The main Open Repositories conference concluded this morning with a keynote by Clifford Lynch and the separate user group meetings began. I tried to transcribe Cliff’s great address as best I could from my notes; hopefully I’m not misrepresenting what he said in any significant ways. He has some thought-provoking comments about the positioning of repositories in institutions and the policy questions that come from that. For an even more abbreviated summary, check out this Storify archive of tweets during his keynote. Then I attended the DSpace track of user group programming, and below there are summaries of plans for DSpace version 1.8 and the new DSpace Curation Services.

Repositories: Major Progress and Open Questions

Instead, the growth of repositories has highlighted critical policy discussions of what the missions of institutions of higher education are supposed to be. Questions such as the responsibility to curate knowledge they create, curate the evidence on which inquiry is based, to disseminate knowledge. These weren’t on the table 10-15 years ago. Now they are central issues for discussion in the leadership of universities. Tied to institutional repositories is the question of open access. The scope of issues goes beyond just open access, though. It reaches into the kind of questions that are now getting traction like getting access to research data and an institution’s role of stewardship and disseminate of research data. Also the creation of open educational resources and institution’s responsibility to disseminate such resources. These questions wouldn’t have emerged without the effort to build out institutional repositories. As soon as you start talking about these questions they demand investments in infrastructure of institutional repositories. So we should take satisfaction in the role that the efforts of deploying institutional repositories have played in advancing these critical policy discussions. These questions have gone unanswered far too long.

That said, there is a danger of confusion of mechanism with policy. We went through a bad period around 2004 when institutional repositories were deployed without knowing what would be put in them. Institutional repositories are services to support policies, not ends to themselves. We have mostly gotten past this and can have the discussion of whether institutionally based repositories are the appropriate tool and when should we build discipline-specific repositories or other kinds of platforms that are not institutionally focused.

He also noted that the question of institutional assets and the balance of faculty control with institutional responsibility is being talked about, if only quietly. The piece of video that Clifford referred to — a talk by Derick Law on how universities have failed in their stewardship responsibilities of research — may be this video from the The Blue Ribbon Task Force on Sustainable Digital Preservation and Access’s National Conversation on the Economic Sustainability of Digital Information (skip to “chapter 2″ of the video) held April 1, 2010 in Washington DC.

Not only have institutional repositories acted as focal point for policy, they have also been a focal point for collaborations. Library and IT collaborations were happening long before institutional repositories surfaced. Institutional repositories, though, have been a great place to bring other people into that conversation, including faculty leaders to start engaging them in questions about dissemination of their work. Also chief research officers; in 1995 if you were a university librarian doing leadership work constructing digital resources to change scholarly communication, would have talked to CIO but may not know who your chief research officer was at that point. That set of conversations, which are now critical when talking about data curation, got their start with institutional repositories and related policies.

Another place for conversation has been those in the university administrations concerned with building public support for the institution. By giving the public a deeper understanding of what the institution contributes to culture, industry, health and science, and connecting faculty to this effort. This goes beyond the press release by opening a public window into the work of the institutions. This is particularly important today with questions of public support for institutions.

That said, there are a number of open questions and places where we are dealing with works-in-progress. Cliff then went into an incomplete and, from his perspective, perhaps idiosyncratic, list of these issues.

Repositories are one of the threads that are leading us nationally and internationally into a complete rethinking of the practice of name authority. While it is a librarian, old fashion concept, but it is converging with “identity management” from IT. He offered an abbreviated and exaggerated example: librarians did name authority for authors of stuff in general in 19th century. In 20th century there was too much stuff, particularly stuff in journals and magazines became overwhelming. So libraries backed off and focused only on books and stuff that went into catalogs; the rest they turned over to indexing and abstracting services. We made a few weird choices like an authority file should be as simple as possible to disambiguate authors rather than be as full as possible, so we had the development of things along side name authority files like the national dictionaries of literary biographies.

For scientific journal literature, publishers followed practices about how obscure author names could be (e.g. just last name and first initial). Huge amounts of ambiguity of “telegraphic author names” results in a horribly dirty corpus of data. A variety of folks are realizing that we need to disambiguate authorship by assigning author identifiers and somehow go back and cleanup the mess in the existing bibliographic data of scholarly literature, especially journal literature. Institutions taking more responsibility for the work of their community, and having to do local name authority all over again. We have the challenge of how to reconnect this activity to national and international files. We also have a set of challenges on whether we want to connect this to biographical resources. It brings up issues of privacy, when do people do things of record, and how much else should come along with building a public biography resource. We also see a vast parallel investment of institutional identity management. Institutions haven’t quite figured out that people don’t necessarily publish with the same name that is recorded in the enrollment or employment systems that the institution manages, and that it would be a good idea to tie those literary names to identity files that the institution manages.

We’re not confident of the kind of ecological positioning institutional repositories among a pretty complicated array of information systems found at a typical large university. Those systems include digital library platforms, course management systems, lecture capture systems, facilities for archiving the digital records of the institution, and platforms intended to directly support active research by faculty. All are evolving at their own rate. It is unclear where the institutional repositories fit, and what are the boundaries around them.

Here is one example. What is the difference between an institutional repository and a digital library/collection? You’d get very different answers from different people. One might be who does the curation, how it is sourced, and how it is scoped. The decisions are largely intellectual. Making this confusing is that you’ll see the same platform for institutional repositories and digital library platforms. We are seeing a convergence of the underpinning platforms.

Another one: learning management systems (LMS). These are virtually universal among institution in the same timeframe that institutional repositories have been deployed. We’ve done a terrible job at thinking about what happens to the stuff in them when the course is over. We can’t decide if it is scholarly material, institutional records, or something else. They are tangled up between learning materials and all of the stuff that populates a specific performance of a course such as quizzes and answers, discussion lists, and student course projects. We don’t have taxonomies and policies here and a working distinction between institutional repositories and learning management systems. It is an unusual institution that has as systematic export from the LMS to an IR.

Lecture capture systems becoming quite commonplace; students are demanding them in much the same way that the LMS was demanded. A lecture capture system may be more universally helpful than an LMS. Lectures being captured for a wide range of reasons, but not knowing why means it is difficult to know whether to keep them and how to integrate them into the institution’s resources.

Another example: the extent to which institutional repositories should sit in the stream of active work. As faculty are building datasets and doing computation with them, when is it time for something to go into an institutional repository. How volatile can content be in the repository? How should repositories be connected or considered as robust working storage? He suspects that many institutional repositories are not provisioned with high-performance storage and network connections, and would become a bottleneck in the research process. The answers would be different for big data sets and small data sets, and we are starting to see datasets that are too big to backup or two big to replicate.

Another issue is that of virtual organizations, the kind of collaborative efforts that span institutions and nations. They often allow relatively low overhead to mobilize researchers to work on a problem, and are becoming commonplace in sciences and social sciences and starting to pop up in the humanities. We have a problem for the rules-of-the-road between virtual organizations and institution-based repositories. It is easy to spin up an institutional repository for a virtual organization, but what happens to it when the virtual organization shuts down. Some of these organizations are intentionally transient; how do we assign responsibility for a world of virtual organizations and map them into institutional organizations for long-term stewardship.

Software is starting to concern people. So much scholarship is tied up now in complicated software systems that we are starting to see a number of phenomena. One is data that is difficult to reuse or understand without the software. Another is the is difficulty surrounding reproducibility — taking results and realizing they are dependent on an enormous stack of software and we don’t have a clear way to talk about the provenance of a result that is based on the stack of software versions that would allow for high-confidence in reproduction of results. We’re doing to have to deal with software. We are also entering an era of deliberate obsolescence of software; for instance, any Apple product that is older than a few years is going to the dustbin and it hasn’t been fully announced or realized so that people can deal with it.

Another place that has been under-exploited is the question of retiring faculty and repositories. Taking inventory of someone’s scholarly collections and migrating it to an institutional framework in an orderly fashion.

How we reinterpret institutional repositories going beyond universities. For example there is something that looks a bit like an institutional repository but has some different things about it that belongs in public libraries or historic societies or similar. This dimension bears exploration.

To conclude his comments he talked about a last open issue. When we talk about good stewardship and preservation of digital materials, there are a couple of ideas that have emerged as we tried to learn from our past stewardship of print scholarly literature. One of these principles is that geographic replication is a good thing; we’re starting to see this in a sense that most repositories are based on some geographically redundant storage system or we’ll see a steady migration towards this in the next few years. A second one is organizational redundancy. If you look at the print work, it wasn’t just that the scholarly record wasn’t in a number of independent locations but also that control was replicated among institutions that were making independent decisions about adding materials to their library collection. Clearly they coordinated to a point, but they also have institutional independence. We don’t know how to do this with institutional repositories. This is also emerging in special collections as they become digital. Because they didn’t start life as published materials in many replicated versions, we need other mechanisms to have curatorial responsibility distributed. This is linked to the notion that it is usually not helpful to talk about preservation in terms like “eternity” or “perpetuity” or life-of-the-republic. It is probably better in most cases to think about preservation in one chunk at a time; an institution making a 20-year or 50-year commitment with a well-structured process at the end. That process includes whether an institution should renew the commitment and if not other interested parties could come in and take responsibility with a well-ordered hand-off. This ties into policies and strategies for curatorial replication across institutions and ways that institutional repositories will need to work together. It may be less critical today, but will become increasingly critical.

In conclusion, Cliff said that he hoped left the attendees with a sense that repositories are not things that stand on their own. That they in fact are mechanism that advance policy in a very complex ecology of systems. In fact, we don’t have our policy act together on many systems adjacent to the repository that leads to issues of appropriate scope and interfaces with those systems. Where repositories will evolve to in the future as we understand the role of big data is also of interest.

DSpace 1.8

SWORD is a lightweight protocol for depositing items between repositories; it is a profile of the Atom Publishing Protocol. At the current release, DSpace has be able to accept items; the planned work for 1.8 will make it possible to send items. Some possible use cases: publishing from a closed repository to an open repository, sending from the repository to a publisher, from the repository to a subject-specific service (such as arXiv), or vice versa. The functionality was copied from the Swordapp demo. It supports SWORD v1 and only the DSpace XMLUI. A question was ask about whether the SWORD copy process is restricted to just the repository manager? The answer was that it should be configurable. On the one hand it can be open because it is up to the receiving end to determine whether or not to accept it. On the other hand, a repository administrator might want to prevent items being exported out of a collection.

MIT has rewritten the Creative Commons licensing selection steps. It uses the Creative Commons web services (as XML) rather than HTML iframes, which allows better integration with DSpace. As an aside, the Creative Commons and license steps have been split into two discrete steps allowing different headings in the progress bar.

The DSpace Community Advisory Team prioritized issues to be addressed by the developers, and for this release they include JIRA issue DS-638 for virus checking during submission. The solution invokes the existing Curation Task and requires Clam AV antivirus software to be installed. It is switched off by default and is configured in submission-curation.cfg. Two other issues that were addressed are DS-587 (Add the capability to indicate a withdrawn reason to an Item) and DS-164 (Deposit interface), which was completed as the Google Summer of Code Submission Enhancement project.

Thanks to Bojan Suzic in his Google Summer of Code project, DSpace has had a REST API. The code has been publicly available and repositories have been making use of it, so the committers group want to get it into a finished state and include it in 1.8. There is also work on an alternative approach to a REST API.

DSpace and DuraCloud was also covered; it was much the same that I reported on earlier this week, so I’m not repeating it here.

From the geek perspective, the new release will see increasing modularization of the codebase and more use of Spring and the DSpace Services Framework. The monolithic dspace.cfg will be split up into separate pieces; some pieces would move into Spring config while other pieces could go into the database. It will have a simplified installation process, and several components that were talked about elsewhere at the meeting: WebMVC UI, configurable workflow, and more curation tasks.

Introduction to DSpace Curation Services

Some built-in tasks are to validate metadata against input forms (halts on task failure), count bitstreams by format type, virus scan (uses external virus detection service), on ingest (the desired use case), and the replication suite of tasks for DuraCloud. Other tasks: link checker and 11 others (from Stuart Lewis and Kim Shepherd), format id with DROID (in development), validate/add/replace metadata, status report on workflow items, filter media in workflow (proposed), and checksum validation (proposed).

What does this mean for different users? As a repository or collection manager, it means new functionality — GUI access without GUI development: curation, preservation, validation, reporting. As a developer: rapid development, and deployment of functionality without rebuilding or redeploying the DSpace instance.

The recommended Java development environment for tasks is with a package outside of dspace-api. Make a POM with dependency on dspace-api, especially /curate. Required features of the task are a constructor with no arguments to support loading as a plugin and that it implements the CurationTask interface or extends the AbstractCurationTask class. Deploy it as a JAR and configure (similar to a DSpace plugin)

There are some Java annotations for Curation Task code that are important to know about. Setting @Distributive means that the task is responsible for handling any contained DSpace objects as appropriate. Otherwise the default is to have the task executed across all contained objects (subcommunities, collections, or items). Setting @Suspendable means the task interrupts processing when first FAIL status is returned. Setting @Mutative means the task makes changes to target objects.

Invoking tasks can be done several ways: from the web application (XMLUI), the command line, from workflow, from other code, or from a queue (deferred operation). In the case of the workflow, one can target the action of the task at anywhere in the workflow steps (e.g. before step 1, step 2, step 3 or at item installation). Actions (reject or approve) are based on tasks results, and notifications are sent by e-mail.

A mechanism for discovering and sharing tasks doesn’t exist yet. What is needed is a community repository of tasks. For each task what is needed is: a descriptive listing, documentation, reviews/ratings, link to source code management system, and link to binaries applicable to specific versions.

With dynamic loading with scripting languages in JSR-223, it is theoretically possible to create Curation Tasks in Groovy, JRuby, Jython, although the only one Bill has been able to get to work so far has been Groovy. Scripting code needs a high level of interoperability with Java, and must implement the CurationTask interface. Configuration is a little bit different: one needs a taskcatalog with descriptors for language, name of script, and how the constructor is called. Bill demonstrated some sample scripts.

In his conclusion, Bill said that the new Curation Services: increases functionality for content in a managed framework; has multiple ways of running tasks for different types of users and scenarios; makes it possible to add new code without a rebuild; simplifies extending DSpace functionality; and with scripting lowers the bar even more.

School is out and the summer heat has started, but there is no signs yet that the threads of technology change are slowing down. This week’s threads include a healthy review of the Google Book Search lawsuit settlement, the downside of recommendation engines, and how academics are contributing to Wikipedia.

Feel free to send this to others you think might be interested in the topics. If you find these threads interesting and useful, you might want to add the Thursday Threads RSS Feed to your feed reader or subscribe to e-mail delivery using the form to the right. If you would like a more raw and immediate version of these types of stories, watch my FriendFeed stream (or subscribe to its feed in your feed reader). Comments and tips, as always, are welcome.

New Video: What Next for Google Books?

I’ve just posted a new video on behalf of the Public Index, What Next for Google Books?. It’s an 80-minute discussion between myself and noted digital copyright experts and longtime settlement followers Jonathan Band and Kenneth Crews. We discuss Google’s scanning project, the lawsuit against it by copyright owners, the proposed settlement and the controversy around it, Judge Chin’s opinion rejecting the settlement, possible next steps for the parties, and some of the larger issues raised by the case. It’s a self-contained overview of how the settlement got to where it is now and what might happen next, designed to be informative no matter how little or how much you already know about the case.

- New Video: What Next for Google Books?, James Grimmelmann’s The Laboratorium

James Grimmelmann continues to be a prime go-to person for clear analysis of the Google Book Search lawsuit. If for some reason you haven’t been keeping track of what has happened with the lawsuit from the very beginning, then this is a great overview to get you up to speed. Even if you have been following a lot of the commentary, this video is a good way to quickly refresh your memory of the key points that started the lawsuit and how those initial key points have woven themselves throughout the story. Or, as Ed Summers tweeted, “lost 1h20min of my afternoon to ‘What Next for Google Books?’ … was worth it though”

All the News That’s Fit for You

Delivering personalized news poses much harder problems than
delivering personalized recommendations of books and movies as Amazon and Netflix do. Yet, despite the difficulties, personalized news seems all the rage these days. In February alone, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Yahoo! all announced some form of automatic personalization, and Google is quietly running its own experiments in personalized news delivery. …

But despite the promise of algorithmic personalization, the idea is far simpler in theory than in practice, and newspapers have struggled to figure out how to do it without giving up their traditional role as arbiters of news.

“Computer scientists may think it’s nirvana to get what you want to get,” says Penelope Abernathy, professor of digital media economics at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “But a newsperson will say, ‘My role is to bring you the world, and it may be news you didn’t know you needed to know.’ “

- All the News That’s Fit for You [subscription required], by Marina Krakovsky, Communications of the ACM

Pair this up with Eli Pariser’s Eli Pariser: Beware online “filter bubbles” 20-minute TED Talk from early last month and you might start to wonder if recommendation engines based purely on user behavior are the right way for us to go. Is it a role for librarians to help patrons break out of an echo chamber of their own making when the highest relevant hits are based on what they have already searched and read? I wonder if there has been a study of clusters of users that naturally form from recommendation engines because there is a high correlation between what the cluster has already selected. Or are human interests varied enough to prevent these self-selected, tight-knit clusters from happening.

Academics editing Wikipedia

The call to action was all over the Association for Psychological Science’s annual meeting here this past weekend. “Attention APS Members. Take Charge of Your Science,” fliers shouted. Promotional ads in the conference programs urged the society’s 25,000 members to join the APS Wikipedia Initiative and “make sure Wikipedia—the world’s No. 1 online encyclopedia—represents psychology fully and accurately.” And the Wikimedia Foundation, which backs the encyclopedia, was holding editing demonstrations in the middle of the conference exhibit hall.

- Academics, in New Move, Begin to Work With Wikipedia, by Josh Fischman, The Chronicle of Higher Education Wired Campus blog

This school year, dozens of professors from across the country gave students an unexpected assignment: Write Wikipedia entries about public policy issues.

The Wikimedia Foundation, which supports the Web site, organized the project in an effort to bulk up the decade-old online encyclopedia’s coverage of topics ranging from the Toxic Substances Control Act of 1976 to Sudanese refugees in Egypt. Such issues have been treated on the site in much less depth than TV shows, celebrity biographies and other elements of pop culture.

- Wikipedia goes to class, by Jenna Johnson, The Washington Post

Could the title of this section be “Librarians editing Wikipedia”? It could have been. This pair of stories show how faculty and students are channeling their efforts to improving the open access encyclopedia. Librarians are doing their part, too — notably OCLC Research is looking for ways to add authority data to Wikipedia entries.

If it is Thursday it must mean it is time for another in this series of Thursday Threads posts. This week there are an abundance of things that could fall into the category of “disruptive innovation” in libraries and higher education. If you find these interesting, you might want to subscribe to my FriendFeed stream where these topics and more are posted and discussed throughout the week.

The User-Driven Purchase Giveaway Library

“[W]e have reached the important tipping point where digital files can be read on machines that are nearly as good as paper books and where paper books can be created and delivered nearly as quickly, cheaply, and reliably as digital files. This makes it possible for libraries to radically rethink their fundamental approach to providing documents to users.

In this EDUCAUSE Review article, David Lewis — dean of the IUPUI University Library — proposes a brief thought experiment where he argues that it is more cost-effective for academic libraries to stop purchasing physical items just-in-case. Rather libraries should acquire the rights for digital delivery and print-on-demand production of works from publishers, suggesting that the licensing and production costs would be cheaper in the long run than buying, cataloging, circulating, and storing the physical artifacts. Lewis mentions use of the Espresso Book Machine, a earlier topic on DLTJ and I’ve commented on Lewis’ work before, and I highly recommend looking at the full description of his thought experiment.

Amazon’s Kindle Singles e-books: One shrewd business move

Amazon’s Kindle store is getting more like a music store everyday. Now you can buy a whole book or just a single—an e-book that’s about twice as long as a New Yorker feature. In a statement, Amazon called on writers, business types and other big thinkers to create Kindle Singles.

This post on ZDNet is an opinion piece about Amazon’s announcement for the Kindle Singles program. A “Single” is intended to be longer than an article but shorter than a full length book — about 10,000 to 30,000 words (roughly 30 to 90 pages, according to Amazon’s press release). But what it really seems to be about is the disintermediation of traditional publishers in the Kindle digital distribution world.

Blackboard to Sell Online Courses Through New Partnership

Blackboard announced today that it is teaming up with a for-profit education provider, K12 Inc., to sell online courses to colleges that want to outsource their remedial offerings. The companies say their plan will offer a new way for students who lack basic skills to get caught up. Blackboard would sell online courses that are designed and taught by employees of K12. The courses would be delivered on the Blackboard course-management system. It is the first time that the company has sold full courses, and not just software to deliver them.

Very interesting. A posting at the Chronicle of Higher Education Wired Campus news stream. This is arguably a Christensen-inspired disruptive path. Blackboard and K12 create a product that takes the unwanted consumers from market incumbents (those that need remedial work to meet the minimum standards for starting credit-earning courses). While doing it establish a tight vertical market where you can add value. Then move “up-market” and start to take other low-margin consumers from incumbents. Will we see Blackboard teaming up with for-profit education companies to offer associates and bachelor degrees next?

How energy-efficient is cloud computing?

Researchers have found that, at high usage levels, the energy required to transport data in cloud computing can be larger than the amount of energy required to store the data.

The researchers looked at the aggregation of energy needed to store and process data on a user’s own computer versus using servers “in the cloud.” The PsysOrg.com article is a brief summary of the study to be published in the Proceedings of the IEEE.

One Step Closer to a National Digital Library

Can the nonprofit world create a national digital library to put America’s collective intellectual wealth within everyone’s reach? Robert Darnton, the historian who directs the Harvard University Library, has been one of the most public champions of the idea. This past weekend, Mr. Darnton convened a group of 42 top-level representatives from foundations, cultural institutions, and the library and scholarly worlds to talk about how to build that library. In a short statement, the group endorsed the idea of “a Digital Public Library of America,” envisioning it as “an open, distributed network of comprehensive online resources” drawn from the country’s libraries, archives, museums, and universities.

This is another short news post from the Chronicle of Higher Education’s Wired Campus news stream and it takes the form of an interview with Robert Darnton. Although the details of a U.S.-oriented National Digital Library still seem to be sparse — the most comprehensive information comes from an article by Darton in the New York Review of Books — the implementation of this concept is certainly something to keep an eye one.

OhioLINK, my employer, is seeking nominations and applications for the position of Executive Director. The search is being conducted with the assistance of Brill Neumann Associates, and the position description is linked from their current searches page (direct link to PDF, cached link to PDF).

The text was modified to remove a link to http://www.brillneumann.com/searches.html on May 17th, 2011.

The text was modified to remove a link to http://www.brillneumann.com/pdf/ohiolink_pd.pdf on May 17th, 2011.

This week I was at the Multiple Perspectives on Access, Inclusion, and Disability annual conference conference at the Ohio State University and was reminded again about the principles of Universal Design. The presentation was “Universal Design: Ensuring Access to All Learners” by Maria Morin from Project Enhance at the University of Texas — Pan American. Although she talked about Universal Design for Learning (encompassing assessments, instructional delivery and resource presentation), there was a point in her presentation that I snapped to Universal Design for Libraries.

Here were the two slides:

Universal Design for Learning is about Options!

• Representation refers to how one can design and deliver information to the class.
• Engagement refers to how students participate in class.
• Expression refers to how one can ask students to demonstrate what they have learned.

Options>>>>>>

• Multiple ways of REPRESENTATION to give learners various ways of acquiring information and knowledge.
• Multiple ways of EXPRESSION provide learners alternatives for demonstrating what they know.
• Multiple ways of ENGAGEMENT to tap into learners’ interest, challenging them appropriately, and motivate them to learn.

Are there ways that we can provide options for multiple ways of representation, expression and engagement in the services we provide? A quick Google search for Universal Design for Libraries has some interesting possibilities, including a checklist from the University of Washington DO-IT office and an announcement about an ALA ASCLA Midwinter 2010 institute. Is anyone else thinking about this?

The Seven Principles of Universal Design, as offered in a handy bookmark from the presentation by the Project Enhance folks, are:

1. Equitable Use: The design is useful and marketable to people with diverse abilities.
2. Flexibility in Use: The design accommodates a wide range of individual preferences and abilities.
3. Simple and Intuitive: Use of the design is easy to understand, regardless of the user’s experience, knowledge, language skills, or current concentration level.
4. Perceptible Information: The design communicates necessary information effectively to the user, regardless of ambient conditions or the user’s sensory abilities.
5. Tolerance for Error: The design minimizes hazards and the adverse consequences of accidental or unintended actions.
6. Low Physical Effort: The design can be used efficiently and comfortably and with a minimum of fatigue.
7. Size and Space for Approach and Use: Appropriate size and space is provided for approach, reach, manipulation, and use regardless of user’s body size, posture, or mobility.

As we design information systems, certainly the first five of these seven apply to us. And, as is the hallmark of Universal Design, are useful for not only people with disabilities but for everyone one in general.

Joshua Kim, senior learning technologist and an adjunct in sociology at Dartmouth College, recently had a series of posts about working with software vendors. Although Joshua’s focus is with learning technologies (course management systems, lecture capture systems, etc.), these are general enough to be useful in a variety of library environments as well. His posts, hosted by Inside Higher Ed, were:

• “A Manifesto for Vendor Webinars” (January 31, 2010)
• “5 Questions Your Company Must Answer” (March 4, 2010)
• “Toward a Product Evaluation Framework” (March 7, 2010)

Here are descriptions or excerpts from each of the posts.

In the first, Joshua describes guidelines for vendors delivering presentations. (Joshua is describing webinars, but I think the guidelines apply to all forms of vendor product presentations.) For instance: “Your webinar should not be about your product, service or company, but about the problem that your product, service or company solves for your potential customer (us).” And: “You need to assume that your audience is comparing your product/service again your competitors. This means that you need to be willing to make direct contrasts and comparisons about why and how you believe that your platform/application/service solves our needs to a greater extent than your competition.” (As an aside, Ed Corrado today points to the post of another blogger on Inside Higher Ed on the same topic.)

Next up, albeit a month later, is a post on questions a company must answer when presenting a product to a potential buyer. He points out that “these questions have little to do with features or technologies, although these are the topics on which companies usually spend most of their time.” Rather, like the first post, he advises companies to focus on focus on “what problem does adopting to or switching to your platform/service/product solve for our institution/division/department?” In addition to Joshua’s five questions, a commenter adds one on data portability — how easy is it to get one’s data out of the system for migration to another. That is one that libraries should take to heart.

A few days later is a post with 10 points that form the framework that “is designed to guide the evaluation process (as well as the writing of requirements), with a goal of moving away from features, design etc. (which will change) towards a more strategic method.” Although the post commenters take Joshua to task for his conservative approach (“Someone has to be first [to adopt a new product]; it shouldn’t be you.”), I like how he clearly articulates areas that should be considered when evaluating a product.

I like Joshua’s blog, and suggest academic librarians should add it to your reading list. Learning technology overlaps a great deal with academic library technology, and he writes clearly about his perspective of bringing services to the same users we serve.

QR-Code pointing to DLTJ

Tom emphasized the need to have an activity that is relevant to the technology. As he put it, “Use the technology to ampliy the activity.” In this specific case, the 2-D barcodes pointed to text, pictures, and videos that provide additional background to the components depicted in the World War II Memorial. As participants mentioned in the video, it is a way add context to the experience of walking through the memorial.

I had one minor quibble with the execution of the project. The presenters were using EZcodes, a 2-D barcode format licensed exclusively to ScanBuy rather than the emerging de facto QR codes. The problem with EZcodes is that what is encoded is an identifier that is translated by the ScanLife smartphone app to the final destination. By contrast, a QR code has the actual content — a short snippet of text, a URL, a phone number, etc. — actually encoded in the barcode. With an EZcode, the application on one’s smartphone has to look up the value of the identifier at ScanLife’s service before going to the final destination. With a QR code, the smartphone application can go right to the destination website.

The EZcode/Scanbuy scheme has privacy and sustainability issues. First, according to the terms-of-service for the ScanLife reader, each reader application is assigned a unique identifier; because the application must contact the ScanLife with the 2-D barcode identifier to find the value behind the identifier, ScanLife knows everything you scan. Secondly, the ScanLife server is a mandatory intermediary in the process, so if ScanLife goes away all of the barcodes become worthless. This is somewhat similar to the problem with music encumbered with digital rights management; if the server is unavailable, the music file is worthless.¹ QR codes, though, since the data is encoded in the barcode itself, does not have either of these problems.

The text was modified to remove a link to http://www.rcet.org/dvcproject/geohistorian.html on February 11th, 2011.

Footnotes

1. See, for example, DRM sucks redux: Microsoft to nuke MSN Music DRM keys, and also how Wal-Mart Reverses Decision To Shutdown Digital Music DRM Servers.

For those interested and involved with distance and technology enhanced learning or have attended one of the past ODCE/LLT higher education conferences, you’ll want to know about the Ohio Educational Technology Conference in early February.

Add this event to your desktop calendar program.

The Ohio ETC is the combination of OLN/OhioLINK/OARnet conference and the eTech Ohio conference — coming together this year for the first time. There are many sessions directed towards higher education that shouldn’t be missed and opportunities to network with counterparts in primary and secondary education. The Ohio Educational Technology Conference has published its program guide for its annual meeting February 1 through 3, 2010 at the Greater Columbus Convention Center. With over 300 concurrent sessions, 225 exhibitors, and acclaimed keynote and featured speakers (Adora Svitak and David Weinberger among them), it is sure to be a great event.

Registration is available on the eTech Ohio website. While there, also sign up for a “Hall Pass” that will enable you to create your own personal itinerary in the Ohio ETC Conference Planner. (Tip: when registering for a Hall Pass and are prompted for an Organization Category, select “Other” then select “College/University” under the Organization Type heading.)

This year is the first year of an exciting new conference mission — one that includes primary, secondary, higher education, and adult career center participants all in the same meeting. That mission is reflected in the theme of the conference: P-20 Conversations: Shaping a Path for the 21st Century Student. Highlighted below are events that might be of particular interest to higher education faculty and staff, and you are encouraged to view the entire conference planner for other sessions of interest. As you read through the descriptions, look for the “BYOT” sessions; these are “Bring-Your-Own-Tools” — 90-minute hands-on sessions where presenters teach attendees on their own tools.

The theme of the 2010 Ohio Educational Technology Conference, P-20 Conversations: Shaping a Path for the 21st Century Student, addresses the need to provide seamless technology integration throughout students’ careers. Reflecting this year’s theme, the sponsors of last year’s Learning, Libraries and Technology conference — Ohio Learning Network (OLN), OhioLINK and OARnet — have joined with the Ohio Resource Center (ORC) and eTech Ohio, the technology service provider for primary and secondary education, to provide a premiere professional development event for all of us – teachers, faculty, librarians, instructional designers, administrators, students, and technicians.

The conference organizers are seeking interactive and engaging proposals for presentations, posters, and technology demonstrations. Proposals for college and university audiences will be peer reviewed by a committee of higher education representatives. In exchange for presenting a session or display, the presenter and co-presenter(s) will receive complimentary registration for the day of the presentation!

This year’s conference features three types of proposals:

• In the room: 45-minute sessions of a variety of formats that are held concurrently in breakout rooms
• On the board: full-day poster displays located in the interactive Technology for Learning Center
• Out of the box: highly interactive, hands-on sessions that are held in the Technology for Learning Center

All proposals must be submitted through the online proposal system hosted by eTech. To submit a proposal, the presenter must create an account in eTech Ohio’s online user account system, called “Hall Pass.” (When prompted for “Organization Category” select “Other” followed by “College/University”) With that account you can submit the proposal by following the “Begin a proposal” link at one of the three proposal types above. The deadline to submit a proposal is October 7, 2009. Please note that the proposal deadline will not be extended.

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Visit http://www.etech.ohio.gov/conference/register/presenters.dot to learn more about submitting a proposal today!

The text was modified to remove a link to http://www.etech.ohio.gov/conference/register/proposals.dot#onboard on June 9th, 2011.

The text was modified to remove a link to http://www.etech.ohio.gov/conference/register/proposals.dot#outbox on June 9th, 2011.

The text was modified to remove a link to http://www.etech.ohio.gov/conference/register/presenters.dot on June 9th, 2011.

The text was modified to remove a link to http://www.etech.ohio.gov/conference/register/volunteers.dot on June 9th, 2011.

The text was modified to remove a link to http://www.etech.ohio.gov/conference/register/proposals.dot#inroom on July 13th, 2011.

Carl Grant, president of Ex Libris North America, posted a pair of messages on his corporate blog that it is worth calling attention to regarding the OLE Project final report, if you haven’t already run into them: OLE; The unanswered questions and Library Software Solutions – We need a higher level of discourse... Equally important is the comment on the first by Brad Wheeler, Vice President for Information Technology and Chief Information Officer at Indiana University. The whole thread should take about five minutes to read; five minutes well spent if you are interested in the intersection of community source software development with proprietary, closed-source software development. It is even more important if you are looking for a case study of governance issues surrounding community source software development. Go ahead…I’ll wait.

It is important to clear up one misconception. Brad Wheeler, at Indiana University, was not involved in the design phase of the OLE Project. Heavens — I hope someone who is VP of IT and CIO of a major university would have better things to do than to slog through discussions of workflow decomposition of back-room library automation functions. No, Brad is a consumer of the final report draft, just as many library directors and CIOs are the intended audience of the draft. In fact, Brad is a special category of report readers because he is at the forefront of community source in higher education; he believes in the community source model because he is witness to how it has and is working. From his biography:

Dr. Wheeler has been a pioneer in leveraged models for university collaboration. He serves in leadership roles for over $50M of shared university investments in open source software and was a co-founder of the Sakai Project and co-principal investigator on its $2.7M in grants and the $500K Open Source Portfolio project. He was a co-founder of the original Kuali Project, and now chairs the Kuali Foundation, Inc. board of directors. He has been a co-principal investigator on $4M of Kuali grants and three of the foundation.

Sakai (learning management system), Open Source Portfolio (electronic portfolio, since folded into Sakai), and Kuali (a suite of project including student records, research tracking, university financials, as well as other systems) are all well-regarded open source projects that are “leveraged models for university collaboration” — projects where universities have pooled their resources to develop and own the systems that are at the core of their institutions. The OLE Project is looking to join the Kuali Foundation and follow its proven and evolving patterns for community source development. From that perspective, it might be valuable to go back and reread Brad Wheeler’s response to Carl’s first post.

As someone embedded deeply in the OLE Project design phase, I can only speak for myself. Given the depth my head was in the design documents — and there were many others deeper than I was — it is difficult to separate reality from my perhaps biased impression of the report. I’m not sure a point-for-point debate on the merits of the report are useful as public discourse. Rather, I for one am listening to what others have to say and assimilating that into my version of reality. I’m grateful to Carl for taking the time to post his observations, just as I am to Brad and the other commenters on Carl’s post.

The text was modified to update a link from http://student.kuali.org/ to http://kuali.org/ks on June 9th, 2011.