From the web: tools for project management and how to contract developers

Over on the IE blog Andy McGregor has a useful annotated list of some of the online tools that he has used to help with programme management.

Many could be just as useful projects – distributed or not.

http://infteam.jiscinvolve.org/2008/11/06/web-tools-for-programme-management/

On a related note David Flanders has a useful and extensive reflection and how to guide on contracting out software development.

 http://dfflanders.wordpress.com/2008/11/04/how-to-contract-consultant-developers/

Journals and the right choice of words

Erik Duval has just blogged about the first issue of IEEE Transactions on Learning Technologies.
His blog post is available at http://erikduval.wordpress.com/2008/10/01/ieee-transactions-on-learning-technologies/

I’m glad to see the launch of a new journal in the field of learning technology and very glad to see that the content is going to be Open Access after a 12 month embargo during which it’s only available to subscribers. They’ve got a featured article that looks interesting “Capture, Management, and Utilization of Lifecycle Information for Learning Resources, Lasse Lehmann, Tomas Hildebrandt, Christoph Rensing, Ralf Steinmetz” http://www.computer.org/portal/cms_docs_transactions/transactions/tlt/featured_article/featured.pdf.

<rant> I may just be grumpy because the train strike is making my life difficult but there are two things about this journal (or -to be fair- IEEE’s journal system) that have already managed to frustrate me.

The first is that there is no publicly (non-subscriber) viewable table of contents  – this may be a mix up because its the first issue – but apart from the featured article – I have no idea what’s in this issue.

The second is that the journal has access to PrePrints and Rapidposts.

‘PrePrints are papers accepted for publication in a future issue, but have not been fully edited. Their content may change prior to final publication. RapidPosts are articles that have been accepted for inclusion in a future issue. Content is final as presented, with the exception of pagination.’

This making available of content that is ‘in press’ is great and adds value for subscribers – but please – find a different word!  ‘PrePrint’ – as confusing as it may be as a term – has very strong connections and a lot of established use in Open Access repositories. When I see that word I expect to find something I can access not a subscribers’ login screen.

IEEE login screen

I know this choice of words has nothing to do with the editors but frustrating potential readers isn’t going to incline me to return to the page. </rant>


Transistions

Some of you may be aware that I’ve been working halftime for CETIS and halftime for the CDLR (Centre for Digital Library Research). From today I’m now working full time for CETIS.

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 …