da blog

Beacon cited through fog

Who would have thought that reference management could be so interesting? We spent a  very informative and enjoyable Thursday in snowy Milton Keynes, at the Innovations in Reference Management (#IRM10) event (part of the OU/JISC TELSTAR project). All thoroughly blogged by Owen Stephens, and tweeted by many.

Owen Stephens and Jason Platts of OU described the outputs of the TELSTAR project, which integrates the OU’s Moodle VLE with Refworks. This means that students using the VLE can move seamlessly between their reading lists and Refworks, locating resources, maintaining consistency of style and generating bibliographies easily.

Paul Stainthorp of Lincoln University described some exciting, bleeding-edge uses of Yahoo Pipes to mashup data from Refworks, OPAC, and Amazon. Arguably even more bleeding-edge was the presentation by Euan Adie from Nature Publishing, who showed us Help Me Igor, a reference manager plugin for Google Wave. Speakers from CiteULike and Mendeley also gave us fascinating insights into their respective social-tinged bibliographic management offerings.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Kevin and I brought to the table the theme of web preservation. With reference to our work with JISC-PoWR, UKWAC and ArchivePress, we reminded anyone who hasn’t heard our spiel already that there are many important, valuable and eminently citable web resources, notably blogs by academic researchers, that are at risk of disappearing – making references to them virtually useless.

Authors may not be responsible for ensuring their readers can access the resources they reference, but we think they should at least give them a fighting chance of doing so! We  therefore proposed that students and researchers should be encouraged to locate and cite copies of web resources in stable web archives (such as the UK Web Archive) rather than “in the wild”.

We also discussed the idea that persistent collections of web resources could be created at the institutional level, whether that were an open archive of blog posts by a university’s researchers, or a closed repository where researchers can store copies of the web resources they cite.

One of the strong themes that emerged in discussion was the need for information literacy/digital skills training at all levels to address current tools and trends in reference management; and to re-assert the purpose, value and nature of citation in online digital environments

An interesting suggestion also made was that reference management tools are becoming a natural part of the environment, just as email has: is provision of specialised applications by universities an “aberration”?

I’m inclined to think not, after all it was clear from the workshop that there’s still a need to support ongoing study and research effectively, and scope to develop and validate new approaches.  Microsoft Word may now include reference management features, but that doesn’t obviate the need to educate people in how to use them effectively, and why.

We’re very grateful to Owen for including us in his programme: this is a fascinating area, where e-learning, libraries, preservation and publishing collide, and I’m sure we haven’t heard the last of it.

Some of us at ULCC, and over 100 other people from around the UK, spent a couple of days this week at the Aston Business School reviewing the outcomes of JISC’s repositories and preservation programme and looking forward to what comes next. It was a useful and stimulating couple of days – the best programme meeting I’ve attended so far. The few projects that weren’t represented at the meeting missed out in a lot of ways. If you’re involved in a JISC project, make sure you, your project manager, or both of you go to a programme meeting when you are invited. You’ll learn a lot, make some useful contacts, save some time, get some useful ideas and possibly lay the groundwork for future projects or collaborations.

I began the day by chairing the final meeting of RPAG(the repositories and preservation advisory group.) Read the rest of this entry »

Originally published on the JISC-PoWR blog.

On dablog recently I have put up a post with a few observations about archiving a MediaWiki site. The example is the UKOLN Repositories Research Team wiki DigiRep, selected for the JISC to add to their UKWAC collection (or to put it more accurately, pro-actively offered for archiving by DigiRep’s manager). The post illustrates a few points which we have touched on in the PoWR Handbook, which I’d like to illuminate and amplify here.

Firstly, we don’t want to gather absolutely everything that’s presented as a web page in the wiki, since the wiki contains not only the user-input content but also a large number of automatically generated pages (versioning, indexing, admin and login forms, etc). This stems from the underlying assumption about doing digital preservation, mainly that it costs money to capture and store digital content, and it goes on costing money to keep on storing it. (Managing this could be seen as good housekeeping. The British Library Life and Life2 projects have devised ingenious and elaborate formulae for costing digital preservation, taking all the factors into account to enable you to figure out if you can really afford to do it.) In my case, there are two pressing concerns: (a) I don’t want to waste time and resource in the shared gather queue while Web Curator Tool gathers hundreds of pages from DigiRep, and (b) I don’t want to commit the JISC to paying for expensive server space, storing a bloated gather which they don’t really want.

Secondly, the above assumptions have led to me making a form of selection decision, i.e. to exclude from capture those parts of the wiki I don’t want to preserve. Read the rest of this entry »

Originally published on the JISC-PoWR blog.

Much discussion of blog preservation focuses on how to preserve the blogness of blogs: how can we make a web archive store, manage and deliver preserved blogs in a way that is faithful to the original?

Since it is blogging applications that provide this stucture and behaviour (usually from simple database tables of Posts, Comments, Users, etc), perhaps we should consider making blogging software behave more like an archive. How difficult would that be? Do we need to hire a developer?

One interesting thing about Wordpress is the number of uses its simple blog model has been put to. Under-the-hood it is based on a remarkably simple data base schema of about 10 tables and a suite of PHP scripts, functions and libraries that provide the interface to that data. Its huge user-base has contributed a wide variety of themes and additional functions. It can be turned into a Twitter-like microblog (P2 and Prologue) or a fully-fledged social network (Wordpress MU, Buddypress).

Another possibility exploited by a 3rd-party plugin is that of using Wordpress as an aggregating blog, collecting posts automatically via RSS from other blogs: this seems like a promising basis for starting to develop an archive of blogs, in a blog.

Read the rest of this entry »

I was a keen participant in the activities of ERPANET , but I must confess I haven’t kept abreast of its successor, Digital Preservation Europe (DPE). However I was interested to see the recent DPE briefing paper about blog preservation, since it covers an area that we also tackled in the course of the JISC-PoWR project – on the blog , in the workshops and the handbook. The Briefing Paper highlights key issues for those who would preserve blogs. It is a necessarily general overview, and manages to cram a lot of preservation issues into its two sides of A4. But, for the blogger approaching preservation, or the preservationist approaching blogs, I wonder if such avalanches of considerations aren’t sometimes unnecessarily overwhelming. It seemed worth looking at a few of the points made in the DPE briefing paper, and considering whether we can demystify them or make the task seem less daunting.

Read the rest of this entry »