The event report has now been published on the DevCSI blog, some highlights include:

- Considering the use of SWORD 2 and BitTorrent to deal with large datasets
- Proof-of-concept centralised service for tracking activity data around research projects and individual datasets
- User perspectives on metadata for datasets and examining a common schema to describe metadata for datasets

There are several multimedia interviews with attendees who talked about what they learned, discussed and worked on at the event.

We hope you find the report useful and watch out for similar future follow-up events in this area from DevCSI and JISC.

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.

Text mining tools and technologies have a long history in the repository world, where they have been applied successfully for a variety of purposes. These vary from pragmatic aims such as enabling document search and browse facilities, linking related documents, identifying copies or facilitating the deposit process, to support tools for academic research. The latter category includes supporting research on the basis of a large body of documents, facilitating access to and reuse of existing work, and connecting the formal academic world with areas such as the traditional and social media. The JISC have funded a number of projects and initiatives in both areas, notably NaCTeM and the ResDis programme. Research areas as diverse as biology, chemistry, sociology and criminology have seen effective use made of text mining technologies.

However, the uptake and hence the impact of these tools has been uneven. Several obstacles to development and deployment are frequently cited, including the maturity, complexity, and in some instances cost of software packages, as well as scarcity of relevant technical skills. Text mining methods and tools can be fragile and complex, requiring significant set-up time and effort. Projects making use of text mining may also suffer from legal obstacles, such as copyright and intellectual property considerations. The benefit to be gained from deployment of text-mining tools in areas such as institutional repositories or as a research tool in its own right may be difficult to predict without a costly pilot project.

This workshop is intended to bring together contributions from practitioners and researchers in fields connected to text mining and analysis. Authors are invited to submit original, unpublished research papers: as a workshop, both work-in-progress and completed work are welcome.

This event will take place during the OR–2012 pre-conference workshop session (9th–10th July 2012).

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

1. Discipline-specific research involving text-mining: bioinformatics, chemistry, the social sciences, etc.
2. Techniques in text mining: sentiment analysis/subjectivity analysis, opinion mining, affect analysis, metaphor analysis, etc.
3. Legal aspects of text mining/analysis.
4. Current developments in text mining.
5. Metadata extraction from document text, including formal and informal metadata: document indexing, document classification, and evaluation of metadata quality.
6. Text mining for document categorisation or summarisation.
7. Text mining over the social web: community detection, timelines, etc.
8. Evaluation of text mining tools, open-source or commercial: case studies and findings.

Types of contribution

The following possible contributions are sought:
1. Full papers (6–8 pages)
2. Extended abstracts for oral presentation, posters or software demos (1–2 pages)

Submission

Papers/extended abstracts should be prepared in either Word or LaTeX using the Springer LNCS format (http://www.springer.com/computer/lncs?SGWID=0–164–6–793341–0).
Files should be submitted by email to Emma Tonkin

Important Dates/Deadlines

• 15-May–2012 Title/Abstract submission (optional)
• 25-May–2012 Full paper/Extended abstract submission
• 8-June–2012 Decisions announced
• 25-June–2012 Submission of final papers
• 9/10-July–2012 Workshop

Publication

All accepted contributions will be published in the workshop proceedings. Authors of selected contributions will be invited to submit an extended and revised version for formal publication; to this end, a call for chapters will be launched following the workshop.

Workshop chairs

• Emma Tonkin – Innovation Support Centre, UKOLN, University of Bath, UK
• Torsten Reimer – JISC
• Paul Walk – Innovation Support Centre, UKOLN, University of Bath, UK

The harnessing of tags in the deployment of this Drupal platform has proven central to the degree to which the extensive legacy material (dating back to the mid-1990s and the eLib Programme) has been more readily exposed to Ariadne’s readership. These tags or keywords will also serve to assist readers, sometimes in their first post (and third language), concerned with new concepts arising in the most current articles where they will equally provide a path to complementary information on new concepts as much as the old. The adoption of features such as ‘Forthcoming content’, the revolving gallery and Today’s choice also cater for readers’ inclination to browse at the same time as Ariadne’s various feeds offer them the opportunity to pull in specific information to which they will want to subscribe.

The re-design of Ariadne also means that its authors benefit from the exposure of a wide range of new data, of particular use to readers seeking information on particular themes or on authors’ interests and expertise. This is most apparent in the construction of author profiles which now operate independently of the articles by their author which they list in full. Editor Richard Waller will be very pleased to hear from authors published in earlier issues who would like to update their details, for which messages a contact form stands ready.

Brian Kelly has written, “I am pleased to announce developments to Ariadne which not only enhance the user interface but also, perhaps more importantly, provide much richer access to the large number of articles which have been published during its lifetime.

Ariadne was launched at a time when mailing lists provided the main communications channel with Web sites acting primarily for publishing information. In today’s environment there is a much greater diversity of communications and publication channels including blogs, wikis, Twitter and social networks. Ariadne continues to have a valuable role to play in this space and we hope the developments which have been launched in this issue will appeal to both existing readers and those who may not have come across Ariadne previously. In light of the changing landscape we have reduced Ariadne’s publication frequency from four to three times per year. We feel Ariadne provides a valuable publishing channel which is positioned between the many blogs which describe digital library developments and peer-reviewed journals.”

Further information on the new Ariadne can be obtained from a complementary news feature on the UKOLN Web site.

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).

The UK Government has been working on the development of a policy on use of open standards.  A formal public consultation focused on open standards for software interoperability, data and document formats in government IT requirements and sought evidence to inform:

• the definition of open standard in the context of government IT;
• the meaning of mandation and the effects compulsory standards may have on government departments, delivery partners and supply chains;
• international alignment and cross-border interoperability.

This consultation was launched on 9 February 2012 and will scheduled to closed on 3 May 2012 (although the closing date was subsequently extended until 4 June 2012).

UKOLN ISC has giving feedback on the initial survey an the open standards consultation document.

Dates

Work started: 9 Feb 2011

Planned completion date: 3 May 2012

Actual completion date: 25 April 2012

Activities

This work involved reading documents published by the UK Government, responding to the documents and encouraging involvement from others within the UK higher and further educations sector.

Outputs

The outputs of this work were:

• Blog post on Preparing a Response to the UK Government’s Open Standards: Open Opportunities Document, UK Web Focus blog, 26 April 2012 which summarised experiences of support for open standards in JISC development programmes since the 1990s and encouragement of others to participate in consultation.
• Response to Chapter 1: Criteria for open standards
• Response to Chapter 2: Open standards mandation
• Response to Chapter 3: International alignment

This work was also mentioned in the JISC Daily News Update, 27 April 2012.

People

This work was led by Brian Kelly.

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.

We have reverted back to the three-day format for this year’s event and since we’ll be starting on the opening morning (rather than after lunch) we are able to provide a fuller programme than usual, with 11 plenary talks and 20 parallel sessions.  Further details about the plenary talks is given in a post on the UK Web Focus blog.

Together with JISC, the Innovation Support Centre recognises the growing importance of CERIF in the research information management landscape in the UK – our own Rosemary Russell has recently published a study on this.

Brigitte has a very high level of expertise with CERIF and will bring strong information management skills and experience to the Innovation Support Centre. We have already worked with Brigitte a little: in particular, she was a speaker at our recent CERIF Tutorial in Bath.

We look forward to working with her!

(We’ll be posting more about the CERIF Support Project in due course)

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)

Relevance to the UK Researcher ID Task and Finish Group

This meeting follows a series of six meetings of crucial institutional, high-level, strategic and administrative stakeholders in the UK Higher Education sector, the Researcher ID (ResID) Task and Finish Group. This group has been organised by the JISC, which has been represented on the group by programme managers as well as by Brian Kelly and Talat Chaudhri of the ISC at UKOLN. It aims to meet once more in order to present its findings, having achieved a broad consensus amongst those stakeholders and having funded, agreed and published a series of reports and statements of principle. However, the Knowledge Exchange Digital Author Identifier (KEDAI) summit (tweets archived here and notes in this post by Brian Kelly) represents a wider international group interested in the same issues, and the ResID group has expressed a strong interest in developing UK support for researcher ID schemes firmly within the broader international perspective. The ResID group had, broadly speaking, supported the ORCID identifier scheme, which is in early development, since it is being built on just such an international basis and has buy-in and financial support from governmental organisations, worldwide higher education institutions and international publishers. The KEDAI summit, however, did not unambiguously throw its weight behind ORCID. Unlike the ResID group, which could be seen to have understood the competing International Standard Names Identifier (ISNI) as one of a host of many identifiers that would be linked by a single ORCID identifier for each researcher or author, the KEDAI summit, after much discussion, identified both ORCID and ISNI as potential solutions, although recognising that other possibilities could arise and should not be ruled out either at this early stage. Consequently, it will be necessary for the UK members of the ResID group who attended KEDAI to report back and for the group as a whole to re-think some of its findings.

Discussions and Consensus Building

The meeting was extremely successful in clarifying the roles of the possible international players and interest groups in this space, along with the likely sources of conflict that might need to be mitigated in order for any scheme to succeed. In addition to those mentioned above, VIAF, RePEc, CrossRef, TROVE (in Australia) and VIVO (principally in the US and Australia) were factored into the discussions, which were in large part led by Andrew Treloar (Australian National Data Service), Cliff Lynch (CNI), Bas Cordewener (SURF, Knowledge Exchange) and Rachel Bruce (JISC). Other names amongst many that deserve an honorable mention here include, but are not limited to, Paolo Bouquet (University of Trento), Josh Brown (JISC), Nicky Ferguson (Clax Ltd., and author of ResID reports for JISC), Andrew MacEwan (British Library), Mogens Sandfær (DTIC), Chris Shillum (Elsevier) and Maurice Vanderfeesten (SURF).

There were considerable discussions of issues of scope, i.e. who should have an identifier, the differences between authors, researchers, academics and others who could in certain contexts require such an identifier. A great deal of time was devoted to the benefits and financial motivations for developing such infrastructure, which it was agreed were considerable in all of the countries represented – however, the range of use cases are so broad that it is currently difficult to make generalisations about financial incentives: each use case would have its own specific business case, so no single business case can be developed; it is so early in the development of both ORCID and ISNI (amongst others) that only a broad-brush discussion of benefits could be had. All the same, it was agreed that these benefits, in general terms, were so substantial and of such wide applicability within academia internationally, that the case for a single international identifier scheme, whatever that may end up being, was agreed unambiguously and unanimously by the attendees. It was regarded as a major risk to fail in this process, since the likely result would be a series of commercial identifier solutions lacking interoperability, as to some extent already exist today in Web of Science, Microsoft Academic Search and Google Scholar, none of which unambiguously identify authors well at present.

Issues Arising and Differences of Approach

There were, of course, differences. Most notably, there were issues of control. Some argued that it is academics who should have control over their own identifiers, which is the basis upon which the ORCID development is proceeding, albeit with a dose of realism: the data will need to be bulk-loaded by institutions and curated by them whenever an individual academic does not choose to take control over their identifier and associated data. On the other hand, the ISNI data, via the VIAF database, is collected by institutions on a model more familiar to traditional library and research reporting approaches, although this does not mean that there is never a role, lower down in the process, for individuals to correct their own data and take control of it. There are international differences in terms of privacy legislation that will need to be taken account of. In Norway, for example, national security numbers are now public information, whereas in the UK they are considered private. The same could be said even of tax returns in different jurisdictions.

Perhaps the greatest area of uncertainty was over the level of semantic information that needed to be attached to an identifier in order for it to be disambiguated, and whether too much information would effectively turn it into yet another silo of information, unconnected to other similar data silos, as Paolo Bouquet convincingly argued. One alternative view in the ORCID group, as Chris Shillum reported (although not his own view) is that semantic information additional to the lowest level required for author identification will be required in order to create added-value services capable of incentivising the take-up and use of the identifiers by academics in practice: without this, the identifier scheme would be, according to this view, an expensive white elephant, unused by the academics whose institutions had registered them. While it was agreed by all that such added-value services were crucial, the opposing view was that they ought to be kept separate from the identifier scheme that they relied on. Paolo Bouquet won considerable support in maintaining the view that ORCID, for example, should aim at a “thin layer” of interoperability based on a minimum of semantic information attached to each identifier. For example, institutional affiliations can change over time, and require date-stamping: if this were to be included, the identifier scheme would quickly be overburdened; if only the registering institution were included, it would be the source of frequent misleading information about earlier or later publications written elsewhere.

Future Work on Identifiers

One telling discussion occurred on the first day, on this subject, about the broader scope of identifier schemes: specifically organisational identifiers. It was quickly agreed that, while this is a critically important area in future, it is of little use creating organisational identifier schemes when even individual researchers, academics or other authors cannot be uniquely identified. It remains to be seen whether such organisational identifier schemes will be necessary, although this seems likely, and to what extent it will be possible to keep much of the metadata in dispersed stores across institutions rather than overburden the identifier scheme as was discussed with regard to identifiers for individuals. Unlike ISNI, which is a “top-down” initiative, ORCID represents a “bottom-up” approach where authors make claims or assertions about themselves. In phase 1 of ORCID, there will only be self-assertions, whereas Phase 2 is planned to include verification by institutions, publishers, funders and other authorities. It could be said that even this represents a substantial broadening of the metadata that is required to make an identifier scheme function effectively, despite being clearly very useful as an added service.

Summary

Overall, it was agreed in general that it was very useful, if not critical, for a broad coalition of international partners and national interests to set out broad principles and guidance in this way, as agreed at KEDAI, for developers of author and/or researcher identifier schemes to follow. It was further agreed that, although the technical difficulty of producing such a scheme is in fact low, it is nonetheless far from easy to produce one that will succeed in practice because of the huge range of stakeholders, international governance organisations and interests, both public sector and commercial, that need to be able to use the scheme effectively in order for it to succeed. As a consequence, previous schemes have not succeeded. Lastly, and most significantly of all, researchers and academics themselves have to see a reason to use any identifier scheme as a necessary and gainful part of their employment in a way that substantially benefits research and human knowledge but also helps individuals in their daily workflows. The attendees agreed that this, above all, was the key criterion of success.

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.

JISC funded four projects in RIM2: BRUCE, CERIFy, IRIOS-1 and MICE, which ran from February to July 2011, with some extensions until the Autumn allowing for the short timescale. As a departure from RIM1 (which had a broader remit), all projects were based on CERIF at the core and aimed to:

All the projects have helped to move CERIF use forward at a technical level in various ways. The BRUCE project for example developed an open source CERIF-based reporting tool. While the reporting element may not be innovative in itself, mapping data to CERIF has allowed Brunel University to perform analysis on research information which was not previously possible. The open source tool could be used by other smaller HEIs without a ‘full’ CERIF CRIS.

The CERIFy project also worked with institutions which did not have a CERIF CRIS at the time. It carried out business process mapping for common RIM activities (which revealed many similarities across institutions). The project successfully tested the export and re-import of CERIF-compliant institutional data from the CERIFy CRIS to Thomson Reuters InCites.  This was innovative in that it demonstrated data exchange rather than one-way import/export, which is the most common process, given the lack of mature CERIF compliant systems which are capable of exchange and the absence of business demand to date.

However the IRIOS projects (1 and now 2) have been working with the Research Councils, and therefore helping to drive forward the CERIF agenda outside HEIs; the business need may grow in future. IRIOS developed a CERIF-based demonstrator ‘interrogation’ tool for Research Council-funded projects and outputs.

The MICE project was driven by the fact that CERIF did not fully address impact issues, thus limiting its applicability to the UK Research Excellence Framework. The project worked closely with euroCRIS and succeeded in extending CERIF to incorporate impact indicators and measures into the model’s architecture. However further work is needed to agree a taxonomy of indicators and measures within the community.

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.

Last Monday, I attended a meeting with Mimas, the co-ordinators of the JISC funded Discovery Programme in order to start planning the delivery of training for Discovery in 2012. This was my first meeting with the Discovery team, and it was really good to see a few familiar faces  and  also to be able to put ‘faces’ to some well known and respected ‘names’ and tweets.

I have been aware for a while of the great work that has been done by the Resource Discovery Taskforce and it is great to have the opportunity of working on the project alongside colleagues at Mimas.

The Discovery programme is based on the vision of the Resource Discovery Taskforce to make the digital resources in our museums, libraries and archives more discoverable; both by people and machines. This is being done by developing a ‘metadata ecology’ that will improve the discovery and delivery of important collections data that often lies deep within our repositories. Most of my career has been spent building these collections and I am only too aware of the importance of improving access to the resources that lie, sometimes far to hidden, deep within our websites and databases.

The discovery vision is underpinned by a set of 5 aims and 10 targets that are available from their website at:  http://www.discovery.ac.uk/vision/, but more recently this has been built on by Paul Walk here at the ISC to create the Discovery Technical Principles, which will become a backbone of the efforts to ‘enhance the impact of our knowledge resources for the furtherance of scholarship and innovation.’  You can read more on this in Paul Walk’s post on the Technical Foundations blog.

The meeting started with some interesting discussion on how we might agree on a working definition of ‘identifier’ and whether this varied depending on the domain using the term and indeed whether it was even possible to provide a watertight definition of ‘entity’, that would be accepted by all domains.  In the end we felt it would be better to use a more pragmatic approach and use case-studies to illustrate how different  organisations have successfully tackled these issues.

The main role of the ISC within discovery  is going to be helping  Mimas with delivering their  training program.  We will be helping develop the training sessions and preparing training materials for use in the training and release through the website.  Initially, this work is starting by reviewing what relevant materials are already available from within UKOLN, such as those on APIs and metadata. We will then looking wider afield to see what is available from CETIS and other sources so that we can avoid any unnecessary duplication.

The majority of these materials will be textual, but we are also going to be producing a range of multi-media resources including video and podcasts and I will be taking the lead on the production of these, and I am really looking forward to building my experience and knowledge in this area.

There are full details of the Discovery Project Training intentions on their blogsite at:

http://blog.discovery.ac.uk/2012/02/01/embedding-the-principles-our-approach-to-guidance-materials-and-workshops-so-far/

All in all, a very useful meeting and a good start to planning training with the discovery project. Lets get going!

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…

Although the title may seem a little dull, the report is rather exciting. I’ve been given a brief that includes assessing what I would consider to be some of the most useful outcomes of projects – the potential use of a development project by the wider community, the potential for technologies to be developed beyond the life of an individual project and the potential for building future collaboration between institutions based on shared interests identified during the review.

The term ‘assessment’ has connotations of an end, something that is done when the work is finished. What interests me in the assessment brief I’ve been discussing with the JISC programme managers involved in Inf11 is the joint emphasis on what has been achieved, and how that might be built on into the future. It’s inspiring to think that the projects included in this report will be used to share knowledge and develop technologies in one form or another into the future in the areas that they were working on during the Inf11 programme.

The report itself will be based on a review of final reports from the selected projects plus discussion with the project managers/staff who worked on the projects. The delivery date for this work is May 2012.

Natasha has been the event organiser for the IWMW series, including IWMW 2012, as well as several events for DevCSI, including the Dev8D series.

She also co-ordinates the marketing activities including managing the production of a range of publicity materials in electronic and paper-based media.

See also: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ukoln/staff/j.cheal/

The post requires a broad knowledge of research information management issues, systems and practice and a good working knowledge of CERIF. The post holder will also be expected to engage actively with the all project stakeholders and to be able to undertake frequent UK and some overseas travel.

The post forms part of the JISC-funded Innovation Support Centre at UKOLN. Informal enquiries about the vacancy should be made to Paul Walk, UKOLN ISC Director.

Full details of the vacancy together with contact details for informal enquiries are available on the University of Bath Web site.

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 call for submissions for this year’s event is now open. As described in an accompanying blog post in addition to proposals for plenary talks and 90 minute workshop sessions we also invite other ideas for ways of engaging with the IWMW 2012 participants.

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.

His recent work at UKOLN includes the project management of two work-packages for the European FP7 digitisation project – IMPACT – Improving Access to Text, established to improve the quality and speed of the mass digitisation and OCR of historic text. Now available at: www.digitisation.eu

Ed trained and worked as a photographer, before building expertise within Digital imaging and Digitisation but now works mainly as a trainer and producer of Open Educational Resources and e-learning materials.

For the first time euroCRIS task group meetings will be co-located, and preceded by a CERIF tutorial and data surgery. UKOLN, euroCRIS and JISC are jointly organising these events on 9-10 February. CERIF, the Common European Research Information Format, is now being widely used in UK higher education institutions as a result of many recent procurements of CERIF-based CRIS (Current Research Information Systems) – particularly during 2010 and 2011. However staff in many institutions have expressed the desire to strengthen their understanding of CERIF in order to better exploit the opportunities offered by this powerful (and complex) standard. The meetings are being supported by the JISC Research Information Management (RIM) Programme which is working to increase engagement with CERIF and support the emerging community of practice in the UK.

An introductory CERIF tutorial will be held on the morning of 9 February. In the afternoon there will be a ‘data surgery’ session which will examine the use of CERIF in real life scenarios. The aim is both to support new adopters of CERIF and to consolidate existing expertise. The afternoon session will therefore be divided into two groups – one for those new or relatively new to CERIF, and another for more advanced users. Participants are being asked to bring CERIF queries and data modelling/mapping issues for discussion with CERIF experts.

On 10 February five euroCRIS task groups will meet in parallel sessions. See the agendas and note that CERIF expertise is not required to participate. Task group leaders are keen to gather UK RIM experience.

The meetings are open, and all those involved in research information management (eg CRIS managers and IT staff, metadata/repository managers, research office staff…) are strongly encouraged to participate.

Note that the closing date for registration is 3 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.