Review (PDF format) noted such successes: ‘There is no comparable body within the UK, and internationally its reputation is outstanding as a strategic leader and partner.’

Such successes have been based, I feel, on JISC’s willingness to embrace open practices in its approaches to helping to develop and embed innovative practices across the sector. But such open practices are now vanishing, as the Jisc comms department is now controlling messages from the organisation as part of the process of “reshaping our approach to deliver for our customers“. Expect to see good news on Jisc communications channels!

The anger myself and colleagues feel is compounded when we look at how CETIS, our fellow JISC Innovation Support centre has responded to the loss of its core funding. I was aware that a group of CETIS staff had been given responsibility to look at new funding streams and at the recent CETIS conference Paul Hollins, CETIS Director summarised the various proposals for new funding which have been submitted. It looks at though the future for CETIS is much more secure than ours. Although the decision to seek additional funding in the area of informatics appears to have provided an additional year’s funding, this is only for a tiny proportion of staff and it is still unclear as to whether such a small department with limited funding is sustainable (especially when one considers that the director will probably continue on the same salary, despite the organisation downsizing from a peak of over 30 people to 4.7 FTEs. A goal of transforming UKOLN from a organisation with its roots in the Library world to a research informatics organisation may have been successful, but this was clearly a phyrric victory.

Acceptance .. and a Better Future?

But rather than looking back, myself and my colleagues who received redundancy letters today, need to look forward. This will not be along the lines of the official announcement:

While the Innovation Support Centre will cease operating after July 2013, UKOLN will continue and as the organisation enters a new phase, it is a time to reflect on what we’ve achieved.

but the future for the large numbers of colleagues who, from 1 August, will be facing an uncertain future, with bills to pay, families to support and mortgages and other loans which will need paying.

Fortunately many UKOLN staff do have expertise, skills and connections which will continue to be needed (back in December when I carried out the calculation there was about 240 years of staff expertise based on our time in UKOLN!). We have been providing training and support for staff and will continue to do this over the next three months. In a post on Importance of Social Media for Finding New Opportunities I summarised a session I facilitated in December on ways in which social media can be valuable in developing new contacts, strengthening existing relationships and helping to discuss new opportunities. I suspect there will be a number of further sessions along these lines in which we can help each other in moving towards the ‘better future’.

But over the next three months there will be still be work to be done. I am in the process of preparing content hosted on UKOLN Web sites so that is is ready for archiving. I should add that, in light of my concerns that UKOLN’s value to the sector over a period of over 30 years will be marginalised, ignored or appropriated by others, I am working with colleagues to ensure that their involvement across a wide range of activities is acknowledged and that significant intellectual content is not lost. This process involved ensuring that my colleagues deposit copies of their papers, articles, project reports, etc. in Opus, the University of Bath’s institutional repository (and, at the time of writing, there appear to be 424 items in the repository). In addition I have also suggested that authors embed their ORCID ID within papers, which might be particularly important for project reports if the author details are not clear.

But in addition since the large majority of UKOLN staff will be leaving, we will be exploring ways in which our expertise can continue to be harnessed, perhaps through consultancy work. Don’t write us off, yet!

For now, I think I may be allowed to conclude on a rather emotional day by summarising the Change Curve with the words used by Father Jack “Arse, feck, drink, women“. Anyone fancy joining me in the pub tonight? Then maybe be could go clubbing.

Note: A Storify archive of the tweets related to this story is now available.

View Twitter conversation from: [Topsy] | View Twitter statistics from: [TweetReach] – [Bit.ly]

On Thursday 18 April 2013 the University of Oxford’s Facebook page reached one million ‘likes’. The University took this opportunity to promote a video they had made when it became clear that they were approaching this figure:

Wow! Our Facebook page has more than one million likes. Many thanks for following us! Have you seen our Twitter page @UniofOxford too? Here is a special thank you video from us – why not share this video with your friends and see how quickly we can get to two million! http://youtu.be/uYNOgWgb-5E

Monitoring Weak Signals

As part of my work for the JISC Observatory I have an interest in observing weak signals which can help to spot technological developments at an early stage which may turn out to have a significant impact across the sector.

It was back in May 2007 when I wrote a post entitled Something IS Going On With Facebook! which highlighted “the announcement of Facebook’s F8 platform – a development which lets users embed other services inside their pages in Facebook“.

In November 2007 I post entitled UK Universities On Facebook described how “A Facebook search for organisations containing the word ‘university’ revealed (on Friday 9 November 2007) a total of 76 hits which included, in alphabetical order, the following UK Universities: Aston, Cardiff, Kent and the University of Central Lancashire (UCLan)“.

For a period of several years I monitoring growth in use of Facebook, focussing on the Russell Group universities in order to have a manageable sample to analyse. The accompanying blog posts were Use of Facebook by Russell Group Universities (January 2011), Is It Time To Ditch Facebook, When There’s Half a Million Fans Across Russell Group Universities? (September 2011) and Survey of Institutional Use of Facebook (May 2012) with the final survey in August 2012 which recorded Over One Million ‘Likes’ of Facebook Pages for the 24 Russell Group Universities capturing a snapshot the day after the numbers of Russell Group universities had grown from 20 to 24 institutions.

It was the final post in which I realised that the most significant growth in Facebook likes was taking place at the University of Oxford, as can be seen from the accompanying image.

Implications

What are the implications of the popularity of Facebook at the University of Oxford for the wider community?

I hope we have moved away from the instinctive dismissive of Facebook for reasons such as “It’s not open source“, “It’s a walled garden” and the strange arguments that we sometimes encounter in the sector: “It’s popular but so is the Daily Mail” and “It’s popular, but so was MySpace and look what happened to it“.

Some questions which may be appropriate to ask include:

• What benefits can be gained by institutional use of Facebook?
• What level of resources should be allocated to managing institutional use of Facebook?
• What ROI can be gained from institutional use of Facebook?

I appreciate that some people feel very uncomfortable with the notion of ROI in an educational context? But since students are now paying £9,000 per year we need to acknowledge that going to university is a significant financial investment for students, with the provision of the leaning experience also clearly having significant costs. Understanding cost effective ways of engaging with students, listening to students, supporting informal learning, etc. will therefore be important.

There is also a need, I feel, to embrace what could be regarded as a ‘post-digital’ perspective on social media, in which the important issues shouldn’t address the technical aspects of services, but their relevance as part of the accepted infrastructure.

Issues such as the institution’s brand value on such services then become relevant. It is then appropriate to see what can be learnt from the commercial sector’s valuation on Facebook.

A post entitled “Facebook Fan value rises 28% since 2010” was published yesterday by BizReport which described how:

Fans of brands on Facebook have significantly upped their worth over the past three years, according to new figures released by social media marketing firm Syncapse, with some brands averaging Fan values in the thousands of dollars.

and went on to provide estimated values:

Fashion brand Zara’s Fans are worth over $405.54, found the research, followed by Levis at $312.01. Meanwhile, the value of Coca-Cola Fan is relatively low at $70.16.

In his tweet which alerted me to this people Dion Hinchcliffe gave a caveat:

Tho’ fans are just 1 measure of #socbiz value & not a good one.

How then can we measure the value of an institution’s Facebook page? What should we make of the (public) analytics for the University of Oxford’s Facebook page which tell us that as of Monday 22 April 2013 there are:

• 1,002,967 like for the page. 
• 7,794 people are talking about the page.
• 9 December 2012 was the most poplar week (why was this?).
• The most poplar age group are 18-24 year old.

In order to enable others with responsibilities for managing institutional Facebook presences to be able to compare their experiences, discuss operational practices and, perhaps, develop mechanisms for helping to measure ROI and allocate appropriate levels of resources, at this year’s IWMW 2013 event there will be a birds-of-a feather session on “Institutional Use of Social Media Services“.

I hope this session will be of interest to those who, perhaps quietly, are using Facebook to engage with potential students, have conversations with current students (and staff) and, perhaps, looking at enhance use of Facebook.

In order to inform the session a simple survey has been set up which aims to gain feedback on respondents views on institutional use of Facebook. The form is embedded below or can be accessed on the PollDaddy Web site.

The “A million likes: how big is a million?” Video

The video produced by the University of Oxford is available on YouTube and is embedded below.

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On Monday night I was listening to live music in The Bell, Bath when I noticed in my Twitter stream the tweets about the Boston bombings. At 7 am this morning I came across another flurry of tweets from the US< this time about today’s Boston bomb incident, which seemed to have been described using the hashtag #watertown on Twitter, as can be seen from a Twitter search for this hashtag.

When I first heard the news I was surprised that there was no mention on the BBC or Guardian Web sites. However Danny Sullivan, an American living in England who spoke at the IWMW event back in 1999 was my trusted source, who provided links to news sources from the US. One tweet which caught my eye was the comment from Bill Amend that:

The combination of twitter, streaming live police radio, and google maps is pretty amazing tonight. #watertown

As described in an article on Mashable.com ”The best place to follow the news as it unfolded: Twitter“ and Mashable is compiling real-time updates of the incident on Storify.

“It’s all gone horribly wrong: disaster communication in a crisis“

How would we respond if there were similar incidents in campuses in the UK, I wonder? This was a topic Jeremy Speller addressed three years ago in a talk at IWMW 2010 entitled It’s all gone horribly wrong: disaster communication in a crisis.

The abstract for the talk highlighted the importance of IT in responding to major incidents:

How do you communicate with your staff and students and the wider world when it all goes horribly wrong? Is your IT/Web related response aligned with your institutional Major Incident and Disaster Recovery policies?

Over the past few years a number of experiments have been undertaken by various institutions to address these issues. Externally hosted websites are one solution and some have used SMS messaging and third-party services such as Twitter. This talk covers ways in which communications can be disseminated via as many channels as possible while allowing simple access to tools for those in MI teams who need to make announcements.

One day it will of course go so wrong that the only solution is a walk around campus with the megaphone – short of that we owe it to our users to provide information in as coherent and effective a manner as possible.

In his talk Jeremy recollected how IT had used during a major incident which took place during the IWMW 2005. On the 7/7 2005 the IWMW 2005 event was taking place at the University of Manchester. This was the first IWMW event for which a WiFi network was available and about 20 people were able to use their laptops to engage in discussion using IRC (this was in the days before Twitter). Afterwards an archive of the IRC log was kept so we have a record of the discussion:

Jeremy recollected this incident in his talk at IWMW 2010. In addition to his slides being available on Slideshare, a video recording of the talk is also available, together with a mashup of the video recording and the tweets posted during his talk, as illustrated.

What’s The Current State of Play?

How are institutions preparing for major incidents today, I wonder?

The University of Bath has used its official Twitter stream in the winter during heavy snowfalls to alert staff and students when the University was closed, due to dangerous conditions on the roads on the steep hill leading up to the University.

But if social media will have an important role to play during major incidents, how should social media services such as Twitter be used? Equally important, how should concerns that incorrect, misleading or even fraudulent tweets are posted?

On a weekly basis the final alarms on campus are tested and their are occasional fire drills in which staff and students need to leave the building and assemble at designated assembly points. Do we need similar drills in use of social media, I wonder? But if this is not possible, do institutions have plans for use of social media during major incidents? And are institutions aware that, unlike fire drills, they do not have control over use of social media? A post by Paul Boag posted in December 2008 entitled The power and problems of twitter highlights the problems which can happen when a jokey tweet is misinterpretted as a cry for help. As Paul described in the introduction to the post “I take no pleasure in this post. I do not like embarrassing myself in public. However, I need to both publicly apologise and also share a valuable lesson in the use of twitter. If you use twitter, please read this post. It is important that you do not make the same mistake.“

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IWMW 2013 programme

Bookings are now open for this year’s Institutional Web Management Workshop, IWMW 2013. This year’s event takes place at the University of Bath on 26-28 June. Due to the number of submissions we received we decided to extend the programme so that this year will, I think, have the largest number of plenary talks in the 17 years the event has been running. In addition to the 13 plenary talks there are also 17 parallel workshop sessions each of which lasts for 90 minutes and provides an opportunity for delegates to address a particular topic in depth.

Since we appreciate the pressures which those who have responsibilities for providing institutional Web services face, this year we are providing opportunities for participants to enhance their skills and knowledge across a range of areas relevant for those who support online services.

Day 1, 26 June 2013

The opening session has the theme Opportunities and Openness. I’m pleased to announce that the opening talk will be given by Cable Green, Director of Global Learning at Creative Commons who will talk on Open Education: The Business & Policy Case for OER,

The theme of the new opportunities which can be provided by embracing open practices is further developed by Doug Belshaw, formerly of JISC infoNet and now working for the non-profit Mozilla Foundation who will talk about Mozilla, Open Badges and a Learning Standard for Web Literacy.

The importance of the Web in Supporting Key Institutional Drivers will be addressed in the session on the afternoon of the first day of the event. The need for people with a variety of skills in the provision, support and development of online services will underpin the talks on E tu MOOC? Massive Online Considerations by Kyriaki Anagnostopoulou, head of the e-leaning team at the University of Bath and Amber Thomas manages the academic technologies team at the University of Warwick who will describe how her team is Turning our Attention to Supporting Research.

Day 2, 27 June 2013

The second day of the event begins by hearing about The User Experience. Jonathan Hassell, lead author of the BS 8878, the British Web Accessibility Standard that help organisations to embed accessibility competence within their workforce, culture and business-as-usual processes will describe how those involved in providing institutional Web service should Stop Trying to Avoid Losing & Start Winning: How BS 8878 Reframes the Accessibility Question. This talk is followed by David Cornforth, Jisc infoNet who will describe his experience in Adapting to Responsive Web Design.

The Changing Technical Landscape is the focus of the next strand with Martin Hamilton, Head of Internet Services at Loughborough University, explaining the move to being ”open by default” in what might be described as The Inside-Out University. My colleague Paul Walk, in a talk entitled Working With Developers, argues that “If institutional web managers are to stay on top of their game, they need to be able get the most out of the software and systems they rely on” and to do this there is a need “to learn how to work well with the developers who build and maintain them“.

Judging by the titles of the talks in the session on The View From Outside the two speakers from commercial companies are likely to stimulate lively discussion and debate. Ranjit Sidhu, founder of Statistics into Decisions, will ask 9am, 16^th August, 2012: “What the fcuk just happened then?”. This is followed by Paul Boag, co-founder of Headscape who feels that Institutional Culture Is Crippling Your Web Strategy!

After this busy day, delegates will have the opportunity to unwind at the wine reception which will be held at the Roman Baths.

Day 3, 28 June 2013

The final day begins with two Institutional Case Studies. Tim Kaner, Director of Marketing & Communications at the University of Bath, will discuss the implications of a changing marketing model for HE institutions and reflect on the challenges and opportunities ahead in a talk entitled Marketing 2.0. Dai Griffiths, Professor at the Institute for Educational Cybernetics, University of Bolton, in a talk on The University in a Bind, will argue that as Universities are finding themselves subject to increasing financial, regulatory and marketplace pressures which are pushing them in a number of different directions, institutions are constrained in their ability to adapt or reinvent their identity. Dai will explore these contradictions at multiple levels, and discuss the practical implications for the future of universities.

Finally in a session which asks What Does The Future Hold? Neil Denny will describe The Delicious Discomfort Of Not Knowing: How to Lead Effectively Through Uncertainty. The abstract for this talk describes how:

These are times of rampant uncertainty heralded by technological, financial and social pressures. Occupying such a space can feel disorientating. We might be bewildered, afraid, excited or overwhelmed. What will it take to enable you to continue to move forward when you are no longer even sure which way you are facing?

This talk will be followed by the Conclusions from IWMW 2013, which will reflect on the issues raised during the 3 days and explore ways in which the institutional Web management community can develop in the future. Uncertain times, certainly, but also times of new opportunities.

I hope to see you in Bath in June. The three-day event costs only £360 which includes two nights’ accommodation. Can you afford to miss it?

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I’m now back from an enjoyable and informative 3 days in Bournemouth where I attended the UKSG 2013 conference. I have spoken at this annual conference organised by the UK Serials Group on two previous occasions: in 2005 I ran a briefing session on “Providing And Using News Feeds: How RSS Can Help” and in 2001 I gave a talk on The Latest Web Developments both of which took place at Heriot-Watt University.

This year’s event, the 36^th in the series, was the largest, attracting over 900 participants. I’d like to give my thanks to Ross MacIntyre, Karen Sadler, Alison Whitehorn and colleagues for successfully rising to the challenge of providing a programme of plenary talks, breakout sessions, lightning talks and various other meetings, as well as ensuring that the participants’ social needs were also addressed – and yes, there really was a funfair inside the conference venue!

In addition to successful organising such a large event I should also say how pleasing it was to see the speakers’ slides and video recording of the talks being uploaded to Slideshare and YouTube within about 24 hours of the talks being delivered. At the time of writing there are over 50 slides from talks given at the conference available on Slideshare and 25 videos available on YouTube.

Conference Highlights

For me the highlights were:

• Phil Sykes opening keynote talk on “Open Access Gets Tough” – see video and slides.
• Jenny Delasalle’s talk on “Research Evaluation: Why is it Relevant to Librarians?” – see video and slides.
• Laurel Haak’s talk on “Connecting Research and Researchers: ORCID” – see video and slides.
• Lynn Silipigni Connaway’s talk on “The new digital students, or, “I don’t think I have ever picked up a book out of the library to do any research — all I have used is my computer”” – see video and slides.
• Joshua James Harding’s talk on “The student-information relationship:>a perspective of its evolution” – see video and slides.
• The breakout session on “Altmetrics: Understanding New Ways to Measure Academic Impact using the Web” – see video and slides by Mark Taylor and Paul Groth.

I should add that I left early on the third day and so did not attend any of the sessions. However from the feedback on Twitter (using the #uksglive event hashtag) it seems that I should watch the video of the talk on “The Twenty-year Butterflies: Which Web Cookies Have Stuck to the Internet’s Pan?“ as this plenary talk on the final morning was highly regarded.

The altmetrics Breakout Session

The altmetrics breakout session (which was held on Monday and repeated the following day) was the one most closely aligned with my interests. But in addition to the content delivered by the speakers (i.e. the slides on “altmetrics and the Publisher” and “altmetrics: What Are They Good For?“) I was also interested in the reactions to the points made and the people in the audience who had similar interests.

Since access to a free WiFi network was available at the conference and large numbers of people had a mobile device I was able to engage in see the thoughts and comments made during the session. Since the session was of particular interest to me I have curated the tweets using Storify, since I am sure that this will be of interest to others besides myself.

It was pleasing to note that the two session speakers both encouraged tweets at the start of the session (this, incidentally, provided a useful bookmark which helped me identify the start of the tweets associated with the session). Some of the comments which summarised points beiung made by the speakers included:

• Taylor: makes distinction between calculating and evaluating meaning: #altmetrics is former, not latter #uksglive
• Taylor: what is relationship between social usage of schol content and social/academic impact of content? Big Q for#altmetrics #uksglive
• Very important distinction that bit.ly/11OvCcY is a company. #altmetrics bit.ly/10Q9IVt is a community of people #uksglive
• Taylor outlines a number of options eg impactstory.org,altmetrics.com for exploring #altmetrics #uksglive
• Taylor: researchers don’t have to do anything to collect#altmetrics, simply plug DOI into one of these tools #uksglive

In addition we saw some examples of those on Twitter responding to questions such as:Twitter

• .@TAC_NISO @ElsevierLabs Is a tweet or facebook-like equivalent to a scholarly citation? @herrison#uksglive

for which the following response was given:

• @EndoMetabPub@herrison No, it isn’t and won’t ever be. Does have some assessment value. Correlates to future citation #altmetrics#uksglive

Thoughts on Best Practices for Event Amplification

Although the event appeared to be a successful for the 950 participants, no longer need the talks and associated resources given at such conferences be restricted to the live audience. The event organisers did a great job in ensuring that video recordings of many of the talks were made publicly available, together with their slides. I’ve some suggestions on how this might be enhanced for next year’s event. But responsibilities for enhancing the sharing of ideas presented at conferences is not solely the remit of event organisers. Here are some suggestions for ways in which speakers and participants as well as event organisers can enhance the amplification of talks at events

For large events with parallel sessions, provide a session Twitter hashtag which can be useful in diffentiating tweets posted about parallel sessions (I’ve used the format #A1 to #A9 and #B1 to #B9 for the two parallel sessions for events I have organised (this should be included together with the main event hashtag).

Participants at sessions, especially parallel sessions, can help to signify their interest in an area by simply tweeting that they are attending the session (e.g. Here we go: Mike Taylor from Elsevier Labs on #altmetrics#uksglive)

The subsequent cuartion of tweets from a session can be carried out by participants who have a particular interest in the session (as I did for the altmetrics session).

The archive of slides and videos on services such as Slideshare and YouTube needs to be carefully labelled to ensure that others can easily correctly find and reuse appropriate resources.

Slides and videos should be tagged so they can be referenced as a collection of event-related resources. Note that although the #uksglive hashtag was used on Twitter (to avoid a clash with another event which was using the #uksg13 tag) the resources held on YouTube and Slideshare should include the year in any tag so they can be distinguished from resources from other years.

Note in order to illustrate how curated resources from a conference can be reused, the slides and video recording from the session on “Altmetrics: Understanding New Ways to Measure Academic Impact using the Web” are given below.

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Gartner has finally come out and said it: The PC market is dying.

Except it hasn’t said that, quite. But it is, and saying so is really important.

and went on to add:

Gartner, however, can’t bring itself to say the PC market is shrinking toward irrelevance. Instead, it describes the PC market as “transitional,” in much the same way companies firing large swathes of their workforces insist that employees have been “downsized.” If Gartner was a brokerage firm, its analyst would have placed a “hold” rating on the PC market, with all the wishy-washy implications that word connotes.

The reason for such evasiveness was:

to protect the lucrative relationship that Gartner has with its clients. If Gartner declares an industry dead, why should a company like Dell spend thousands of dollars a pop for a report that says so?

 The talk was based on the work of the JISC Observatory which has been provided by UKOLN and CETIS. The JISC Observatory was not provided by JISC itself in order to provide some distance from existing services and development programmes. However in light of the cessation of core funding for UKOLN and CETIS (together with other JISC-funded bodies such as OSS Watch and the JISC Monitoring Unit) there do seem to be dangers that JISC (or Jisc as it is now known) will lose its ability to focus on the rapidly changing technological infrastructure, preferring to focus, instead, on the delivery of existing services. In light of such concerns in the talk I gave yesterday (and which will be repeated later today) I argued that there was a need for organisations themselves to have mechanisms in place for detecting signals which may indicate changes which institutions will need to prepare for, as well as sense-making processes to interpret the signals and their implications.

As I was invited to write an article about the talk after giving the presentation yesterday, there does seem to be interest across the sector in the approaches I described :-)

The slides for the talk are available on Slideshare and embedded below:

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I remember buying the Guardian on the opening day of the conference and noticed the headline on the front cover: “Royal web war feared as Queen sets up site in cyberspace“. I decided to use this as an example of how the Web had gone beyond its roots in academia and was not clearly mainstream.

However I quickly discovered that I’d been taken in by an April Fool joke. If I’d have read beyond the plausible-sounding opening paragraphs I might have realised it was a joke:

However, friends of Princess Diana are setting up a web site in what looks like an effort to start a “web war”. Jo-Jo Williams, self-styled “Prince of the Net Surfers,” said: “Princess Di will be queen in our cyberspace and Charles will feel as though he has fallen into a black hole.”

A battle taking place between Princess Diane and Prince Charles – how preposterous!

In reality according to the British Monarchy’s Web site “ The Queen launched the British Monarchy’s official website in 1997. In 2007 the official British Monarchy YouTube channel was unveiled, swiftly followed by a Royal Twitter site (2009), Flickr page (2010) and Facebook page (also 2010)“. However it was in November 1995 when Diana admitted adultery in TV interview so the speculation that we would see a domestic squabble taking place in cyberspace was perhaps plausible.

In a recent paper on “What Next for Libraries? Making Sense of the Future” I described a methodology for helping to predict technology trends. I might have included use of jokes which highlighted technological advances which were felt to be absurd to a mainstream audience. Today, for example, we have seen an advertisement for a new product called Guardian Goggles:

But today, ending months of speculation and rumour, this newspaper announces a groundbreaking development in the modern history of the media: a pair of web-connected “augmented reality” spectacles that will beam its journalism directly into the wearer’s visual field, enabling users to see the world through the Guardian’s eyes at all times.

However today my Twitter stream gives me a view of the UK’s political environment through the filter of my Twitter stream, including various stories featured on the Guardian’s front cover.

Meanwhile this morning I came across a tweet from the Times Higher Education about a story which again may come true in the near future:

Major innovation: Social media (Twitter, Facebook) to be included in World University Rankings: http://ow.ly/1Ulc5w

The article began by sounding very plausible:

Data from social media, including You Tube viewing figures, Twitter follower counts and accumulated “likes” on Facebook will be developed into a new reputational indicator for the Times Higher Education World University Rankings, it was confirmed today.

The magazine said the move is designed to reflect the growing influence the internet has on a university’s reputational standing, and to recognize the key role social networking has in reflecting student opinion and influencing their study choices.

Phil S Batty, editor of Times Higher Education’s rankings, said: “We are living in a fast-moving information age, when a university’s reputational standing around the world is heavily influenced by its presence and its activities on the internet. It is time that global rankings reflected this reality. Social media is one of the most effective ways of capturing student views on institutions, and measuring an institution’s popularity.”

But needed to signal that it was an April Fool joke in a very clumsy fashion, citing Itzah Jaok:

Ivor Binhad, head of thinking, search engine optimisation and office services at the web marketing consultancy Itzah Jaok, based in Dalston, London, said: “Universities are just so 12th century, man, with their ivory towers and all those dusty books and old people sitting around. It is time for them to saddle up and straddle the information bridle path, whatever brand hurdles they may encounter on the way. I confidently predict that the Internet’s time has come, so bring your e-stirrups.

The Queen’s Web site was set up a year after the Guardian’s April Fool story appeared on the font cover. I wonder how long it will take before the World University Rankings includes online ranking scores?

As Martin Hamilton pointed out in his post on A Tale of Two Jiscs: Reflections on CETIS13, FutureLearn and the JISC Diaspora ”In many cases, JISC was farsighted enough to forsee requirements in the research and education sector that have subsequently turned into significant businesses in themselves“. But Martin then went on to describe how those benefits are about to be lost: “we are entering a new era, necessitated by funding reductions, changing student demographics and frankly an unwillingness to see “R&D” type activities (of which a large proportion can be expected to fail) facilitated through top sliced central funding“. For myself and many of my colleagues we are having to respond to the scenario depicted by Martin:”Behind the scenes, a lot of people who have been working for JISC on its various centres and services have been having meetings with their local HR departments about redundancy and redeployment“.

But what should you do if you wish to continue to make use of the skills and expertise you have developed over the years but new full-time posts appear to be in short supply? I suspect the changes in Jisc will provide new consultancy opportunities, with their current preoccupation in telling good news stories without addressing any of the underlying complexities or tensions leaving a void which can be filled by those who have a more realistic understanding of the complexities of exploiting IT to support institutional requirements.

The preparation for a new career will mean the loss of an IT infrastructure and the accompanying support which many of us will have grown accustomed to. But how can provide help and advice in the preparation for a move away from an institutional environment? One might expect the Library to provide support, especially for institutions which have a commitment to information literacy, which is defined as “the ability to find, use, evaluate and communicate information” and is “an essential skill in this digital age and era of life-long learning“. But as I will be describing next week at the LILAC 2013 conference this is not necessarily the case, with the role of librarians perhaps being to promote use of institutional rather than Cloud services. But since we will all, at some point, leave our host institution, this is not really providing staff and researchers with the life-long skills needed to thrive beyond an institutional context.

Surely it is timely for a change in focus, especially if the gloomy predictions are correct and we continue to see reductions in staffing levels in higher education institutions?

I’d welcome your thoughts and comments – especially if you have experience of leaving your host institution and continuing to work, perhaps as a consultant. My slides are available on Slideshare and embedded below:

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Earlier this morning I came across the news that Google have announced the demise of their Google Reader service:

We’re retiring Reader on July 1. We know many of you will be sad to see it go. Thanks for 8 great years! goo.gl/7joct

Despite the announcement only being made a few hours ago we are already seeing bloggers up in arms about the news. We might expect large-scale service such as TechCrunch (GoogleReaderpocalypse. For Real This Time.) to provide a speedy response to the news but closer to home bloggers such as James Clay have responded in blunt terms: Google Reader is Dead.

What Does the Announcement Tell us About Open Web Standards?

The implications of the demise of applications was always intended to be mitigated by use of open standards. But in this case the underlying format used by Google Reader (RSS) is widely accepted as an open standard in both its variants (RSS 1.0 and RSS 2.0). Blogs will continue to publish RSS feeds as will a variety of other tools and services. Why should the demise of Google Reader cause so much anger amongst users of the tool?

As RSS grew in popularity we saw the development of a range of RSS readers. Initially we saw dedicated RSS clients which users installed on their desktop. We then saw RSS add-ons to existing tools, including RSS extensions for popular email clients such as Outlook. But the development of the “Web as a platform” led to a growth in popularity of Web-based RSS tools, which meant that users did not have to install software on their desktop computer (which was particularly useful for those with locked-down desktops and IT Service departments who were reluctant to install new software).

One of the early Web-based RSS readers was Bloglines. I used this service many years ago but haven’t logged in for several years. As I learnt from Wikipedia the service was scheduled to be shut down on 15 November 2010 but a last-minute reprieve meant that it continued under a new owner. However a few minutes ago when on to the service I discovered that the feeds that I had subscribed to had been lost. This was not a problem for me, as I have migrated by feeds to Google Reader. But now it seems that I will once again shortly be losing the service I use to view my RSS feeds.

I should be able to export the list of my feeds held in Google Reader and return to Bloglines as my preferred RSS reader. However in reality it will not be so simple. I now use a variety of tools on my mobile devices (such as Flipboard, Currents, Pulse, etc.) to read my feeds, and use Google Reader as the intermediary for managing my large number of RSS feeds. I suspect I will be reluctant to wish to manage my subscriptions across a range of clients. For me, as for many others who have been commenting on blogs today, Google Reader has been the ideal tool.

What conclusions can we reach about the role of Web standards in light of Google’s announcement?

The view that open standards protected the user from the vagaries of the market place seems to be undermined – in reality it seems that users grow to love tools which are embedded in daily use.

It also appears that successful applications not only attract large numbers of users; successful applications can also attract developers and companies who can develop an ecosphere of applications which are dependent on services such as Google Reader.

It also seems that social sharing services are undermining the use of RSS for bringing relevant content to users. Perhaps related to this will be the difficulties companies will have in monetising RSS feeds.

It is interesting to see the arguments which have been made in the Hitler parody: Hitler finds out Google Reader is shutting down which is available on YouTube and embedded below. I’d be interested in other’s thoughts on the reasons for the closure of Google Reader and the implications of this announcement.

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Google Street View inside Sheffield University Information Commons

Last month, Sheffield University became the first University to have Google Street View inside one of their buildings. So far, the ground and first floor of the university’s flagship learning space, the Information Commons has been mapped out, with more buildings on their way.

To see the imagery, just drag the little man into the building or you can go directly to it. Don’t forget to explore both floors by going up or down the stairs.

Once more buildings have been made live on Street View, each building will be embedded into the university’s website, along with integration into the University’s Facebook page.

Edward Photographing Street View inside Sheffield University Information Commons

Google started to roll out Google Street View inside buildings about a year and a half ago, initially just in the United States and now have a roster of “Google-Trusted photographers” across several countries who are able to photograph the Street View imagery.

In addition to photographing Street View imagery, photographers also take still photos around each venue for use in any offline and online marketing and are uploaded to your Google Place Page to help improve a building or businesses’ web presence and SEO.

After what began with a few streets in the States 5 years ago, Street View has now expanded to 5 million miles of road across 48 countries with 96% coverage of all roads in the UK. We can travel from the Rainforest to the Grand Canyon; from caves in Japan to a hut in the Antarctic in a matter of seconds. It allows us to visit places halfway across the globe that are inaccessible, either because of time, money or practicality.

For universities, this means prospective students who are unable to visit a university in person are able to gauge a feeling for the environment from the comfort of their homes on their computer or mobile device. For international students particularly, this could be an invaluable resource. In a world becoming increasingly digital, Street View allows universities to celebrate, promote and attract people to their physical home, online.

Edward Miller, a graduate from the University of Sheffield, started a business producing interactive photography in his third year of University whilst reading Philosophy and Psychology. He specializes in large scale ‘gigapixel’ photos that can be tagged through Facebook and is trusted by Google to produce Street View imagery. Since leaving university, he as built a client list including The Mail, ESPN, Press Association and Vogue.

Contact Details

Website: www.reaxive.com
Email: edward@reaxive.com
Telephone: +44 (0)20 3397 7989

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Whilst preparing a follow-up post on institutional repositories I started to explore the data which has been collected by the JISC-funded CORE project. The CORE (COnnecting REpositories) project aims to “facilitate free access to scholarly publications distributed across many systems“. The CORE Web site, which was developed at the Open University, provides access to four applications including:

Repository Analytics - A tool that enables to monitor the ingestion of metadata and content from repositories and provides a wide range of statistics.

I wanted to use this service to find information about the repositories provided by the 24 Russell Group universities. However, as can be seen from the accompanying screenshot, it was not easy to associate a repository with its host institution.

The first four examples illustrate the difficulties I had in using the information. The first entry, for the Aberdeen University Research Archive, gives a clear indication of the host institution. The second example, Abertay Research Collections, is somewhat more obscure, unless you know that Abertay is the name of a Scottish university. However the next two examples, Access to Research Resources for Teachers and Advanced Knowledge Technologies EPrints Archive, give no clue as to the host institution.

This meant that browsing the list was not an effective way of finding the repositories for the Russell Group universities. In addition the search interface was misleading: a search for “Southampton” enabled me to find eCrystals – Southampton and Electronics & Computer Science EPrints Service – University of Southampton - but not the main repository which has the name e-Prints Soton.

Using CORE to Search for Russell Group University Repositories

Despite the limitations caused by the lack of institutional identifiers I felt it would be useful to discover information held about Russell Group university repositories, based on a search of the CORE system using the obvious name for the host institution. The following table summarises the findings for a survey carried out on 21 February 2013 using the search term given in the second column.

Note that the Repository Analytics page does not appear to provide a formal definition of the data collected. However from hovering over the accompanying icon for the entries it appears that the Metadata Download column gives the number of metadata records, the Metadata Readable column gives the number of links extracted from the metadata and the PDF Download column the number of PDFs which were downloaded.

Discussion

It is difficult to interpret the data given in the table: the entry for the UCL Discovery repository, for example, tells us that there are 0 metadata records, with 245407 links having been extracted from these records and 2 PDFs downloaded!

However the table does suggest patterns of naming conventions for institutional repositories, such as the institutional name being provided at the beginning (“University of Birmingham Research Archive, E-prints Repository“, “University of Liverpool Research Archive” and “LSE Research Online”) or end of the repository name (“EPrints at the Centre for Scientific Computing, University of Warwick“, “Electronics & Computer Science EPrints Service - University of Southampton” and “Computer Laboratory Technical Reports - Cambridge University“) together with a large number of examples which use a partial form of the institution’s name (e.g. “Edinburgh Research Archive”, “Glasgow DSpace Service” and “Manchester eScholar Services“).

But of greater interest are the institutional repositories which have been harvested by CORE but are missing from this search such as “e-Prints Soton” and the “White Rose E-theses Online” and “White Rose Research Online” repositories which are used by the universities of Leeds, York and Sheffield.

Whilst the ownership of a repository will be apparent to the end user who access the service via the main entry point (perhaps from the institution’s Library Web site) in a number of cases such information is not apparent when the repository has been harvested and accessed using other systems such as, in this case, the interface developed by the CORE project.

In light of the findings from a survey of Russell group Universities, I would make the following simple recommendation:

Institutional repositories should contain the name of the host institution.

In order to illustrate the need for such a recommendation, here are a list of repositories which have been harvested by CORE:

Access to Research Resources for Teachers - Department of Computer Science E-Repository - Enlighten - Modern Languages Publications Archive - Online Publications Store - Open Research Online - Pharmacy Eprints

If you are unfamiliar with these repositories, would you to able to guess who owns them?

Or, to put it another way, meaningful metadata is important for repositories!

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The article described how:

This week we report on a 22 per cent rise in the sums spent by universities on direct marketing to students in 2011-12, with many planning to increase this further.

and went on to draw comparisons between the changing funding environment in the UK’s higher education sector and the US higher education marketplace:

According to a recent estimate reported by Reuters, the for-profit University of Phoenix, whose owner Apollo Group also controls BPP University College in the UK, was at one point spending nearly $400,000 (£254,000) a day on online adverts targeted at students.

In the UK:

There is little doubt that as far as universities in England are concerned, marketing to and competition for students are now far more pressing concerns than they once were. … The vice-chancellor of one Russell Group university confided that his institution had simply not anticipated the rapid impact of the government’s reforms, and had almost expected “business as usual” – a mistake he would not be making again.

In some quarters, some comments would be regarded with misgivings, since it would appear that scarce resources are being diverted from provision of front-line services. However I myself feel that marketing is important. In the context of research, for example we are seeing how social media services can enable researchers themselves to being their research papers to the attention of their peers, and engage in discussions about the ideas provided in the papers. Melissa Terras’s post on The verdict: is blogging or tweeting about research papers worth it? provided concrete advice for researchers based on her experiences:

If you want people to find and read your research, build up a digital presence in your discipline, and use it to promote your work when you have something interesting to share.

But although social media services enable researchers to promote their work with an authentic voice and engage in open discussions with their peers and other interested parties, there are dangers that traditional marketing departments who have a product (the institution) to promote will misuse social media services, in which there may be expectations of authenticity, openness, transparency, engagement and speed of response which may not be the case with traditional marketing channels.

In addition to such concerns I think we should be worried that the financial pressures on the sector will lead to a loss of openness and transparency and the sharing of practices which has characterised working in a public sector environment in which discussions of best practices for developing innovative approaches to teaching and learning and research have helped to develop better understanding and inform the deployment of new practices.

Innovation is defined in Wikipedia as “the development of new values through solutions that meet new needs, inarticulate needs, or old customer and market needs in value adding new ways“. As part of our work with the JISC Observatory we have sought to identify ‘weak signals’ which can help to identify early indications of developments which can be beneficial to the sector. In occurs to me, however, that there is also a need to identify signals which may suggest developments which may meet meet needs which we may question the value of. Is the need for institutions to give a positive portrayal of their activities to be welcomed, if this means that activities which could be improved cease to be discussed? Are we seeing any ‘anti-patterns’ in which marketing activities are hindering approaches to openness?

How significant is use of third-party repository services?

In a recent post I explained Why I’m Evaluating ResearchGate. In the post I summarised the reasons why I felt that researchgate.net could provide an additional service for depositing research papers which would complement Opus, the University of Bath institutional repository. But what others services might also be relevant? And which services are hosting the largest numbers of research papers?

In order to seek answers to these questions, I used Google to provide a measure of the size of a number of hosting services for PDFs and the number of PDFs they host. The services I analysed were:

• Researchgate.net: This site is described in Wikipedia as “a social networking site for scientists and researchers to share papers, ask and answer questions, and find collaborators. The site has been described as a mash-up of “Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn” that includes “profile pages, comments, groups, job listings, and ‘like’ and ‘follow’ buttons”. Members are encouraged to share raw data and failed experiment results as well as successes, in order to avoid repeating their peers’ scientific research mistakes.“
• Academia.edu: This site is described in Wikipedia as “a platform for academics to share research papers. It was launched in September 2008. Currently the site is approaching 2 million registered users.^[2] The platform can be used to share papers, monitor their impact, and follow the research in a particular field.“
• Mendeley.com: Thus site is described in Wikipedia as “a desktop and web program for managing and sharing research papers,^[2] discovering research data and collaborating online. It combines Mendeley Desktop, a PDF and reference management application (available for Windows, Mac and Linux) with Mendeley Web, an online social network for researchers.^[3][4][5] Mendeley requires the user to store all basic citation data on its servers – storing copies of documents is at the user’s discretion“.
• Citeulike.org: This site is described in Wikipedia as “based on the principle of social bookmarking [the service] is aimed to promote and to develop the sharing of scientific references amongst researchers. In the same way that it is possible to catalog web pages (with Furl and del.icio.us) or photographs (with Flickr), scientists can share information on academic papers with specific tools (like CiteULike) developed for that purpose“.
• Scribd.com: This site is described in Wikipedia as “a document-sharing website that allows users to post documents of various formats, and embed them into a web page using its iPaper format“.

Many researchers will probably be familiar with the first four services listed. The fifth service, scribd.com, is included in order to explore whether a general-purpose PDF repository service could have a role to play in supporting the sharing of research publications.

Findings for the Coverage of the Services

Google was used in order to provide an estimate of the coverage of the services, including the total number of resources which have been indexed by Google and the number of PDF files. The findings are given in the following table. Note that the figures were initially collected on 6 February 2013. In order to check the volatility of the findings the searches were repeated on 11 February.

It seems that Scribd hosts a very large number of resources (although a finding of 3 PDF resources originally found was discarded as the results seemed to be unreliable).

However since Scribd is a general purpose repository service, it was felt that ResearchGate provides a repository of a large number of PDFs resources which are more relevant for researchers. In light of this confirmation of the popularity of Researchgate an additional survey was carried out which reported on use of the service across Russell Group universities.

Findings for Institutional Use of Academic.edu and Researchgate

On 1 August 2012 a Survey of Use of Researcher Profiling Services Across the 24 Russell Group Universities was published on this blog. This survey has been repeated in order to detect changes in the use of ResearchGate. Since the original survey also provided an analysis of Academia.edu, this was also included in the current survey. The results are given in the following table. Note that the data is also available in Google Spreadsheets.

Note: *  As described in the previous survey the numbers of Academia.edu members is obtained by entering the name of the institution in the search box.

Conclusions

Nos. of items deposited in Researchgate in Aug 2012 (blue) & Feb 2013 (red)

Nos. of Researchgate Members in Aug 2012 (blue) & Feb 2013 (red)

As illustrated in the accompanying diagrams it seems that the numbers of researchers who have signed up for a ResearchGate account has grown significantly over the past six months, and now stands at over 33,000 users, a growth of 82.7%. The numbers of papers which have been deposited by researchers at Russell Group universities has also grown to a total of over 477, 000 items. However since this represents a growth of 11.9% over six months it suggests that new members are providing metadata records only and not depositing the full text.

I therefore conclude that the conclusions I reached in my post which explained Why I’m Evaluating ResearchGate were correct and ResearchGate is a service which I should use not only to provide a presence about my research activities but also to host my research papers. I do wonder, though, whether the large numbers of items which have been deposited in ResearchGate is due to promotion of the service with the Russell Group universities or represents a bottom-up approach, in which researchers have recognised the benefits of the service and recommended it to their peers?

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I #lovelibraries because they welcomed me as a child, educated me as a teenager and sustain me as an adult. #NLD13

Since it is National Libraries Day it was appropriate to see see a tweet which referenced a recent talk by Lorcan Dempsey, former UKOLN Director. In a recent talk presented at the Bobcatsss 2013 conference in Ankara last month Lorcan Dempsey revisited the concept of the Inside Out Library. Lorcan described how this was an idea he has spoken about previously, and cited his presentations on “The Inside Out Library: Libraries in the Age of Amazoogle” (MS PowerPoint format) presented at the 34th LIBER Conference in July 2005 and “The Library and the Network: Flattening the Library and Turning It Inside Out” (MS PowerPoint format) presented at the ACCESS 2005 Conference in October 2005.

In the slides Lorcan provided the following quotation from Seán O’Faoláin written in 1994:

 People should think not so much of the books that have gone into the National Library but rather of the books that have come out of it. A library, after all, feeds the people that go in there. 

A little research showed that Lorcan used this in a paper on Library places and digital information spaces: reflections on emerging network services in Alexandria, 11(1), 1999 – and a preprint of the paper is available on the UKOLN Web site.

Although it is 19 years since Seán O’Faoláin made this observation, Lorcan’s thoughts on the importance of revisiting not so much the resources in the library (which were physical objects in the 1990s) but on the ways in which the needs of library users are being addressed is particularly true in today’s political, economic and technical environment.

It is now several years since the “Library 2.0” term was coined but I do wonder the extent to which Library 2.0 which have been adopted in libraries are restricted to syndication technologies, such as RSS, and the notion as “the Web as the platform” is being lost, as libraries seek to replicate functionality at a local level and fail to gain the benefits of scale which working at a global level could provide.

To updated Seán O’Faoláin quotation for National Libraries day in 2013, should we not be saying:

 People should think not so much of the technologies that have gone into the Library but rather of the global technologies that come out of it. A library, after all, feeds the people that go in there. 

I should add that I appreciate that for public libraries in particular there will be a need to ensure that appropriate physical resources are provided. But aren’t things different in academic libraries?

Lorcan’s slides are available on Slideshare and embedded below:

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In a recent post which explained Why I’m Now Embedding ORCID Metadata in PDFs I described my intentions to ensure that my research papers contains rich embedded metadata to held enhance the discoverability of the publications, ensure that authorship is asserted (by embedding the ORCID ID of the authors of the papers) and ensure that embedded images contain descriptions which help ensure that the content can be understood by visually impaired readers. In addition I wish to ensure that the PDF is stored in PDF/A format which provides a more preservable format.

In light of discussions on the blog and on email I have decided to embed the ORCID IDs for co-authors of my peer-reviewed papers although, as suggested by Geoffery Bilder, I will be embedding the HTTP URI version of the ORCID IDs (e.g. http://orcid.org/0000-0001-5875-8744) rather than just the ORCID ID itself (0000-0001-5875-8744). In addition I will also be embedding the DOI for papers which have been assigned a DOI.

But I am now faced with the problem of where the paper should be hosted. This post summarises the processes I am using in the selection of an appropriate repository service to complement my institutional repository.

Selection Processes

As described previously workflow processes used in the creation of cover sheets for items hosted in our repository means that metadata embedded in PDFs is lost. Although we’re having discussions with repository staff about this, it occurred to me that I now have an ideal opportunity to make use of a third-party repository service.

In the past I have normally deposited papers in my institutional repository and used third-party services (such as ResearchGate and academia.edu) to host the metadata, with links being provided to the full-text of the papers hosted in the institutional repository. The main reason for doing this was to ensure that usage statistics for accesses of the full-text was available in a single location rather than being fragmented across a range of services. There was a need to minimise the effort in collating such statistics for the product of evidence reports of our work which our funders have required in the past. However in light of the recent announcement of the cessation of core-funding for UKOLN, this is no longer a priority! Indeed it is now important to ensure that ideas described in peer-reviewed papers are widely disseminated.

Using ResearchGate

Having recognised the value of hosting PDF copies of my papers on a third-party repository service the question then was which one to select. The key criteria used in the selection were:

• Easy to upload files.
• Popular with readers.
• Resource is easily found using Google.
• PDF files preserved intact.
• Service appears to be viable.

On 25 December 2012 I received an automated email from ResearchGate which informed me that “28 of your colleagues from University of Bath have joined ResearchGate in the last month“. On 24 January 2013 an automated message announced “44 of your colleagues recently joined ResearchGate“. As illustrated the University of Bath”s entry of ResearchGate shows that there are currently researchers from 26 departments who have uploaded a total of 7,263 publications. It seems ResearchGate is growing in popularity, at least at the University of Bath.

On 20 December 2012 I was notified of the numbers of views of my papers (or, more accurately, the numbers of views of the metadata for my papers): “Your published research was viewed 1,678 times in 2012” so perhaps ResearchGate is popular beyond the University of Bath!

In light of the apparent popularity of the service I decided to upload one of my papers to the service: the PDF copy of the paper on “Developing A Holistic Approach For E-Learning Accessibility“.

It was trivial to upload the paper, especially as the associated metadata had been created previously. I then downloaded the PDF and was able to confirm that the metadata was still embedded in the PDF resource.

The paper can be accessed from ResearchGate and the user interface is shown below. I’ll leave others to judge the usability of the service.

Page on ResearchGate for one of my papers

But in addition to users who are linked directly to the paper or access resources on the ResearchGate service using the Web site’s browse and search functionality, what of the discoverability of resources using Google.

ResearchGate, Google and Embedded Metadata

The PDF version of the paper now contains content which will not be widely used elsewhere: a combination of the authors’ names and their ORCID ID. A Google search for “Brian Kelly ORCID: 0000-0001-5875-8744“, “Lawrie Phipps ORCID: 0000-0002-0834-273X” or Elaine Swift ORCID: 0000-0002-6101-6861“ should initially find information about the paper hosted on the UKOLN Web site, the UK Web Focus blog and other services which may be used by the co-authors, although not the institutional repository as this does not currently provide ORCID information (understandably, as ORCID is so new).

I have therefore provided links to the following Google searches which I will monitor to see when Google has indexed the PDFs hosted on ResearchGate:

It appears that over a period of a week the ORCID metadata is being found from citation records hosted on the UKOLN Web site together with the citation records already indexed on the ORCID Web site and this blog, but not yet the PDF files hosted on ResearchGate. Might this be due to Google not indexing the researchgate.net site? In order to answer this question Google was used to provide information on the total number of resources on the service and the total number of PDF files. The results are given below.

* The numbers of search results have fluctuated from 24,100,000 – 55,300,000 during the last few days.

It seems that a large number of PDF files hosted on Researchgate have been indexed by Google, but it takes longer than a week for new resources to be indexed and the results found using a Google search.

Sustainability of the Service

What Does The Evidence Say?

The home page for the service displays a graphic (to users who are not logged in) of the numbers of the service. It seems that 2.4 million users have subscribed. Since there are likely to be researchers, this does appear to be a significant number.

But what else do we know about the service and the company which provides the service? TechCrunch provides a handful of posts about the company together with the following summary:

ResearchGate is the leading social network for scientists. It offers tools and applications for researchers to interact and collaborate. ResearchGate offers a social, crowdsourced platform designed for researchers. The platform provides a global scientific web-based environment in which scientists can interact, exchange knowledge and collaborate with researchers of different fields.

The results of ResearchGate’s new search engine, called ReFind, are not merely based on keywords, but selected in an intelligent way based on semantic, contextual correlations.

In addition the article also provides a graph showing the numbers of users over the past year, based on figures provided by Compete.

As can be seen, the numbers of unique visitors seem to be growing significantly, from 61,640K in December 2011 to 236,170K in December 2012.

I also used MajesticSEO to report on the SEO characteristics of the service (note free subscription required in order to view findings). As can be seen there are 7,459 domains which have links to Researchgate.net and a total of 177,945 backlinks. Although such figures need to be regarded with caution (for example, they can be skewed significantly by link spam) the number of links from educational domains (3,241) and the numbers of educational domains (551) may be more appropriate to measure, due to the difficulties in creating educations domains to host link farms. This snapshot may therefore provide a useful baseline for measuring changes in the link popularity in the service.

Terms and Conditions

It should be noted that looking at the ResearchGate terms and conditions I found no suggestions that the company claims rights to sell my data or my attention data to others (although I haven’t studied the terms and conditions in great detail). Although some may welcome this, others may wonder what the business model for the company is. An article entitled ResearchGate Wants To Be Facebook For Scientists published by Forbes in March 2012 described how:

“ResearchGate will also be looking into ways to monetize its platform. The “no-brainer” way to do that, in Madisch’s words, is to provide job boards for scientists looking for jobs. Universities and companies would pay the site to place listings. The company is also looking for ways to partner with other companies that manufacture and sell biotech lab equipment, as well as several other different programs.”

 Perhaps this is an appropriate business model which will accepted by researchers who normally shy away from free services on the grounds that “If You’re Not Paying for It; You’re the Product“.

Interest in UK HE Sector

Although ResearchGate seems to be growing in popularity globally (and in the University of Bath) is there any evidence of interest with the UK’s higher education community? For me this is not necessarily a significant issue (it can be fine to be an early adopter) but it would be interesting to see what others in my community are saying about the service.

Using a Google search for “researchgate terms and conditions“ I found that the DCC have provided a summary of ResearchGate in its list of resources of digital curators with a similar resource being provided by the University of Edinburgh’s College of Humanities and Social Science. A Google search for “researchgate UK“ finds a number of additional resources from the sector including pages provided by the University of Leeds (PDF format), the University of Leicester, the University of Liverpool (PDF format) and the University of Gloucester together with blog posts at the University of Loughborough and the University of Warwick.

My Decision

In light of these figures and my experiences in using the service I am happy to use the service to provide additional exposure to my research papers which complements the master copy of papers which are hosted on my institutional repository. Are other researchers making similar decisions or are alternative services felt to provide better options?

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Back in July 1997 UKOLN held the first IWMW (Institutional Web Management Workshop) event. The event aimed to share examples of best practices and innovation for those involved in providing institutional Web services.

D0 you remember what your institution’s home page looked like in 1997? Back in 2002 we set up a service which provides a rolling display of University home pages. We subsequently used the same tool to provide a rolling display of University home pages taken from the Internet Archive.

It is therefore possible to see how University home pages looked before the first IWMW event took place and to compare this with how the pages look today.

How We Are Today

The following rolling displays show how Web sites look today:

• Institutional home pages
• Institutional 404 pages

• Library home pages
• Institutional Web gateways

Note that if links are broken this indicates that the URL of the original Web page no longer exists. It is interesting to note the high profile that was given to the provision to institutional Web gateways ten years ago; nowadays institutional Web sites are more likely, I suspect, tow ish visitors to stay on the Web sites with links to interesting resources elsewhere being minimised.

I should also add that historical displays which show the evolution of the home page are available for the following institutions:

• University of Bath
• University of Oxford
• JISC

Looking Forward to the Future

The theme of the IWMW 2013 event is “What Next?“. We are currently inviting submissions for talks and workshop sessions which will be of interest to those involved in the provision of institutional Web services. Participants will be interested in looking to the future and to hear about approaches to the management of large-scale institutional Web services which are applicable in today’s environment.

It seems to me that it would be useful to look into the lessons which can be learnt from the history of institutional Web development when making plans for the future. I hope the resources mentioned above will be useful for those who wish to travel back in time and see how Web sites have evolved over the past 17 years.

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Yesterday a post of mine entitled “Why every researcher should sign up for their ORCID ID” was republished on the LSE Impact of Social Sciences blog. The announcement made by @lseimpactblog was subsequently widely retweeted, as illustrated.

It was subsequently pointed out the sentence contained a grammatical error: “every researcher” is singular and therefore shouldn’t be followed by a plural form of the pronoun: “their ORCID ID“. Coincidentally yesterday I came across as tweet which linked to the announcement that “The [University of Washington] Daily adopts gender-neutral pronoun“. I responded to the tweet questioning whether this was a wise decision:

Univ of WA adopts gender neutral pronouns – they as singular pronoun: ow.ly/hgwD6 Surely a thumbs down?

In response it seems that several people were in agreement with the decision taken at the University of Washington that “The Daily will join the efforts of these organizations by implementing gender-neutral language, using “they” as a singular pronoun when applicable“. I received several responses shortly after publishing my tweet:

• It was good enough for Jane Austen! :)
• Meh. It’s been around since at least 1595 – better than ubiquitous ‘he’, generally less clumsy than ‘he/she’, so why not?
• I use ‘they’ as a gender neutral pronoun. Better than s/he surely?
• why? I can live with it for the sake of less gendered conversations (and have been doing it for years anyway)

However one person made the point that:

• I really HATE the use of “they” as a singular pronoun!

I would agree with the view that “Why every researcher should sign up for his/her ORCID ID” is ugly. I also feel that “Why every researcher should sign up for his ORCID ID” is sexist and “Why every researcher should sign up for her ORCID ID” seeks to make a political point which, although I might be sympathetic towards, will distract from the purpose of the sentence.

In light of the comments and subsequent discussion on Twitter this morning I now realise that I agree that this construct is now acceptable. However as a comment made on the English StackExchange forum put it:

It’s not ungrammatical per se on the basis of analysis of actual usage using reasonable linguistic methods. But use it at your own risk of being criticized by the self-righteous but misinformed.

The question seems to no longer a question of one’s understanding correct and incorrect language use but one’s willingness to potentially alienate the “self-righteous but misinformed“. And note that before anyone suggests that there is no such things as incorrect language use I’ll highlight a tweet I saw this morning which provided an ironical perspective on language misuse:

Somewhere, someone who writes “should of” instead of “should have” gets paid more than me.

The particular example discussed in this post clearly has ‘political’ connotations as one form which was popular in the past makes 50% of the population invisible (it was interesting to observe, y the way, that 4 of the 5 initial responses were from women). It would be possible to sidestep such controversy by restructuring the sentence e.g. “Why all researcher should sign up for an ORCID ID” or “Why all researchers should sign up for their ORCID ID“. But what about the more general question regarding changing rules of grammar?

“Data Is” or “Data Are”?

As recorded in a Storify summary of the subsequent Twitter discussion, last year a reviewer of a paper which asked “Can Linkedin and Academia.edu Enhance Access to Open Repositories?” commented that:

“the word ‘data’ is still a plural noun, no matter how many times people may erroneously use it in the singular“

Myself and my co-author Jenny Delasalle disagreed and the paper was published containing the sentence:

As described by Delasalle [8] the data for Academia.edu was obtained by entering the institution’s name in the search box; the number of entries were then displayed

But what if reviewers or editors insist that text must conform with specific house rules in order for a submitted article to be published? Should one’s approach to writing and grammar be based on one’s own views on what is appropriate or on what may be appropriate for the readers? And if that latter, whose opinions should one prioritise: the editors and reviewers or general readers?

It seems to me that it can be helpful to gauge opinion on such matters. I have therefore set up two surveys to solicit views on whether the following grammatical constructs are felt to be appropriate in scholarly works: “Anyone who loves the English language should have a copy of this book in their bookcase” and (b) “The data was obtained from an online survey“.

I invite responses to the survey and comments on this topic.

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This report, which provides a close look at three institutions (UCL, Imperial War Museums and the National Library of Wales) in the United Kingdom confirms:

• How fragmented the digital landscape is at universities and within other organisations.
• How there are examples of good practice within and outside higher education that all can learn from but that greater co-ordination is required to deliver this at a UK level.
• How little the topic of post-build sustainability comes up at the higher levels of administration.
• How risk is present within the current system, concerning the sustainability of digital content.

The report (which is available in PDF format) is substantial, containing 88 pages. In addition to this main report a second document (also available in PDF format) provides a “Sustainability Health Check Tool for Digital Content Projects“.

This report is very timely arriving at a time in which we are seeing reductions in the levels of funding available across public sector organisations in the UK, which will lead to questions regarding the sustainability of existing online services and digital resources.

The report is based on a study conducted by Ithaka S+R, with funding from the Jisc-led Strategic Content Alliance, which reported on findings of earlier studies showing that both funders and project leaders rely heavily on their host institutions to support and sustain digital content, beyond the end of the grant. But what will happen when the host institutions have significantly reduced levels of funding to continue to maintain and develop such content?

The report describes the need for an “early and honest appraisal of which projects are likely to require .. support post-launch“:

• Digital content, requiring just “maintenance”: These may not require ongoing growth, but certainly do require a clear exit plan to ensure that the content will be smoothly deposited and integrated into some other site, database, or repository. The issue of ongoing investment does not disappear; it just becomes the concern of the larger platform on which this piece of content now lives.
• Digital resources, requiring ongoing growth and investment: These require early sustainability planning, including identifying institutional or other partners and careful consideration of the full range of costs and activities needed to keep the resource vibrant.

The Sustainability Health Check Tool provides a paper-based checklist for those with responsibilities for managing digital content. The tool covers a number of areas including ongoing support; audience, usage and impact assessment together with preservation issues.

A series of video clips have been produced to accompany the launch of this report. It was particularly interesting to hear the comment from Prof David Price, Vice-Provost (Research) at UCL:

“We’re not just worried about things disappearing but about things never appearing! They are hosted all over the place, and not all the projects have a sustainable plan.”

This video clip is available on YouTube and embedded below.

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The day after announcing a post on Reflections on the Discussion on the Quality of Embedded Metadata in PDFs I received a tweet from @community which alerted me to a blog post on SEO Action for PDF files on the Adobe blog. The post describes an extension for use in Acrobat X Pro which automates the settings of the properties of the PDF file in accordance with guidelines which can enhance the discoverability of PDF files by Google. The guidelines, which had been published way back in August 2009, were based on experiments which demonstrated improvements in Google’s indexing of PDF files. The article’s main conclusion was that “Every PDF needs a title“:

In terms of PDF files, the blue underlined text in Google’s search results comes from one of two places. First, Google looks in the “Title” document information field. If it finds nothing, Google’s indexer tries to guess the document’s title by scanning the text on the first few pages. This usually doesn’t work, producing incorrect and improperly formatted results.

In addition to this advice, the article also suggested use of other metadata fields including author, subjects and keywords.

Metadata For Peer-Reviewed Papers

Although I ensure that I provide the correct title for my peer-reviewed papers when I create them in MS Word I was unsure whether I included the names of the co-authors or made use of other metadata fields.

On Friday 25 January 2013 I decided to update the metadata for one of my papers, ”Developing A Holistic Approach For E-Learning Accessibility” which was the first paper myself, Lawrie Phipps and Elaine Swift wrote back in 2004

I added a number of tags to the paper and used the Comments field to provide the abstract. In addition the publication details were added to the Status field.

Whilst updating the metadata it occurred to me that it would be useful to include the ORCID ID for the authors as this will be less volatile than the author’s email address (one of the co-authors was based at the University of Bath when the paper was published but subsequently moved to Nottingham Trent University).

In addition to the resource discovery metadata for the paper I also remembered that I should ensure that images in the paper contained appropriate alt text so that image descriptions are available to those who may make use of a screen reader. Fortunately we had done this for the paper, but I have to admit that this isn’t necessarily done for all of my research papers.

Having updated the metadata for the paper and embedded images I then created the PDF from MS Word. I noticed that the Save As PDF option in MS Word enabled a number of options to be specified, including Save As ISO-19005 (PDF/A).

As described in Wikipedia PDF/A is “an ISO-standardized version of the Portable Document Format (PDF) specialized for the digital preservation of electronic documents“. The articles goes on to explain that “PDF/A differs from PDF by omitting features ill-suited to long-term archiving, such as font linking (as opposed to font embedding)“.

Since the digital preservation of peer-reviewed publications is important I ensured that I saved the paper in PDF/A format, using the Save As option illustrated.

Approaches to Embedded Metadata Embedded in PDFs

What practices should be used in providing the metadata to be created in the original authoring tool (MS Word, in my case) which will then be available in the PDF version of the paper? Here’s a summary of the approaches I have used:

Title: The title of the paper

Tags: My preferred tags about the content and my organisation.

Comments: The abstract of the paper, normally taken from the abstract provided in the paper.

Author: First Name Surname (ORCID: ORCID ID) e.g. Brian Kelly (ORCID: 0000-0001-5875-8744)

The title field will be obvious. The tags will reflect keywords which I feel will enhance access to the document (and I choose less than five). I am using the comments field to host the abstract for the paper. Finally the author field contains the full name followed by ORCID: ORCID ID (in brackets). I feel that this is a pragmatic approach to ensuring that the significant information which will be indexed by Google is found in the metadata fields which are available through my authoring tool (MS Word).

But could this cause problems? Might Google think my name is Mr Orcid or Mr 0000-0001-5875-8744? Might other indexing and aggregation tools have problems as I am misusing the semantics of these metadata tools? My feeling is that Google will be capable of understanding the content and it is better to have such quality metadata (which I have chosen) rather than no metadata. But are other researchers embedding ORCID IDs in PDFs? In order to answer this question I have using Google’s advanced search capability to search for “ORCID” in PDF resources across a number of domains, as summarised below.

These numbers are low – and when you realise that the results include PDFs which contain the string “ORCID” in the text of the pages (as illustrated) it seems clear that there is little evidence that ORCID IDs are being embedded in PDFs yet.

So before I embed ORCID IDs in my other papers I would welcome feedback on this proposal. Is it desirable to include the ORCID IDs of authors in the PDF versions of papers? If so, is the approach I have taken to be recommended to others? Or might it be desirable to provided richer structured metadata in PDF files, using the XMP (Extensible Metadata Platform) standard? But if this is felt to be desirable, how would it fit into the workflow, given that it appears difficult to persuade authors to provide metadata for their papers in any case?

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Yesterday Twitter announced Vine: A new way to share video. As described in a TechCrunch article “[Vine] integrates with Twitter in the same way that Instagram does, except that Vine never turned off permissions randomly, meaning that Vine videos can be embedded directly in tweets, showing up in followers’ streams“. An article in the Guardian explains how “Vine clips automatically play when embedded in tweets, although their sound is turned off by default. The clips also play within Twitter’s official mobile app. Users can add locations to their clips – the app draws on Foursquare’s places database for that – with three options for sharing: Vine, Twitter and/or Facebook.” The Guardian article instantly attracted comments on how Vine might be (mis-used):

• Sexting app
• Advert app
• oh no it’s the video equivalent of gifs, twitter is gonna become as annoying as tumblr is with these.

although others provided more thoughtful responses:

As with everything, it’s all about how you leverage the technology. 
Yes, for the most part, this app will feature videos of no importance whatsoever, but there will, as always, be some gems in the dirt.

Leaving that aside, you have to remember that with Twitter, many people end up forming a close circle of people they meet physically in the real world – so Twitter augments that. 
I don’t give a damn about someone I’ve never mets photo of their dog on twitter, but I do care if a friend of mine posts a picture of their dog.

The same applies to tweeting – to most people, the “Did xyz run in xyz area this morning, totally knackered” is completely meaningless and banal. But to this persons friends, it’s likely to promote conversation when they next meet. “Saw your tweet Dave, how was the run down at xyz? Did a run there recently” …

So, before you instantly dismiss tech such as this, perhaps give it a *little* more thought?

I would agree that we should give a little more thought to the implications of new technologies, especially their potential in higher education.

Initial Experiments

Earlier today I installed the Vine app on by iPod Touch and recorded a number of video clips. I asked what could be said in 6 seconds (partly to get a feel for what could be said in such a brief period. In my second video clip I said “E=MC² and the DNA is a double helix” to illustrate how important scientific concepts could be described using the Vine app. By then I had gained some familiarity with the app. In my third post I described what I liked about the app: being able to stop and start reshooting by simply removed my finger for the screen. My four post described what I didn’t like – the lack of support for the iPod Touch’s forward-facing camera.

I then started to write this post – and discovered that I couldn’t find the URL for the video clips I had created and uploaded to Vine. I can view the videos using the Vine app and people who follow me on Vine will see the videos in their Vine timeline but it seems as though they are not available via a Web interface; this was confirmed by Giles Turnbull, one of my Twitter followers who is also experimenting with Vine: “only way to find out the URL of your Vine post is to share it somewhere. if you choose not to share, or forget, you can’t find it on the web“.

I therefore created another clip which is available online. However there does not appear to be a Web interface to my Vine profile, so I can’t access my clips via a Web browser in order to change access rights, delete videos, manage Vine followers, etc.

Perhaps it is unfair to be too critical of the limitations of the initial release of the app: these short=-comings may be remedied in a subsequent release. However I thought I would summarise my initial experiments for others who may wish to evaluate the app. And rather than describe possible use cases for 6-second long video clips in higher education I’d welcome suggestions. If you’d rather not describe possible uses, perhaps you may wish to complete the poll on whether you think Vine has a role to play in higher education.

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A few days ago I received the following email from Instagram:

As we announced in December, we have updated our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. These policies also now take into account the feedback we received from the Instagram Community. We’re emailing you to remind you that, as we announced last month, these updated policies will be in effect as of January 19th, 2013. 

That’s right, as of Saturday 19^th January 2013, the new terms and conditions come into operation.

Did you delete your Instragram account before Christmas, once you saw the tweets and the blog posts about how Instagram intended to sell the photos you have taken of your loved ones? Perhaps you made a new year’s resolution to cancel subscriptions to services for which you don’t pay a subscription, so that “you’re the product“. Or maybe you have taken the opportunity to delete accounts which you simply don’t use perhaps Google+ appeared promising when it was launched but it hasn’t found a place in your regular workflow.

Are You Making An Informed Decision?

Is your decision based on a correct understanding of the appropriate policies? Are you aware of the possible risks in deleting social media account?

Back in April 2012 a post which asked Have You Got Your Free Google Drive, Skydrive & Dropbox Accounts? was written in response to a tweet from @sydlawrence which said:

Holy crap. Google owns everything on google drive. Tell me a business that will use it… cl.ly/1W2h1A163p0W2A … 

which linked to the following screenshot of the Google Drive terms and conditions:

The screenshot quite clearly states that “You retain ownership of any intellectual property that you hold in that content. In short, what belongs to you stays yours“. It’s therefore not surprising that the image was subsequently deleting – but not before the post was retweeted 1,109 times and favourited by 115 Twitter users!

This provides a good example of how an incorrect summary (whether through a mistake or malicious intent) of the terms and conditions of a service can be easily repeated and, through Twitter’s power in viral communications, lead to such misinformation being widely accepted as the truth.

The situation with Instragram is not as clear-cut since the company have admitted their failings:

it became clear that we failed to fulfill what I consider one of our most important responsibilities – to communicate our intentions clearly 

and explained how, in the light of user feedback (emphasis provided in original):

we are reverting … to the original version that has been in effect since we launched the service in October 2010

Instragram now echo Google in providing an unambiguous statement regarding ownership of content uploaded to the service:

Instagram has no intention of selling your photos, and we never did. We don’t own your photos – you do.

So if you deleted your Instagram account because you had been led to believe that you were losing ownership of your content or your content could be sold without your permission then your made this decision based on incorrect assumptions!

Further Thoughts on Deletion of Social Media Accounts

“If you’re not paying for something, you’re not the customer; you’re the product”

Back in November 2010 a post on the LifeHacker blog gave the background to the statement If You’re Not Paying for It; You’re the Product:

This particular quote comes from a discussion on MetaFilter, regarding the massive changes at the social aggregation news site Digg earlier this year. MetaFilter user blue_beetle accurately observed that “if you’re not paying for something, you’re not the customer; you’re the product being sold”. This sentiment doesn’t just apply to unhappy Digg users but to a significant portion of the online experience and many real life interactions.

I’ve commented previously on the flaws in this argument: I didn’t pay for my education as a child – does this mean that I’m simply a product of the capitalist system which will seek to exploit me as a worker and provide free health care so my productivity is maximised? Similarly I don’t pay to watch ITV; in this case the adverts are the TV companies’ key services which I am encouraged to consume, with the TV programmes filling the gaps between the advertising breaks.

In reality many of the social media service seek to monetise the ‘attention data’ in order to make a profit, as well as cover the costs of providing the services. Like many people, although by no means everyone, I am prepared to accept this environment and have not chosen to purchase a premium account which many social media companies provide for those who wish to avoid seeing advertising materials.

I am not alone in my views on the phrase. The Powazek blog contained a post entitled I’m Not The Product, But I Play One On The Internet which was published in December 2012 which described how:

But the more the line is repeated, the more it gets on my nerves. It has a stoner-like quality to it (“Have you ever looked at your hands? I mean really looked at your hands?”). It reminds me of McLuhan’s “the medium is the message,” a phrase that is seemingly deep but collapses into pointlessness the moment you think about using it in any practical way. 

The post concludes:

we should all stop saying, “if you’re not paying for the product, you are the product,” because it doesn’t really mean anything

There will be legitimate reasons why you may chose not to use a service because you are unhappy with their terms and conditions – but such decisions should be made because of an informed decision and not just because you aren’t paying for the service.

Social Media Accounts Which Aren’t Being Used

But beyond the issue of the terms and conditions, should you delete an account because it is little used? Although this would appear to be a sensible decision there is a need to consider the associated risks.

Back in January 2011 a post on Evidence of Personal Usage Of Social Web Services described the long gestation period for services such as Twitter. As I concluded “in the case of Twitter it was only after two years of first using the service that it became embedded in my working practices” – there was a need to have (a) have a critical mass of Twitter followers with whom I could engage with; (b) have more effective tools than the Twitter Web client I used initially and (c) have a compelling use case which convinced me of the value of the service (this turned out to be use of Twitter at a conference when I was away from the office for a period and meeting new people).

I would admit that I have not yet found a compelling use case for Google+. But I will keep the account, partly because the account is used to authenticate myself with other Google services. But in addition I would not wish to miss out on the occasional use I do make of Google+ or to have to rebuild a Google+ community if I delete the account and subsequently find uses for the service.

Similarly my Facebook account provide an address book for friends and colleagues and a means of keeping in touch beyond annual Christmas cards. But in addition, as I suggested in a post which asked What Could Facebook’s New Search System Offer Researchers? recent Facebook developments, such as the Facebook Graph Search, may provide new opportunities which could be of value to me. Stephen Downes on the OLDaily blog has commented that:

A graph search makes sense, and would eventually provide better results than Google, but it really depends on people being engaged enough with Facebook to generate useful data, and that is far from clear. More from E-Commerce Times, Social Media Today, BBC News, Mashable, Brian Kelly, ClickZ, Technology Review, Ben Werdmuller, Wired News..

I agree that it is unclear whether Facebook will have sufficient momentum to provide a useful service; for me, this is also true of Google+. However I have judged the risks of continuing to use the services as low, with the loss of my networks on such services meaning that it would be difficult and time-consuming to regenerate such networks if the services did turn out to be useful.

I have summarised the decisions I have made and the rationale behind the decisions. Have you chosen to delete any social media accounts? Or have you considered deleting accounts and decided not to? I’d welcome your thoughts.

PS: A tweet from @digisim reminded me that I had intended to also add that one reason for subscribing to social media services which aren’t used is to claim your username. I have claimed briankelly on the identi.ca service in case that service (touted as an open alternative to Twitter) ever takes off. However as I have only posted four times since July 2008 and only have 12 followers it seems unlikely that the service will take off.

Yesterday my Twitter stream was full of tweets about Facebook’s announcement that they were Introducing Graph Search Beta - and this morning the headline Facebook’s Search for Supremacy featured on the front page of the Metro newspaper.

The significance of this announcement can be gauged by the BBC news headline: Facebook’s Graph targets Google in which Rory Cellan-Jones, the BBC’s technology correspondent, describes how his initial scepticism may have been misplaced: “If [Facebook's] Graph Search more closely resembles what Bing describes, then users will be able to stay on Facebook, earning the company huge advertising revenues as they search for goods and services“.

A TechCrunch article which asks “What Can You Search For On Facebook Graph Search?” has focussed on the social aspects of this development (dating, finding places to eat and drink, etc.). But what could Facebook’s new search system offer researchers?

What Does The Evidence Tell Us?

Importance of Evidence

Although people may be tempted to be instinctively dismissive of any developments to Facebook, as described in a paper on “What Next for Libraries? Making Sense of the Future” (available in PDF and MS Word formats)” involvement with work of the Jisc Obervatory has led to a greater emphasis on evidence-gathering. In addition the Jisc Inform article which announced “A Bright Future for Independent Jisc in 2013” described how a greater emphasis for development work will be based on the needs of the institutions. There will therefore be a need to gather evidence on how Facebook is being used across UK higher and further educational institutions in order to understand whether Facebook developments can enhance uses of made of Facebook to support institutional activities.

Institutional Use of Facebook

Facebook ‘Likes’ Across Russell Group Universities

Back in November 2007 a post on UK Universities On Facebook provided early evidence of use of Facebook by early adopters, when there were only about 76 universities with a Facebook presence. A year later a post on Revisiting UK University Pages On Facebook started to keep a record of Facebook usage by the early institutional adopters. More recently a post on Over One Million ‘Likes’ of Facebook Pages for the 24 Russell Group Universities provided an indication of the scale of use of Facebook across a selection of UK universities.

This might suggest that the enhanced searching techniques announced yesterday may be relevant for those involved in university marketing activities, although there may be some interesting privacy issues to be addressed.

But beyond use of Facebook by students, what about its potential to support researchers?

Use of Facebook by Researchers

As described in a post of The Sixth Anniversary of the UK Web Focus Blog Facebook is “in third place behind Search Engines and Twitter in referring traffic to this blog” (as illustrated). This suggests that Facebook may have a role to play in supporting dissemination activities for bloggers. But does Facebook have any relevance for enhancing the dissemination of research papers, beyond the indirect dissemination which research blogs may provide?

A year ago a post entitled Facebook and Twitter as Infrastructure for Dissemination of Research Papers (and More) described the SpringerLink mobile app.

Earlier today I used the app to search for papers on ‘Web Accessibility. As illustrated a relevant paper can be shared across my professional networks using Twitter or Facebook as well as sharing with selected individuals using email.

As I described in the blog post “the Springlink app suggests that Facebook and Twitter may be becoming part of the dissemination infrastructure for research papers, especially on mobile devices“. But is there any evidence that researchers are using Facebook, in particular, to facilitate access to research papers?

Back in October 2012 a series of guest blog posts were published during Open Access Week 2012 in order to share the experiences of a number of institutional repository managers. In the posts on SEO Analysis of WRAP, the Warwick University Repository by Yvonne Budden, University of Warwick and on SEO Analysis of LSE Research Online by Natalia Madjarevic, LSE there was no evidence that Facebook was a significant driver of traffic to the two repositories, according to the MajesticSEO tool used to carry out the analyses. This was echoed by William Nixon in his post on SEO Analysis of Enlighten, the University of Glasgow Institutional Repository. William described how:

Social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter don’t appear in these initial results, it may be because the volume is insufficient to be ranked here or there may be breach of service issues. Google Analytics now provides some social media tools and we have been identifying our most popular papers from Facebook and Twitter.

Reading William’s post on the Enlighten blog it seems:

Looking at the data for the past year the following papers have had significant numbers of referrals from Facebook:

van Dommelen, P., Gómez Bellard, C., and Pérez Jordà, G. (2010)Produzione agraria nella Sardegna punica fra cereali e vino. In: Milanese, M., Ruggeri, P., Vismara, C. and Zucca, R. (eds.) L’Africa Romana. I Luoghi e le Forme dei Mestieri e della Produzione nelle Province Africane (Atti del XVIII Convegno di Studio, Olbia, 11-14 Dicembre 2008). Series: L’Africa Romana (18). Carocci, Rome, Italy, pp. 1187-1202. ISBN 9788843054916. http://eprints.gla.ac.uk/48143/

Cockshott, W.P., and Zachriah, D. (2012) Arguments for Socialism.Amazon. ISBN B006S2LW6U. http://eprints.gla.ac.uk/58987/

So at this stage it would appear that this is little evidence that Facebook has a significant role to play in enhancing access to papers hosted in institutional repositories. But are the experiences from these three institutional repositories typical across the sector? Might the early adopters, such as P van Dommelen and W. P. Cockshot and their co-authors be gaining advantages in enhancing access to their papers? And, finally, might the announcement of Facebook’s Graph Search prove of relevance to those with an interest in enhancing the discoverability of research papers?

I’ve asked questions, rather than suggested answers in this post. In part that is because the potential relevance of Facebook’s Graph Search will be based on the use of Facebook, rather than advocacy or critique of use of Facebook in a scholarly context. I’d therefore welcome comments from repository managers, in particular, on evidence of Facebook as a driver of traffic (whether large or small) to institutional repositories. For those who may not wish to leave a comment I’ve created two polls: one of the amount of traffic provided by Facebook and the other on interest in understanding the potential of use of Facebook’s Graph Search in a repository context.

Finally, if you’d like to know more about Facebook’s Graph Search, the following links may be of interest:

• Background:www.facebook.com/graphsearch
• To learn about Graph Search and privacy: www.facebook.com/about/graphsearch/privacy
• How Graph Search was built: click here.
• A behind the scenes video, click here.
• A collection of screen shots, click here.
• How Graph Search can help people discover your business, visit Facebook Studio

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Aaron Swartz, a celebrated internet freedom activist and early developer of the website Reddit, has died at 26.

The activist and programmer took his life in his New York apartment, a relative and the state medical examiner said. His body was found on Friday.

A sad day, especially for those who share Aaron Swartz’s commitment to openness and admire his commitment to the development of tools, services and standards, such as RSS, which have helped to make open access to resources accessible on a global basis.

Earlier today I came across a tweet which encouraged academics to show their support for Aaron’s work:

Please share: Academics posting their papers online in tribute to Aaron Swartz using hashtag #pdftribute.

I would like to endorse this proposal. I have created a Storify summary of the #pdftribute tweets, which contains over 500 posts since the call was made just over 3 hours ago.

Although we have see that initial tweet being widely retweets, as @neuroconscience (Micah Allen) has suggested:

Folks as exciting as #pdftribute is we need less links talking about it and more actual paper posting.

But what could be said in 140 characters?

Within my Twitter stream I have already seen tweets from those involved in supporting their institutional repository including @SarahNicholas:

Cardiff academics! Post your articles to @CardiffOrca. #openaccess#pdftribute

and @glamlaflib (Sue House):

Glamorgan academics can deposit their articles & papers here (if you retained the copyright) http://dspace1.isd.glam.ac.uk/dspace/ #pdftribute

I have also seen @openscience endorsing @jambina’s reminder of the role which can be played by librarians:

Librarians: always friends in #openaccess, #openscience MT @jambina: librarians can help you free your work. we are on your side #pdftribute

Meanwhile @MrGunn describes services which can be used:

@opendna @venturejessica @Aine Mendeley can push into to local repository via Symplectics Elements, other routes can be made with Open API.

Of course many researchers are demonstrating their commitment to providing open access to their research papers:

whilst others provide a more political view:

@MarietjeD66 @mikebutcher Let this be the start of the end of the ridiculous copyright laws. #pdftribute #AaronSwarz

Would you like to join in by giving your views or ensuring that your Twitter community is aware of how you have made your research papers openly available?

Note archives of the #pdftribute tweets are available at http://pdftribute.net and http://twubs.com/pdftribute

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The recent post on Embedded Metadata in PDFs Hosted in Institutional Repositories: An Inside-Out & Outside-In View generated a fair amount of discussion, with ~17 comments on the post itself but perhaps more significantly, a more interactive discussion on Twitter, with relevant contributions being made by @mrnick, @neilstewart, @rmounce, @carusb, @pj_webster, @emmatonkin, @MikeTaylor and @wrap_ed, with other Twitter users sharing links to the posts to their communities.

Whilst some people may still feel that discussions should take place on one centralised system (e.g. a mailing list) in reality this is an unrealistic expectation. In the real world discussions based on ideas which may have originated online will be dispersed across office and common rooms in institutions around the world, to say nothing of other discussions which may take place in pubs and coffee rooms as well as whilst travelling. Conversations about interesting ideas will be distributed; we have to accept that. However it can be helpful to aggregate valuable comments which may be fragmented across a variety of communication channels. Since I felt that the Twitter discussions about the post were particularly interesting I have created a Storify summary entitled The Quality of Embedded Metadata in PDFs (Jan 2013). Note that this complements the Topsy summary which gives the tweets which contains links to the blog post.

Note that in the comments on the blog post Nick Sheppard suggested that a forthcoming UK RepNet event might provide an opportunity to discuss the issues which were raised in more depth::

I wonder if some of these issues might be relevant within the context of the UK RepNet project which is holding a meeting in London on 21st Jan –http://www.rsp.ac.uk/events/supporting-and-enhancing-your-repository/

I will therefore provide a summary of the main issues which were discussed on the blog and on Twitter.

The Context

The initial post was written in response to a post by Ross Mounce in which he asked PDF metadata – why so poor? and a follow-up post a week late on PDF metadata: different tool, same story. Ross’s post was based on an analysis of the metadata embedded in PDFs hosted by scholarly publishers. Ross’s second post succinctly summarised his work:

So a week ago, I investigated publisher-produced Version of Record PDFs with pdfinfo and the results were very disappointing. Lots of missing metadata was found and one could not reliably identify most of these PDFs from metadata alone, let alone extract particular fields of interest.

I wondered whether PDFs hosted in institutional repositories also suffered from poor quality or missing embedded metadata. I examined some papers I had deposited in the University of Bath repository and found that metadata which was contained in the original PDF file I uploaded to the repository was missing from the PDF which users can download. I surmised that the metadata had been lost in the workflow when a cover sheet was added to the paper.

My post referenced a post by Lorcan Dempsey entitled Discovery vs discoverability … in which he explored the idea of the “inside-out and outside-in library“. This seemed very relevant to this scenario as both Ross and myself were concerned primarily by the implications is missing metadata for systems which may be used outside of the repository context: in Ross’s case this related to text mining of large collections of PDFs whereas my interest focussed on reuse of PDFs in other repositories.

The Discussion

The initial comment on the blog post by Ingmar Koch illustrated how embedded PDF metadata can be (mis-)used by external systems. Ingmar descried how “the company that designed the document templates for most of the government agencies added a title and author in the template-file. The result is that thousands of online government documents (.pdf and .doc) are titled “at opinio facillime sumitur” and are written bij M. Hes.” This example provides a vivid illustration of how metadata embedded in PDFs is being used by Google. However this example might also be used to demonstrate the poor quality of embedded metadata.

In light of such examples Neil Stewart therefore asked “does it matter if the rare and patchy instances of author-created metadata gets over-written or otherwise distorted?” since “the structured metadata provided at Eprint/DSpace/other repository software record level does the job here (as opposed to metadata embedded within the PDF itself).“

But surely we cannot argue that since some resources may contain poor quality metadata we should delete all metadata! I would argue that there is a need to educate authors on the importance of appropriate metadata, which includes showing how such metadata can be used by services outside of the host institution. Neil recognises the validity of this point when he acknowledged that “not every service will use OAI-PMH or web crawling, some might parse the objects themselves“.

The discussion then moved on Twitter and initially addressed the relevance of cover sheets, since these appear to cause problems in work flows which take place outside of the institutional repository.

Ross Mounce asked:

why do IRs need 2 slap on cover page anyway? Perhaps they should just embed additional provenance metadata @briankelly @mrnick @neilstewart

Neil Stewart provided one use case for cover sheets:

@rmounce @briankelly @mrnick viewed as a way of advertising provenance (proper citation), branding as from home inst but agreed!

However Ross re-iterated his criticisms of cover sheets:

Cover-pages from a user-POV r just plain annoying. If provenance must be visibly embedded why not overlay? @neilstewart @briankelly @mrnick

Others, such as Chris Rusbridge, agreed with this view:

@mrnick @ukcorr @rmounce @briankelly @stevehit I agree with Ross that it’s BAD practice, from my POV

The discussion then moved on to problems which may occur if a paper is to be downloaded, with Nick Sheppard provided a good example of how PDFs may end up containing multiple cover sheets if they are taken from one repository and deposited (by, for example, a co-author) in another repository:

@neilstewart Um, can also lead to cover page disasters like this (scroll down) eprints.port.ac.uk/2278/1/A…@rmounce @briankelly

I then highlighted a paper by my colleague Emma Tonkin which showed that that problems with poor quality metadata went beyond the individual examples provided on Twitter:

@carusb @mrnick @rmounce My colleague @emmatonkin analysed PDF metadata a few years ago: opus.bath.ac.uk/24958/

The paper (PDF format) described how:

Many repositories … have developed or identified a means of adding a cover sheet to each document within the repository. This has potential for positive impact, for example, as a means of clearly indicating the provenance of an item (Puplett, 2008). As can be seen in Fig. 7, Google Scholar does not necessarily recognise the cover sheet for what it is, and this has negative implications for effective indexing and retrieval.

and went on to conclude:

However, the addition of a cover sheet has caused a number of issues beyond those that are usually encountered with the PDF format (ie. font problems, file corruption, etc). This limits the ability for automated processes to make use of this information, and could therefore be said on the level of automated indexing and other software access (such as conversion) to be a retrograde step. If this becomes common practice it may be necessary to review both the assumptions under which automated systems are developed, and perhaps the rationale that lead us to make use of cover sheets in this context.

Conclusions

The paper on Supporting PDF accessibility evaluation: early results from the FixRep project was written in 2010 by my colleagues Emma Tonkin and Andy Hewitt and presented at the 2nd Qualitative and Quantitative Methods in Libraries International Conference (QQML2010).The concluding sentence in the paper highlighted work which needs to be addressed:

it may be necessary to review both the assumptions under which automated systems are developed, and perhaps the rationale that lead us to make use of cover sheets in this context

The paper identified the benefits of cover sheets but also the problems they can cause for automated activities which may take place outside of the institutional repository environment.

But should repository managers and developers necessarily devote resources to addressing potential problems which may arise downstream of the repository environment? In a comment on Ross Mounce’s blog the point was made that publishers will need there to be a sound business case to be made:

“Why would publishers add metadata? Because their customers – libraries, governments, research funders (in the case of Open Access PDFs ) should demand it.” I’m not seeing a compelling business case here. High-quality metadata would be nice, but can anybody argue that their research is being hampered by a lack of such metadata? Could someone working in publishing make a case to their boss that adding such metadata would generate more revenue, web traffic, manuscript submissions (insert whatever metric matters)?

In the context of institutional repositories perhaps the approach to be taken would be to ensure that embedded metadata is preserved and that the training and advice provided by repository support staff ensures that authors are made aware of the ways in why embedded metadata can be used, even if such reuse takes place outside of the institutional repository.

The discussion also highlighted the need for enhanced workflow practices for merging cover pages with the original content and also for enabling users (and automated tools) to be able to access the original source paper in addition to the version contained provenance information designed for consumption by users.

Do any institutional repositories currently provide solutions to these requirements? In addition, I am interested in how many institutional repositories provide cover pages and whether those that do use a repository plugin technology to do this, some other automated technologies or by manual processes. Two polls on these questions are embedded in this post but if the situation is more complex than can be summarised in the poll, feel free to add a comment.

Footnote (added 12 January 2012): A tweet from @community alerted me to the blog post on SEO Action for PDF files on the Adobe blog. This describes an “Action” for use in Acrobat X Pro that will automate setting the properties of the PDF file in accordance with guidelines which can enhance the discoverability of PDF files by Google.

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The news item describes how:

Jisc joins organisations from across the UK higher education network to welcome the launch of the Open Researcher and Contributor Identifier (ORCID).

and goes on to describe the benefits which ORCID can provide:

There are more academic articles being published than ever before and more authors working together. In order to be able to identify an author correctly a unique identifier is needed that can then link to each author’s publications. ORCID provides this link and if widely used would:

• Ensure researchers get credit for their own work
• Ensure researchers and learners looking for information will be able to find academic papers more accurately
• Enable better management of researcher publication records, making it easier for them to create CVs, reduce form filling and improve reporting to funders
• Create a means of linking information between institutions and systems internationally
• Enable researchers to keep track of their own work with funders, publishers and institutions around the world.

It also provides researchers with their own ORCID. Researchers are able to control how much information it holds about them and who that is shared with. The adoption of ORCID is a solution to the current challenges of being able to search for work accurately. By researchers volunteering to adopt its usage it could improve discoverability and accurate referencing.

As described in a post which explained Why You Should Do More Than Simply Claiming Your ORCID ID I feel it is important that researchers claim their ORCID ID (I will use two words as I suspect that this will less ambiguous than ‘claiming an ORCID‘). The post gave the reasons why I feel that researchers should do more than simply claim their ORCID ID and go on to include their ORCID IDs together with the ORCID IDs of their co-authors in references to their papers. The reason I gave for doing this was to minimise the risks of losing connections with co-authors, who may have changed their affiliation and thus no longer have their original email address and institutional Web presence.

In light of the recent Announcement: UKOLN – Looking Ahead which described how the Jisc “will only provide core funding to the UKOLN Innovation Support Centre, up to July 2013 but not beyond” there will clearly be a need for myself and my colleagues to minimise the risks of losing the connections with our research outputs. Since the first bullet point of the benefits which ORCID can provide is to:

Ensure researchers get credit for their own work

it would appear that claiming an ORCID ID should be a priority for researchers whose position in their host institution is uncertain. But doesn’t this apply to everyone? From one perspective this might be relevant in light of funding uncertainties in the sector which are compounded by last month’s announcement of the “Huge Drop in Students Starting University“. But beyond the current economic situation, every researcher will, at some stage, leave their host institution (whether to take up a new post elsewhere, retirement, redundancy or death in service).

It would appear that every researcher who wishes to ensure that they get credit for their own work, and can ensure that such credit can be managed when they leave their current institution should benefit from claiming an ORCID ID. As described in the post claiming an ORCID ID “is a painless exercise, taking about 30 seconds to complete” so this is something which all researchers should be able to do.

In the Jisc news item Neil Jacobs, programme director, Jisc commented: “We recognise that this is only the start and that work needs to be done to implement ORCID in the UK. However, we have a solid beginning and we look forward to working with our partners across the sector to build on it.“

As is clear from the ORCID Knowledge base many suggestions have been made on ways in which the service can be enhanced. But the simplest action lies in the hands of the individual researchers: sign up for an ORCID ID!

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PDF metadata – why so poor? asked Ross Mounce in a blog post published on New Year’s eve.

In the post Ross expressed surprise that although ”with published MP3 files of audio you get rather good metadata … the results from a little preliminary survey of academic publisher PDF metadata” were poor: “Out of the 70 PDFs I’ve published (meta)data on over at Figshare, only 8 of them had Keywords metadata embedded in them“.

This made we wonder about the quality of the metadata for papers I have uploaded to Opus, the University of Bath repository.

I looked at a paper on A Challenge to Web Accessibility Metrics and Guidelines: Putting People and Processes First which is available in Opus in PDF and MS Word formats.

I first used Adobe Acrobat in order to display the metadata for the original source PDF file, prior to uploading to the repository. As can be seen from the accompanying screen shot the metadata included the title, the author details (with the email address for one of the authors) and two keywords.

However looking at the display for the PDF downloaded form the repository we find that no metadata is available!

This PDF differs from the original source in that a cover page is added dynamically by the repository in order to provide appropriate institutional branding. It would appear that in the creation of the new PDF resource, the original metadata is lost.

Looking at the metadata created in the original source document – an MS Word file – we can see how the authors’ names which were subsequently concatenated into a single field. We can also see that although the title of the paper was given correctly, poor keywords had been included, which did not reflect the keywords which were included in the paper itself (Web accessibility, disabled people, policy, user experience, social inclusion, guidelines, development lifecycle, procurement).

I suspect that I am not alone in not spending much time in ensuring that appropriate metadata is embedded in the master source of a peer-reviewed paper. I have also previously not considered how such metadata might be lost in the workflow processes when uploading to an institutional repository: after all, surely the important metadata is added when the paper is deposited into the repository?

Ross’s blog post made me check the embedded metadata – and I discovered that the correct metadata is still included in the MS Word file which was uploaded to the repository along with the PDF copy.

Does the loss of the metadata embedded in the PDF matter? After all, surely people will use the search facilities provided in the repository in order to find papers of interest?

But people will not necessarily visit a repository to find papers of interest. A post which described A Survey of Use of Researcher Profiling Services Across the 24 Russell Group Universities showed that on 1 August 2012 there were over 18,000 users of ResearchGate in the 24 Russell Group universities and judging by the messages along the lines of “28 of your colleagues from University of Bath have joined ResearchGate in the last month. Why not follow them today?” which I am currently receiving, use of this service is growing.

As can be seen from the screenshot of my ResearchGate profile, the service provides access to PDF copies of my papers. I normally simply provide a link to the PDF hosted in the repository but the example illustrated contains a copy of original PDF which was uploaded to the service by one of the co-authors.

In the case of most of my papers it is clear from the thumbnail of the PDF that the paper contains the coversheet provided by the repository.

Discussion

We can see that the PDF copy of a paper hosted in a repository should not be regarded as a final destination; rather the PDF may be surfaced in other environments.

It will therefore be important to ensure that workflow processes do not degrade the quality of the PDF. It will also be important to ensure that authors are made aware of how embedded metadata may be used by services beyond the institutional repository. But to what extend do repository managers feel they have a responsibility to advise on practices which will enhance the discoverability of content on services hosted outside the institution?

In a paper which asked “Can LinkedIn and Academia.edu Enhance Access to Open Repositories?” myself and Jenny Delasalle commented on how “commercial publishers are encouraging authors to use social media to drive traffic to papers hosted on publishers’ web sites” and provided examples of such approaches from Taylor and Francis, Springer, Sage and Oxford Journals. As an example, Taylor and Francis describe how they are “committed to promoting and increasing the visibility of your article and would like to work with you to promote your paper to potential readers” and go on to document services which can help achieve this goal.

In a blog post which discussed the ideas describe din the paper I described how we had failed to find significant evidence of similar approaches being employed by repository managers:

It was interesting that in Jenny’s research she found that a number of commercial publishers encourage their authors to use services such as LinkedIn and Academia.edu to link to their papers hosted behind the publishers paywalls – and yet we are not seeing institutional views of the benefits of coordinated use of such services by their researchers. Institutional repository managers, research support staff and librarians could be prompting their institutions to make the most of these externally provided services, to enhance the visibility of their researchers’ work in institutional repositories.

But that paper was limited to use of third-party services to provide access routes to research papers. What of the bigger picture in which institutional work flow processes should be designed to enhance discoverability?

The ‘inside-out and outside-in library’

On Wednesday in a post entitled Discovery vs discoverability … Lorcan Dempsey explored the idea of the “inside-out and outside-in library“. In the post Lorcan described how:

Throughout much of their existence, libraries have managed an outside-in range of resources: they have acquired books, journals, databases, and other materials from external sources and provided discovery systems for their local constituency over what they own or license.

However in a digital and network world, there have been two major changes, which shift the focus towards inside-out:

First access and discovery have now scaled to the level of the network: they are web scale. If I want to know if a particular book exists I may look in Google Book Search or in Amazon, or in a social reading site, in a library aggregation like Worldcat, and so on. … Secondly the institution is also a producer of a range of information resources: digitized images or special collections, learning and research materials, research data, administrative records (website, prospectuses, etc.), faculty expertise and profile data, and so on.

Lorcan goes on to describe the challenge facing libraries:

How effectively to disclose this material is of growing interest across libraries or across the institutions of which the library is a part. This presents an inside-out challenge, as here the library wants the material to be discovered by their own constituency but usually also by a general web population.

I would suggest that institutional repositories could usefully adopt the approach taken by Taylor and Francis:

 ”[The institution is] committed to promoting and increasing the visibility of your article and would like to work with you to promote your paper to potential readers“

But rather than simply encourage researchers to simply add links to papers deposited in the repository from popular services such as LinkedIn and ResearchGate might the institutional goal be enhanced by encouraging researchers to make the content of their papers available in such third party services (subject to copyright considerations) – with the institutional repository providing both a destination and a component in a workflow, with papers being surfaced in services such as ResearchGate, as I have illustrated above.

If such an approach were to be embraced there would be a need to ensure that embedded metadata was not corrupted through repository workflow processes. If, however, the repository is regarded as the sole access point, there would be little motivation to address such limitations in the work flow.

Or to put it another way, repository managers will have a need to manage content hosted within the institution, including management to support the use of the content by services they have no control over.

To a certain extent, this has already been accepted: repositories were designed to have “cool URIs” which can help resources to be discovered by Google. I am suggesting that there is a need to observe usage patterns which indicate emerging ways in which users are finding content. The growing numbers of email alerts from ResearchGate suggest that it may be a service to monitor – with Ross Mounce’s recent post of on the quality of metadata embedded in PDFs suggesting one area in which there will be a need to revisit existing workflow processes.

PS. Ross Mounce described “a little preliminary survey of academic publisher PDF metadata” and has published the data on Figshare. Has anyone harvested the metadata embedded in PDFs hosted on repositories and published the findings?

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Fat Man Swings at The Bell (I responded to a tweet during the break)

Last night I was in The Bell in Bath listening to Fat Man Swings when I noticed someone had mentioned me in a tweet:

@NSRiazat no but briankelly may be able to help

The message related to a discussion on the #phdchat Tweetchat during which Nasima Riazat (@NSRiazat) asked:

Has anyone used social media to publish/share ideas/opinions which have not been peer reviewed prior to sharing? #phdchat

According to her Twitter biography Nasima Riazat is “#PhDchat moderator. PhD research expertise in capacity building, distributed leadership, leadership sciences, developing middle leaders – Open University UK“. Her question was therefore very relevant for those who participate in the #phdchat discussions, which I have commented on previously.

The question, and its timing, may well horrify those who do not ‘get’ Twitter and are worried about being inundated with tweets during every hour of the day and having to respond during out-of-work hours. However established Twitter users will understand that Twitter provides a steady stream of content which you can dip into when it suits you and @ messages can often be ignored. On this occasion I felt the question was of interest and so I responded during the break to say I would address the question. The interaction, incidentally, including taking and posting a photo of the band probably took less than a minute.

Publishing and Sharing Ideas Which Have Not Been Peer Reviewed

Back in October, during Open Access Week I gave a series of talks on Open Practices for the Connected Researcher at the universities of Exeter, Salford and Bath in which I described the benefits which social media could provide for researchers. The talk was based on personal experiences of use of social media to support my peer-reviewed papers, especially in the area of Web accessibility. I described how social media could be used to develop one’s professional network (with the example of how I met Sarah Lewthwaite (@slewth) on Twitter and subsequently collaborated on a paper which won an award at an international conference). I also described how use of services such as Twitter and Slideshare could be used by one’s co-authors during a conference presentation in order to maximise the numbers of views of the paper and accompanying slides by those who have a particular interest in the conference – those who may subsequently cite the paper in their own research publications or take actions based on the ideas described in the paper.

But although social media has proven value in developing one’s professional network and enhancing access to research publications, the question which was raised addressed a different scenario: Has anyone used social media to publish/share ideas/opinions which have not been peer reviewed prior to sharing?

I suspect the answer to this question will be influenced by the area of research together with personal approaches towards openness and the culture within one’s research group or host institution.

In my case my areas of research are based on the Web (Web accessibility, Social Web, Web preservation, Web standards and institutional repositories). My organisation (and our funders) has always been supportive of open access for the research outputs. In addition I have sought to embrace open practices in my work. I should add that I do not feel that others should adopt similar approaches; as I described in a post on The Social Web and the Belbin Model my preferred roles as a ‘plant’ and ‘resource investigator’ in the Belbin model are well-aligned with use of social media services such as blogs. I am therefore comfortable with the notion of exposing one’s ideas to public view at early stages, with the intention that flaws in the ideas will be identified at an early stage and the value of the ideas will be enhanced by contributions from others.

For me the ideas published in a blog post (or even a tweet) can be subsequently developed and used in a peer-reviewed paper. As an example, in September 2012 I wrote a brief post which asked “John hit the ball”: Should Simple Language Be Mandatory for Web Accessibility? After the post had been published I came across a tweet from @techczech (Dominik Lukes) which commented:

Should Simple Language Be Mandatory for Web Accessibility? http://ow.ly/dOV4T < Bad idea for #a11y - ignorant of basic #linguistic facts

I looked at Dominik’s Twitter biography (“Education and technology specialist, linguist, feminist, enemy of prescriptivism, metaphor hacker, educator, (ex)podcaster, Drupal/Wordpress web builder, Czech.“) and followed the link to his blog and read his post on “Why didn’t anyone tell me about this?”: What every learning technologist should know about accessible documents #ALTC2012. I realised that we had similar interest so I decided to follow him on Twitter and then had an interesting phone conversation on Web accessibility and language issues.

I subsequently submitted a brief paper on this topic with Alastair McNaught, JISC TechDis, to the W3C WAI’s online symposium on “Easy to Read” (e2r) language in Web Pages/Applications. As described in a post on ‘Does He Take Sugar?’: The Risks of Standardising Easy-to-read Language the paper was not accepted. However since we were not restricted to the 1.00 word limit imposed by the organisers of the online symposium Alastair and I expanded on our original which were further developed through the contribution provided by Dominik. Our article entitled ‘Does He Take Sugar?’: The Risks of Standardising Easy-to-read Language was published in the Ariadne ejournal just before Christmas.

Although the article was not peer-reviewed we have subsequently realised that the ideas described in the article could provide a new insight into our previous work in developing a framework for making use of accessibility guidelines such as WCAG. We are currently discussing how we can build on these new insights.

To summarise, a brief blog post was commented on in a tweet. This led to an exchange of tweets, a phone call, a joint Skype call and a joint article – with an understanding that we will look for opportunities for further collaboration. Without the blog post and without the tweet, this would not have happened!

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