events

I’m spending the first morning at the Spring Internet2 meeting focusing on Grouper and COmanage, which fits in nicely with the discussions on the jisc-shib list on extending attribute usage.

Upcoming functionality in v1.5.0 of Grouper: namespace transition (i.e. the ability to move and copy groups), audit facilities, indirect membership management, and possible work on the attribute framework (in terms of adding parameters to groups in terms of a full understanding of what a role can do).

One of the interesting questions is around the attribute framework. The work of the Signet application, which assigned privileges to groups and individuals, did not take off as a standalone piece of work. This is now being developed as part of both Grouper and COmanage, but more work is needed to support this complex information flow.

The question of user interfaces was discussed by the group. SurfNet has done some work on a simple GUI to allow people to log-in with a federated ID and then manage their own groups. The University of Washington has is about to move towards a Grouper implementation using. The UI within the Grouper package is not seen as applicable to end-users – it is purely for systems administrators – so more work is needed in this area. In the UK, the University of Newcastle has done some work in this area as part of the G-FIVO project. For Grouper to be really applicable in the UK, I think that more work is needed on the UI issue – this may be an interesting area for the upcoming Access and Identity Management Programme.

Another area for development is the position of groups management within the institutional hierarchy, and understanding of ‘official’ institutional groups and hierarchy and those that have been developed for other purposes. The ‘official’ status of a group is very difficult to determine, but it is important to understand where and how a group was developed and its role within the institution. This will increase the opportunities for reuse of groups and labels – a positive thing from a management perspective.

COmanage is intended to be undetectable to end-users. COmanage being used in relation to Confluence should look like Confluence for end-users. However, unlike Grouper, COmanage is intended to focus on user interfaces to allow a larger groups of users to create and manage groups to facilitate wider use of collaboration management.

Some of the issues raised by the attendees at the group session were:

• Regular versus virtual organisations: revocation of user rights becomes complex;
• Pushing the tool beyond the educational domain;
• ‘Domesticating’ other tools to work with COmanage;

Back from UKSG and as usual found it to be a very useful event. The most common question I was asked other than questions about access management was, “this twitter thing, I don’t get it, what are you doing?”.

I spent quite a bit of the conference contributing to the twittering about the event at #UKSG09 and writing up sessions on both this blog and the Live Serials blog (an excellent record of the event by the way). I’m quite lucky in that I find it easy to write up sessions on the hoof, and actually find the need to explain a session to another audience helps me concentrate and focus more on what the speaker is saying. As many of you will know, I was a big twitter sceptic until a short while ago. So…

Why have I changed my mind?

1. It is a great way to be a virtual attendee at an event. I missed the JISC conference this year through illness but got a lot out of both the podcasts of the event and even more by being able to talk to people who were in session.
2. It enhances events as a back channel. The value that was added to each presentation at #uksg09 through twitter was impressive – people sent links, definitions of strange terms used, asked questions they didn’t have the chance to pose to the speakers, evaluated speakers on the fly, compared notes cross parallel sessions, and provided amusement when things were flat. A review of the #uksg09 tweets will probably be a far more useful event evaluation process than a review of the delegate evaluation forms.
3. It is as useful as a news channel as any of my other RSS feeds.
4. It is a good way of making new contacts and keeping in contact with colleagues. I meet several publishers face to face via twitter, and also learn a lot about what is going on in JISC – an almost impossible task normally due to the size and variance of our work.

What have I learnt?

1. Twitter is not e-mail – it is of the moment. You don’t have to and probably shouldn’t try and go back and read all the updates from people you are following if you have been offline for sometime. This is not your in-tray.
2. Use # tags wisely and well. If you want to review an area retrospectively, search # tags, not friends. If you want to be able to review areas retrospectively, use # tags so that you and others can easily find the information.
3. Instead of, not as well as. Blogs and microblogging can replace other types of communication and shouldn’t be seen as just another thing to do. If I’ve written up events on the blog, I don’t then write up separately in a formal report. If I’ve made a point on the blog or via twitter, I don’t send out via mailing lists as well. I don’t use either channel to rehash press releases but try to use as a way of indicating my thoughts on a topic.
4. Practise makes perfect. Everyone uses blogging and microblogging in slightly different ways but unless you give it a go, you won’t find your way of using it. You will make mistakes – tweeting too much of what a speaker is saying, tagging something to a formal event which is irrelevant to that tag, quickly venting and regretting later – but all of these are true of any form or medium of communication.

Finally, if you want to comment on work being carried out on federated access within the UK, please use the tag #ukfed.

Understanding and Recognising Research Excellence: Jay Katzen

Katzen starts by saying that technology is being touted as the way out of the economic crisis, but the reality is that people are pulling back because they are unsure of the future. Lean times = lean research, but there are inefficiencies in the current research that can be improved to ensure that more data is processed, not less. How should performance be measured to ensure the best results? Existing processes that exist such as the RAE2008, have shown a significant downturn for institutions based on the performance measured. Accountability measures will increase, but it needs to be transparent to the users.

Some of the major issues that are faced:

• Research measures tend to be on a country by country basis, but research has responded to globalisation – the old metric processes are no longer viable in this environment.
• Researchers are spending more time finding information than they are analysing information.
• Competition is intense – only 15% approval rate for National Science Foundation grants.

Publishers are not doing enough to support the whole research system and all of the activities that researchers are engaged with. This needs to be connected across the entire workflow and is needed to reduce the cycle time and improve the output of researchers. Improved efficiency in research will only help and support the publishing market.

Vice-chancellors and other senior leaders should be asking:

• are my strategic decisions effective?
• am I capitalising on new hot areas?
• where is my strategic focus?
• who are my competitors and how are they performing
• how is my competency portfolio performing?

Current performance measures do not support the process of answering these questions. More focus should be placed on understanding your institutions distinct competencies. Comparisons need to be like for like, not institution against institution or even department versus department (i.e. comparing activities just in stem cell research rather than across the board).

In summary, lean research is about taking a deeper look at research activity workflows and identifying improvement opportunities. Publishers and libraries both have a role to play in this process.

Warning – this session is likely to be off-topic for access management audience

National e-Books Observatory: Lorraine Estelle

The JISC e-Books Observatory has been running for several years, analysing the use of a set of core text book usage by students. The reasoning behind the study was to prove that there was a viable market for e-Books that did not have a negative impact on print sales.

The study showed that most users were dipping in and out, with short session time. This suggests that if students want to read in a consistent linear way, they will still use the print version – although Warren Holder noted that this could also be users printing the online version. The JISC study proposes that e-version tends to be used to find references etc. and that the business models for both can exist together.

A third of all users are accessing e-Books off-campus – this highlights the importance of getting the access management right for e-Books – a work in progress on most e-Book platforms at the moment. The platform is not seen as important, discoverability is seen as important. Students are normally directed to a specific textbook by lecturers and want to get straight to the text – making the standards such as marc records very important in the JISC study, although tweeters disagreed on this point! Sophisticated platforms are less important.

e-Books were seen by librarians as a route to take pressure of the short loans collections in libraries, availability is key as demand for specific books tends to follow peaks of demand at points in a specific course or path of study. The model of restricted concurrent users does not help this process

The study continues to look for a fair and sustainable metric that will enable publishers to grow the market and for libraries to meet the criteria for availability. Access models and business models will be presented.

Turning the Page: Warren Holder

University of Toronto has over 700,000 e-Books available for users. Toronto has a lot of local and historical collections, and prefers to work with e-Book aggregators, highlighting Lorraine’s point about the platform issues for users. Warren recognises that they will never get away from using multiple vendor platforms, but prefers to give users other options. Goal is to integrate e-Books in to the catalogue and to add discovery tools like book cover images to help students identify the books.

The University of Toronto carried out a survey, mostly covering students but also including other members of the university. It is interesting to note that the study was funded by publishers – good to see this investment. Many of the users started their research from web search engines when asked directly, but also shows that the catalogue was used for ‘University of Toronto’ resources – this may be due to misunderstandings about the way resources can be accessed online.

Despite evidence that there was not much engagement with e-Books, the survey seemed to provide good evidence that students were increasing their use and understanding of e-Books. Most users were printing content for use offline – this may explain the short sessions discovered in the JISC study.

The growth pattern for e-Books is similar to the growth pattern for e-Journals seen in the late 1990s. University of Toronto also saw the same peaks in e-Book use around key points in the academic year. Holder also notes that there were high levels of e-Book usage for books that had no loans of the print copy – he queries that if you make it available they will come?

What’s Happening with e-Books: Jill Jones

Jones gives the publisher view of the evolution of the textbook, starting with the evolution of the textbook. She describes the textbook as being developed specifically for lecturers – the ‘market gatekeepers’ – but notes that this situation has changed and textbooks are now viewed with students in mind.

Jones sees the e-textbook offering as a more complete offering that includes the platform – this seems to be at odds with comments from the previous two speakers. This includes interactivity and publishers very much think of this as part of the e-learning process, including enhanced functionality like audio and video clips. Pricing and business models are currently very random and may be per page, chapter or book and prices are normally set on an institutional basis.

Jones says there is no proven need to date for e-textbooks, but this is equally attributable to the lack of supply as well as the lack of demand. The challenge is in creating the same value that is gained in print in the digital model for textbooks.

For this session only, you get the opportunity of hearing both mine and Mark’s opinions on the same presentation! Marthyn Borghuis gave an overview on the path analysis done by ScienceDirect of user sessions from 2004, 2006 and 2008.

Some of the main points of interest for me were actually inferred from the talk, rather than the direct content. ScienceDirect treats people as either customers or guests. Customers are people with corporate accounts such as academic libraries, guests are everyone else. ScienceDirect continues to separate out registration for enhanced usability (i.e. personalisation) and log-in to prove that you are an authorised user. Therefore, even if you buy an article and register as part of this process, you are still not seen as a customer, but a guest. This separation has lead to poverty of user analysis information. I have stressed before the importance of bringing authentication and authorisation logs together with session logs to improve information for both publishers and librarians. I’m hopeful that two JISC pieces of work – the Usage Statistic Portal and the work by the UK federation to provide a central analysis for SAML authentication logs – can be brought together to help address these problems. We also hope that publishers will move forward to use federated access for personalisation, rather than having separate systems.

The session also highlighted the importance of being able to track student behaviour as opposed to researcher behaviour. At the moment in the field of federated access management, most people are using the standard member@affiliation.ac.uk. A simple introduction of increased use of student@affiliation.ac.uk and staff@affiliation.ac.uk might help in this area. Increasing the use of attributes is one of the key work areas for the access management team over the next few years. I felt that some assumptions were made in the session regarding ‘guest access’. It was assumed that much of this was members of the general public being misdirected to the site and ending their session quickly as they realise it was not a site they had access rights to or interest in. I’d be interested in further exploring the question of how many of these are students and researchers accessing the site from off-campus as apparent guests and getting turned away because they do not know how to log-in. We are hopeful that federated access will help improve this area overtime, so this will be interesting to track.

Other key facts from the session were:

– The Google effect is very real. From 2004 to 2008 the number of accesses from Google increased dramatically.
– Embedded links from library portals and subject specific portals such as PubMed are the most effective way to get your user to an actual article.
– Deep-linking has created a culture of short-session behaviour.
– Don’t forget the prevalence of IP access in countries outside the UK (and on site within the UK) and the impact this can have on usage data.

Marthyn Borguis session was on how users navigate publisher platforms. Tied in nicely with the JISC study focused on SP interfaces which will be starting up soon and reporting in July.

Martyn used path analysis to track activity on the basis of logged actions, distinguished between guests and customers, with attention paid to entry pages and paths.
The principal conclusions were: Guest usage – session were short, entering an abstract page and not having an interest in specialized content.

For specialised users: The environment around platforms (google etc) has had a significant effect on how users navigate and the importance of direct linking functionality. 71% of all sessions started with a link to an article on the platform in question -which I think highlights how useful SSO and VLE linking will be in the future.

With regard to the coming study, at the moment of course we have a wide range of authentication points on the range of platforms that the Publisher community, within the Federation, operate. Often the login point has developed organically (an open to the public site may choose to have the login only at the point someone wants a purchase a pay for view article – obviously a wholly restricted content platform will authenticate earlier. The study will aim to make sense of issues like this, putting context to when / where authentication happens and recommending some best practice and developing strategies for removing some of the happenstance in login / entry.

The only things I have to add to Nicole’s comments about Joe Janes presentation was that it featured my two favorite words (and no, not “dairy milk” ) – No slides! How refreshing! And I eagerly await his pop science information book which from his talk sounds like it may well be a cross between Stephen King esque chatty littering of pop culture references with the accessibility yet rigorousness of James Burke. And I mean all that in a good way.

Jan Velterop: Beyond Open Access

Jan Velterop is starting UKSG off with a talk on ‘Beyond Open Access’ – by this he means everything but Open Access! From my perspective, this is interesting as he is talking about ‘organisational underload, rather than knowledge overload’ – which fits in well with themes from this blog regarding lack of strong infrastructure to support content, services and knowledge. An example being scientific blogs – this information is out there, but not being captured by scholarly processes. This is about preparing content for the future.

Jan suggests we need to hover above the field of knowledge and getting views we can’t see from the ground. This is part of the work of the Concept Web Alliance. This is due to the complex nature of information that he explains in relationship to triples: an object (i.e. the author of an article), a predicate (what they are the author of and other traits) and a subject (the article itself). Work like Wikipeople is doing more to help navigate this field by providing better mechanisms to join the ‘author as object’ to the other parts of the triple they may be involved in.

Finally, worth thanking all the lovely people on twitter who explained realtime what is a triple is to help me understand Jan’s talk!

Tim o’Shea: How Technology is Changing Learning and Research in Universities

Tim will be talking in using the University of Edinburgh as a concept – interesting background for those of us who have mainly heard him talking in a JISC context recently. He highlights that research is now being directly fed in to the student experience through technology rather than the traditional model that separates research from undergraduate teaching and learning. He also highlights the importance of authentication, but also the importance of allowing people to use their own software routes – this fits in well with the federated access agenda.

Universities are under pressure to use new technologies, particularly for students that are off campus. One example is the ‘virtual farm’ and ‘virtual postmortem room’ and ‘virtual patients’ to support veterinary studies at the University of Edinburgh. Students are now creating their own virtual sick animals to help them with their studies, and contribute back.

Vicarious learning is important – as technologies such as twitter demonstrate. Connections between the students and the way they learn from each other through technologies are enhancing learning – particularly in distance learning courses. Virtual Worlds are being successfully used by students at the University of Edinburgh, and is connecting the virtual world to the real world in a successful way. Speckled computing has also offered new opportunities to join up the real world and the virtual world.

Tim goes on to talk about Open Access and the importance of linking through to linking through to other enterprise systems within the Universities to create a full research management system. This goes hand in hand with authority issues regarding copyright and author identification. The importance of the JISC Collections work with SHEDL was also given much praise!

He concludes by saying that technology has changed who the owners of information are through increased social learning and participation. This will be important for both librarians and publishers. He also points out the e-mail did not displace other technologies such as the phone – the new and the old can exist together and technology does not dehumanise the process.

Where Do We Go From Here? Joseph Janes

Jo Janes begins his talk by comparing the differences to his normal life in Seattle to coming to the UK to highlight the point that things can be more disorientating when things are only slightly different from what you are used to as opposed to a complete change (i.e. language the same). In scholarly communications, we are now leaving a country that we know really well (we built it) in to a country that looks the same, but is quite different. His point was don’t try to do ‘old’ things with new technology – our processes have to change.

Journal sources tell a tale of continuity – serials / continuation – these concepts leave a permanent trace. Refreshed endurance is key to the publishing process. The containers are as important as the ‘article’ so the processes around the article need to move forward with the changing article concept. This ties in neatly with Jan’s talk on triples. There are now so many different things that can be pulled in to an object / article to tell the story that the article wishes to tell: videos, visualisation etc. etc.

Where do we go from here depends on who takes on the new roles that are associated with the new processes for scholarly communications. To continue the analogy, we shouldn’t just settle for what is on the edge of the city but go further in and explore as the more you see, the more you understand.

Developing a model for scholarly communications based on incremental change may work, but it may be more interesting to think about what it might look like if we had the opportunity to start over. The question is therefore not where do we go from here, but how do we get to there?

All in all three very different and interesting talks from different ends of the spectrum. All of the presenters highlighted the need for change, and demonstrated ways in which the environment is changing. However, there was no clear conclusion as to what librarians and publishers should do, apart from ensure that they are well embedded in the change process.

At the co-sponsored JISC Collections / RSC NW / RSC Yorkshire and Humber event today. These events tend to be fairly informal, and as they are done on a regional basis. Participants often come for just a few hours- which perhaps is an indicator of how time pressed IT staff and Librarians are in FE. It’s a reminder that sometimes the major factor in FE IT / LRC decisions is sometimes not what’s the best technology, or the cheapest in the long run, or the most future proof, the big leverage is actual just “what can I implement in the time frame available”. It’s a factor that probably had a significant role in some FE institutions not deploying their own IdP the last academic year – however we now have a full year ahead, and institutions should be able to plan a migration to running an IdP by the beat of their own drum, if they so wish.

Normally I’m at these events principally to disseminate and present but today what I really want to do is to learn. So the question to institutions that have not deployed an IdP will be “Why not?” and hopefully the answers will inform some of the support we provide this academic year.

The second presentation in the general session is on the C-SPAN Library – again, apologies for being off-topic today.

The C-SPAN Library Archive plans to create an online, Indexed, accessible, digital video collection of all C-SPAN Programming from 1987 – present, including 150,000 hours of programming. C-SPAN captures important political recordings as a public service, and the archive seeks to make this resource a permanent record.

I’m using NewsFilmOnline as an example of a federated resource in the UK in a session later today and it is interesting to look at the comparison with C-SPAN. The sustainability question that is being closely examined by the Strategic Content Alliance is also of interest – C-SPAN receives no government funding but is funded by fees paid by cable and satellite affiliates who carry C-SPAN programming.

The service has a lot of advanced searching capability, including the ability to track usage of certain words within congress. This is interesting for organisations such as Internet2 and JISC as hot-topics can be tracked across debates, speeches and other recorded events.

After the usual welcome from Doug and being treated to a New Orleans tradition of being bombarded with Mardi Gras beads, the general session will start with an update from Tulane University on the impact of Hurricane Katrina.

Scott Cowen highlights the fact that New Orleans is still a tale of two cities. Whilst the french quarter and business district now show little sign of the impact of Katrina, the residential areas are still struggling. It is important that events like Internet2 keep on coming to New Orleans – and this is the best sign of support for the city. Katrina was the worst storm to hit the US in over 100 years.

Tulane University itself survived the storm itself very well due to its hurricane planning strategy. It was the breaking of the levies that caused damage – putting a significant part of the university underwater. Much of New Orleans was under water for 57 days – and Tulane University had to close its campus for an entire semester. The cost to the University was $650 million dollars.

Scott also reveals that his own escape plan included hot wiring a golf cart – not something usually required of a University President

The Tulane University survival plan:

1. To keep everyone on payroll for as long as possible;
2. To reach out to the Higher Education community and ask other institutions to support Tulane students;
3. To reopen in January 2006 regardless.

These were all achieved, with an impressive response from other US universities to support Tulane students.

The ultimate challenge proved not to be making the campuses reusable – the problem was the fact that the rest of New Orleans was still not functioning making it impossible for staff and students to practically live in New Orleans.

1. All of the K-12 schools were closed – Tulane managed to get its own small campus school formally chartered and opened this with over 1000 students.
2. Over 4000 staff and students did not have housing. Tulane’s response?? They bought a cruise ship!
3. Students needed to be re-recruited. 87% of students returne.d
4. There were no hospitals open:Tulane opened a street-corner clinic which has now been adopted as a model across New Orleans.

The major impact was a complete change in the attitude of the University in relation to the city of New Orleans itself and its responsibility as a major business and employer. All students are now required to do some form of public service whilst they are studying at Tulane

Tulane’s efforts are now being rewarded by unprecedented applications from students, excellent staff retention and strong research activities.

The negatives? Still having to sue insurance companies, still $200million out of pocket, still dealing with negative reactions to working with New Orleans.

Apologies for blogging off-topic, but this was too interesting not to capture – a real insight in to the true impact of Katrina.