JISC

At first sight, the first world war and galaxies have little in common. Yet both have been at the heart of user generated content success stories, in the form of digital content projects Galaxy Zoo and The Great War Archive.

In 2007, JISC funded the First World War Poetry Digital Archive with the remit of digitising valuable primary material from the major poets of the period. However, such was the interest in the project that it was decided that members of the public should be able to contribute their own highly personal, highly valuable items of ephemera for digitisation too, and the Great War Archive was born. Some items were sourced from the Imperial War Museum, but much material was collected from the wider public, by allowing them to upload images of their own photographs and memorabilia to a dedicated website.

‘The response was massive,’ says project manager Kate Lindsay. ‘A lot bigger than we predicted. We had 6,500 submissions in three months.’

‘People really did want to share and they wanted to see what other people had,’ says Lindsay. ‘They had this sense that “if we don’t give this to you, it’s going to be lost forever.” That they were preserving something important.’

The organisers of Galaxy Zoo also discovered that many members of the public have a real desire to contribute to research.

‘We accidentally tapped this desire to do something useful,’ says Dr Chris Lintott, the principal investigator on the project (and co-presenter on the BBC’s Sky At Night with Sir Patrick Moore). ‘It started as a solution to a simple problem: we had too many images of galaxies. We had a million images taken by a robotic telescope and in order to understand what these images could tell us about galaxy formation and the evolution of the universe we needed to sort them out according to their shape. And it turns out that humans are much better at doing that than computers. We tried giving the task to a PhD student. He looked at 50,000 galaxies, which was fine, but also we quickly realised we had to look at the other 950,000 so the solution was to put it on the web and invite members of the public to come and help us out.’

Just over two years after launch, Galaxy Zoo has 250,000 registered users. Many came thanks to the project’s initial publicity drive (it was mentioned on the Radio 4 Today programme among other places), but it has since grown exponentially as those taking part have spread their enthusiasm across the web.

When the project conducted a survey of 12,000 users aimed at discovering why they were so enthused, ‘by far and away the biggest reason they gave was that they wanted to contribute to research,’ says Lintott. As contributor Julia Wilkinson explained on the Galaxy Zoo blog: ‘I get a real kick out of the fact that I am contributing to cutting edge research in astronomy on an equal footing with other volunteers and professional astronomers.’

This enthusiasm is reflected in the quality of the results users have generated. ‘It’s all gone very well. I’m not sure that we dreamt that we’d get anything like this,’ Lintott confirms. ‘We’ve produced good science. We’ve had about 16 papers submitted and accepted to date.’

This view is echoed by Lindsay who described the quality of contribution as ‘great’. In terms of cost, the Great War Archive maintains that contributions from the public worked out even cheaper per item than the poetry documents that were scanned in-house. This was due to contributors providing their own scanned items with metadata already inserted. As Lindsay confirms, out of all the thousands of items that were submitted, ‘we only got one item that wasn’t appropriate for the archive and that was because it was from the wrong war. All those things that we were worried about didn’t happen. The only problems that emerged were related to our time. It was a lot more time intensive than we thought it would be because the response was so much greater than we thought it would be.’

Lindsay says other projects could certainly emulate her team’s experience so long as: ‘you manage for a large response. You need a good system to deal with all those queries, you need time for marketing and dissemination. You need contacts with local press and the radio. You need to be prepared to meet them. You have to be really hands on and move away from behind the computer.’

The Galaxy Zoo team are similarly convinced that their success can be replicated in other fields and have deliberately built what Lintott calls ‘a very flexible back end programme designed to host a whole array of projects. At the moment they’re looking at applying it to a NASA feed from the moon, and projects using extensive webcam coverage to monitor wildlife in its natural habitat, and it should have many more applications. ’So if you’ve got an interesting project and too much data, talk to us,’ says Lintott.

Crowdsourcing has been one of the buzzwords of the year, with the ‘wisdom of the crowd’ harnessed for everything from analysing MPs’ expenses to citizen science. Guest journalist Sam Jordison investigates how group intelligence can enhance digital content projects.

Between August 1914 and January 1920 1,150,000 Memorial Death Plaques commonly called the ‘Dead Man’s Penny’ were sent by the British Government to the next of kin of soldiers who lost their lives in the Great War. This is the Memorial Death Plaque for George William Oliver.

Ever wondered how many degrees of separation there are between a Barbie doll and the CIA? Or wished that you could use your phone to find out more about a painting in a gallery or an object in a museum?

These kinds of cool ideas, which use concepts such as linked data and augmented reality in software applications, are no longer the stuff of sci-fi. They are all featured in a range of projects being worked on in the higher education field at the moment. In the vanguard are David Flanders and Andy McGregor, programme managers at JISC, who are working with software developers as they come up with ever more exciting ways to push technology into the learning sphere.

For McGregor, the potential for mobile phones that use data from GPS satellites to layer digital information on to the real world, is an area he thinks the education cultural heritage sector should be paying heed to.

‘You could really bind together academia, museums, libraries… it starts to make the whole cultural space a learning space, which is really exciting.’

‘If you’re out and about in London and you point your iPhone or your Android phone at Big Ben, your phone knows exactly where you’re looking. Because of the GPS, it knows what’s there and it can overlay data about Big Ben on your screen to give you information about when it was built and who built it. That’s interesting enough, but in the educational and specifically the digital content sphere it suddenly gets terribly exciting. You can imagine museum tours where you can point your device at a painting and get further information from the museum about the painting, or you can get social comments from other people who have liked or disliked it.’

‘You could really bind together academia, museums, libraries… it starts to make the whole cultural space a learning space, which is really exciting. The world is your museum,’ agrees Flanders. He gives the example of a project that is overlaying old maps onto contemporary maps on mobile phones to allow users to delve into the history of the place they are standing in right at that moment.

‘You could be in Edinburgh, looking at modern day Princes Street and then on your device you can say “show me the map from 19th-century Edinburgh, say 1904” and it will overlay that map on your device and show you what used to stand where you are. That type of learning experience is invaluable.’

At the next level, the project will make it possible to plan walks and share them with others so that, for example, users can download walks with a commentary from a history lecturer giving all the background on the tour they are taking.

‘It sounds futuristic but these augmented reality applications are  there, it’s just a matter of tailoring them to the educational sector…’

‘It sounds futuristic,’ says McGregor, ‘but these augmented reality applications are there, it’s just a matter of tailoring them to the educational sector, or the museum sector.’

The same is true of work currently underway to bring together online data in a structured way so that what might seem to be relatively unrelated concepts can be mapped, visualised and mashed-up. This is where Barbie comes in. One of the demonstrations offered by a project called Concept Linkage and Knowledge Repositories is to use Wikipedia to map the related concepts between Barbie dolls and the CIA to find that the two are, in fact, not very far removed at all.

‘You could say that education is all about making links between concepts and that’s what linked data essentially is,’ says McGregor. ‘If you’re a student writing an essay on iconography and cubism, and you want to get some background information, you can put those two terms into this interface linked to Wikipedia and it will show you other related things – Salvador Dali, Pablo Picasso – and you could use that for further exploration of the data.’

JISC has been picking up on some of these exciting ideas through what it calls Rapid Innovation projects. These provide small amounts of funding to developers for a short period to pick up on technologies that are only just becoming mainstream and develop them into something that meets a user need and could be useful in educational research. With technology moving so fast, there’s a need for agile and rapid projects to experiment with ideas.

‘If it succeeds, brilliant, we can go on and develop something for the longer term. If it doesn’t succeed, it doesn’t matter because we’ve found that out quickly, it’s a useful lesson, we can move on and try something else,’ says McGregor.

The projects also help to build communities of like-minded developers, which is good for the developers and good for the institutions that employ them, as Flanders explains:

‘Universities are getting a lot of free development time in the sense that one developer with five or six contacts who can advise him or her on how to use Javascript or html is ten times as powerful as a person in their office trying to figure it out themselves. Anybody can come up with an idea and who knows if it works well or not, but as soon as two minds or more get together then that idea is enriched.’

Cutting edge software applications are changing the way we interact with the world around us. Michelle Pauli finds out more from the team helping to bring the future into our educational and cultural spaces.

JISC Developer Days is the key showcase event that brings together developers to work together. The next one will take place in February 2010 and is open to anyone interested in software development within the higher education or related sectors.

Science fiction writer and technology activist Cory Doctorow likes to say that he specialises in accurately ‘predicting the present’ rather than imagining the future. If the present he depicts in his latest novel, Makers, comes to pass then we’re in for a hell of a ride.

The first part of Makers describes a world in which two trash-hacker geeks in a garage kickstart a new economic system based on a boundlessly optimistic, creative, mash-up culture and the crazy things that can be invented using 3D printers, from seashell robots that make toast to Boogie Woogie Elmo dolls that drive cars. ‘New Work’ is based on small cells of technology entrepreneurs working on rapid micro-projects and it transforms America. Inevitably, the bubble bursts and the novel’s heroes have to make their way through the ensuing depression in an adventure that takes in interactive rides, a jealous Disney corporation, a Goth cult and lawsuit upon lawsuit.

Doctorow explains that the book was partly inspired by a talk he heard in which the head of the music industry trade body, the BPI, warned that every business would be ‘dead in the water’ because of trademark infringements once everybody’s desk has a 3D printer on it.

‘If he thinks that the major consequence of a 3D printer is going to be trademark infringement, well, it’s like saying you just wait until the railroad comes along and all you people who rely on your income sewing up oat bags for horses noses are all going to be out of business,’ says Doctorow. ‘I mean, it’s true but it’s totally trivial. Printing AK47s is so much weirder and interesting as a futuristic effect of the 3D printer than printing trademarked objects will ever be. It’s so incredibly parochial, small-minded and provincial to say “oh my gosh, 3D printers are going to bankrupt our business making moulded Mickey Mouse heads”. It’s absolutely ridiculous.’

So, how futuristic is the notion? Doctorow laughs. ‘We will have 3D printers which will make the world weird and they will beget something even weirder. 3D printers are just for starters!’

Part of what makes the book such a compelling read is the knowledge that, if anyone can predict the uses and abuses of technology, it is Doctorow. The Canadian, who now lives in London, is co-editor of acclaimed technology blog Boing Boing, former European director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and co-founder of the UK Open Rights Group. His commitment to open source and freedom of information extends to his own work with all his books available to download for free under Creative Commons licences, as well as being published in the usual way.

‘It’s super techy and this is why it’s really exciting – it’s still on the drawing board and it hasn’t had a chance to meet reality and be disappointing yet…’

His contempt for controls on what we can do with data means he is unimpressed with new software developments on phones – ‘if people could take the device in their pocket and turn it into a cloud or an expanding zone of mobile connectivity for anyone who happens to be in the neighourhood to join up pockets that are otherwise unconnected with the digital society, that would be exciting and disruptive and it’s exactly what the phone companies and carriers are 100% opposed to’ – but what does excite him on a speculative level is the potential of what he calls ‘software-defined radio’. This is radio that can do lots of different applications simultaneously, listening in to multiple channels in the same box, retransmitting one on the other, indexing them, grabbing big chunks and decrypting it later and, says Doctorow, ‘doing all kinds of really interesting and wild things like sensing when there’s another smart radio near by and automatically creating point to point connections at very high frequency that don’t interfere with other radio users. This would allow you to substantially up the density of communications in the spectrum so that you start to get really disruptive, gigantic amounts of bandwidth.’

If that sounds hard to take in it’s because this kind of technology is so new that, just as when the first PCs arrived on the scene, we don’t yet have the right words to even begin to describe the potential.

‘It’s super techy and this is why it’s really exciting – it’s still on the drawing board and it hasn’t had a chance to meet reality and be disappointing yet,’ says Doctorow. ‘The potential of it is so disruptive that it’s literally inexplicable as we don’t yet have the vocabulary to describe it outside of engineering jargon. We’re left groping for metaphors.’

Doctorow believes that these kinds of exciting, disruptive technologies will be developed not by the big, lumbering corporations but by small groups of entrepreneurial geeks and hackers – ‘makers’. There are already maker groups out there, working away in their maker sheds, just as in his novel, and even a ‘maker manifesto’, which, paraphrased by Doctorow, defines a maker as ‘someone who when they run up against a limitation in the world, instead of saying well, that’s the way things are, reaches for a toolbox and starts to take things apart. Having the figurative tools, the cognitive tools, the social tools – the networking tools for helping you acquire expertise – and the actual physical tools like a drill and a hammer, all of those things come together to make a maker.’

The objects and concepts makers come up with may be so futuristic they are impossible to imagine right now, but the reality of a maker movement gives weight to Doctorow’s claim that he is merely predicting the present. As he says, ‘There has never been a better time to be a maker because finding the people who know how to fix the thing that’s broken for you has never been easier. Finding someone else who has done 80% of what you want to do has never been easier, and sharing the things you have done with other people has never been easier. A maker is someone who is of and in the 21st century.’

Technology in the future will be far weirder than anything we could possibly imagine today, says writer and technology guru Cory Doctorow. He explains why to Michelle Pauli.

Makers by Cory Doctorow is published by HarperVoyager. It is also available to download for free under a Creative Commons licence from Doctorow’s website

Galileo’s dictum to ‘count what is countable, measure what is measurable. What is not measurable, make measurable’ has been taken firmly on board by the University of Sheffield’s IT department. A recent audit by the institution found that desktop computers were responsible for more than 20% of its total energy use and that turning off the machines while unused could save 75% of its running costs – reducing both carbon emissions and energy bills.

It’s been estimated that the one and a half million computers and quarter of a million servers and printers will produce over half a million tonnes of CO2 this year…

Making ICT more sustainable is an issue that’s becoming increasingly important with the government’s pledge to reduce public sector carbon output by 30% within the next decade. IT in universities and colleges in the UK has a large carbon footprint. It’s been estimated that the one and a half million computers and quarter of a million servers and printers will produce over half a million tonnes of CO2 this year with associated energy costs of well over £100m.

Measurement is crucial, says Rob Bristow, JISC’s Green ICT programme manager. ‘You can’t start tackling your carbon footprint until you know what it is and getting a base line is a really good first step. It gives you some metric of where you’ve come from and where you’re going with it.’

The Carbon Footprinting Tool is JISC’s pioneering attempt to ‘make what is not measurable, measurable’ in terms of the energy used by universities and colleges. It’s a simple, lightweight Excel spreadsheet-based carbon footprint calculator that has been designed for educational institutions but will work equally well for any organisation of a reasonable size. Institutions can work out their carbon emissions by inputting information about the numbers of computing devices in the building – computers, servers, monitors, routers, faxes and even overhead projectors are all examined as part of the process. The tool then estimates the overall amount of electricity used, and the related carbon emissions, to help the institution target areas for energy saving.

The information the calculator requires can come from real use metering or the manufacturers’ ratings, but there are also default ‘rough rule of thumb’ figures provided by the University of Sheffield and institutions can either use all their own data, all the default data or mix and match depending on what they’ve got.

‘That’s the strength of it – it’s simple to use,’ says Bristow. ‘The difficult thing is finding the equipment – universities tend to be stuffed full of computers hiding under people’s desks and in cupboards and things. I know that in Sheffield where they trialled this they had quite a job actually finding everything!’

Fraser Muir, director of information services at Queen Margaret University (QMU) in Edinburgh, used the carbon footprint tool to audit QMU’s energy use and agrees that it is ‘very simple indeed. Coupled with a £15 power meter from Maplin, it gives very accurate figures for current and modelling future energy use.’

QMU’s green campus has already won a major award for green ICT but, for Muir, the more information there is about energy use, the easier it is to pinpoint areas where reductions can be made.

‘I was very keen to use the tool to analyse where further energy savings could be made and to model some of the energy savings for our planned server virtualisation project,’ says Muir.

Some of the savings identified by Muir as a result of using the tool include automatic power down of terminals not in 24/7 areas, saving an estimated 70,000kWh per year, and replacing 25 aging servers, with 50,000kWh savings per year.

Of course, the savings made from changes such as these are not just environmental but also financial. Every kilowatt of energy reduction saves 12p and that adds up to a big incentive in the current economic climate.

‘I’m not a tree-hugger, but I understand the necessity of acting urgently to reduce carbon emissions. Action on green IT makes sense in that respect but also in terms of business efficiency,’ says Bristow. ‘Institutions should embrace the green agenda because it will help them in lots of ways and there is also serious money to be saved.’

Find out more about JISC’s sustainable ICT tools, including carbon footprinting

A ‘Carbon Footprinting Tool’ is a simple way for institutions to find out how much energy their IT equipment is using and can help them to identify ways to help the environment – and their energy bills. Rob Bristow, JISC’s Green ICT programme manager, explains how it works to Michelle Pauli.

The 10:10 campaign was launched in September at Tate Modern in London with a simple premise: to get as many individuals, organisations and businesses as possible to sign up to work together to achieve a 10% cut in the UK’s carbon emissions in 2010. Individuals pledge to meet the full 10% while companies commit to getting as close to the 10% target as possible – with a minimum cut of 3%.

Conceived by the team behind climate blockbuster The Age of Stupid and partnered by organisations including the Guardian, ActionAid, Comic Relief and the Carbon Trust, 10:10 has already seen organisations as diverse as a premiership football team, universities, city councils, schools, supermarkets, museums, the Department of Energy and Climate Change and an arms manufacturer sign up.

Museums can face particular challenges when it comes to reducing energy costs because of the need to look after their archives in special ways. The Roald Dahl Museum and Story centre in Buckinghamshire has pledged to investigate green technology to tackle the amount of electricity the building consumes. ’It probably accounts for 80% of our footprint because of the lighting and air conditioning. To protect our archive, the temperature and humidity has to be kept constant, and air needs to keep circulating to avoid mould, which means unavoidable electricity use 365 days a year. It’s a problem the industry is just beginning to address,’ the centre’s director Amelia Foster told the Guardian.

Meanwhile, the University of Bristol is taking a multi-pronged approach to reducing the institution’s emissions. ‘We’re spending £300,000 this year on insulating our buildings, making heating and lighting systems more efficient and controlling ventilation systems. In addition to this we have a £1.5m project to reduce overvoltage at the university that will save an estimated £500,000 and should reduce emissions by 8% alone,’ said Martin Wiles, head of sustainability at the university.

The Science Museum has also jumped on board and is exploring the possibility of installing an energy-saving heating system, which would use water stored deep underneath Exhibition Road. If it goes ahead, in the future heat would be pumped into the ground in summer when it’s not needed and removed in the winter to heat the building. The museum has also sought to reduce the carbon footprint of its Prove It climate change exhibition by using recycled or recyclable materials and sustainable sourced wood.

‘You cannot escape the reality of climate change. By signing up to 10:10, NMSI [National Museum of Science and Industry] is helping to influence people’s private, political and professional lives,’ said Professor Chris Rapley, director of the Science Museum.

However, despite the fanfare attached to the 10:10 initiative, not all public sector institutions are convinced that it is the right approach for them. Some bodies already have their own environmental strategies in place and, in some cases, these go further than the simple commitment required by 10:10.

The Museums, Libraries and Archives Council (MLA) has not signed up to the 10:10 pledge, says Katie Pekacar, policy adviser on excellence, improvement and innovation, but is committed to reducing its carbon footprint. Measures it has recently implemented include an extension of home-working to all the field teams, better video-conferencing facilities and a pledge to work with the sector to help museums, libraries and archives improve all aspects of sustainability, including environmental sustainability.

Nick Poole, CEO of the Collections Trust goes further. ‘We did look into 10:10, but we believe that as a social enterprise, environmental responsibility and sustainability should be long-term commitments rather than short-term initiatives,’ he explained.

‘We maintain a proactive environmental policy and we work not only to minimise our own impact, but also to promote ethical and sustainable practices throughout our supply chain. Ultimately, we think that it is a question of long-term cultural and professional change. While we applaud 10:10 for raising the profile of the issues, we don’t think it is the solution.’

A new campaign to get individuals and organisations to sign up to carbon cuts has been hitting the headlines – but does it go far enough? Michelle Pauli reports.

‘We have over 400,000 complete programmes, both radio and television, going all the way back to the birth of radio in 1926. We also have quite extensive records and archives of the BBC itself as an institution. We have over four and a half miles of documents, we have one of the largest record collections in Britain, we have the largest working sheet music collection in the world – more than five million items – and we have about five million photographs, most of which are within BBC copyright.’

Talk to Tony Ageh, controller of archive development for the BBC, about the BBC Archive and how it might move into the digital age and the immediate impression is of the sheer scale of the task in hand.

For every item in this massive archive there is a whole tangle of copyright and royalties issues to deal with. With it taking an estimated six hours to clear the rights for every hour of film, a staggering six million hours would be needed to clear the entire archive for use online. Added to that, there are issues around how to digitise certain types of old film, along with the need to ensure that the metadata and cataloguing is of a high standard so that anyone trying to use the archive can easily find what they are looking for.

Ageh, however, seems undaunted. Appointed just over a year ago and tasked with looking at what the future role of the BBC archives could be and its maximum use and potential, Ageh is excited about what his boss, Roly Keating, the director of archive at the BBC, calls the ’pent-up energy‘ of the resource.

For Ageh, archives today are like the coalfields of the 18th century.

For Ageh, archives today are like the coalfields of the 18th century. ‘Until they were mined and until we created the ability to mine the coal, to move the coal out of the fields and move it towards not only the fireplace but actually to create industrial level enterprise, it was nothing more than a black rock lying underground, buried away and forgotten. I think that our archives can be seen in much the same vein. They are sitting there, not doing anything, unused, and yet with this huge potential, which if realised and brought to the surface could fuel, in the same way that coal triggered and fuelled the industrial revolution, a creative revolution inside the UK.’

Some of that mining is just now starting to take place. The director of BBC Vision, Jana Bennett, recently announced the launch of an online catalogue of every TV and radio show the corporation has broadcast by Christmas 2010. Next year, Melvyn Bragg’s Radio 4 series chronicling the history of ideas, In Our Time, will be among the first BBC programmes to have its complete archive made accessible online.

These are still small steps, and Ageh sees partnership with other cultural organisations, such as the BFI, Tate and Wellcome, as the only way that the BBC will be able to meet its 2022 deadline for digitising those parts of the archive deemed suitable.

‘We’ll need to recruit an army of people to help us and certainly education is one place that we can look for solid and reliable support, whether it’s through metadata or cataloguing or tagging that information in the first place,’ he says. ‘Ultimately we’d like to put as much of this in front of the public and the data itself is something we’re pretty sure we can open source or make available to more than just the professionals and the BBC ourselves to work with. We’re looking at ways we can open the archive to the greatest potential use, particularly for educational purposes and that’s why our relationship with the Strategic Content Alliance is so vital to this.’

Mining the Archives today are like 18th-century coalfields, says Tony Ageh, controller of archive development for the BBC. Find out why as he tells Michelle Pauli how the corporation is making moves to tap into the huge potential of its near-century-old archive, and the challenges it presents.

‘Europeana: Creation, Collaboration & Copyright’, a conference held in Setember in The Hague saw the largest group of people Europeana has gathered together to date. Emma Beer attended and reports back on the hot topics under discussion.

More information or contact Sarah Fahmy

Digital Content Quarterly is produced by the Strategic Content Alliance, which is an initiative created to support citizens in gaining best value from the public investment made in digital content. JISC is taking this work forward in collaboration with and with the support of the British Library, the BBC, BECTA, The Museums, Libraries and Archives Council (MLA) and the National Library for Health, plus many other organisations around the UK under the affiliate scheme.