I work at Somerset College as research & library services manager and many of my colleagues may ask – ‘Is it worth creating various interactive tutorials or embedding other media with the use of digital tools for the sake of a one hour session?’

Let’s be honest here, learners rarely master research or referencing skills in a one hour library instruction session. The sheer amount of information all around them in different types and formats may even leave them more overwhelmed. Alongside this, the numerous methods of referencing information sources can turn learners to the web, (sites like Neil’s Toolbox, for example), and without the proper understanding of how citation works in real terms or what it consists of this is not always a good thing.

This has been helped at some colleges by the induction of an integrated study skills module into the curriculum; this means that librarians are delivering library instruction sessions throughout the academic year. Although, this is not the case everywhere and library staff are often heard saying that getting numerous library instruction sessions booked in for learners would ‘eat away’ at precious tutorial time with their lecturers.

I believe that there are two areas where we can teach learners how to use library materials and reference usage correctly:

• Create effective communication to enhance participation
• Support a learner-centred/interactive approach to activities enhanced by the use of technologies.

Here are some thoughts on how we can help make this happen:

• Communication is fundamental and it does create transformation, awareness about libraries and their services gets cascaded to learners via academic staff almost instantaneously.  In my experience most colleges have staff development departments or units, as they are sometimes called, that can help with organising training sessions for academics. How about thinking of a cunning title that will encourage curiosity and ultimately better attendance (we called one of ours ‘Library at Your Fingertips’)
• Another idea…… librarians ‘roving’ around with tablets (iPad, Samsung Galaxy or their equivalents) and mingling amongst learners and staff demonstrating library resources in less traditional learning environments (see University of Huddersfield’s Project 2012: The Roving Librarian)
• As for teaching materials, rather than venturing into the vastness of cyberspace in search of ready-made tutorials, it can be rather satisfying to create your own that can turn a traditional library instruction into an interactive learning experience. Such tutorials, if uploaded onto a virtual learning environment (VLE), can be particularly helpful in reaching a large number of learners 24/7. What’s more – they are also tailored to individual learning needs and their study levels. Creating an envisioned tutorial through the use of freely available Web 2.0 digital technologies can be a huge accomplishment for librarians and learners alike.  Read our full case study for more information
• At Somerset College our latest development with harnessing technologies involves the use of e-clickers. A vital feature of the TV games’ shows such as Who Wants to be a Millionaire and Jeopardy! are now mimicked during the referencing and research teaching sessions. The use of e-clickers helps to engage learners during their library instruction and results in an increased participation and competitiveness with their peers. Instant feedback provided on screen helps librarians assess learners’ understanding of the subject matter during the session.
• Involving learners in creating tutorials could improve their digital literacy development and employability skills. In doing this you could also be enhancing your own technical skills.

College libraries are always on the lookout for new emerging technologies to see how they can be utilised in improving library instruction and the learning experience. JISC RSC South West has been pivotal in helping us with researching and implementing new technologies as well as showcasing best practice in their use across the academic region. The JISC RSC South West has been key in providing that all-round continuity!

“Digitisation breathes new life into material from the past, and turns it into a formidable asset for the individual user and an important building block of the digital economy.”[1]

Still, the way we create content online is still in its infancy, and the path from initial funding to long-term sustainability can be challenging. Despite financial investment, some undesirable outcomes have emerged:

• Project leaders return again and again to funders, because alternative revenue streams have not been developed;
• Completed projects cannot always be updated/ungraded once funded has ended;
• Content created may live in silos, be difficult to find and hosted on a variety of platforms;
• Preservation strategies are often uncertain, both for digitised and born digital content;
• Project leaders often rely heavily on the largesse of a host institution
• Some programmes or projects that cease to secure ongoing funding are obliged to stop work altogether

Add to this the challenging economic environment of the past few years and all of these issues are brought into glaringly sharp relief.

Since 2007, Ithaka S+R and the JISC-led Strategic Content Alliance have led the way in examining ways  that the academic and cultural heritage sectors are defining sustainability and helping to make sure that the digital resources will endure and provide value well beyond the term of the grant. In 2012, two years and one economic crisis later, this essential research is more important than ever to answer questions such as:

• What were the key sustainability issues to consider?
• How have project leaders made their resources valuable to users?
• How have project leaders made growth and innovation possible?
• Which sustainability models have been most successful?
• How had budget cuts and other factors affected the projects?

Answers to these questions however are never simple and the process by which projects, both current and previous, consider them are multifaceted and complex. As a first step to traversing the difficult road to sustainability, the following video lecture series has been developed with Nancy Maron (sustainability expert at Ithaka S+R) to consider how universities, museums and libraries can deal with these issues in a challenging economic environment. You may not find all the answers here, but you will certainly find out more about the questions you need to be asking and guidance on how to answer them.

Split into parts or available as full versions, the videos (under a CC-BY-NC-SA licence) allow for individuals or organisations to embed or repurpose the relevant sections for their own specific audiences. As they are in easily digestible ‘bite-size’ chunks with links to the relevant resources referenced, these should help you to think in more depth about the issues raised and to read and research at your own pace. All we ask is that you let us know how you are planning to use them and if/ how these have been useful to you.

Please follow the links below to view the videos most relevant to your sector:

Sustaining Digital Resources for Universities

Click here to view the embedded video.

Sustaining Digital Resource for Museums

Sustaining Digital Resources for Libraries

The second thing I notice is how open education goes across the boundaries of formal and informal, children and adults, across academic disciplines, into professional development and into making and crafting. Universities don’t own the “open education” space any more than any organisation could be said to own “learning”.

This question is explored by Lou McGill and also by Laura Czerniewicz.

The third thing that strikes me is that we really have reached a tipping point in the availability of learning opportunities online. David Kernohan asked on Monday “is open education becoming mainstream?” . The reality of the networked world is webcasts, podcasts, courseware, etextbooks, a huge range of content created by anyone and shared with the world. This is the reality now, but for those of us working in education, we need to make the most of this opportunity. We need to be digitally literate, but more than that, we need to find ways of doing our work online, to become open practitioners and digital scholars.

For a compelling description of this opportunity, see David Wiley talking about “Why Be Open?”

Click here to view the embedded video.

For educational institutions to thrive, we need to explore models for how we can work in this space, with all its opportunities and risks, all its noise and vibrancy. It is here that we see possibilities for new models of collaboration, peer learning and accreditation. To see how some UK Universities are responding to this opportunity, see four case studies on institutional approaches to open education, released this week.

And check out the huge range of activities that are taking place across the UK.

These are not always easy or obvious decisions for institutions to make: the ideas of open education can be a threat to the status quo. Good decisions navigate this space carefully. As Martin Weller wrote in The Digital Scholar, “in education, technology is often talked of in utopian or dystopian terms”, but the reality is often more complex. My colleagues and I have been trying to move beyond this polarisation by sharing our pictures of the open education space. At the core of the discussion are some crucial questions about the economics of openness, which were eloquently described, entirely independently, by Paul Stacey. This storify shows the discussion develop: click the links to see each blog post. Hopefully this is the start of an ongoing conversation.

“Open education” matters because it’s already happening all around us. The fact that the US Dept of Education is teaming up with Creative Commons and the Open Society to launch a video competition on Why Open Education Matters suggests that although it may not be mainstream yet, it is very real. The models continue to grow and combine with the ethos of open access and the methods of open source.The choice for us, as individuals and educational organisations, is in how we respond.

Amber Thomas and David Kernohan

Just weeks into the New Year and already there is a new ebooks revelation that colleges and universities need to digest. January saw the launch of Apple’s new iBooks2 software which grabbed headlines (see the BBC article here) and sparked heated debate across the academic community.

Quietly underpinning the technology of the iBooks software is ePub.  ePub is the ‘defacto’ ebook standard, with the latest version of ePub3 supporting complex layouts and rich media and interactivity for eTextbooks and professional and scientific publications.

Supporting institutions and academics in taking advantage of these new technologies saw JISC fund the creation of a thinktank to explore the potential of ePub for the academic community.  JISC, the members of the thinktank and Edina at the University of Edinburgh, undertook a study on ePub and the current ebook landscape.

Digital Monographs: Technical landscape exemplars and Recommendations peers beneath the eye-catching headlines and provides an important message for institutions and how they increasingly adapt their teaching and support services to an online, interactive and digital future.

Importantly, the report identifies areas where ePub3 can help institutions, students and researchers confront some of the problems they currently face. For example, students face a continued rise in the costs associated with buying print text books.  Researchers too find that they have to adjust to an increasingly open mandate from funders and institutions.

Listen to a podcast about this with JISC programme manager Ben Showers:

Podcast

EPub provides opportunities for institutions to answer critical problems such as those above and others:

• Academics and researchers can publish their work cheaply and easily, benefitting students as well as researchers who may be outside an academic institution;
• It is easily readable on multiple devices (from phones to tablets and desktop) and can be accessed from popular platforms;
• It provides a clean copy of text or data for quoting – essential for the scholarly process;
• ePub3 realises the potential for highly interactive and rich academic content,
• It has no legal restrictions or patents preventing its open use,

The report also provides a picture of the current ebook landscape and the impact that ebooks and mobile access are having on the support institutions provide to their students and academics. In particular there is a lot of talk about student expectations; but scholars’ expectations are changing rapidly.

As the report makes clear: The next generation of scholars will be educated in a context of increasingly-digital learning materials. Their expectations for ease of discovery, format-shifting, mobile access and multimedia exemplars will extend beyond e-textbooks used at the undergraduate level (P. 15).

Increasingly these expectations are focussing around mobile access and consumption: “…mobile devices are ubiquitous, personal and always at hand; even if they are not the locus of sustained content consumption, they are a critical adjunct” (p. 38).

JISC has been interested in the transformations taking place in scholarly publishing and communications for a number of years, most recently with its work on scholarly communications and the idea of campus-based publishing. Indeed, the availability of cheap and easy e-book publishing platforms combined with open licensing is the basis for a growth in open textbooks , often with significant public investment (for example in California).

While processes such as peer-review ensure the quality and value of scholarly outputs, ePub3 could see academia exploit a trend that’s already witnessing blockbuster authors such as JK Rowling withholding digital rights and publishing ebooks directly.

The once high barriers to such a future are being rapidly lowered with ePub and similar standards. Criticlaly, ePub reuses existing technologies wherever possible, for example, XML, XHTML, and has led to ePub being described as “a website in a box”:

Its technology stack is heavily borrowed from web technologies. This allowed a number of ebook readers to be developed quickly using web browsers as base platforms

It also means that the technologies and tools are ones familiar to many in the academic community; this is based on existing technologies, ensuring it is quickly adopted within the academy.

With open standards like ePub3 and the JISC Digital Monographs: Technical landscape exemplars and Recommendations report institutions are in a great position to start taking advantage of these technologies and providing students and their researchers with the tools enhance their learning and research and give UK institutions a cutting-edge in the competitive world of education.

Find out more about the report and its 10 recommendations for the future of ebooks in education.

Amber Thomas, programme manager at JISC, knows the issues well because she works on our open educational resources programme and gave a presentation earlier in the month (see her slides here) which outlined the benefits of content sharing and reuse.  Amber says, “Personally I welcome the provision of easy content creation tools, and the ability to create attractive usable content.”

However, she also raises concerns about the proprietary nature of Apple’s resources, adding, “What concerns me is that Apple control a ‘technology stack’ through devices, software apps, content collections and delivery platforms. I am not sure that the drivers on them to ensure interoperability will be strong enough to avoid their business model being a form of vendor lock-in.”

There are complex issues around intellectual property when it comes to sharing resources.  Amber says, “We all need to be savvy about the ownership of our content and data these days, so that we are at least aware of the trade-offs we are making, and the effect it has on our ability to share content with each other.”

If you’re concerned about these issues you might be interested to consult the advice in our infokit around the legal aspects of OER.

Doug Belshaw, of JISC Infonet, echoes Ambers concerns.  Doug is a practising teacher and  former Director of e-Learning and he welcomes Apple’s new software.

He says, “Yes, it involves significant vendor lock-in, but so long as you go into it with your eyes open there’s potential for really engaging, contextualised content to be produced by both teachers and learners.”

Doug points out as others have done, that “where Apple leads others tend to follow.”  His hope for the future?  “We’ll end up with equally shiny, but more open, versions of iBooks Author.”  That remains to be seen – but it wouldn’t be the first time that Apple’s announcements act as a catalyst.

Which leaves the final say to JISC programme manager and OER expert David Kernohan, who is a staunch supporter of the move.  He agrees with David Riley who blogs about it here that “the announcement is an outright win for advocates of affordability and open textbooks.”

David explains, “iBooks looks like an attempt to prove that the idea of a text book (the single, codified, unmodifiable, static source of information) is still pedagogically and technologically valid.”

However he does have concerns about using the web effectively for learning and is concerned whether we are simply replicating analogue artefacts.

He concludes, “The question should not be how cheap textbooks should be, or how shiny, but whether we need them at all.”

If you’re new to ebooks, you can learn more by joining in the JISC Advance webinar on ‘getting started with ebooks’ http://www.jiscdigitalmedia.ac.uk/surgery

What do you think about the Apple iBooks?  Have you used any in your classes?  We’d be interested to hear your thoughts in the comments below.

What strikes me about the post is that is latches on to some recent synthesis work on digital humanities, extracting some of its findings and treating them as an ideology to be critiqued.

This implies there is a coherent philosophy to the digital humanities. A set of founding ideas, an essential ideology, that will either determine its success or failure.

The trouble is that the Digital Humanities is not reducible to a manifesto. Rather it is the evolving set of humanistic traditions and practices about investigation, analysis, critique, communication and publication that are coming under pressure in the Internet age. The whole practice of scholarship is evolving / being revolutionised (delete to taste) because of the digital realm.

All scholars are affected by this. Are there really any scholars who don’t use emails, mailing lists, JSTOR, digitised resources, Google Search, electronic journals, Wikipedia? Are there really any scholars who’ve not worried about peer review, or taken advantage of open access?

No, of course not. Although they might pretend that this is all mere convenience and doesn’t help come them closer to the ‘explanation of aesthetic works’?

But the ‘convenience’ of the digital can drive their work in different directions; a radical reduction in the hours spent travelling to libraries and browsing through print archives changes the research process.

And as the tools created by digital humanities projects grow in their scope and functionality – projects in 3D scanning, data mining, textual analysis, crowdsourcing – these too will change research practices.

I don’t disagree with Fish that we need to measure the contribution of digital tools to scholarship, but this should be with the aim of refining these tools, not just throwing them all away.

Arguing against the Digital Humanities is a little like arguing the Internet itself. It’s there, and it surrounds you. It won’t go away.

This post originally appeared on the JISC digitisation blog here.

This was the question that JISC set out to answer by funding 9 experimental projects to analyse and exploit activity data to provide new services to researchers and students or to improve existing services. These projects covered recommendation services for library and repository content, access grid usage patterns, analysing data for student retention, virtual learning environment usage data, the link between student attainment and library usage and the possibility of taking a user centered approach to activity data.

The simple answer is yes, there are lots of ways that working with activity data could be useful. But there are many technical, legal, skills and policy issues that need to be addressed in order to do so. To enable others to learn from the experience of these projects and to copy the technical and legal solutions they developed we have produced a site that summarises all that was learned in the programme. The site is live now. It provides a high level overview of what activity data is, why it is useful and how it can be exploited and also contains detailed recipes for anyone who wants to start the process of exploiting activity data at their institution. You can also read more about the projects that made up the programme.

The site was produced by Sero Consulting working with Tom Franklin and Mark van Harmelen.

One interesting question about activity data is should it be made openly available? There are plenty of challenging issues here to do with anonymisation, compliance with data protection and ensuring that the users are appropriately informed and it is what they want. But there are also benefits to open data. A good illustration of what can happen with open activity data is the Book Galaxy app below that uses the library circulation data released as part of the JISC Mosaic project to provide an innovative interface for exploring the relationship between books. The activity data guide includes resources that address the question of open data and links to open data released by some of the projects.

Here’s the Book Galaxy – move your mouse around the galaxy to see the titles. Blue dots are books, yellow dots are courses. If nothing is appearing, you might not have Java installed. Download Java

It seems to me that there is likely to be appetite for further innovation with activity data as it offers the potential for more efficient institutional services and new functionality that can enrich the research and learning experience. Both of which are important drivers in the current climate. We will be funding further work on 4 of the 9 projects to explore whether they can develop further answers or produce useful services. There is also a programme of projects on Business Intelligence managed by my colleague Myles Danson, these projects are building solutions for storing and analysing data about the business critical operations within universities. You can read an overview of the projects on the JISC website and there is a useful JISC Infonet Infokit on the topic of business intelligence. Within JISC we are also starting to think about the bigger picture of business intelligence for universities and what we can do to help universities exploit emerging opportunities so look out for future work in this area.

Find out more about this work and that of the digital infrastructure team on their blog.

Image from The First World War Poetry Digital Archive, University of Oxford www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ww1lit © The Imperial War Museum

The legacy of World War One in terms of social, economic and political global change cannot be overstated; it changed the individual’s view of society and their place within it with far-reaching effects into their future and our past. In the words of H.G. Wells: ‘This is the end and the beginning of an age’.

To mark this event in international history is therefore a key priority for custodians of heritage and educators alike.

We’ve already made considerable efforts to preserve online the memories and writings of those active during the First World War.  The popular Great War Poetry Archive was funded by JISC to digitise precious documents relating to the poetry of the Great War – including Wilfred Owen’s original notes for the well known poem Dulce et Decorum Est.

It also includes podcasts with eminent historians and veterans including the writer and broadcaster Ian Hislop talking about his grandfather’s experience in action and why he is so ‘obsessed’ with the First World War.  The Serving Soldier collection might also interest you as a way of finding out about the lives of soldiers from 1899 to 1918, a period which spans the Second Boer War, Younghusband Expedition and World War One.

But now it’s time to commemorate the 2014 anniversary.  Higher and further education has a  unique part to play in the WW1 commemoration because it can offer an academic appraisal and reappraisal of themes, events and perceptions.  To help people in education who are studying the period, we are promoting a joined-up approach across many different organisations that currently hold audiovisual, images, text based works and film relating to the First World War. JISC wants to explore how providing this in a more seamless way could help those working in education and research to access the resources. So as a result we’re planning two activities:

• JISC WW1 Discovery programme- to aggregate digital content such as films from a range of digital collections and find new and innovative ways of presenting this content for the benefit of education and research on WW1.

• JISC WW1 OER project- to create innovative Open Educational Resources around WW1 relevant across disciplines for embedding in teaching and learning using a range of content pertaining to WW1 in the UK and internationally, ready for release in March 2012

JISC’s overriding goal for both activities is to work for researchers, teachers and students to produce digital content and resources that are comprehensive, open and sustainable, but that answer differing, specific needs within higher and further education.  The plans are underpinned by a common strategic ‘direction of travel’ which is outlined most clearly in the JISC Statement of Intent.

I look forward to updating you further as these projects progress.

To find out more about what’s planned visit the blog.

With the uncertainties of a new funding model to deal with, it is becoming harder than ever to convince institutional managers to support nice-to-have projects. Everything needs to be justified, both on a balance sheet and within a wider battle for hearts and minds. But the way in which open educational resources (OER) allow institutions to meet their strategic goals alongside making the world a better place means that it is moving from being nice-to-have to becoming an essential component of academic practice.

More than 10 years on from the formal establishment of the OpenCourseWare project at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the casual observer could be forgiven for assuming that the case for OER (materials suitable for learning and teaching, made available for reuse under an open licence) had been made and accepted. MIT, alongside many other institutions, both great and small, and including Nottingham, Oxford, University College Falmouth and the Open University in the UK, is currently supporting the ongoing release of resources with their own funds. The likes of YouTube and iTunes are establishing themselves as platforms for the discovery of learning material, and institutions are beginning to see open resources as a major component of their student recruitment strategies. But it can often feel, as Javiera Atenas described last week, as if we are going round the same discussions without building on what already has been discovered.

To try and condense some of the vast amount that has been learnt about the benefits of OER releases in the past 10 years, the Higher Education Academy and JISC have developed an InfoKit. This now includes materials specifically aimed at advocacy to senior institutional staff, talking about business models for openness and making arguments around institutional ethos, alongside sound evidence-based advice about every aspect of getting to a stage where releasing materials openly online is as natural as creating them. We also have an interactive tool – how open are you – which uses your responses to make a recommendation concerning how much openness your institution is ready for.

Jorum, the UK’s national learning repository, is refocusing itself around OER, introducing new features and tools to aid the deposit and discovery of resources. It is now as easy, – and increasingly, as expected – to deposit in Jorum as it is to upload to Youtube, WordPress or Twitter.

There are parallels between OER releases and the ways in which universities and colleges have begun to make more intelligent and active use of social media. For example, in following major political stories readers, bloggers and professional journalists are increasingly making use of sites such as British Politics and Society at LSE, Nottingham University’s Ballots & Bullets and the University of Oxford’s Politics in Spires to understand the background and meaning of news stories, drawing on the passion and expertise of academic specialists to further their own understanding. Strictly speaking, only the last of these is available under an open licence allowing for reuse, but all of these bloggers expect to be retweeted, quoted, referenced and their work drawn upon. It’s the point of blogging, and in many ways the point of academic practice.

One theme emerging from the research around OER is the idea of open academic practice – it comes out strongly from our ongoing evaluation and synthesis of the UKOER programme, and from other linked research such as a recent Oxford University study into the practicalities of academic reuse. Open academic practice draws a link between OER, open access to research outputs and research data, and the general practice of “professing” (in the late-medieval sense) a subject, by what we now call a “public intellectual”. By seeing OER as a component of what is traditionally expected of academia, rather than as a new imposition, we are arguing from a much stronger foundation based on what many in the sector see as their primary motivation – to explain to people the importance and relevance of the subject specialisms they have devoted many years to understanding.

Evidence is increasingly being identified that students, both traditional, and wider open learners, are getting a lot of benefit from openly available materials. From on-campus students having access to a range of supporting materials (as reported by Steve Carson at MIT), to prospective students using OER to think more clearly about subject and institution choices, there are a range of benefits that can be accessed. A recent literature review highlighted these issues, but also alerts us to gaps in our understanding where further research would help improve our understanding.

JISC and the Academy have recently supported a range of new projects (under UKOER phase 3, details to be announced soon), investigating ways in which we can use the approaches and affordances of OER to meet other key societal goals. Goals such as supporting alternate forms of delivery, making meaningful links with employers and publishers, working across sectors even preserving subject areas and teaching approaches that would otherwise be lost.

The world of OER may not be as new and as ground breaking as it was 10 years ago but for such a radical idea to survive for 10 years, and to become almost mainstream in the process, is an incredible achievement of which the global OER community, and in particular those working in the UK, should be proud.

This blog post first appeared on the Guardian Higher Education Network on 28 October 2011.  Visit the Guardian site

The committee’s report, now available online, describes access to data as ‘fundamental’ for researchers to reproduce, verify and build on each other’s results.  It highlights that reproducibility should be the gold standard that all peer reviewers and editors aim for when assessing a manuscript. This spirit of openness is something JISC supports, through its work with the UK Research Councils.But researchers will also be aware of the challenges of making their data sets available to reviewers.  In the longer term, there are technical and economic challenges associated with making data available, especially as different types of data require different treatment. A lot of social data that is created through longitudinal studies makes sense only if the entire length of the study is available. Other data, such as environmental data, must be kept permanently available – you can’t repeat an earthquake.

Keeping data like this available in perpetuity is expensive and could end up as a cost that universities across the world simply cannot afford.  JISC is funding Dryad-UK which mirrors a US initiative to help researchers control who sees their data and when.  Researchers can deposit their data in a secure environment and then give privileged access to reviewers, for example, and then make the data available more widely once the article is published.

However, in some areas of science the data is produced by computers and programs and is correspondingly huge. Storing indefinitely the mass of outputs of Large Hadron Collider experiments is unfeasible. So we have to make it possible for people to re-run the programme, something that requires you know quite a lot about the machine and the environment it is running on in order to understand the data.  As long as the researcher defines the input conditions, and what the program is designed to do, you should be able to trust the outputs. And if we ensure that authors make clear the nature of the program they are running and the algorithms then people in the future should be able to re-run the program to retrieve the data.  I’m hinting of course that beyond the software or statistical test is something much more fundamental – the accuracy of the data itself.

As part of the report’s consultation process I was asked to comment on whether, in some cases, peer review might encourage a tendency towards conservative judgements among reviewers. But peer review in one form or another has been an underpinning aspect of research arguably since before journals as we know existed. As the report highlights, journal editors are well-placed to find the right experts to review unusual research, so the process itself cuts against the conservatism. Online publication affords us a great deal more flexibility in how the peer review process works.  In the past, two different forms of assessment have happened as part of a single process.  Both the technical assessment and the impact assessment have happened after publication of a research paper.  But separating the two processes is important because of the longer time scale over which you get your answer – so it’s encouraging that the committee’s report recommends a pre-publication technical assessment.

Another criticism sometimes levelled at peer review is that it is a burden on academics who have to do this in their own time.  But few researchers feel they have a nine-to-five existence anyway. In my experience reviewing manuscripts outside of a regular working day is part of the mentality in the research community. The situation would only become worrying if researchers had to spend more time on peer review proportionate to their own research. Greater transparency in the process might also help garner more recognition for peer reviewers, by ensuring that an individual reviewer’s work is known to their peers.  The committee report rightly highlights that we need to encourage researchers to deposit their data, rather than enforce it. Researchers deserve credit and recognition for working in an open way. It’s a complex situation, so a blanket mandate on open data might not be feasible but we need to create the right conditions so it is easier for researchers to make their data openly available.

This blog post first appeared in Research Information.

When we started creating a search environment to look at multiple databases in one we were given the oddest, but most precious piece of advice: ‘lose the search box’. The stunned looks around the project team’s faces said it all… isn’t searching about, well, searching?

At the BUFVC we offer access to many different types of datasets, from listings of practically everything that was broadcast on British TV and radio since 2001, to newsreels produced throughout the 20th century. In the United Kingdom there is no audiovisual equivalent for the British Library legal deposit. We therefore work hard to fill that information gap and find ways for education institutions to gain access to audiovisual content.

When we thought of ‘federating’ most of our data (searching it all at once) we thought it would be easy. And it was. We know our data well and could map it quickly.  But that wasn’t the real challenge. It was by looking at how users interacted with the developing system that we learnt the key lessons. If you are searching our 13 million records there are two difficult steps: what to type in that search box and how to then get rid of all the stuff you don’t want.

The answer to the first dilemma – how to stop users worrying about the empty search box – was to make it less important. We needed to make sure that whatever the exact search term, users should be able to make interesting discoveries even if the results were not the best. To do this we created relationships between our records based on semantics. This means that users will see suggestions for searches and records that may take them in different (but related) journeys.

The second dilemma is all about filtering. The search results page became our control centre, allowing users to filter results, tweak searches, see the suggestions for related searches and use a variety of additional tools. All this makes for a busy page but after many rounds of user testing we think our designer hit the right balance between complexity and elegance. Some of these features include:
•    Human-friendly filters such as identifying results by availability (‘can I see it online, do I need to order it from someone?), media type (moving image, audio, documents), genre or collection
•    A comprehensive history function that keeps track of viewed records, searches and tweaks to searches and the ability to mark and cite or export records in a variety of standards

When reflecting back on the project, I remember mostly the sense of fun, the permission we gave ourselves to think creatively, and our exciting user testing rounds. Developers and users don’t often mix but with good moderation these sessions proved magical. These are three elements I would urge anyone to replicate in future projects.

We are not alone in this development; sites that enable discovery and aggregate results from multiple collections are increasing in number – Edina’s JISC Media Hub is well worth a visit. We hope to have created something which rewards users with new connections through discovery. Work will only be completed in September and there are many plans beyond that. In the meantime if you are looking for moving image and sound, be it television or radio, newsreels or commercially available programmes for education pay a visit to our beta site and give us your feedback. If you are reading this from a UK higher or further education institution, please remember to login to access all areas.

The open-source based software and interface will be released as a package under an Open Source licence later this year. This project was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and led by Royal Holloway, University of London.

Luis Carrasqueiro is Chief Executive, British Universities Film & Video Council
luis@bufvc.ac.uk

Why all this interest now? One reason might be the overwhelming evidence that open access is a desirable destination for all kinds of reasons.  A joint report was released last month from JISC, RIN, Publishing Research Consortium, RLUK and the Wellcome Trust, which showed clearly that moves toward open access were supported by an analysis of the costs, benefits and risks in scholarly communication.  A recent Danish study of SMEs showed that most of them struggle to access findings from publicly funded research, which surely inhibits innovation.  JISC, on behalf of the UK Open Access Implementation Group, is commissioning three further studies to discover how open access can support the work of the private, public and third sectors, and these studies will report over the next six months or so.

But there are other reasons why open access is gaining a lot of attention from governments.  We have known for some time that the knowledge economy depends on the application of codified, technical knowledge.  As David Cameron and Barack Obama pointed out this week  “science and higher education are the foundation stones of their two nations’ 21st century economies”.

Most readers will know that JISC has been an advocate of open access for some time but that does not mean we have taken an uncritical stance.  Now that the direction of travel is established and widely accepted, there are some tricky practical challenges to overcome.  For example:

• Open access is likely to look different, and emerge at different speeds in different disciplines.  In some disciplines such as the life sciences, there are major, innovative publishers such as the Public Library of Science, and repositories such as UK PubMedCentral supported by research funders.  In other disciplines, such as chemistry, open access is not yet growing fast.
• The transition to open access will need to be co-ordinated to ensure the continuity and rigour of the peer review system.  Again, the Public Library of Science is leading the way here, exploiting the opportunities of digital technologies while preserving academic rigour.  JISC’s new programme in campus-based publishing is exploring an alternative approach that has had success in other countries already.
• The institutional repository infrastructure, while mature and reasonably comprehensive, is not yet as joined-up as it needs to be.  JISC will be commissioning work in this area during 2011-12, and will be working with international initiatives such as the European OpenAIRE project.

Open access publishing faces a number of specific challenges, which could be summarised under the following six headings:

a)      Funding outputs from research that is not grant-supported.  This is a real challenge, and one that is likely to fall mainly to universities, who might want to act collectively to address it, as in the COPE scheme in the US.  Some publishers offer waivers, which is helpful.

b)      Funding outputs produced after the end of the grant.  This can be addressed by changing the ways in which grants are administered, for example by making it clearer and more straightforward for indirect costs to be used in this way.

c)      Complexity of funding arrangements from an author’s perspective.  Here, I think funders, universities and publishers do simply need a way to sit down together and develop a better set of arrangements.  There may be lessons from the approach taken by the Wellcome Trust, especially if research grant funding becomes more concentrated.

d)      Need for transparency in costing, especially for hybrid journals.  There seems to be no consensus that these are a way to transition to open access.

e)      Absolute cost.  Recent research shows that the average article processing charge needs to be under £2000 for the cost-benefits to work for the UK.  It seems likely that the PLoS-One publishing model, now widely emulated, must be a large part of the answer.  In the medium term, this needs to be combined with agreements on the wider sharing of usage statistics and citation data , and review services such as the Faculty of 1000, to open up a market in services to help readers navigate the literature.

f)       Distribution of costs / benefits among the sector.  Will research intensive universities have to pay more?  This is not necessarily the case, if arrangements are in place to ensure that research papers from grant-funded research are supported via those grants.  However, this will require close monitoring and perhaps collective action, and JISC Collections may well have a role in seeing a way through this.

We are working towards making open access in the UK both good for the research community and good for UK plc.

JISC Podcast:
How you can build a business case for open access policy

This statement is revealing of wider issues institutions face in today’s times of financial constraints: how do we know if a digital resource is having an impact on its target audience? How do we reach and speak to scholars, teachers and students to measure their satisfaction? What metrics should be adopted in the context of digitised scholarly material? How much does a digital resource tell about the institution that created it? And above all, has the investment paid back? These are not easy things to assess and often impact just takes time to materialise.

In order to support content creators, resources managers and information professionals within institutions in the task of assessing the usage and impact of their digital resources, JISC has supported the development of the Toolkit for the Impact of Digitised Scholarly Resources (TIDSR), by the Oxford Internet Institute (OII).

The toolkit, first developed in 2009 and recently updated, provides a framework for conducting this kind of analysis and offers guidance on a range of qualitative and quantitative methodologies that can be used such as webometrics, content analysis, surveys and focus groups. The TIDSR was used by projects in the JISC Impact and embedding of digitised resources programme, of which the Old Bailey was one, to conduct an analysis of their collections, identify where resources were working well and what could be done to improve them and better embed their content within teaching and research.

The case studies drawn from the experience of the projects are available in the toolkit and are a useful starting point for beginners in the field. They also provided fertile ground for the programme’s final report, “Splashes and Ripples: Synthesising the Evidence on the Impacts of Digital Resources” (PDF), by Eric Meyer. The report begins to sketch a picture, based on evidence rather than anecdotes, of how digitised resources in the humanities are currently being used and provides a set of recommendations to content creators on how to go about maximising the impact of their resource such as:

[quote from report]

1.     Remember in advance that you will want to contact your users. A number of projects had a difficult time finding users to survey or interview, but users are a key resource that you will want to approach from time to time.

2.     Use the media to your advantage. One of the undeniable advantages that arts and humanities resources have in the United Kingdom is that there is considerable public interest in these topics. […] The Old Bailey Proceedings Online project has benefitted from inclusion in popular BBC programmes (see page 11).

3.     The media and the public are influenced by numbers and metrics. Being able to demonstrate your impact numerically can be a means of convincing others to visit your resource, and thus increase the resource’s future impact. For instance, the amount of traffic and size of iTunesU featured prominently in early press reports (see page 21).

4.     Make your resource easy to find. This can involve a number of strategies, including search engine optimization (SEO), partnerships with more prominent related sources (see page 31), links in related sites, and inclusion in Wikipedia and other sources. A Vision of Britain through Time has been the most proactive resource in this regard, (see page 28),

5.     Give your resource an unambiguous name and acronym/initialism, both to increase the likelihood that your resource turns up at the top of relevant searches, and to make measuring mentions of your resource result in as few false positives as possible.

6.     Create quick wins for new visitors to your collection. By finding things that they can quickly learn, do, see, or contribute, you can increase the stickiness of your site, and increase the likelihood that your resources will be used. Oxford University’s podcasts, for instance, are easy to immediately access and hear (see page 23).

7.     Leverage your wins. Using the most popular aspects of your resource to attract people to other parts of the collection via features such as suggested links and recommendations for further information can increase the time spent with your collection.

8.     Adopt Cool URLs as persistent, consistent, human-readable, and citable links to digital resources. The British History Online collection has used this method to increase the readability of its links (see page 39).

9.     Provide the ability to export citations directly to reference management software such as Zotero and EndNote.

10.     APIs are the future. Linked data, apps, and other ways that enable researchers to access and combine the data in your resource will increase its utility.

In my role at JISC I look after our content programme which brings scholarly collections into the digital age – taking journals, newspapers, manuscripts, photographs and other material and putting them on the web. I have the pleasure of working with many outstanding collections in the UK and have helped unearth some real treasures that can be shared and used for education and research.

The British Cartoon Archive is one such example. Hosted by the University of Kent, it represents a visual history of British history whether through the social comedies of Carl Giles or the political satire of Steve Bell. It provides the student with an alternative viewpoint on the century – not official documents, but a more slanted approach that provides a more accurate portrayal of public opinion. The video explains more.

The First World War Poetry archive, curated by the University of Oxford, is another astonishing collection. Incorporating the Great War Archive, where members of the general public where asked to submit images of objects relating to the war (letters, diaries, photos etc.), the resource is a seminal example of a crowd sourced website. The accompanying video tells some amazing stories that have been collected by the archive. In one story, we hear of a Scottish soldier, enlisted for war without the chance to say goodbye his family. He placed his goodbye message inside a matchbox and threw it onto the platform in the hope it would get to his loved ones. This video recounts the full story.

Most of the time I am looking at ways to promote these resources and create awareness amongst academics, researchers and learners that they exist. The JISC content site lists all the resources JISC has either funded or licensed for educational use. But one also needs to remember digitisation from the perspective of the creator, and the many things to take into account when putting collections online.

There are five pieces of advice that recent JISC funded projects have discovered have been crucial to successful digitisation projects.

Five top tips

1. Embedding digitisation within a university needs engagement, you need people on your side from across the whole of the organisation from researchers, academics and IT staff as well as senior management

2. Partnership is vital for those developing digitised content. Not just with other universities but with innovative publishers and producers

3. Digitised resources will achieve maximum impact when part of universities’ teaching and research strategies

4. Users love speed and convenience – one quick search over a federated website works better than multiple searches over disparate websites

5. Engaging external communities in digital content needs to be a two way process. It’s not just about universities broadcasting their expertise and exposing their digital content

Our parallel session at the JISC Conference 2011 was entitled Using Digital Media to Improve Teaching and Learning.

Between our speakers we had a wide range of knowledge, skills and experience: each of our speakers was a cartographer of the digital media landscape, mapping not only the Ariel perspectives of policy and future trends but also individual bumps along the road. Rather than promoting digital media as a pedagogical ‘magic bullet’ our session focused on ways to mitigate the problems of using digital media:

- view ‘workflows’ themselves as useful tools in a similar way to open source software. Workflows can be shared, refined and recirculated amongst communities to help us learn from the experiences of others (Zak Mensah, e-learning officer at JISC Digital Media)

- support  your students as producers of digital media, a concept of importance as resources are cut and students are encouraged to take ownership of learning resources (Dr Jane Williams, director of e-learning within the University of Bristol’s Faculty of Dentistry and Medicine)

- where possible be aware that the idea of ‘attendance’  needs to develops in line with new technologies. Learners  ‘in attendance’ may be using a webcam at home or contribute to discussion via Twitter (Doug Belshaw, JISC Infonet).

In summary, our session suggested that the use of digital media really can enhance teaching, but also poses the risk of only passively engaging the learner.  No single individual or even institution in isolation could possibly ‘keep up’. Only by pooling knowledge and sharing stories of what works and what doesn’t can we use successfully integrate digital media into our teaching and learning.

Find out more at the virtual goody bag for this session.

I would like to consider one area affected by the financial challenges: digital content collections development. I would like to share with you some ways in which the JISC-led Strategic Content Alliance can help you evaluate the financial standing of those important resources. As early as 2008, the Alliance commissioned Ithaka to address different aspects of the sustainability issue. Sustainability and Revenue Models for Online Academic Resources presented a framework for thinking about the mindsets and cultural factors needed to create sustainable resources and included a high-level survey of different revenue models that support digital content. In 2009 we commissioned the Ithaka  Sustaining Digital Resources: An On-the-Ground View of Projects Today. It took this approach a step further, examining in detail 12 digital content collections to understand how their leaders define and work towards sustainability, and drawing out the lessons other project leaders might apply to their own work. This included real figures giving the costs and income streams. Additional and supportive international research was also published in the Blue Ribbon on Sustaining Digital Preservation and Access in 2010.

As colleges and universities face increasingly tough choices on what to stop, start and continue in terms of provision of a range of activities to support their core missions, we have revisited and updated the twelve case studies. This will  show how their costs and income streams have been affected by the economic downturn and present the lessons learnt to help colleges and universities considering their options. It will contain real world examples of what is and isn’t working in terms of new emergent business models for digital content and collections. The preliminary findings will be showcased at JISC meeting rooms at Brettenham House in London on 17 March. Further information, including the registration details will be made available via the JISC website and Strategic Content Alliance blog shortly.

Just as we have considered how a college or university might weather the economic storm, we have thought about how funders might adopt good practice in developing their policies and practices in the future to help sustain their investments over the long term. So in 2010 we commissioned Ithaka to undertake research on how funders in Europe and North American are approaching the issues surrounding sustainability and taking the “best in class” practices develop a “tool-kit”. This will be published in April 2011. We hope that this research will support UK universities by allowing funders to identify good investments to help sustain not just digital content collections agencies such as JISC enhance its tactical and strategic approaches to help develop and sustain not just digital content collections, but other mission critical activities that are vital to UK college and university competitiveness globally.

We must be careful not to be too stereotyped and simplistic in our views, as this leads only to unhelpful and diversive views. Clearly, there is still an essential need to protect and maintain access to unique primary resources. There is equally a clear need to try to make as many high quality resources as possible available to learners  - including citizen scientists and school children who are just starting out on their educational journey – and to researchers. In times of challenging funding cuts, libraries need to judge carefully who it is that they are trying to support and how they can get most value from their budgets. Libraries have a long and successful history of collaboration and sharing resources, through services such as the inter-library loan system, through regional collaborations such as the M25 group and through shared use of the JISC Collections Company. It now seems urgent that libraries consider how they can achieve even more value for their users through collaboration, including more partnership with public and school libraries, whilst continuing to evolve the specialized support that they provide to their key user communities.

Yet this is far from the truth. Opinions vary, but it is probably fair to say that more than 95% of the world books, magazines, newspapers, videos, films, documents still lay hidden in archives and libraries, inaccessible in digital form.

And there are numerous benefits to continue with the work of digitising all this content – it’s more than making it convenient for the learner to access something from the comfort of their own home or office.

So, for example, research is radically changed by the availability of millions of new documents, as shown by resources like the Proceedings of the Old Bailey, which is changing the face of the study of history of London.

Equally, costs of publishing and travel can be significantly reduced by open access journals, such as the 2m pages of text provided by the Wellcome Trust’s Medical Journal Backfiles digitisation.

The University of Oxford’s Great War Archive not only gathered and digitised the general public’s material evidence from World War One but enabled new communities and expertise to be developed outside the campus walls.

And projects such as Freeze Frame collection of polar photographs, or the Old Weather resource for transcribing weather reports in Naval logbooks, not only provide new data for educators and learners around the world, but also allow for a greater appreciation of the nation’s ‘prize jewels’ within its cultural and educational collections.

Much of the argument is laid out in a new JISC report written by Simon Tanner of King’s College London. Inspiring Research, Inspiring Scholarship is available as a pdf document from the JISC website.