This report provides an overview of ebook technologies currently adopted within institutions as they respond to the increasing growth in ebook reading in wider society as well as within academic contexts. It emphasises in its opening observations the importance of understanding how the adoption of ebooks should not be regarded as working towards the replacement of printed books, but rather as a means of providing a more diverse range of reading opportunities for students.  Its recommendations will be of interest to Higher and Further Education institutions as they plan for the changes in provision to students that will be driven by the increasingly rapid evolution of ebook technologies.

Preparing for Effective Adoption and Use of Ebooks in Education examines the historical development and present context of ebooks, reviews the basics of ebooks technology and usage, considers scenarios for ebook adoption and usage in the Higher and Further Education context, addresses the challenges that are currently facing institutions and considers the future.

Production editing and project management of this report have been provided by the Innovation Support Centre at UKOLN.

In addition we are pleased to provide a further article on the subject of CERIF following the appearance of JISC Research Information Management: CERIF Workshop in Issue 69. We are indebted once again to Rosemary Russell who, together with the CERIF Support Project National Co-ordinator based at the Innovation Support Centre, Brigitte Jörg, reports on the bi-annual euroCRIS membership and Task Groups meetings which took place in Madrid on 5-6 November 2012. The report covers the range of meetings and activities arranged for those days including sessions from national groups, a CERIF tutorial and a session on identifiers.

The new issue has as usual a wide range of feature articles, events and book reviews and we hope that Ariadne’s policy of publishing on a wide range of topics will ensure that there is something there to interest as many of its readers as possible. We hope you will enjoy Ariadne  Issue 70.

While ebooks can justifiably be described as mainstream in the consumer realm, this report considers their enormous potential to Further and Higher Education institutions over the next five years. Specifically, this report: 1) introduces the historical and present context of ebooks; 2) reviews the basics of ebooks; 3) considers scenarios for ebook adoption and usage; 4) addresses current challenges; and 5) considers the future.

Preparing for Effective Adoption and Use of eBooks in Education updates previous research on the usage and adoption of ebooks within academic institutions, examining recent developments. Many institutions, conscious of the uptake by their students and staff of ebook technologies, are considering how to adopt ebooks and organise their support more effectively in a number of contexts.

This report provides an overview of many ebook technologies currently adopted within Higher and Further Education institutions as they start to embed the use of ebooks. It also takes into account various consumer ebook technologies that have developed rapidly over the last few years, as these consumer technologies have increased demand for ebooks within academic contexts by learners. The report also examines: how ebooks are being adopted within academic libraries; how ebooks are being used for learning and teaching; how ebooks have practical impacts on a broad range of areas, including scholarly publication. In so doing, it also addresses key technical and cultural issues likely to be faced by institutions as they respond to opportunities and challenges in adoption of ebooks.

Thom Bunting and Richard Waller (UKOLN ISC) have been responsible for the project management and production editing of this most recent in a series of TechWatch reports. In their work on this forthcoming TechWatch, they liaised closely with its author James Clay (ILT Learning and Resources Manager at Gloucestershire College) as well as more broadly with many others in the JISC Observatory team (notably Li Yuan, Scott Wilson, and Phil Barker of JISC CETIS) and in Higher and Further Education institutions across the UK and internationally to coordinate input into this report.

If you would like to read Preparing for Effective Adoption and Use of eBooks in Education, and send your views on its content, see the JISC Observatory Web site for explanations of how to provide feedback.

At the same time, Rosemary Russell of the ISC has contributed a report on the recent JISC Research Information Management: CERIF Workshop in which she provides readers with a firm grounding in the current activity of the CERIF Support Project at the Innovation Support Centre as well as an introduction, if one is still necessary, to Brigitte Jörg, the new National Coordinator for the Project. Rosemary provides an overview of the current CERIF landscape in the UK, reporting on the state of RIM-related activity in the UK currently as well as the rate of CRIS (Current Research Information System) procurement since the first Pure system in the UK was procured jointly by the Universities of Aberdeen and St Andrews in May 2009. She also covers UK involvement with euroCRIS and other international initiatives, the outcomes of the HE Data and Information Landscape report, the launch of a test version of the ‘CERIFied’ Research Outputs System (ROS), and the effect of the Gateway to Research (GtR) over this year. Rosemary supplies details of other developments as well as discussions and issues that arose during what was clearly a successful workshop organised by UKOLN.

Further information on Issue 69 is available in a news feature on the UKOLN Web site.

The paper which asked Can LinkedIn and Academia.edu Enhance Access to Open Repositories? has  been summarised in a post on the UK Web Focus blog. At the OR 2012 conference itself this summary had to be given in the challenging context of 21 one-minute madness summaries. A video recording of the presentation, lasting 58 seconds, is available on Vimeo and a screenshot is illustrated below.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Note that you can also view the accompanying poster (in MS PowerPoint, PDF and TIFF formats) and a  slidecast (slides with accompanying audio) of a rehearsal of the presentation, which lasts for 4 minutes 47 seconds, which is  also available on Slideshare and embedded below.

Slides from the plenary talks and several of the parallel sessions are available on the IWMW 2012 web site.  In addition video recordings of the plenary talks together with several brief video interviews which were recorded at the event are also available on the UKOLN Vimeo account.

The report documents best practices for the organisation of amplified events, which can not only help to raise the visibility and impact of ideas discussed at conferences and provide accessibility benefits for those who might not be able to attend an event in person, but also provide environmental benefits by minimising the need for unnecessary travel.

The report will be launched at UKOLN’s IWMW 2012 event. This is an appropriate forum for the launch as, as described on the UK Web Focus blog, the event itself will be amplified to a remote audience through the live video streaming of the plenary talks at the event.

The talk appears to have generated considerable interest in the Sakai and Jasig communities, with an invitation to DevCSI to collaborate more formally.

Slides for this talk are available on Slideshare.

Increasingly there is a need for quantitative evidence in order to help demonstrate the value of online services. Such evidence can also help to detect emerging patterns of usage and identify associated operational best practices.

and concludes:

Repository managers should be pro-active in showing a willingness to provide open access to repository metrics, which is felt to be consistent with the culture of openness which underpins those involved in the provision and support of open access repositories.

The paper was written to complement our work in supporting open practices within the UK higher and further education sector which includes a series of guest blog posts which were published in March-April on the UK Web Focus blog.

As described in the introduction to the report:

This report is intended to help staff of UK education institutions, involved in the development of content, gain an understanding of the emerging approaches to delivering services and content for mobile devices using the Web.

The following areas are covered in the report:

• State of the Mobile Web (including UK HEI findings)
• Mobile Web Browsers
• Responsive Web Design
• Mobile First
• Progressive Enhancement
• Server-side Device Detection
• Dedicated Mobile Site?
• Mobile Web Apps
• HTML5
• Device APIs
• HTML5 Frameworks
• “Hybrid Apps”

The report, which was written by Mark Power, JISC Cetis, is the second in a series of TechWatch reports that have been published by the JISC Observatory. The JISC Observatory is provided by the Innovation Support Centre at UKOLN together with our fellow Innovation Support Centre at Cetis. The JISC Observatory is a JISC-funded initiative to systematise the way in which the JISC anticipates and responds to projected future trends and scenarios in the context of the use of technology in higher & further Education in the UK.

A draft version of this report may be downloaded from this page. Please note that comments are very welcome, and should be emailed to the author, Emma Tonkin (e.tonkin@ukoln.ac.uk).

In May 2011 a survey of Privacy Settings For UK Russell Group University Home Pages was followed by a post which asked How Should UK Universities Respond to EU Cookie Legislation?  The suggested answer was to work collaboratively in order to share best practices and monitor developments, especially advice from the UK government organisations.

In December 2011 a post which provided a The Half Term Report on Cookie Compliance highlighted government guidelines which suggested that the government would be taking a pragmatic approach to interpretation of the legislation: “The Information Commissioner will take a practical and proportionate approach to enforcing the rules on cookies. He has to enforce the law, but he does have some discretion in how he exercises his formal enforcement powers“.

In February 2012 a post which provided suggestions on the Next Steps In Addressing Forthcoming Cookie Legislation was published.

In April 2012 a report on a survey of privacy policies provided by 30 UK Universities was published in a post which sought to provide answers to the question  How is the Higher Education Sector Responding to the Forthcoming Cookie Legislation? The post also highlighted the emphasis on providing appropriate information rather than implementing technical solutions which was described in a post on Enforcement of cookie consent rules for analytics not a priority, ICO says published on Out-law.com, a Web site which provides legal news and guidance from Pinsent Masons, an international law firm. This article began:

The UK’s data protection watchdog is not likely to take action against the users of data analytics cookies on websites even if they fall foul of new EU rules on cookie consent, it has said. 

A statement from the ICO said:

“ … it is highly unlikely that priority for any formal action would be given to focusing on uses of cookies where there is a low level of intrusiveness and risk of harm to individuals.“

In addition to engaging with practitioners across the sector who have responsibilities for managing institutional web site, in order to ensure that policy makers as well as practitioners were aware of the appropriate responses to the legislation we published an article in the Spring 2012 issue of JISC Inform. The article concluded with the following suggestions on actions to be taken by May 2012:

JISC Inform (33) Spring 2012

• Audit your web site – so that you know what cookies you are using and for what purposes. It is likely that many cookies being used are redundant and serve no useful business purpose. Stop your web server using them and get rid of the information collected by them.
• Assess how intrusive your use of cookies is. It might be useful to think of this in terms of a sliding scale, with privacy neutral cookies at one end of the scale and more intrusive uses of the technology at the other. You can then focus your efforts on achieving compliance appropriately providing more information and offering more detailed choices at the intrusive end of the scale.
• Ensure information about cookie use is clear and prominent. This involves providing a simple explanation of what the information collected by the cookie is to be used for, who has access to it and how long the information will be retained. Having this cookie information in a consistent location and in language similar to other institutions is advisable.
• Devise an appropriate mechanism for obtaining informed consent from your web site users – in advance of you placing a cookie on their device. ICO guidance suggests a number of methods which are frequently used to obtain prior consent from users.
• Look wider. Don’t forget that you will need to go beyond the main web site which may be managed by a central web team. Intranet web pages which are not available to the public are not covered by the legislation – but web pages that are directed internally will be covered if they are available to the public.

We hope that the open approaches we have taken in coordinating this work has helped to minimise unnecessary duplication of effort across the sector in interpreting the legislation and developing appropriate instituional policies.

In order to address the need for more support for CERIF use in UK, the JISC RIM Programme and UKOLN ISC are coordinating a range of support initiatives. Among these is a new CERIF national coordinator post, based at UKOLN. A CERIF Tutorial and UK Data Surgery was organised in Bath in February 2012, together with euroCRIS task group meetings. A range of CERIF-related resources is provided, including the recent UK CERIF adoption study. UKOLN ISC is also working with the euroCRIS Best Practice Task Group to produce supporting materials on CERIF use. These are just some examples of activities. In parallel, the UK user groups for the individual CRIS platforms (Pure, CONVERIS and Symplectic Elements) have grown rapidly in the last 18 months (as a result of much procurement) and provide valuable CERIF support for institutional users.

Led by Richard Jones (Technical Lead) of Cottage Labs and Stuart Lewis (Community Manager), formerly of the University of Auckland, now of the University of Edinburgh along with oversight from Paul Walk from the UKOLN Innovation Support Centre, the project was steered by an international technical advisory group of 36 experts in the areas of repositories, standards development, and scholarly content.

The development of the standard will allow a new breed of smart deposit scenarios and software products that are able to deposit content into one or more repositories, track the deposits over time, interact with them and update, or remove them. Before SWORDv2, deposit interoperability took the form of single deposits, coined as ‘fire and forget’. Once a deposit had been made, no further interaction was possible. SWORD v2 extends its support for the Atom Publishing Protocol (AtomPub) by adding support updates and deletions. These will enable new interoperable deposit management systems to be built that will work with any SWORD v2 compliant system.

Deposit use cases which are now possible include collaborative authoring, or getting more integrated with the publication workflow where multiple updates and versions of documents are required. Further details can be found at the SWORD website: http://swordapp.org/ or by emailing info@swordapp.org

(Text by Stuart Lewis & Richard Jones)

However despite the widespread use of CERIF as an underlying standard, many institutions are not engaging with CERIF directly. Staff find CERIF complex and rely on external expertise from CRIS vendors and UK user groups; only institutions involved in JISC projects are properly engaging with CERIF. Many staff are keen to engage more – this is likely to happen as local CRIS implementations are completed and institutions are able to start exploiting the many efficiency benefits offered by CERIF.

Introducing Technical Foundations

The Technical Foundations web site is an important developing strand of ISC activities at UKOLN. It is aimed at those involved in technical innovation in the higher and further education sectors in the UK, and features a growing collection of resources to support the selection and use of information standards and technologies. It is intended to provide an authoritative overview and synthesis of a wide range of technical subjects of interest to the JISC community, principally in the UK HE sector. It seeks to build on cutting-edge developments in information science in the UK HE sector, developing practical information on these areas as they become increasingly mature.

Who is it for?

It aims to serve research managers, researchers, early adopters, developers, and ultimately the whole UK HE sector from a technical perspective: the entire JISC community.

Who is working on it?

The Technical Foundations work will involve an increasing number of people, both within the UKOLN ISC and the JISC and from outside. These will be both contributors and expert reviewers of the content in specialist areas. Our hope is that people across the sector will become involved, so please contact us if you have any suggestions or contributions to make as the site develops.

This work is being co-ordinated by Talat Chaudhri (introduction and staff page here).

What do we do?

In order to make Technical Foundations work, we have recognised that technical information comes from a variety of sources and people working in different roles across the sector have valuable contributions to make. That means that we have to build content for Technical Foundations that is able to evolve as expertise in developing areas matures over time.

As you might expect, the process starts off by collecting and bringing together disparate sources of information from across the Web. In addition to having staff who monitor develops in specific areas, other specific inputs include blogs and the JISC Observatory. We will maintain our own blog to make initial reports on areas of interest to the sector. The next stage is to produce guidance notes about the issues that are being faced, the ways in which people are trying to solve them and the possible approaches that could be used. The form these brief guidance notes may take will vary from topic to topic, and they do not have to be comprehensive. This content will need to be flexible, following the needs of each particular developing area.

Lastly, when a particular topic reaches sufficient maturity for us to develop this content into a more mature synthesis, we will produce topic pages outlining the background and providing an introduction to a topic, the current usage of technologies in that area, and the issues that are being faced, together with solutions and approaches to any problems that are arising. We will include the broadest possible variety of views and perspectives from those who have already engaged with these technologies, especially people who are developing them right now.

We will make sure that this content goes through a robust quality assurance exercise from people who know what is going on in these areas, so that you can trust the information we provide. You will be able to see how up-to-date each topic page is.

It is the mission of Technical Foundations to keep all this information up-to-date and to cover cutting-edge developments, so it is always a relevant and attractive resource, both to experts and to newcomers to the topics that we cover.

How far have we got?

The site is in development: draft content on a number of topics is already available, pending quality assurance by expert reviewers in each specific area – and more will follow soon. There are already some guidance notes for topics in early-stage development. Please contact us if you have any suggestions. We will be carrying out further phases of consultation on the topic-based content and on the usability of the user interface of the site. There are also quite a number of blog posts on the blog, so we would encourage you to subscribe and comment on what we have written.

Brigitte Jörg’s in-depth tutorial covered the CERIF data model (eg there are lots of entities but all are described in exactly the same way) and how it is used, including new items in CERIF 1.3. CERIF also has a triple structure, so can link to the semantic web.

The data surgery in the afternoon focused firstly on a synthesis of UK CERIF mapping work, so involved a number of JISC projects, including CERIF in Action, IRIOS (1 and 2) and CERIFy. There was lively discussion on some of the issues to be resolved eg multiple identifiers, person names, titles, vocabularies. The CERIF in Action project is tasked with implementing the resulting model.

Other sessions covered CERIF use in the Research Management and Administration System (RMAS) – institutions will be able to start buying from framework at the end of February; CERIF and research datasets; linked open data; and a taxonomy of research equipment for inclusion in CERIF. A fuller write-up will follow.

Most of the presentations are already on the UKOLN web site. A number of participants used the #cerifbath Twitter hashtag at the event and a record of the tweets has been published on Storify. Twitter users (and, indeed, non Twitter users) at the event may also wish to add their details on the CERIF tutorial and UK data surgery Lanyrd page which will enable you to make links with others with an interest in this area.

Also watch this space for JISC RIM project synthesis posts, coming up soon…

The workshop is described on the SCONUL website, along with links to the ‘vision’ and the accompanying presentation, both of which are linked to below for convenience:

• the vision
• the accompanying presentation on Slideshare

The Group will be meeting in Bath (see details of agenda, papers, maps, etc.) on 10 February 2012, alongside the other euroCRIS Task Groups, and preceded by the CERIF Tutorial and UK Data Surgery on 9 February.

The events were accompanied by a series of blog posts published on the UK Web Focus blog which provided a combination of evidenced-based surveys of usage of online services, discussions of the implications of the findings and reflections on the survey methodologies.

A report on this work is available as a series of self-contained documents which have been published on the Evidence, Impact, metrics blog.  These reports are also available below:

• Why the Need for this Work?: [HTML] – [MS Word]
• Summary of Events: [HTML] – [MS Word]
• Summary of Blog Posts: [HTML] – [MS Word]
• Feedback from the Second Workshop: [HTML] – [MS Word]
• Summary of the Final Workshop: [HTML] – [MS Word]
• Running Your Own Surveys: [HTML] – [MS Word]
• A Framework For Metrics: [HTML] – [MS Word]

Note that the report on Running Your Own Surveys may be of particular interest to projects which have a requirement to be able to provide quantitative evidence of the benefits of the project activities.

Feedback on this work is welcomed.

As can be seen from the Google Reader Bundle aggregation of the JISC MRD project blogs many of the projects have now set up a blog, as contractually required, and are now starting to publish blog posts.

Approaches to Measuring Effectiveness

As mentioned in the workshop session on “Blogging Practices To Support Project Work” which I gave at the JISC MRD Launch Meeting projects may also need to give some thought to ways in which they can measure the effectiveness of their blogs.

On the UK Web Focus blog I have carried out a number of surveys, most recently in November 2010, which provided feedback from blog readers. However this can be a time-consuming process and, for project blogs which may have a niche readership, may fail to gain sufficient numbers of responses – especially if all 17 Research Data Management Infrastructure Projects chose to announce a reader survey at the same time!

Many blog platforms will provide widgets which can allow readers to rate posts, or give other indications of interest in the content of posts (including, it should be added, disagreement with the contents) by liking them or favouriting them in social networking environments of tweeting links to the post.  As illustrated below the blog post on EPub Format For Papers in Repositories has received 4 votes.

However once again it cannot be guaranteed that readers will be willing to make use of such tools. And although it may be easy to interpret a meaning for number of positive votes it the ratings are poor, as they are for a post on are Thoughts on Google Scholar Citations does this indicate criticism of the post itself (poorly written and flawed arguments) or a disagreement with the subject of the post?

An alternative approach, which was mentioned at last week’s blogging workshop session, would be to register your blog with a blogging analytics service.

A post on #jiscmrd 2011-2013 Launch Meeting – Blog analytics on the Research Data Toolkit blog highlighted ways in which Google Analytics can be used to measure usage statistics, and mentioned the  Web Ninja Google Analytics Plugin which can be used to “bring immediacy and motivation to blog in a way that the more extensive but remote Google Analytics dashboard does not“.

Google Analytics will be familiar with most projects and is likely to be used on many project Web sites.  But there are also analytic services which have been developed to provide an understanding of the ways in which blogs are being used, in particular through the analysis of comments and trackbacks which do not normally feature on conventional Web sites.

Ebuzzing

Ebuzzing, which was until recently known as Wikio is one such service.  A graph of an analysis of the EBuzzing statistics for the UK Web Focus blog is illustrated.  As can be seen the blog is currently ranked at 60 in the Technology category, and peaked at 34 in February 2011.

The service was rebranded on 25 November and it seems that the documentation of how the ranking are determined is not currently available, although the following summary was posted earlier this year:

The position of a blog in the Wikio ranking depends on the number and weight of the incoming links from other blogs. These links are dynamic, which means that they are backlinks or links found within articles.

The post goes on to answer questions on How do you move up (or down) the rankings?, Which links do you use?  What about links in the sidebars of blogs?, what is the point of these rankings?, Why do you have some US blogs in a UK ranking list, and How does a blog become registered to be considered for the rankings?

It should also be noted that registering for the service can provide an additional access route to your blog as well as providing links to a number of social media sharing services, as illustrated below.  Note that this shows that there have been five tweets about the post on Paradata for Online Surveys – although the link providing details of the tweets seems to be broken.

Technorati

There can be dangers in using a single analytics service, especially is the underlying algorithms are not documented and the relevance is unclear.  However making use of additional service can help to provide a better understanding of a blog’s connectedness in the blogosphere. One such service is Technorati.

The Technorati service does provide a somewhat more detailed description of the approaches it takes to identify authority and rank:

What is Technorati Authority?

• Technorati Authority measures a site’s standing & influence in the blogosphere. With the October 2009 redesign of technorati.com, we’ve changed the Technorati Authority calculations to better reflect the continually changing attention of the blogosphere.
• We have also added a new measure of Technorati Authority, which is topical by content category, i.e., technology, movies, automotive, etc.

How is Technorati Authority calculated?

• Authority is calculated based on a site’s linking behavior, categorization and other associated data over a short, finite period of time. A site’s authority may rapidly rise and fall depending on what the blogosphere is discussing at the moment, and how often a site produces content being referenced by other sites.
• The new Authority calculation differs from the past version, which measured linking behavior over a longer 6 month timeframe. Please note that links in blogrolls don’t count towards Authority, as they are not indicative of interest in relevant content; we stopped including blogroll links in August 2008.
• Authority is on a scale of 0-1000. 1000 is the highest possible authority.

What Should You Do?

There are lies, damned lies and Web analytics, to paraphrase a well-known saying.  Analytics services for blogs may also be subject to gaming (such as artificially generating links to blogs in order to inflate rankings), may fail to understand the purpose of a blog (it may be a reflective blog, which isn’t intended to gain a big audience and solicit feedback and comments) and could lead to misleading league tables being published.

Whilst such comments have elements of truth, there may still be a requirement to be able to provide information on a project blog’s effectiveness.  The approaches listed at the beginning of this post may therefore be relevant.  But it should be noted that use of the two blog analytics services I’ve mentioned will require no additional effort  on the part of the blog provider or the reader, once the blog has been registered with the service.

I therefore feel that there can be advantages to projects in registering their blogs with these services.  But in addition to possible benefits to the individual projects who chose to do this, there may also be benefits in being able to have a picture across all project blogs. Adding a keyword in Technorati of ‘JISCMRD’ for example, would enable the Technorati ranking for the blogs to be easily aggregated.  An example of this can be seen from a Technorati, search for ‘JISC’ from which we might deduce that the JISC Digitisation, Lorna’s JISC CETIS blog, UK Web Focus and MASHe blogs seem to be successful in generating discussion across other blogs.

A Road map for altmetrics

The altmetrics Web site provides access to altmetrics: a manifesto which describes how “the growth of new, online scholarly tools allows us to make new filters; these altmetrics reflect the broad, rapid impact of scholarship in this burgeoning ecosystem” and goes on to “call for more tools and research based on altmetrics.“.

The JISC MRD programme with its interest in management of data across the research community and the requirements for projects to blog would appear to provide an opportunity to explore altmetrics in the context of blogs.  The two commercial services I have mentioned might provide an opportunity to begin such exploration.  But I am sure that we will see the development of more appropriate tools targetted at the particular requirements of the research sector being developed. Perhaps by the end of the current JISC MRD programme we will be using such tools to analyse the blogs.   In the interim projects may wish to consider using the services I have mentioned.

I should add that this is a suggestion and I’d welcome feedback, including concerns and criticisms people may have.

I use the Smartr app on my iPod Touch to view the content of links posted by my Twitter followers. During the day, in particular the links are often work-related, with the variety of interests which people I follow on Twitter have providing serendipity which does not really happen when I follow topic-focussed blogs and RSS feeds.

However in addition to the serendipitous links which are tweeted by the people I follow (which in the evening and during weekends tends to become more diverse in nature) I also use Smartr to follow specific Twitter lists which I have created. The lists include people who have attended specific events, official organisational or project Twitter feeds or people who are closely associated with particular JISC programmes.

The Twitter lists I have created, which can be accessed from my Twitter account, include:

JISCMRD: people who tweet mainly related to work on JISC MRD project activities.  Recent tweets from members of this list are illustrated.

IWMC: people who are members of the institutional Web management community.

IWMW2011: Speakers at UKOLN’s IWMW 2011 event.

JISC: Official JISC Twitter accounts of particular interest.

Note that although Twitter lists are often used for viewing the content of tweets from selected groups of Twitter users, applications such as Smartr make use of Twitter lists in other ways.

As can be seen from the accompanying image Smartr harvests the content of links posted by members of the list. In this example we can see the contents of the link referred to in the following tweet from Jez Cope:

Hertford Regional College outsourcing storage and compute resources to Iceland for geothermal power http://www.guardian.co.uk/government-computing-network/2011/nov/30/hertford-regional-college-iceland-data-centre #jiscmrd #idcc11

and the contents of the link referred to in this tweet from Simon Hodson:

#jiscmrd #jiscmrd 2011-2013 Launch Meeting – Biomedical/Health breakout group from @wjworthington bit.ly/vFT8K2

However tweets which contain no links are not displayed in Smartr.

Clicking on the summary will display the full contents of the page which has been linked to. The accompanying  image shows how a blog post on “JISC Managing Research Data programme launch – Day 1” provided by the RDM_C4DM project is displayed in the Smartr app.

It should also be noted that this content can be bookmarked and is available if the mobile device is offline.  Favouriting a page also means that the page can be accessed from a Web browser, as can be seen from these favourites for the JISCMRD list.

We can therefore see how Smartr can be used to provide curated access to content relevant to a particular community.  Use of project Twitter accounts to provide links to appropriate content provided by a project as well as links to content of interest to projects and the programmes can therefore be used to ensure that resources likely to be relevant to funded projects can be made available with little effort (posting a tweet of up to 140 characters) in a way which would be not as easy to do using conventional mailing lists.

Note that the Smartr app is currently available for the iPhone and iPad platforms. However a desktop app is also being developed.  In addition to Smartr there are similar personalised newspaper apps which provide attractive and easy-to-use interfaces to content available via RSS feeds, such as Pulse and Feedly, both of which are available on multiple platforms. However with the exception of Flipboard. which is only available for the iPad, I’m not aware of other apps which process links posted on Twitter. Any suggestions?

Simon Hodson, the JISC Programme Manager for the Managing Research Data programme had invited me to run a workshop session on “Blogging Practices To Support Project Work“. This was felt to be an important topic for the funded projects as there is a contractual requirement for projects to provide blogs as part of their engagement and dissemination activities.

Running an interactive workshop session for an audience of over 60 people can be quite challenging, especially as many of the attendees were new to me and I was unsure of their expertise and interests and whether they be willing to engage on open discussions.  I had therefore prepared a large number of slides which I would be able to use to cover a variety of topics related to the use of blogs. Despite only a small number of people being activebloggers I was pleased to find the the audience was willing to engage in discussions which meant that I was able to allow time for the discussions to take place, with the slides being a resource (available on Slideshare and on the UKOLN Web site and embedded below) which could be accessed afterwards.

In addition note that a Storify summary of the session, based on the tweets posted during the workshop session are available.

The main points I made during the sessions are listed below:

• Blogs have a role to play in engaging with a project’s user communities and supporting dissemination activities.
• Not every will be a natural blogger (or coder or writer of peer-reviewed papers). However since project must publish blog posts there will be a need to enable those who enjoy blogging to do so and encourage those who may be reluctant bloggersto develop their skills in use of this medium.
• Since many blog platforms provide mobile-friendly access to resources, we might expect access to content hosted on blogs to increase as use of mobile devoices grow.
• Blog platforms can provide machine-friendly access to resources through use of RSS. In order to ensure that full content of blog posts is made available, blogs should be configured to deliver the full content of the posts and not just a short summary.
• Spam comment can be a problem, but spam filters can trap much automated spam.  It is probably better to accept the need to manage spam that to impose barriers which can inhibit interested parties in adding comments to posts.
• There will be a need to manage blogs which the project is completed.

The slides which are available on Slideshare are also embedded below.