I have a bunch of spreadsheets. Each spreadsheet represents one institution. Each spreadsheet contains a list of resources that institution subscribes to.

I want to turn this around so that I end up with one spreadsheet with each resource as column, and each institution that subscribes to that resource underneath it.

Can anyone suggest ways to make this happen?

JISC Collections have a blog now running. Slightly strange as I’ll be posting on this one and the JC blog. It feels like I need identity management not just for access to multiple wordpress sites but for my own head. Different blogs, different styles, different things you can / should say. Anyone who follows Brian Kellys blog will have seen those issues discussed before - I for one await the day when our overlords put chips in our heads that will deal with attribute release and role management in my brain.

We’re organizing the FAM event for November and I’ve been slightly surprised at the fact that a few people have returned their forms indicating that they don’t wish to have their face in any photos or have their voice recorded.

Of course the right to privacy is key and in many ways what a huge part of access management is all about. And we should never assume consent. Apart from the fact that sometimes should we?

Your average public sector event is going to be attended by public sector employers, who I’m assuming will get their fares and accommodation paid for by their host institutions and they are certainly attending in an official capacity. So should we be able to say “no I don’t want my comments or questions recorded”?

Web casting is becoming more and more common – events in our field actively take into account that many more people will be actually participating than physically at the event. So is standing up for the rights of privacy doing anyone any good in this case?

There is a flip side to this – recording and broadcasting everything does make it harder to ask or make off the record comments and can inhibit frank discussion which is a key reason for events like our FAM one to take place.

I know the law on this one, but I’m not sure if I know the answer…..there is certainly a fight to be had over privacy which I’m happy to get behind but should public sector events be the battleground?

I’m not going to comment on the rights and wrongs of the election but this does seem almost a test of the power of web 2.0 vs traditional state apparatus. BBC now with reporting restrictions have started providing links to all sorts of citizen journalism. Very useful but the only problem is that if I see John Simpson (a credited BBC Journalist) doing a report, there is a degree assurance as to his identity ( I say degree because even the New York Times hasn’t been immune from made up reports). Some of the stuff I’ve seen on Youtube is authentic but then some I have my doubts about. Even if I have an assurance about the origin ( ie student at Tehran ac uk or the equivalent) it probably wouldn’t help me in this case, as my understanding of Iranian affairs is too poor to make a qualitive assessment of that info. But imagine it was transposed here….video footage or tweet of an incident….. would it help to know it was from a UK Media student?, UK Academic? Academic in a Politics faculty?

Competitiveness of UK HE v the world is a hot topic so I wanted to look at push factors for ebook adoption in UK v US. Certainly a lot of work is going on in the e-textbook market but to help that take off, the mass market needs to help as well. UK HE / FE staff really only got into “computers” once they had a personal use for one. One college principal who had an early one per desk policy actively encouraged staff to surf for cheap holidays etc knowing that eventually it would filter down to them accepting e-learning at a more rapid rate. So will staff (and here I mean curriculum rather than librarians) push e-books textbooks to their students if they don’t use them in their personal life?

Well part of the factor in getting mainstream adoption is price, and a quick, dirty and absolutely statistically irrelevant survey around the web showed up interesting price differentials between the UK and US. For the “new” James Bond novel by Sebastian Faulks (don’t get me started on that issue- I’m with J D Salinger all the way) the US ebook non discounted price is 45% cheaper than the discounted UK ebook price. The UK discounted ebook price is itself 45% more expensive than the UK paperback list price. Now I know there are a ton of issues here - VAT, discounting, market differentials…. but if pricing is anywhere in the ballpark just described, mass take up of ebooks is surely gonna lag in the UK compared to the US in a way that we have never lagged before? (PC’s Video, DVD etc we are always up there with the US in early adopter stakes)

Arnie terminated paper books in KAL LIF FORNIA last week – suspect might be while before e-readers rise up to take control here….

Clearly we are moving from a startup Federation to a more mature evolved one. Part of this process is looking at End User experience and how that can be improved. So FYI:

Invitation to Tender for the JISC Collections Service Provider Interface Study

JISC Collections wishes to commission a study to explore the approaches taken by Service Providers to the implementation of federated access management, and its effect on the End User experience. The aim of the study is to make clear recommendations regarding common terminology and practices across service provider platforms to both improve the user experience and to ensure the maximum number of successful authentications.

It is expected that the project will be undertaken over a 4 month period between 30th March–20th July 2009.
The deadline for proposals is 12 noon on Monday 2nd March 2009.
Funding of up to £35,000 (including VAT, travel and subsistence) is available for the project.
Further information including the full ITT can be found at:

http://www.jisccollections.ac.uk/consultations.aspx

Outside of work, I blog with an entirely secret identity, usually in geeky domains where I may want to say something slanderous about Cylons. Well journalspace where I existed suffered a blogpocalypse over the holiday period. The drives failed, but hey that happened before so they installed rigorous backups. The backups failed. Well last time that happened users recovered a lot of stuff (before the backup systems were installed) using the internet archive and way back machine. That failed too…well to be precise the journalspace settings no longer allowed everyone’s blogs to be botted and archived. So I’m not sure I’ll (and by me I mean Cylon slandering me, not JISC me) ever trust any free web provided service again. (Oh I will use them, penny pincher that I am , I just won’t TRUST them). So much of identity management is obviously about trust, not just about who someone is, but that it will actually be done properly. I actually want to be able to shake the hand of the person looking after my identity provision, and I mean literally shake their hand, not in some web brokered virtual way. Fortunately for me at least my identity is handled by an academic institution so I can actually seek out a real individual, look them in the eyes and ask “is my online presence safe with you?”. That I guess is why I have faith in Shib and the Federation not because of lines of code but because of the human factor based in host institutions..having someone to complain to, if necessary, produces accountability, and accountability produces reliability.

This was going to be a comment on Andy’s blog but it got a bit long so I thought I would post it here. Apologies - a little off topic but has some shared themes with access management work!

Andy talks about the fact that iTunesU has not come up for as much criticism as Second Life.

That really got me thinking. Why am I perfectly happy to use something that is fairly locked down like iTunes, fairly happy with the concept of using the same platform for education content delivery, but can’t get my head around Second Life? I do after all spend quite a bit of time talking about the importance of open standards!

I did resist using iTunes for a long time because of file compatibility and lockdown issues but it won in the end because i like the platform, it took me no time at all to learn to use, and because the iTunes store is simple and competitively priced (and addictive unfortunately). I’ve also never run in to a situation where the non-openness has become a problem - I have an i-pod, use i-tunes on my pc at work and home. If I were to change any of this, it would probably be to buy a mac for home and an i-phone It is ubiquitously usable in my life!

iTunesU is an effective example of universities using a platform that students like to offer an educational service. Podcasts on iTunesU makes far more sense to me than the various university attempts to use Facebook. It’s also easy to use for both users and administrators - but I don’t have the experience to know if it would be any better than say just putting the podcasts on uTube. I guess this harks back to how open universities want to be about their content - can it be just out there or does it need access management / rights management? I know iTunes have thought long and hard about the rights issues and non-institutional access with iTunesU as it was very important in their development of iTunesU with Shibboleth.

Finally Second Life - that’s simple. I’ve never been able to get beyond the idea of having to choose a name Suggestions welcome… It is also a platform that takes a reasonable amount of learning to use. The name thing may sound silly but I think it harks to the point that SL is not just another platform - it is an entirely different way of working and engaging.

If I were a student, I think I would be OK with grabbing a podcast of my lecturer from iTunes, but going to a lecture in SL would be a step further for me. Why? Because it requires me to very actively engage in something, other people witness that engagement (and I’m quite shy to be honest) and I would have to learn a lot about how to do all this in SL as well as learning the information my lecturer is trying to impart to me. I’d have to really interested to do all that and I’m not sure that I would gain any more from it than other ways of learning, both online and offline.

In some ways, this actually makes SL more exclusive than iTunes. Not only do I have to use that specific platform, I have to overcome many learning barriers as well.

you don’t accept comments. Have wasted effort on writing replies on a couple of blogs this week only to find that after a suitable period for much needed moderation (after all IT forums are hardly the place to endorse male vitality products) the sites are clearly not putting any replies / comments up. If a an opinion piece doesn’t have scope for comments then that’s what it is - a magazine style opinion piece not a blog. It’s what puts the “2.0″ into the web.
Don’t bother replying as I may just decideto be lazy and auto bin all comments……..

On other news, Federation membership has now moved from 599 (a figure I don’t really like as it sounds like the price of a post credit crunch cut price sofa) to the much more regal 601. That figure really should function as an indicator to publishers who have not yet joined, of the need to get such activity into their business plan.

This blog focuses on middlewhere but sometimes its good to remind oneself of what exactly we are getting access to, essentially to borrow George Marshalls (of Marshall plan fame) phrase - “why we fight”. Well a number of stars are aligning all of the sudden to get me excited about ebooks. I Played with an e-ink based e-reader in a highstreet bookshop, with generally good impressions - have just seen video of the e-ink cover of Esquire magazine in the states - and finally have seen that both the States and Ireland are promoting e-books and readers to school students. Well we won’t be using access management to support an e-ink download tomorrow or even the day after that, but it can’t be too long until it all comes together in the perfect symbiotic relationship (think iphoness for ereaders) and ebooks on e-ink ereaders become an everyday product. Now that will pose all sorts of questions for mobile access……

Apologies for the amount of e’s in that last sentence, they will all be absorbed into their compound parents in time…….