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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

Click here to view the embedded video.

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

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.

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

Slides for this talk are available on Slideshare.

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.

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.

In conjunction with Open Repositories 2012, Edinburgh, Scotland

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

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)

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 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.