Lorna has already provided a great concluding review of the RRT project over on her blog, so I won’t attempt to repeat ground she’s covered. It was a great project to have worked on and, I think, a successful experiment in exploring a model of providing programme-level support. I’m very grateful to the different colleagues I got to work with within CETIS, UKOLN, and JISC for making my years on the project enjoyable and challenging (in a good way).

From the begining of this month I’ve been working on the CETIS support project for the UKOER programme. The project will provide a mixture of project and programme support. Along with other CETIS colleagues, I’ll be developing guides reviewing relevant standards for syndication, packaging, and metadata as they relate to OERs; we’ll also look at relevant tools and the experince of earlier projects. Alongside the projects, in this pilot programme, we’ll be figuring out best practice for Open Educational Resources in these areas and others.

We’ve begun this process by runing one of the programmes monthly training/ discussion events on Elluminate. Phil’s posted the slides from the session we ran: http://www.slideshare.net/philb/metadata-and-content-aggregation-for-ukoer.

Atlanta Aquarium Jellyfish

The conference proper once again provided a state of the art view of repository software and emerging trends in institutional (& organisational) approaches to managing digital assets. It proved to be a thought-provoking few days.

Of particular note was the impact of SWORD which was, frankly, everywhere. I’m not going to say a great deal about it beyond noting that:

• at least for this conference, it has become the de facto standard for deposit tools
• there are now a good number of desktop tools and application plug-ins supporting SWORD deposit

It will be interesting to see how it evolves from here. For those of you on Twitter @swordapp tweets updates of SWORD related developments.
[disclaimer: I have in the past worked with both of the SWORD project managers]

Another feature of the conference was another RepoChallenge. Sponsored by JISC and Microsoft this again attracted a lot of interest; David Flanders, the organiser, has blogged about the event, participants, and winners (Winner: MentionIt by Tim Donohue; Runner up: FedoraFS by Rebecca Koesar)
http://dev8d.jiscinvolve.org/2009/05/20/repochallenge-winners/.

I’ve got about 8 pages of tweets covering the rest of the conference – rather than bore you with I’ll offer this wordle as a summary and instead comment on what I felt to be the most important developments.

I’ll also note in passing the approach one session took to supporting twitterers – programme session 7 a – chaired by Robert Macdonald http://twitter.com/mcdonald/ added a hashtag for their session #ps7a alongside #or09 this would allow the seperate retrieval and analysis of that sessions tweets from the more general stream of conference tweets.

Trends that I noticed emerging from the conference:

• managing datasets is firmly entering institutional agendas. In part this is pushed by funding bodies in part through a desire for more open data.
• the merger of the DSpace and Fedora organisations should provide a more stable future for the software platforms and in the longer term greater opportunities for collaborative development.
• California Digital Library (John Kunze’s presentation) are shifting to repository microservices and beginning to move beyond single software products. (I couldn’t help being reminded of the eFramework but CDL seems to be beginning with a specific local business case)
• there appears to be a growing interest in Open Access journal publishing in North America: both in the production of new journals and through collaboration with university presses; Microsoft Research have also developed a hosted open access journal service.
• Zentity – it’s is unclear yet to what extent Microsoft Research’s repository will gain traction in the community but the impact of their engagement with the sector and tools like Zentity and the SWORD deposit plugin for MS Office is significant in itself.
• @mire and mediashelf are two commercial companies heavily involved in the development of additional functionality or support services for DSpace and Fedora (respectively). It was striking how many projects doing innovative stuff had worked with one or other of them. Eprints has offered customisation, hosting, and related services for a while but that initiative emerged from the ECS department at Southampton where the software originated, whereas these two companies seem to have emerged more independently.

It was also interesting to note a few presentations touching on managing learning materials.

Other blogs reporting on OR09 are listed at:
http://repositorynews.wordpress.com/2009/05/28/open-repositories-2009/

Our poster highlights nine recent ready-to-use outputs from JISC’s repositories and preservation work that the conference might not otherwise have heard about.

RRT poster for OR09

Introductory Report released

We’re pleased to announce the release of the final version of RRT’s introductory report:

An ecological approach to repository and service interactions .

In the report we examine the idea that ecology can usefully serve as a metaphor (or source of metaphors) to help articulate the complex contexts which digital libraries, repositories, and related services operate in.

Many problem-solving tools focus on one dimension of a context such as system architecture or business process. In the report we suggest that prior to using such problem-solving tools it is essential to have a wider view of the local context and to understand and be able to communicate how human interactions, system interactions, and human/machine interactions relate. Ecology offers one metaphor to view such a discussion, and shape how these interactions are analysed and considered.

The report is available from http://purl.oclc.org/NET/RepositoryEcology/IntroductoryReport .

With this milestone it seems appropriate to also mention other work related to this report.

Ariadne article:

A Bug’s Life?: How Metaphors from Ecology Can Articulate the Messy Details of Repository Interactions
R. John Robertson, Mahendra Mahey, Phil Barker.
http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue57/robertson-et-al/

Case Studies

Metadata in an Ecosystem of Presentation Dissemination
R. John Robertson, Phil Barker, Mahendra Mahey, internet gambling Poster at DC2008
Poster http://dc2008.de/wp-content/uploads/2008/10/05_robertson__poster.pdf
Abstract http://dcpapers.dublincore.org/index.php/pubs/article/view/938/934

3 more case studies are underway.

In issue 57 of Ariadne, Phil, Mahendra, and myself have an article introducing some of our work on ecological models of repository and service interaction. “A Bug’s Life?: How Metaphors from Ecology Can Articulate the Messy Details of Repository Interactions”

In our introduction we outline the isseus that our work is addressing.
“The development, implementation, and support of real services challenges how we have traditionally articulated, represented, and tried to communicate the context of those services. We need abstract visions of an information environment, recommended standards, and models of software architectures (or component software functions) that can inform how we begin to develop local repositories and services. However, we, as a community of managers, librarians, researchers, and developers of technology, also need approaches that help us engage with the complex details of local contexts that shape how and why particular repository implementations succeed or fail”

The article goes on to outline different types of complex systems that exist, provides an overview of some relevant concepts from ecology and how they might be of use, and provides an example of using them to examine an academic’s dissemination of presentations (which was also the subject of our poster at DC2008).

Our article is available here http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue57/robertson-et-al . Comments and feedback are very welcome.

How and how why do academics disseminate their presentations? How does this relate to their other forms of dissemination? What academic and organisational influences affect their dissemination? What influences their choice of tool? What metadata is created about the various things that are disseminated? Who creates that metadata, is the duplication necessary?

Our poster at DC2008 (http://dc2008.de/programme/posters) is a case study of ‘one’ academic’s dissemination of their presentations. It uses the repository ecology approach we’ve been developing and the resulting poster allows some interesting questions to be raised.  Here’s a copy for reference…

Here’s a pdf: Metadata in an Ecosystem of Presentation Dissemination at Dublin Core 2008

This is neither an exhaustive list, nor authoritative, but I’ve put some thought into what I think is changing how we manage, find, and use digital stuff and may as well share it. Time permitting I will turn some of these into fuller posts which point to some clear examples and have a bit more discussion, but as a first pass…

1. What, Who, Where, When, Why?
   • Metadata is changing and so must our perceptions and tools. We’ve had non-bibliographic metadata for a while; but increasing tools and users want and can use other forms of metadata. “What is this about and who is it by?” are still key questions but “What is this for?”, “What do you think of this?” “Is this still the same object as it was three years ago?” “What has been done to this object since it’s been in the system?” “Where is this?” “Who owns this?” are all now questions being asked of digital resources. Tools and users are looking for as much information as they can get their hands on. Sometimes this information stands in the object’s stead (like the ‘traditional’ catalogue), but increasingly it’s information that sits alongside the object and provides connections (to other objects or for tools).
2. Universities (and other organisations)  and are beginning to have the opportunity to join up the different systems and data they hold.
   • Conversations about data duplication are not new and often the problems besetting institutional connectivity are cultural rather than technical, but there does seem to be some sense change.  Technical change and new connections may not always be on the scale of Cardiff’s engagement with SOA, but maybe linking student or staff registration services with library/ e-resource user management is a little closer, and when the technical systems are in place perhaps we’ll get better at data management.
3. As more institutions begin to consider what they do with their scientific datasets, digital curation is becoming a real challenge/ practice.
   • Datasets are unforgiving and as more institutions begin to consider how they will manage the data they produce and as more funders expect good data management better practice is being forced onto the agenda. For example UK Research Funders’ Policies for the Management of Information Outputs. Interestingly enough at what might be considered the other end of the spectrum there has also been some JISC-funded work into the curation of learning materials (which are often regarded as ephemeral).
   • Reuse of datasets as more institutions develop VREs may increase the demand for/ on local dataset storage
4. Resource-oriented views of the world are growing in prominence.
   • this has been discussed extensively elsewhere but there does seem to be a trend to making repository and digital library resources more web-friendly. This shift is most evidenced in OAI-ORE.
5. Annotation is here to stay
   • We’re getting used to annotations whether we use tools built into systems or external tools. When we chose between 10 relevant items what Joe in Newcastle thought about the article, image, or food processor does influence our behaviour, and that of the users of our services. More importantly we need to make sure that it’s easy for users to ‘annotate’ our stuff in external services – repositories and digital libraries need add this article to my del.icio.us or digg buttons as much as any other online resource.
6. Mainstream web protocols are seeing more use in the library community
   • more and more repositories now come with refinable RSS feeds for new items.  Atom is seeing a lot of use as part of a deposit API (SWORD) or as a binding for OAI-ORE. These are some examples of mainstream web protocols increasingly used by libraries. This means the protocol development doesn’t depend on community development or maintenance and that, alongside the specific library tools, there’s a greater chance you can take what you produce and mash it into whatever new tool appears in the wider web community. [The importance of this may lurk behind some of ORE’s current discussions about to implement ORE-resource maps in ATOM. ]
7. CRIG motto “the coolest thing to do with you data will be thought of by someone else”
   • People are going to want to metadata and resources you create or manage in ways you don’t anticipate and, if you let them,  some of what they think of will be good. Of course not everything should be freely reusable and not everything people do with it is going to be good but, in the context of publicly-funded instituions freeing up metadata and content should be our default starting point.
8. Institutional-related content is not going to only be held in the institutions
   • Stuff connected to institutions is increasingly going to be all over the place –  academics deposit in subject repositories or slideshare and content produced about institutional life ends up on blogs and flickr. Institutions could try to control what happens but there is a greater opportunity for them to both collect resources from their community (a list of academics on slideshare; an aggregated feed of departmental delicious or connotea tags) and make sure their resources are pushed out to other services too (publicising branded resources, offering training on web2.0 tools,  making sure institutional repository content is also push to relevant subject repositories).
9. Branding, publicity, goodwill
   • 7 and 8 create a lot of this; and I think as a community we’re beginning to understand this (for example: Library of Congress on Flickr, the various Opencourseware initiatives).I’m not saying it’s always going to make ‘commerical’ sense but sometimes it will and we’re getting better at remembering how much of our ‘income’ is public funding.
10. Services should talk to each other…
    • Many of the web tools and services that people use are beginning to offer the possibility of much greater connectivity. This ranges from connected, portable, or shared authentication/ identity (such as linking hotmail accounts; OpenId developments) to api-based access to content (such as: twitter/ ebay/ del.icio.us etc in netvibes, flickr photos pulled into animoto). I think there is a growing expectation that content and services should not be locked into one particular platform or interface.
11. Good metadata matters..
    • I’ve less direct evidence for this but I think that more we want to engage with all of the above, the more we need good metadata and more of it. The more tools and services scale the more that greater metadata quality is required (though see 1. this does not necessarily mean we should spend more time cataloguing). The clearest presentation I’ve seen of this in practice was in connection to IVIMEDS.

I started working for CDLR during my studies at Strathclyde, and over the past four years have had the chance to work on a variety of interesting projects and with a good group of people. The projects have included:

• an examination of metadata creation and workflow process (MWI),
• designing guidelines for the creation and implementation of digital asset management systems (mandate),
• and a series of projects looking at the Static Repository part of the OAI-PMH specification (Stargate)

As I move to work fulltime at CETIS on the Repositories Research Team, I’ll be continuing to develop a few case studies for the repository ecology and stay involved with the eFramework, but I’ll also be contributing to other work the team is begining to support the synthesis of recent work in the Informaiton Environment programmes. Watch this space …

Our discussions for the two days are going to build on a series of teleconferences organised by the CRIG support project – WoCRIG which have just been podcast. I’m both excited about this meeting and a little nervous.

I think that the support project are doing a good job of stirring us up to move forward the work of CRIG and helping us engage with and shape the next stages of repository interface interoperability. For the next stage of this work, this meeting, they’ve organised an unConference. Two days of informal thinking, discussing, and getting at the core of the interoperability issues related to repositories. I’m looking forward to it for what I know I’ll learn, for the chance to contribute, and for the chance to actually just have time to sit down and talk about these things.

The nervousness on my part comes from the unknown – I’ve never been to an unConference before and although the idea is good – to have discussions about what people want to talk about and to cut out the fairly predictable presentation part of a meeting and so to get at the eureka moments that usually happen alongside but not actually in conferences – I’m aware of how much, for me, those eureka moments come along because I’ve been sitting for extended periods of time for my mind to go off at tangents while half listening to a presentation which may or may not be relevant to my thoughts.

Anyway I guess it’s a bit like a codebash for ideas – and that’s no bad thing.

Thoughts so far:

1. Like a domain model an ecological view is concerned with more than the technical issues and interfaces
2. A domain model is usually at a given large scale. In UK terms often the information environment level (parallel to the ecosystem level). An ecological view, on the other hand, can be at different levels. The size of a domain is somewhat arguable but (AFAIK) within the eFramework the domain is taken as the UK (or other given country).
3. A domain model is more like what Les is getting at in terms of an ontology. It’s trying to agree a set of (abstracted) terms to represent all of the activity in a particular area. An ecological view is looking at a slice of that activity in a particular setting for particular purpose. However, I need to think this through a bit more.
4. From a project’s point of view. if we treat the project as a book it may be a bit like the difference between classifying it (putting it in a domain model) and writing an abstract of it (creating an ecological model).
5. From a high level point of view a domain model agrees categories of everything that’s going on; an ecological view (selectively) puts entities, interactions, and influences into a picture/ story.