JISC and Innovation

I recently attended the JISC Innovation Forum 2008, held at the University of Keele on 15-16^th July 2008. Several blog posts about the event have already been published includes one’s by Paul Walk, Owen Stephens and Chris Rusbridge. Rather than repeating such reports, I feel it is appropriate to mention Sarah Porter’s introduction to the event. Sarah, Head of Innovation Group at the JISC, described what JISC meant by ‘innovation’. She provided a description of the term which she obtained from Wikipedia (dated 17 July 2008):

Innovation is typically understood as the successful introduction of something new and useful, for example introducing new methods, techniques, or practices or new or altered products and services.

The emphasis which JISC is placing on innovation clearly reflects developments to the UK Government’s policy initiatives in this area, in particular the establishment of the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills, DIUS.

MLA and Innovation

Elspeth Hyams’ editorial in the CILIP Update magazine (June 2008, Vol. 7, No. 6) has the byline ”In This Climate, You Have To Innovate“. As Elspeth describes, the need to innovate applies equaly to the information sector: “The age of the quiescent library or information manager ot service is dead“. The editorial goes on to describe the MLA’s action plan for public libraries and reports on the MLA’s Chief Executive, Roy Clare, calls for “radical action on structure, far-sighted lreadership vision and more pUblic Private Partnerships“. The editorial concludes with the warning that “It’s not just a challenge for the acasdemic schoopls, but for all of us” but also suggests that “we should use tough times as a golden opportunity to focus on the strategy - and upgrade and refresh our skills“.

UKOLN and Innovation

As UKOLN is funded by both the JISC (we are a JISC Innovation Centre) and the MLA, there is a need for us to respond to these clearly-stated policy directions. So I’m pleased to report that we helped to provide staff in museums, libraries and archives in the London region with an opportunity to “upgrade and refresh [their] skills” with the most recent Web 2.0 and Social Networks workshop aimed at the cultural heritage sector. And next week we’ll be running the twelfth of the annual Institutional Web Management Workshops (IWMW 2008), in which we will be providing further examples of innovation which we hope will be both new and useful for members of the higher and further education communities including our explorations of use of Twitter by event organisers, use of video blogging, a live video stream of the plenary talks, the establishment of a Ning social network for the event and the innovation competition. 

Regular readers will be aware that such technologies have been discussed for some time now. But their use at events and within institutions is still, I feel, fairly unusual and so can be regarded as new. Whether they will be regarded as useful can only be judged by trying things out and receiving feedback.

DSpace for instance has in the past suffered from ongoing bad publicity and its own honesty relating to some issues in early versions where they suffered from some instability and slowness under load (user load and content load). One of the downsides of the web (well, of some of it’s users really) is that old reports stay archived on the web, and are read and believed with no consideration of changes that may have taken place in the interim. Many or most of these issues have now been sorted for the sort of scale that used to cause problems (100,000 items to 1/4 million items) and we need to re-evaluate the platform to see where it now breaks. Indeed the following report set out to test DSpace with 1 million items, and found no particular issues:

Testing the Scalability of a DSpace-based Archive, Dharitri Misra, James Seamans, George R. Thoma, National Library of Medicine, Bethesda, Maryland, USA

I’ve not looked very hard, but there was nothing obvious on the first page of Google results about EPrints scalability, but for Fedora I found this useful page: http://fedora.fiz-karlsruhe.de/docs/Wiki.jsp?page=Main

Our new load testing hardware has arrived. We have a standard spec server to perform the testing, and a beefy little number on which to run the repositories:

• Two quad-core XEON processors
• 16GB RAM
• 6TB raw SATA disk (yes its slow, but cheap!)

We’ve not yet decided what tests we’ll run (get in contact if you have any suggestions!), but we have decided we’ll be using SWORD to perform the test deposits it allows us to throw identical packages at all three repositories which provides us with a level playing field.

We’ve done some initial work which showed some of the repositories fell down as soon as we tried to deposit more than a couple of items concurrently using SWORD, and others fell down at 50 concurrent deposits, but these are small implementation issues which have now been fixed, so full testing can start taking place.

More details will be blogged once we start getting some useful comparative data, however seeing as the report cited above took about 10 days to deposit 1 million items, it may be some weeks before we’re able to report data from meaningful tests on each platform.

These results will inform the next stage of the ROAD project which is to choose one of the repositories upon which to build a repository for the Robot Scientist, so the stakes are high!

The forum has a significant online presence, both in terms of the supporting infrastructure (blogs, transcripts etc.) as well as delegates’ own blog posts etc. - look for stuff tagged with ‘jif08‘.

Some of the highlights of the forum included:

The keynote speech from John Selby, Director (Education and Participation), HEFCE: John gave a really clear outline of some of the issues facing JISC in a changing economic climate. Speaking a little about ’socio-technical’ systems, he offered the view that JISC needs to focus on the nature of such systems, portraying them in terms of the following progression:

Innovation -> Implementation -> Sector change

John suggested that JISC tended to concentrate on communities rather than the sector, that communities could be exclusive and that managing technical and social change together is challenging. We should not take for granted that the buzz within the innovative JISC community is recognised or shared outside this community. He also reminded us that JISC is funded by ‘a tax on the sector’ - I have not heard this description used before.

John offered a stark warning when he described the last decade as a ‘golden era’ in terms of funding and security, and predicted that the next few years would not be so golden.

Finally, John admitted that HEFCE’s strategy is not clear enough, and that HEFCE needs to prioritise and clarify its role in terms of how it deals with the sector and with the Government.

More: transcript and link to presentation slides.

The ‘Identity - Starter for Ten’ session: I was asked to help facilitate this session and I’m very glad to have been involved. It was decided to use a technique known as the ‘gold-fish bowl’ to create a free-flowing ‘debate’, where only two people (out of a room of ~35) could speak at any one time, but the either (or both) of the speakers could be replaced at any moment by any of the other participants. We had a small set of rules to govern proceedings and my role was to ‘referee’ the session - which turned out to be very easy. So easy in fact, that I couldn’t help but join in briefly! The starting discussion was around notions of Identity and the management of this in an institutional context. I imagine that those well-versed in these issues probably didn’t learn anything particularly new, but what transpired was a series of arguments, made by some people with real expertise, which gave a pretty good introduction to this area to those who ‘lurked’ and learned. The feed-back I have received so far has been excellent - here is a short video of a self-described ‘lurker’ (sorry - I don’t know who you are!) explaining how he enjoyed the session (interviewed by Lawrie Phipps of JISC who also proposed the Goldfish Bowl approach in the first place).

More: the gold-fish bowl rules and a transcript.

The closing keynote from Jason DaPonte, Managing Editor, BBC Mobile Platforms: Jason gave an instructive speech about some of the issues the BBC is facing in its quest to ‘deepen the relationship between itself and its users’. He characterised the ‘mobile’ context as having the following characteristics:

• personal
• immediate
• location-aware

An application of this approach might be realised in plans to consider moving from the BBC’s ‘where I live’ paradigm to one of ‘where I am’. In my view, and this is informed by my recent acquisition of a location aware iPhone, this aspect of mobile service delivery is becoming rapidly very interesting.

In another part of his presentation, Jason made reference to a DEMOS report, Making the most of collaboration, which sounds very interesting - I have not yet had time to read it. This report examines the state-of-the-art of ‘public service co-design’ - Jason hinted that the higher education sector did not come out of this too well….

More: transcript and link to presentation slides.

Other good moments included being a part of the winning team at the competition (identifying European countries by map outline, and identifying movie posters) over dinner. My 3G iPhone may have been a contributing factor….

And I did enjoy showing an interactive 3D molecule viewer on the iPhone to Jim Downing and Simon Coles, eminent chemists both, and getting the reaction - ’so what’s the underlying data model?’. To which I could only respond, ‘I have no idea - but look how funky it is….’.

While a few aspects weren’t so good (a bizarre and nearly unusable WIFI service and uncomfortable accommodation) I think the forum was a great success overall - I learned plenty and was able to contribute.

Tags: jif08, JISC

Paul Walk kicked off the day by presenting his work on a next generation architecture for repositories. His presentation started off with a number of starting principles and moved on to some diagrams illustrating a specific architecture based on them. As Paul mentions in that blog post, his diagrams and the principles behind them were “robustly challenged”. As far as I remember, the diagrams were challenged more robustly than the principles.

To cut a longish story short, the discussion and the workshop exercises brought up some interesting ideas, but did relatively little to either validate Paul’s architecture diagrams, or to provide a working alternative. Chatting about it over lunch and later over a pint, I was persuaded that we were looking for an abstraction that doesn’t exist, and that the desire for a single generic repository architecture might have led us down the garden path.

Software engineering, being a field that values pragmatic epistemology, has a couple of empirically derived laws that might help to explain why. Firstly, Larry Tesler’s law of the Conservation of Complexity states (in a nutshell) that complexity can’t be removed, just moved around. A natural way to manage this complexity is find abstractions that hide some of it. This, fundamentally, is what the repositories architecture is trying to do - reduce the multiplicity of interests, politics and data-borne activities of HE into a single abstract architecture.

A second empirical law, The Law of Leaky Abstractions, states that all non-trivial abstractions leak. Some of the complexity cannot be hidden behind the abstraction and leaks through. It feels to me that this is what’s happening with repositories at the moment. Our abstraction (centralization, services provided at point of storage etc) fails to cope with real, current complexities. The problem itself is extremely complex, and if anyone really has their head around it, they’ve still got the hard task of communicating it to the whole community so a good shared abstraction can be developed.

I found myself going back to Paul’s starting principles, and concluded that they were a much more constructive framework for thinking about repository issues than the concrete architectures in the diagrams. Paraphrasing the principles: -

• Move necessary activity to the point of incentive
• [Terms of reference for IRs]
• Pass by reference, not by copy
• Move complexity towards the point of specialisation
• Expect and accept increasing complexity on the local side of the repository with more sophisticated workflow integration.

With the exception of the point on IRs, they are all forms of guidance on complexity, either where to move it (”Move [metadata] complexity towards the point of specialisation”), or which trade-offs to make (”Pass by reference, not by copy” => “Prefer to deal with the complexities of references than the complexities of duplication”). The reason I like this approach is that different disciplines, institutions and activities (e.g. REF, publication, administration) all have different complexities and different drivers. Perhaps we need a number of different architecture abstractions based on constraints and drivers. Perhaps the idea of an architecture abstraction is premature in this community and we should focus on local solutions (in the sense of ‘minima’ rather than geography). This needn’t end in technical balkanization; the repositories architecture is driven by business models, and focusing on interoperability and the web architecture allows more of the technical discussion to happen in parallel.

To get the ball rolling, I’d like to add a caveat to Paul’s “Move [metadata] complexity towards the point of specialisation”: “… unless it’s there already and it’s harder to recreate than maintain”. Any more?

Update

Andrew McGregor has posted extensive minutes and notes from the meeting.

One thing I’ve noticed with the DSpace testathons is that often LDAP does not get tested because many of the developers do not have access to an LDAP system - for example in DSpace 1.5 LDAP authentication does not work with Manakin or SWORD. (I have fixed both in the upcoming 1.5.1 though ). With this in mind, and because I have to teach a DSpace technical course in 4 days time where we’ll be covering LDAP configuration, I’ve created an open LDAP server which can be used for testing and training.

Details:

• ldap.provider_url = ldap://ldap.testathon.net:389/
• ldap.id_field = cn
• ldap.object_context = OU=users,DC=testathon,DC=net
• ldap.search_context = OU=users,DC=testathon,DC=net
• ldap.email_field = mail
• ldap.surname_field = sn
• ldap.givenname_field = givenName
• ldap.phone_field = telephoneNumber

Users and their passwords are:

• stuart / stuart
• john / john
• carol / carol

Each user has a full name (Stuart Lewis / John Smith / Carol Jones), a telephone number and email address so should be fully functional.

If you make use of this server, please drop me a line or leave a comment so I know. Otherwise it might get turned off…!

My intention was to suggest some starting principles and then explore how they held up in the face of real-world issues. Here is the slide where I outlined these principles:

I also asked the question: “do we actually need a new architecture?” - suggesting that there is already a ubiquitous & successful architecture supporting much/most/(all?) of the functionality we want from repositories. Taking a resource oriented approach also seems to offer all kinds of advantages. Applying this approach is certainly not a new idea - others have been here before. However, I suggest that the resource oriented approach and the service oriented approach can be most effective when used to complement each other. I think that there is still be place for the institutional repository as the collection of systems which surround what I call the source repository. I define the ’source repository’ as an (ideally) quite simple system which contains:

• the resources themselves, individually addressed with HTTP URIs
• simple, item-level metadata records
• site-map(s) to aid remote search engines
• public, HTTP interfaces
• feeds to notify remote agents of the deposit of new resources in the repository (RSS and/or Atom)

An ‘institutional’ or ’subject’ or ‘learning object’ repository contains one or more source repositories plus any systems needed to manage it in its particular context. These larger repositories might be very complex: the important point is that the logical component I call the source repository should be as simple as possible in it’s public facing interface: basically a bunch of resources, with an address space. So, a resource is given a Cool URI , and a (probably) simple metadata record is made available, also as a resource with a URI. I suggested that an ORE resource map could be used to relate metadata record to resource - from the point of view of the web or ORE, a metadata record is a resource just like, for example, a PDF of a scholarly paper. Elsewhere more, richer metadata might be created through mechanisms ranging from automatic metadata creation, to further human effort which might be in the nature of traditional cataloguing by trained and motivated individuals, or ‘crowd-sourced’ tagging by untrained but still motivated people.
Complexity is introduced, where necessary, in services developed to manage and exploit resources held in source repositories. Crucially, such activity does not happen unless there is a clear incentive for it, and then it happens close to the point of incentive. As an example, if a particular domain has a strong need to classify papers then someone might go to the trouble of harvesting, aggregating and text-mining the text of these papers with a view to extracting terms to use for classification. Or something similar might be achieved through the application of a team of professional cataloguers using an agreed vocabulary. However it is done, the new metadata thus created could be made available as a web resource where it could be used and combined with other resources as required.
I was asked to illustrate this with a few diagrams which provoked a fair amount of discussion.

The point was made, strongly, that it is subject repositories which have the content, rather than institutional repositories. Regardless of whether this is, or will continue to be true, I think the architectural principles hold up. The business drivers are, I guess, quite different!

I learned a lot from the workshop and had some of these ideas challenged quite robustly. I think they held up but the clarity of presentation could be improved - this is what I will be working on now.

Tags: JISC, ORE, repositories, resource-oriented, ukoln

Back in April I gave an online presentation to the JISC-Emerge community entitled What If We’re Wrong? in which I described some of the concerns which have been expressed related to use of Web 2.0 servies (e.g. sustainability of the service, privacy issues, etc.) and suggested some approaches for dealing with concerns (e.g. risk assessment and risk management strategies.

Following some Twitter discussions Martin Weller wrote a post entitled Web 2.0 - even if we’re wrong, we’re right in which he argued that even if some services aren’t sustainable, we won’t go back to the way thiungs were and we can’t unlearn our experiences and expectations.

As I described in my response “Even If We’re Wrong, We’re Right” Martin’s post gave me a fresh insight into these issues. But what, I wonder, are the implications if we’re right? Perhaps it’s now timely to ask ourselves:

• What if externally-hosted services do turn out to be sustainable?
• What if technologies such as AJAX, coupled with ARIA support, provide usable and accessible services and define the type of user experiences which our users will expect in the services they use?
• What if an’edupunk‘ approach succeeds in implmenting change, leaving behind the more formal approaches to IT development?

Now many of the pragmatic Web 2.0 users and developers are addressing the potential problems they could face with their risk strategies. But are the Web 2.0 sceptics assessing the risks hat they may be wrong? What about the risks that students will abandon institutional services (as, it seems, they are starting to do with email)? What about:

• The risks that graduates will find it difficult to get jobs if they have little experience of popular Web 2.0 technologies, having spent 3 years using elearning tools which aren’t known outside the HE/FE environment?
• The institutions which fail to attract new students, researchers or staff as they aren’t making use of popular social networking services?
• The researchers who continue to work just small groups, using email and accessing papers on institutional repositories but don’t follow discussions which their peers are having in the blogosphere?
• And finally what about the risks that IT development programmes ignore the benefits of lightweight solutions, preferring to develop more sophisticated services which aim to solve every possible contingency - and then nobody uses the service as it’s too complex for most?

The question needs to be asked: what if we’re right?

The first of two presentations was given by Mary Robinson from SHERPA, who talked about her advocacy work for The Depot.

The second of the presentations was given by Niamh Brennan from Trinity College Dublin. This talk just blew everyone away - it was inspirational, practical, based on real experiences, and gave ideas that all the repository managers could take away with them and implement quite easily.

These are some of the insightful snippets I took away with me:

• TCD populate their repository from their CRIS. Personally I believe this is the way to go, and enjoyed the chance to talk to Niamh about the technical side of the CRIS. I’ve yet to find an open source CRIS, and was wondering if this is because so much local integration would has to take place to stitch a repository into local systems, that once you have done that, the core CRIS might as well be developed from scratch. Niamh says that this is not the case, and that a core CRIS is big enough to be worthwhile sharing (and hopes to share theirs! )
• Get in contact with, and stay in close contact with, your local research support office. They deal with the grant process, and are a good way of making contact with academics. A good time to explain the impact of the funder mandates to researchers is when they are signing the T&Cs for their latest grant.
• When it comes to publicity events, always celebrate success! Rather than having a formal launch of your repository, why not have a celebration of the items you already have in there, and the impact that has had.
• Make people feel good - they like that! Possible examples include ringing up academics who have been in the news congratulating them, and offering to archive their work. Or make some of your depositors “Featured Authors”. People like to be ‘featured”!
• Always try to get drinks at events, and once you have drinks, get some food. Once you have food, get some wine. Once you have wine, get some champagne. Once you have champagne, get a photographer. There’s nothing more that some people like that having a glass of champagne and having their photo taken at an event. This can be a powerful way of attracting senior managers.

JISC Repository Aggregator Website 

JISC funds a wide variety of development projects on behalf of its funding bodies. These projects include consultancies and supporting studies where the main deliverable is a report and projects where the deliverables include products and services as well as these reports. 

The project involves developing a small user community to guide the development of the site, to produce the site and to develop a series of bespoke widgets to draw information from readily available sources of information. 

The overall aim of this demonstrator site will be to enable a user to search for, organise and hand submit information about a range of relevant information about repositories. The repository aggregator will provide a single destination where people interested in repositories can get information about digital repositories. 

Aims and Objectives 

The objectives of the aggregator website are to: 

Produce a demonstrator website that can be shown to some members of the repository community to gauge whether they would find such a service useful. Then, make the service available as a public beta offering while plans are made to develop the site further.  Create a customizable and personalisable solution that can adapt to the wide range of information that a user might like to aggregate.  Specifically ensure the service can aggregate with RSS feeds from relevant blogs, the Intute Repository Search service, information from the RSP site including support contacts. Statistics from OpenDOAR and ROAR, Sherpa RoMEO and JULIET, brief explanations of key topics, persistent aggregated search of sources like google scholar and technorati, subject based collection details from IESR, descriptions of useful repository software, e.g. IRstats, feedforward, sword client, manakin and RSS feeds from relevant repositories.  Create focus groups in a structured way to help manage the feeback from the user community at all stages of development.  Specific development requirements include the consideration of the Netvides Universal Widget API, Netvibes Universe, an authentication system, cross browser compatibility. 

(No, not ‘widgets as found in cans of beer‘, but widgets as in ‘web widgets‘!)

It is an interesting development and with my repository stats hat on (http://maps.repository66.org/) I’m particulaly looking forward to seeing what this aggregation can offer, and the value it will provide.

I’ve previously mentioned the JISC Preservation of Web Resources (JISC-PoWR) project which is being provided by UKOLN and ULCC. The project has established a blog and will be running its first workshop, entitled Preservation of Web Resources: Making a Start, on Friday 27^th June 2008 at Senate House, London.

The workshop is aimed staff in the higher and further education sector with responsibilities for the preservation of institutional Web resources. The workshop will introduce the concept of Web preservation, and discuss the technological, institutional and legal challenges the preservation of Web resources presents. One aspect of Web site preservation might be keeping a history of changes to your institution’s home page. Do you have a digital record of the changes? And do you have a record of why significant changes were made and when? I have been working with colleagues in the University of Bath on ways in which we might address this particular issue. The following video clip, which is available on YouTube, illustrates some of the issues (although if the display is too small you might prefer to view the original resource):

There are still a number of places available on the workshop - which is free to attend for those in the higher and further education sector. But please sign up promptly if you are interested. The timetable is given below:

10:00 - 10:30 Registration and coffee

10:30 - 12:45 Morning Sessions:

• Presentation: Preservation of Web Resources Part I
• Breakout session: What are the Barriers to Web Resource Preservation?
• Presentation: Challenges for Web Resource Preservation
• Presentation: Legal issues

12:45 - 13:45 Lunch
13:45 - 16:00 Afternoon Sessions:

• Presentation: Bath University Case Study
• Breakout session: Preservation Scenarios
• Presentation: Preservation of Web Resources Part II

16:00 End

This particular CRIG event was entitled ‘CRIG DRY Workshop’ - DRY = Don’t Repeat Yourself, and today that referred to metadata.

The day started with 5 five minute presentations, one of which was the first public outing for our new project ‘The Deposit Plait‘. This fitted in perfectly with the aims of not repeating ourselves when it comes to depositing items into a repository, and having to typically re-enter metadata.

There are three strands to a plait, and three strands that we hope to weave together in the deposit plait project:

1. Work out exactly what metadata ideally needs to be provided when depositing a scholarly work into a repository. This can be done by seeing who makes use of repository metadata, and what metadata they need in order to do this effectively.
2. Investigate what, if any, metadata can be extracted from XML documents in formats such as OOXML and ODF.
3. See what metadata can be extracted from online or personal bibliographic systems.

So were 1 and 2 to yield useful results, we could investigate the feasibility of writing a web service that take an uploaded document (or a reference to one), extracts some metadata (maybe title, author, abstract) and then uses these to pull in more metadata from other systems. Might be neat, might be a non-starter. That’s what the project will discover.

Anyhow, the event was useful in a number of ways, and there were a number of nice demonstrations. I particularly liked Richard and Rob’s demonstration of depositing OAI-ORE aggregations into DSpace using SWORD. On top of that there was then the resource map encoded in RDFa in the DSpace item page allowing an RDFa reader to use a standard DSpace metadata jumpoff page as an OAI-ORE resource map. The really nice thing about it was that from the DSpace side, it only required a new packager class, and a corresponding entry in the configuration file - I was thinking it might require more tinkering. I also appreciated the ORE talk from Rob. Whilst it only lasted 5 minutes, it was enough to explain the concepts and gave me the dummy’s guide that I’ve been looking out for for some time.

Thanks CRIG!