http://dablog.ulcc.ac.uk/2007/12/18/eprints-web-20-pow-wow-followup/
Thursday’s Eprints Web 2.0 Pow-wow in London was a great opportunity to discuss the issues with the Southampton team and others working at the bleeding-edge of the Eprints coal-face. In the morning, discussion ranged far and wide around Web 2.0 and Social Networking, and we were grateful to Kevin for assuming the mantle of facilitator and getting at least a few of the themes – user experience, consensual sharing, fluid data interchange – down on the flipchart. (David Kane has posted some pictures on Flickr.)
Ben, John, Chris, David, Joss, Ian, Sebastien, Les, Nina, Steve and Tim discussing the social side of repositories.
After lunch we had fascinating demos of, and discussions around, Southampton’s Rich Tags/mSpace, Nature’s Connotea, and our own progress to-date on SNEEP. Rory’s presentation was impressively clear and confident, given that we hadn’t actually prepared anything, and had to hijack Ian Mulvany’s laptop (thanks Ian). Having missed a chance to see it in action in Bristol, it was great to see a live demo of RichTags, which is a very impressive visualisation tool (the sort of thing that, like Gapminder, can totally change one’s ideas about data and metadata – check out the mSpace movies).
Trying to take in all permutations and implications of Web 2.0 is to risk an overload of total perspective vortex magnitude, so I’ll mostly restrict the rest of my thoughts to SNEEP’s and my own interests, and look forward to reading elsewhere how others interpreted the conversation. (There’s a section at the Eprints Wiki.)
It seems to me that one of the most important things we can achieve is to maximise the degree to which Eprints is susceptible to Social Networking. That may be in an “exo” way – (Rich Tags, Del.icio.us, CiteULike, Connotea, etc.) or from within the repository, a la SNEEP. But I’m reassured that, even within its modest scope, SNEEP has a part to play (and isn’t likely to be superseded by anything in EPrints 3.1). How it’s, in the end, used, remains to be seen. Web 2.0 Social Networking is what-you-make-of-it: some things fly, some flutter, others sink without trace (so long Eduspaces!), nevertheless it’s amazing what can be achieved with a few RSS or Atom feeds.
Apropos Bookmarking – as we’ve seen, it has many behaviours in common with Eprints search results. Good advice from Chris on reusing the Saved Search export functionality.
Commenting: Joss was right about the need to put on a little more style. Rory’s promised to embed plenty of CSS hooks, and it might be worth having a less skeletal default, based on standard Eprints livery.
Tagging implementation has some overlap with the Bookmarking, as Rory has already identified. We should also ensure if possible that SNEEP tags play nicely with Rich Tags (or at least are no more than an XSLT template away). Rory’s posted elsewhere his ideas on tagging: worth noting also that WordPress 2.3 seems to have a competent implementation of tagging (you’re looking at it!)
Of the other discussions, I’m particularly keen to follow up David Millard’s work on Learning Object repositories, with both my other projects and my E-learning studies in mind.
But I still haven’t got to the bottom of why some Web 2.0 sites grab me (Del.icio.us, LibraryThing, CiteULike…) and others don’t (BlueDot, Connotea). Not that Connotea’s not impressive: perhaps it is simply, as Ian Mulvany explained, that the strength of its “community” has a strong affinity with Nature’s readership – other SN sites are stronger in social sciences and humanities. Ian also confirmed that Connotea does not support the “save personal copy” feature, in the way CiteULike does: this is a deal-breaker for me, as I’ve found it invaluable to have quick and easy access to my MSc reading list from anywhere – work, home, laptop, desktop. In fact anything that didn’t make it to my CiteULike bookmarks probably didn’t get read!
