The article is based on a blog post originally published on the Networked Researcher blog which was tweaked slightly and republished on the Jisc blog. The version published in the Jisc Inform newsletter includes a series of images to accompany each of the ten tips.

The tips were originally developed to accompany a series of presentations given at the universities of Exeter, Salford and Bath during Open Access Week. These presentations were based on the experiences gained in use of social media to help maximise access to peer-reviewed publications. In particular the tips documented the experiences of use of social media services such as blogs, Twitter and Slideshare  to help maximise the readership of a paper entitled “A Challenge to Web Accessibility Metrics and Guidelines: Putting People and Processes First“.

As a reminder, here are the ten tips:

1. Be pro-active
2. Monitor what works
3. Make it easy for readers
4. Don’t forget the links
5. Encourage feedback and discussion
6. Develop your network
7. Understand your social media network
8. Know your limits in the social media environment
9. Seek improvements
10. Participate!

The article expands on these tips slightly, but doesn’t address the limitations which will be inevitable when seeking to provide advice in the form of ‘top tips’. However the tips are themselves extensible and, as described in tips 6, 7 and 8 you will need to Understand your social media network; Know your limits in the social media environment and Seek improvements.

The week begins with a 60-minute talk on “Open Practices for the Connected Researcher” which will take place on Tuesday 23 October at the University of Exeter as part of its series of Open Access Week events.

Brian will give a 30-minute talk entitled  “Open Practices and Social Media for the Connected Researcher“  on Thursday 25 October at the University of Salford as the featured invited presentation for the University’s celebrations for Open Access Week.

Finally Brian Kelly and Ross Mounce, a PhD student and Open Knowledge Foundation Panton Fellow at the University of Bath, will launch the social media programme for researchers with a 60-minute session entitled  “Open Access and Open Practices for Researchers“.

The slides to be used in the presentations will be available with a Creative Commons CC-BY licence. In addition the slides for the presentation at the University of Exeter are available on Slideshare.

In light of increasing requirements for Higher Education institutions to manage their data more effectively, we are seeing a move in systems design towards a ‘data-centric architecture‘. For example, the requirement by HEFCE for institutions to publish Key Information Sets (KIS) data provides one example of the move towards greater transparency for institutional business processes. The detailed reporting required in the Research Excellence Framework (REF) serves as another example.

Within this context of increasing regulation from government and changing requirements from Higher and Further Education agencies and other stakeholders, institutions need to find a sustainable approach to managing data.

To meet the new regulatory requirements in an efficient and sustainable way, the HE sector has seen the emergence of innovative approaches to ‘data-driven infrastructure’ where it is access to data (from institutions and agencies) that determines the shape and function of that infrastructure.

As our HE institutions face increasing requirements to manage data more effectively, this could mean, for some institutions, a shift in emphasis in systems design towards a ‘data-centric architecture’. In any case, if our institutions are to exploit an emerging data-driven infrastructure, they will need to understand what this entails.

The JISC Observatory’s report on Preparing for Data-driven Infrastructure highlights approaches which institutions can take in responding to these strategic drivers in order to adopt a more data-centric approach. The report includes a description of data-centric architectures and an overview of tools and technologies (including APIs, Linked Data and NoSQL) together with a review of architectural approaches which institutions will need to consider.

A talk entitled  ”What Does The Evidence Tell Us About Institutional Repositories?” has been accepted for presentation at the Internet Librarian International, ILI 2012 conference. This talk, which will take place in session B203 on  Evidence and impact, will build on the ideas described in our paper on “Can LinkedIn and Academia.edu Enhance Access to Open Repositories?” as well as  the paper on “Open Metrics for Open Repositories” by Brian Kelly, Mark Dewey and Stephanie Taylor of the ISC at UKOLN together with Nick Sheppard, Jenny Delasalle, Owen Stephens and Gareth Johnson. The ILI 2012 presentation will also provide an opportunity to present additional findings from our RepUK work, together with our effort with UK Repositorynet+.

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.

Open Metrics for Open Repositories, Kelly, B., Sheppard, N., Delasalle, J., Dewey, M., Stephens, O., Johnson, G. and Taylor, S. OR2012: the 7th International Conference on Open Repositories, 9-13 July 2012, Edinburgh, Scotland.
Paper: [About] – [PDF format] – [MS Word format]

Can LinkedIn and Academia.edu Enhance Access to Open Repositories? Kelly, B. and Delasalle, J. Open Repositories 2012, 9-13 July 2012, Edinburgh, Scotland.
Paper: [About] – [PDF format] – [MS Word format]

Specifically, the report:

• describes data-centric architectures;
• gives some examples of how data is already shared between organisations and discusses this from a data-centric perspective;
• introduces some of the key tools and technologies that can support data-centric architectures as well as some new models of data management, including opportunities to use “cloud” services;
• concludes with a look at the direction of travel;
• lists the sources cited in a References section.

A preview report is being made available for a period of two weeks (from 29 June to 16 July 2012) to allow for public comment and feedback. A final version, taking into account all feedback received, will be published in early August 2012.

The preview copy can be accessed from the JISC Observatory Web site.

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 article is based on a paper on ‘A Challenge to Web Accessibility Metrics and Guidelines: Putting People and Processes First’ which was presented recently at W4A 2012, the 9th International Cross-Disciplinary Conference on Web Accessibility. The paper argues that standards such as WCAG assume that accessibility is a function of a digital resource and that organisational accessibility policies should be based on conformance of the Web resource with WCAG accessibility guidelines . However the authors argue that since accessibility is primarily related to the user’s experiences, such approaches are too simplistic for the diverse ways in which web products are used.  The BS8878 Code of Practice provides a more appropriate standard for use by institutions, as this can help to ensure that appropriate policy decisions are made, processes are deployed and users are involved in these processes.

Mr Kelly took Facebook usage by Russell Group universities as his starting point for research to “gather evidence to support discussions on the relevance of use of Facebook in the higher education sector”. By tallying the number of “likes” a university’s Facebook page had attracted at different points in the past year, he found there had been a “significant growth” for Russell Group institutions.

and goes on to mention the caveats of over-simplistic interpretations of such metrics mentioned in the post which asked What Next, As Facebook Use in UK Universities Continues to Grow?:

“The ‘liking’ of a university may provide a bookmark which is not an indication of engagement with the institution,” he warns.

For instance, students who have left may not have “unliked” their institution despite graduating, so the figures could include those no longer using the university’s services.

A survey on institutional use of Facebook has been set up in order to gain a better understanding  of how Facebook is being used across the sector, beyond the provision of basic Facebook pages. As described in a post about the survey:

The survey is intended primarily for those working in institutional Web management or marketing teams in UK universities or FE colleges.  However we appreciate that universities around the world will have similar interests in the role of Facebook, together with concerns regarding the sustainability of the service, privacy issues and its relevance in supporting educational needs.

We therefore invite those with  responsibilities for managing social media services in the UK and beyond to complete this survey.

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.

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.

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 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?

Rosemary participates in euroCRIS activities and liaises with the euroCRIS board on managing joint meetings. She was previously involved in the UKOLN CERIFy project. Rosemary also has an interest in institutional repository management and the integration of repositories and CRIS.

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.

A couple of particularly interesting aspects of the video can be seen from the screenshot included here:

• The ‘Powered by 5′  logo (bottom right) signals that this video is embedded  directly within HTML 5.
• The ‘Toggle captions’ button demonstrates how captions for video clips can easily be switched on and off in HTML5.

Viewing the source of the video, we see the following HTML5 code:

 <div id='video'>
      <video controls autoplay>
	<source src="http://media.w3.org/2011/11/w3c_video_small.mp4" type="video/mp4">
	<source src="http://media.w3.org/2011/11/w3c_video_small.webm" type="video/webm">
        <text lang='en' type="application/ttaf+xml" src="w3c_video_captions.ttml"></text>
	<div style='width: 640px; height: 360px;'>
	  <p>No Video Support.</p>
	</div>
      </video>
      <div id='captions'>
      </div>
    </div>
  <p><button onclick="toggle_captions()" type="button">Toggle captions</button></p>

Simple

The screen shot included here was captured using Firefox 8 running on a Windows 7 PC.  I have also viewed this video using Internet Explorer 9 and Chrome together with Firefox and Safari on an Apple Macintosh.  But what about mobile devices?

The image to the right shows the same video clip being viewed on an iPod Touch. A similar display was also available on a HTC Sensation phone running Android 2.3.

It does not seem possible to display captions on the mobile devices, so it seems we are still waiting for a completely compatible environment across desktop and mobile platforms.  However in light of yesterday’s TechCrunch article, which described “Steve’s Last Laugh: Adobe Killing Off Flash For Mobile Devices“, the Adobe / Macromedia vision of a proprietary Flash environment for delivering cross-platform multimedia content appears unlikely. Instead, we now have further evidence that HTML5 provides what some people have described as “the operating system for mobile devices”. But if you view the video you will see that the TV and entertainment industry also regards HTML5 as the platform that can help overcome the standards wars bedevilling that sector in the past.

Earlier this year, the W3C described their plans for Television, Mobile, and the Web of Devices. A Web and TV Interest Group was established in February 2011. The Third W3C Web and TV Workshop, which took place in Hollywood in September 2011, produced a range of plans from companies such as Microsoft (PDF format), Google (plain text format), Adobe (PDF format) and AT&T (PDF format). Here are some interesting comments from these papers:

Adobe: “W3C is faced with a significant technical and standardization problem – the possible creation of two competing specifications for video captioning, depending upon whether the video is TV or browser based. The issue is divisive and can potentially fragment the market. Adobe believes that the situation does admit of a technical solution – but one which will require people on both sides of the argument to willingly work together. Adobe believes that the W3C should act to correct this situation based upon our suggestion for a possible way forward.”

Google: “HTML5 is offering a generic means to associate time-aligned text or metadata with audio and video resources through the new <track> element.”

Microsoft: “At the second W3C Web and TV work shop Microsoft and other companies discussed the need to define cross-platform broadband video standards supporting adaptive HTTP streaming, common encryption and DRM interoperability.
Six months later we find that these standards are becoming a reality, enabling scenarios which HTML5 should support. At the third Web and TV work shop we would like to discuss the impact of these emerging international standards on content creators, distributors and consumers, and the importance of HTML5 supporting these scenarios. In our presentation we would provide an overview of these emerging standards, share thoughts on the scenarios enabled by these standards, and suggest ways that HTML5 might support those new scenarios.”

AT&T: “HTML5 with the enhancements being proposed by the Web and TV Interest Group has the potential to accelerate the already growing market for converged IP Video Services. AT&T is proposing a short use case that we hope can be used to help evaluate HTML5 specifications against some of the key requirements to enable this acceleration.”

Significant industry players seem to be aligning themselves with the W3C in providing support for and proposing further  developments of multimedia content delivery across a range of devices.  Whereas Flash had provided a dominant proprietary solution for several years, there now appears to be an agreed open alternative. In addition to gaining experience in use of HTML5,  some players may now face another challenge in migrating from existing proprietary solutions.

I recently attended the Internet Librarian International (ILI) 2011 conference which was held at the Tara Copthorne Hotel, London on 27-28^th October.  I have already summarised What Twitter Told Us About ILI 2011on the UK Web Focus blog, with Martin Hawksey providing a follow-up post on Visualising the #ili2011 Twitter archive. On the JISC Observatory blog I have provided a summary of ”What’s On The Technology Horizon? A Talk at the ILI 2011 Conference“.

What Other People Have Said About ILI 2011

Other blog posts about the conference have included Jo Alcock’s summary of the event, the Digitalist reviews of the The New Normal Needs You panel session and the The Future Internet and Digital Innovations keynote talks, Karen Marie Øvern’s summaries of Internet Librarian International – day 2 and Internet Librarian International – day 2 and the SLA Europe review of the Future Ready Panel Session. In addition Information Europe Today has published several summaries of the main sessions at the conference including Open up your library data and unlock its power and Librarians as agents of social change together with feature articles on Technology Trends to Watch and Academics do not have deep understanding of OA.

I should also add that many of the speakers have made their slides available, either on the ILI 2011 conference Web site, on Slideshare or via the ILI 2011 Lanyrd page so if you are interested in finding out more about the various talks in many cases it should be possible to view the speakers’ slides as well as read the trip reports which have been provided on various blogs.

Personal Reflections on ILI 2011

I’ll avoid replicating what others have already said, especially as I was only able to attend for the first day of the conference.  However one thing that struck me during the opening plenary talk and with discussions I had with some of the speakers at the event was a seemingly uncritical acceptance of the importance of social networking services in the support of library work with surfacing services within Facebook, in particular, seemingly being accepted as the norm.

On the evening before the conference in response to questions about privacy concerns related to use of Facebook several people, from outside the UK, were aware of the issues but seemed to be feel that such concerns were not significant, although if there was a significant backlash against such services, libraries would have to respond.

This view seemed to be confirmed in Klaus Tochtermann’s plenary talk plenary talk on “How The Future Internet Will Shape Librarie” in which he explained how ZBW – Leibniz-Informationszentrum Wirtschaft, the world’s largest economics library, seeks to make its content and services available through its Facebook page. In response to a question I raised it seems that that have been moves in Germany to make services which choose to host content on Facebook responsible for data protection implications of this decisions, rather than placing responsibility on Facebook itself. However despite such developments, which do not – yet – appear to have been implemented, I was not aware of any significant preentations during the conference on the ethical aspects of Library use of  social web services, with the exceptions of Karen Blakeman’s talk on Searching With Google  which addressed the privacy implications associated with use of Google services, and the talk on  Innovations in Usage Analysis given by Dave Pattern and Bryony Ramsden in which they did talk about the need to anonymise usage data related to use of Library services and the decision to not analyse data for courses for which there were small numbers of students, since this could make it possible to identify usage patterns for individual students.

What does this tell us?  Might it be that we have assumptions that trusted organisations such as libraries should have high standards related to privacy issues which are not necessarily the case elsewhere?  This is obviously a gross generalisation. But while I was reflecting on the fact the emphasis given to legal and privacy issues in a session provided by two JISC-funded Activity Data projects, I remembered the OCLC’s Sharing, Privacy and Trust in Our Networked World which was published in 2007. As I descrbed in a blog post shortly after the report was published

“The report is based on a survey of 6,545 participants carried out between 7^th December 2006 and 7^th February 2007. The participants were from the US (a total of 1,801), Canada (921), UK (970), France (821), Germany (846) and Japan (804). An additional survey of 4,000 US library directors was also carried out, with 382 replies from library directors from academic, public, community college, school and special libraries being received. Interviews with selected information professionals (including myself and Andy) were also carried out.”

My summary of the report went on to add:

Some particular issues of note are worth commenting upon, however. There seems to be a discrepancy between the views of library directors concerning privacy issues and the general user community: librarians have real concerns about privacy, and are less likely to make use of social networks for relationship buildings and for fun. Ironically general users “do not rate most library services as very private” even though “the majority do not read library privacy policies.” Most users do, however, “feel commercial sites keep their personal information secure” but only “about half think library Web sites keep their personal information secure“. The nature of trust of commercial social network services is also increasing with use.

Perhaps the seeming acceptance of the privacy risks in making use of services such as Facebook simply reflects that although librarians may have been concerned about privacy issues in the early data of the social web, they now share an acceptance with their users of a greater acceptance of changing views regarding privacy?

It will be interesting to see if social networking services such as Diaspora and Unthink, which are specifically addressing issues such as privacy and ownership of content  will change users views on social networking services. and results in significant migration to such services.

This seminar will focus on using archived web sites and collections of web archives for scholarly research.

A presentation on the current state of play will be given, followed by a brainstorming session on research uses of the UK Web Archive. This will address issues such as:

• What types of research questions could be answered (part or whole) by the UK Web Archive?
• Which disciplines do you think would/could make most use of the UK Web Archive and why?
• What tools or analytical techniques should we be considering?
• How might the research opportunities of a selective web archive differ from those of a domain-level web archive?

Who Should Attend?

This seminar is open to UKOLN staff and members of the University of Bath with an interest in research uses of Web archives. If places are available, others with interests in this area will also be able to attend.

Online Booking for Event

An Eventbrite online booking form has been set up for those wishing to attend this seminar.

Biographical Details

Maureen Pennock is the Engagement & Liaison Manager for the UK Web Archive, based at the British Library. She joined the British Library in 2008 as preservation project manager for the Web Archive and, after a brief stint as a digital curator, returned to the web archiving team earlier this year. She has a long career in digital preservation and curation, having previously worked at UKOLN for the Digital Curation Centre (2005 – 2008) and in the Netherlands (2001 – 2005) on earlier digital preservation projects. She has spoken at numerous conferences and published widely on several different aspects of digital preservation and curation, ranging from authenticity and lifecycle management, to email preservation and archiving websites & blogs. She can be contacted at maureen.pennock@bl.uk and is @mopennock on Twitter.

Ed Pinsent is an archivist and records manager based at the University of London Computer Centre with many years’ experience in digital preservation and web archiving. He has been collecting archive copies of JISC project websites since 2005, via the UK Web Archive; as part of this he has dealt with issues of rights clearance and crawler management. Ed also contributed substantially to the JISC Preservation of Web Resources Handbook, managed the AIDA (Assessing Institutional Digital Assets) project and contributed to the CARDIO project on managing research data. Ed also teaches several modules for the Digital Preservation Training Programme, and in 2011 has done consultancy work for the Parliamentary Archives, the Women’s Library and others.

Brian is chair of the programme committee for the ISC’s Institutional Web Management Workshop 2012 (IWMW 2012) , an event that he launched in 1997 and that continues to support the development of the institutional Web management community of practice.

Brian has long-standing interests in the preservation of Web resources and is continuing work in this area, which will include the preservation of content and services hosted on Cloud services.

During 2010/11 Brian ran the Evidence, Impact, Metrics activity, which developed approaches for the systematic quantitative evidence-gathering approaches that could help identify and shape the impact of online services. Brian will continue to be involved in such evidence-gathering approaches, in particular as part of the joint UKOLN/CETIS JISC Observatory work.  This work aims to identify early technology trends in order to ensure that JISC and the JISC Community can make appropriate plans for managing the implications of technological developments.

Brian will continue his UK Web Focus blog, which will provide personal observations on technological developments and invite discussions on such developments. In addition, he will provide more factual contributions to the ISC blog and Web site.

The JISC Inform Spring 2012 issue highlighted a number of ways on which open practices were being used across the UK’s higher and further education sector. In order to complement this work, a series of guest blog posts on openness were published on the UK Web Focus blog.

Dates

Work started: 2 Oct 2011

Planned completion date: 31 April 2012

Actual completion date: 10 April 2012

Activities

This work involved commissioning and publishing a series of guest blog posts and reviewing this work.

Outputs

The posts published were:

• Announcement of a Series of Openness Guest Blog Posts, Brian Kelly, UK Web Focus blog, 29 March 2012
• Open Access to Science for Everyone, Ross Mounce, UK Web Focus blog, 30 March 2012
• Being Openly Selfish and Making “OER” Work for You, UK Web Focus blog, James Burke, 2 April 2012
• Librarians meet Wikipedians: collaboration not competition!, Simon Baines, UK Web Focus blog, 3 April 2012
• Professional Development Using Open Content, Marieke Guy, UK Web Focus blog, 4 April 2012
• Opening Up Events – The GEII Event Amplification Toolkit, Kirsty Pitkin, UK Web Focus blog, 5 April 2012
• Openly Commercial, Joscelyn Upendran, UK Web Focus blog, 6 April 2012
• Syndicated Post: The Commons Touch, Steve Wheeler, UK Web Focus blog, 7 April 2012
• Openness in One Country, Brian Kelly, UK Web Focus blog, 10 April 2012

Links

The openness articles published in JISC Inform were:

• Open Doors, JISC Inform (33), Spring  2012
• Making the most of the open web, JISC Inform (33), Spring  2012
• The Open Researcher: Follow the leaders and lead the followers, Jennifer Jones, JISC Inform (33), Spring  2012

People

This work was led by Brian Kelly.

As part of the Greening Events II project, UKOLN published a report on Event Amplification.

Dates

Work started: 1 Oct 2011

Planned completion date: 18 Jun 2012

Actual completion date: 18 Jun 2012

Activities

This work involved the analysis of a variety of amplified events and writing a report on best practices.

Outputs

A report has been published:

[About] – [PDF format] – [MS Word format]

Links

• Greening Events II, JISC
• Greening Event II, project web site

People

This work was led by Brian Kelly.