Just back from the euroCRIS Spring 2013 membership meeting which was held in Bonn this week, 13-14 May at the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG). As well as being one of the main research funders in Germany, DFG is also one of the main providers of research information at a national level. There has been a recent upsurge in CERIF-related activity in Germany, as related in the many interesting national presentations. These included a significant initiative to develop a ‘Core Data Set’ for research activities in Germany. Leuphana University reported on use cases to reduce workload but also increase the quality of research reporting (since quality is valued most). Developments in Italy include a CERIF compliant open source CRIS in DSpace (as part of SURplus) at CINECA (with Hong Kong University as a partner). I presented a work in progress report on my current study for JISC addressing the use of CERIF CRIS in the UK.

The draft OpenAIRE guidelines for CRIS interoperation based on CERIF XML were announced. euroCRIS is a partner in several EU projects including OpenAIRE and the new PASTEUR40A project on OA and open data. Other euroCRIS news included the development of a CRIS ‘Reference system’ with data export in CERIF XML plus compliance testing. euroCRIS is also working on mapping CASRAI data profiles to CERIF; the CASRAI approach is bottom up and CASRAI top down, so the two complement each other. In closing the meeting, Ed Simons, the new euroCRIS president suggested that euroCRIS work has previously focused more on technical development of the CERIF model and implementation, whereas it’s now relevant to spend more time addressing business needs.

euroCRIS participants congregate for the official group photo at DFG
(photos by Pablo de Castro and Barbara Ebert)

An Ariadne article on the meeting is in the pipeline, so some selective points of interest follow here in the meantime:

• A new euroCRIS board has just been elected (now with 50% women members)
• CRIS 2012  in Prague this year was also the largest euroCRIS conference to date – interest in CERIF CRIS is growing at many levels
• euroCRIS is continuing to grow its strategic partnerships – an agreement with COAR (Confederation of Open Access Repositories) was signed during the meeting
• CERIF 1.5 has been released – a major upgrade this time
• The Linked Open Data Task Group has carried out a mapping of VIVO and CERIF  (a potential use case is performing analytics on VIVO and CERIF data)
• A new Task Group on impact indicators was introduced at the meeting
• The Snowball Metrics ‘Recipe Book’ was distributed – designed to facilitate cross-institutional benchmarking (and will be CERIF compliant)
• Despite a lot of interesting CRIS activity in Spain, no Spanish CRIS are currently CERIF compliant – although there may be scope for alignment of CVN (a national system for exchanging standardised CV information) and CERIF; however this is not straightforward, since CVN is researcher-based. There is a wide range of CRIS in use, unlike in the Netherlands (where METIS is used by everyone) and the UK (three systems) which makes coordination more complicated. Spain has the same issues as other countries with person IDs.
• Three Italian research organisations have recently merged into CINECA. Planning to implement CERIF using open source software is already underway, which will bring 100 Italian research institutions into euroCRIS
• A session on identifiers covered current work by the CERIF Task Group to incorporate federated identifiers into the CERIF model, effectively opening up closed internal systems to the outside world; ORCID could be one of the person IDs assigned
• A Directory of Research Information systems (DRIS) is being developed; the system is currently being populated by euroCRIS members in a trial phase, before being opened to the wider public to input their CRIS details.  The DRIS could in future act as the basis for a portal to access heterogeneous CRIS

With the new euroCRIS board in place from January 2013, there are likely to be some changes afoot next year. Presentations from Madrid should be available shortly on the euroCRIS website.

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.

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!

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.

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.