So, without evaluating pros and cons, starting from the most basic/most common, what are the options? This is a summary takes information from Garrish and Gulling, EPUB 3 Best Practices, OReilly 2013, (which I take to be authoritative and also as an example of best practice with regard to the metadata in the epub file) as well as the EPUB 3.0 Publications and Content Documents specifications. Any comments would be greatly appreciated.

1. Simple Dublin Core

Within the OEPBS directory of an unpacked EPUB3 is the content.opf file. It pretty much equates to the manifest of an IMS Content Package. The top-level element is <package> and <metadata> is a required first child of <package>.

The default metadata vocabulary is the Dublin Core Metadata Element Set (DCMES, simple DC), with prefix dc:. Three elements are mandatory–title, identifier and language–others are optional. For example, in /OEPBS/content.opf

<?xml version=’1.0’ encoding=’UTF-8’?>
<package xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/ [...]">
    <metadata>
        <dc:identifier>urn:isbn:9781449325299</dc:identifier>
        <dc:title>EPUB 3 Best Practices</dc:title>
        <dc:language>en</dc:language>
        <dc:rights>Copyright © 2013 Matt Garrish and Markus Gylling</dc:rights>
[...]

2 Other metadata schemas

The package element has a prefix attribute that may be used to declare prefixes for metadata schemas other than DCMES. Four vocabularies are reserved, i.e. the prefix may be used without a declaration: dcterms, marc, onix and media (the vocabulary used for EPUB3 media overlays). Example

<dcterms:title>EPUB 3 Best Practices</dcterms:title>

Other vocabularies may be used providing a prefix and a URL in a way so similar to xmlns that is makes you wonder why they didn’t just use xmlns.

<package prefix="prism: http://prismstandard.org/namespaces/basic/3.0/" [...]>

3 the meta element

If used without the refines attribute (see below) the meta element can provide information about the package as a whole, e.g.

<meta property="dcterms:title">EPUB 3 Best Practices</meta>

I have no idea what would be the benefit of this over <dcterms:title>.

4 Refining metadata elements: id attribute and the meta element

The id attribute can be used to provide an identifier any element in the metadata that it may be refined. One example of this is mandatory, i.e. that one occurrence of the dc:identifier element must be the publication identifier:

<dc:identifier id="pub-identifier">urn:isbn:9781449325299</dc:identifier>

In general the refinements are described using the meta element with the refines attribute and a property attribute that specifies the nature of the refinement. It’s kind of like RDF reification. The default vocabulary for the property attribute includes “file-as” – an alternative string for a name to be used when filing, “identifier-type” – a way to distinguish between different identifiers, “meta-auth” – the authority for a given instance of metadata, “title-type” – which of the six forms of title being provided.

<dc:creator id="1234">Matt Garrish</dc:creator>
<meta refines="#1234" property="file-as" id="5678">Garrish, Matt</meta>
<meta refines="#1234" property="role">Author</meta>

Terms from other vocabularies may be used for “property” so long as a prefix is declared.

Refinements may have ids and so may be refined.

<meta refines="#5678" property="meta-auth">Phil Barker</meta>

So and so you can make statements about your metadata statements to you heart’s content (though including the whole of the linked data graph in each epub would be silly).

The scheme attribute may be used to identify the controlled vocabulary from which the meta element’s value is drawn. For example, if the identifier is a DOI (which in onix is apparently entry 06 of codelist 5) you can have

<dc:identifier id="pub-id">urn:doi:10.1016/j.iheduc.2008.03.001 </dc:identifier>
<meta refines="#pub-id"
      property="identifier-type"
      scheme="onix:codelist5">06</meta>

Or, using the marc relator value Aut to specify author

<meta refines="#1234" property="role" scheme="marc:relators">Aut</meta>

5 Sub-package level metadata

The id attribute may be used to provide an identifier of an subelement of <package> or any element in the XHTML content documents, down to a span element around a phrase, word or character. So a chapter may have id=”chap1″ then we can use meta elements in the metadata to describe it seperately from the rest of the epub

<meta refines="#chap1" property="prism:contentType">bookChapter<meta>

6 Links to metadata records

The link element is an optional, repeatable subelement of <metadata>, “used to associate resources with a publication, such as metadata records” The metadata may be within package or anywhere on the www.
Example

<link rel="marc21xml-record" href="pub/meta/nor-wood-marc21.xml" />
<link refines="#chap1" rel="ex:schema_org-record"
      media-type="application/ld+json"
      href="http://example.org/nor-wood-lrmi.json" />

Metadata embedded in the XHTML5 content

As far as I can see the EPUB3 specs are mute on metadata in HTML of the content documents, e.g. as html:meta elements or as microdata or RDFa, there doesn’t seem to be any reason why one should not put metadata here. I wouldn’t expect any EPUB system to look that deeply into the package but it would be a good approach to helping the metadata travel with the resource if the EPUB is disaggregated and passed into a non-EPUB3 CMS.

The technology-will-revolutionise-education approach runs the risk of alienating the people who you most need on your side if that revolutionary change is to be an improvement, that is the teachers and students. I remember we used to talk about technology as a Trojan Horse for introducing pedagogic improvement in HE, something that I stopped doing when I went to a presentation where the speaker pointed out that the Trojan Horse was an act of war in the context of a bloody siege, and perhaps that isn’t the way learning technologists should approach teachers. More importantly, introducing technology probably isn’t the best way to approach improving education. Introducing technology is not straightforward, it will take attention away from other matters: whatever the initial intent, it will distract from thinking about teaching and learning. If you want to improve education you should focus on that and probably not do something else that is really difficult in it’s own right at the same time.

So the start-with-something-familiar approach has an advantage here in that it simply focuses on planting a technology with higher potential into existing practice. The risk is that substiution is seen as as all that needs to be done, or that requirements that arise from this objective are over prioritised. For example, I have seen requirements for page-faithful display (i.e. the ability to reproduce on the ebook reader exactly what would be on paper) and page numbers as requirements for etextbooks. They may be desirable for marketing purposes, and there are real functional requirements relating to how content is presented and how it may be referenced, but building-in these restrictions as requirements would, in my view, be a mistake. Let’s have a strategy where we aim to embed but with a view to enhancing.

The path forward suggested for the US by the Educause/Internet 2 pilot etextbook pilot. Start with a basis aimed at increasing adoption and move forward to improvements in functionality and transformation.
Image from Grajek, Susan, Understanding what higher education needs from e-textbooks: an EDUCAUSE/Internet2 pilot (Research Report), EDUCAUSE July 2013.

I am presenting a session at Alt-C 2013 entitled Into the Mainstream? New developments in eTextBooks next month where I hope to discuss ideas like this.

Into the Wild (Book cover)

From the blurb:

Between 2009 and 2012 the Higher Education Funding Council funded a series of programmes to encourage higher education institutions in the UK to release existing educational content as Open Educational Resources. The HEFCE-funded UK OER Programme was run and managed by the JISC and the Higher Education Academy. The JISC CETIS “OER Technology Support Project” provided support for technical innovation across this programme. This book synthesises and reflects on the approaches taken and lessons learnt across the Programme and by the Support Project.

This book is not intended as a beginners guide or a technical manual, instead it is an expert synthesis of the key technical issues arising from a national publicly-funded programme. It is intended for people working with technology to support the creation, management, dissemination and tracking of open educational resources, and particularly those who design digital infrastructure and services at institutional and national level.

You may remember Lorna writing back in August that Amber Thomas, Martin Hawksey, Lorna and I had written 90% of this book together in a Book Sprint. Well, the last 10% and the publication turned in to a bit of a marathon-relay, something about which I might write some time, but now the book is available in a variety of formats:

• If you want glossy-covered paperback, then you can order it print-on-demand from Lulu (£3.36); if you’re not so fussed about the glossy cover and binding then there is a print-quality pdf you can print yourself.
• If you have an ePub reader you can download, there is a free download of an epub2 file.
• If you have a Kindle, you can download the .mobi file and transfer it, or if you prefer the convenience of Amazon’s distribution over whisper-net you can buy it from them (77p, they don’t seem to distribute for free unless you agree to give them exclusive rights for all electronic formats).
• finally, if you prefer your ebook reading as PDFs, there is one of those too.

All varieties are free or at minimum cost for the distribution channel used; the content is cc-by licensed and editable versions are available if you wish to remix and fix what we’ve done.

Available via the Cetis publications site.

The stakeholders present represented many perspectives from throughout Europe: publishers, publishing industry specification bodies (e.g. IPDF who own EPUB3, and DAISY), national bodies with some sort of remit for educational technology, and elearning specification and standardisation organisations. I gave a short presentation on the OER perspective.

Many issues were raised through the course of the day, including (in no particular order)

• Interactive and multimedia content in eTextbooks
• Accessibility of eTextbooks
• eTextbooks shouldn’t be monolithic and immutable chunks of content, it should be possible to link directly to specific locations or to disaggregate the content
• The lifecycle of an eTextbook. This goes beyond initial authoring and publishing
• Quality assurance (of content and pedagogic approach)
• Alignment with specific curricula
• Personalization and adaptation to individual needs and requirements
• The ability to describe the learning pathway embodied in an eTextbook, and vary either the content used on this pathway or to provide different pathways through the same content
• The ability to describe a range IPR and licensing arrangements of the whole and of specific components of the eTextbook
• The ability to interact with learning systems with data flowing in both directions

If you’re thinking that sounds like a list of the educational technology issues that we have been busy with for the last decade or two, then I would agree with you. Furthermore, there is a decade or two’s worth of educational technology specs and standards that address these issues. Of course not all of those specs and standards are necessarily the right ones for now, and there are others that have more traction within digital publishing. EPUB3 was well represented in the meeting (DITA is the other publishing standard mentioned in the eTernity documentation, but no one was at the meeting to talk about that) and it doesn’t seem impossible to meet the educational requirements outlined in the meeting within the general EPUB3 framework. The question is which issues should be prioritised and how should they be addressed.

Of course a technical standard is only an enabler: it doesn’t in itself make any change to teaching and learning; change will only happen if developers create tools and authors create resources that exploit the standard. For various reasons that hasn’t happened with some of the existing specs and standards. A technical standard can facilitate change but there needs to a will or a necessity to change in the first place. One thing that made me hopeful about this was a point made by Owen White of Pearson that he did not to think of the business he is in as being centred around content creation and publishing but around education and learning and that leads away from the view of eBooks as isolated static aggregations.

For more information keep an eye on the eTernity website

The potential of text and data mining is probably well understood in technical circles, and were well articulated by JohnMcNaught of NaCTeM. Briefly the potential lies in the extraction of new knowledge from old through the ability to surface implicit knowledge and show semantic relationships. This is something that could not be done by humans, not even crowds, because of volume of information involved. Full text access is crucial, John cited a finding that only 7% of the subject information extracted from research papers was mentioned in the abstract. There was a strong emphasis, from for example Jeff Lynn of the Coalition for a digital economy and Philip Ditchfield of GSK, on the need for business and enterprise to be able to realise this potential if it were to remain competetive.

While these speakers touched on the legal barriers it was Naomi Korn who gave them a full airing. They start in the process of publishing (or before) when publishers acquire copyright, or a licence to publish with enough restriction to be equivalent. The problem is that the first step of text mining is to make a copy of the work in a suitable format. Even for works licensed under the most liberal open access licence academic authors are likely to use, CC-by, this requires attribution. Naomi spoke of attribution stacking, a problem John had mentioned when a result is found by mining 1000s of papers: do you have to attribute all of them? This sort of problem occurs at every step of the text mining process. In UK law there are no copyright exceptions that can apply: it is not covered by fair dealling (though it is covered by fair use in the US and similar exceptions in Norwegian and Japanese law, nowhere else); the exceptions for transient copies (such as in a computers memory when readng on line) only apply if that copy has not intrinsic value.

The Hargreaves report seeks to redress this situation. Copyright and other IP law is meant to promote innovation not stifle it, and copyright is meant to cover creative expressions, not the sort of raw factual information that data mining processes. Ben White of the British Library suggested an extension of fair dealling to permit data mining of legally obtained publications. The important thing is that, as parliament acts on the Hargreaves review people who understand text mining and care about legal issues make sure that any legislation is sufficient to allow innovation, otherwise innovators will have to move to those jurisdictions like the US, Japan and Norway where the legal barriers are lower (I’ll call them ‘text havens’).

Thanks to JISC and the SCA on organising this event; there’s obviously plenty more for them to do.

[Aside: textbook rental might be an attractive idea for some, but pricing based on a typical rental of 30 days!?]

It’s quite simple: licence is a noun, it’s the thing; license is a verb, it’s what you do. But how to remember that? Well, hopefully you’ll see that advice is a noun but advise is a verb; similarly device (noun), devise (verb); practice (noun), practise (verb). Words ending –ise are normally verbs[*]. So license/licence sticks to the pattern of c for noun, s for verb.

Hope this helps.

[* OK, you may prefer –ize, which isn’t just for US usage in some cases–but that’s a different rant story]

Actually, I don’t really like the use of the word “marketing” here, but the first of these thoughts is an extension of the ideas expressed in “Marketing” with Metadata, a successful guide produced by a former colleague of mine as part of the PerX project. The idea there was that the effort of exposing metadata openly through OAI-PMH (and the same is true of RSS and ATOM) could be justified by publishers as of a means of marketing the content it described.

During the meeting at Milton Keynes we heard that the same may be said about open content as means of marketing HE courses. Andy Lane director of the OU’s OpenLearn gave a figure of 9,000+ registrations for OU courses from OpenLearn users. Russell Stannard of the University of Westminster, told how by creating the MultimediaTrainingVideos.com site, and linking from there to the University of Westminster course he used the videos in, he had boosted the position of the Westminster course page on Google results pages for queries about multimedia education.

Well, those are just two self-selected instances, not enough in themselves to constitute firm evidence, but it’s easy enough to think of believable reasons why open content would help market courses in this way. One can believe that students would feel more confident choosing a course if they could view some aspect of that course before they choose it (and this would be true at a pan-institutional discipline level, where school leavers especially might not know what constitutes higher education for certain disciplines). One can believe that Google will rank course content higher that course prospectuses in results pages: the search terms will be in the content, and there are likely to be more links to the content than would be the case for a prospectus alone. Furthermore, I can also see parallels between the desire to disseminate OER through web2.0 channels and some search engine optimization practices. This might be enough for leaders at some institutions to decide that marketing should be one of the reasons why they should consider making their content open, though I imagine many would want more convincing.

The second thought about marketing and open content relates more to why one would want to convince people at institutions that there was a marketing opportunity in OER. There had rightly been a great emphasis placed on institutional commitment as part of any bids submitted to the recent HEFCE-Academy-JISC call for OER projects. During the day I had chatted to various people who had been involved in putting to together bids who all confirmed my own experience from a couple of bids that it has been really hard to get this institutional commitment. My own experience served as a reminder that not everyone has been following developments in OER over the last five years or so. Many of the key people don’t have much more knowledge than an awareness that MIT are doing something. It’s not easy to go from that level of knowledge to institutional commitment in the time span of a JISC call for proposals. So, the message for me was that one of the desired outcomes of the pilot phase of the Academy/JISC OER should be some convincing, evidence-based, reasons why institutions should want to commit to making their content open.

The two examples above are slightly short of perfect. I like to see the dates for the blog entries matching the dates for the diary entries (the Pepys diaries do this, Orwell managed it at first, but then slipped). And I think it would make more sense if the monthly archives were arranged to be read top-to-bottom in chronological order. Also I wonder if hosting on wordpress.com is the best idea. It has its attractions, but the tags in the Orwell blog link to posts from other blogs which are well out of scope while the Pepys diary has some very interesting customizations; also if the Orwell blog owners do ever find a way to go back to posting against the diary entry date I imagine they would have problems setting up redirects so that links to the current posts still work.

Notes:
1. I guess I should be clear: I’m not saying that these diaries are open content. The Pepys text is from Project Gutenberg, I don’t know the licensing arrangements for other aspects of the blog; Orwell’s text is still copyright in many countries (including the UK and the US), I don’t the licensing arrangements for the blog.
2. The Orwell diary is on WordPress.com; Pepys uses a customized installation of Moveable Type.

“Re-use is not in itself a good or bad thing and it should not be encouraged or discouraged as a matter of dogma. Rather it should be nurtured and supported where it can provide benefits and not where it will not.”

So the question we should ask is: when will re-use provide benefits? Here are some links to recent and ongoing work relating to the benefits of sharing, reuse and open content.

Firstly there’s an article Why Give Knowledge Away for Free? The Case for Open Educational Resources by Jan Hylén, in an online journal that covers open source developments. It’s interesting that this sits alongside articles about open source software but concentrates on the “giving away for free” side of the argument rather than the benefits of openness while developing a resource (“release early, release often“, “given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow” etc.). Given the time required to develop learning materials (and hence the cost), there’s sense in thinking about sharing the load rather than giving away the product.

Secondly, following a recommendation from a recent report on sharing eLearning content, JISC have commissioned a project to “improve the evidence base in support of sharing learning materials”. Yep, I freely admit that in over a dozen years of trying to promote the sharing of learning materials I’ve based my arguments on “common sense”* and speculation rather than sound evidence and business cases. The project is being undertaken by Intrallect and due to deliver a report, with actual business cases and business models, by December.

Finally, and on a bit of a tangent, there’s a JISC podcast “Uncovering the social and economic benefits of open access”, about the wider benefits of institutional repositories and open access. It ignores learning materials, of course, and focuses exclusively on sharing research and development output; but it’s an interesting listen nonetheless. The main theme is that, since what we want is a cost-effective solution, any analysis of open access needs to look at benefits as well as costs. So the work described in the podcast models the effect of open access on the benefits to the wider community (i.e. the people who pay tax to fund universities) of knowledge creation through research and development: apparently the case for open access is clear.

(* Common sense is the collection of prejudices acquired by age eighteen.–attributed to Albert Einstein)