Tabbloid #5: 22 Oct 2010

Open publication - Free publishing - More lmsmash

This weeks round up of news from the JISC LMS blogosphere includes a couple of 'final project blogposts':
#ENCLAVE: http://enclave.lib.ed.ac.uk/?p=129
#AQUABROWSERUX: http://lorrainepaterson.wordpress.com/2010/10/20/aquabrowserux-final-project-post/

There's also a trio of thoughtful and thorough posts from the #COVPRIMO project sharing the outcomes of their usability testing.

My favourite post this week is the one from the #VUFINDKEVEN blog which shares what they found when they did a google search for their project name: http://blogs.kent.ac.uk/vufindkeven/2010/10/21/goggling-at-keven-on-google/ It is heartening to know that their project impact has already spread beyond the borders of the JISC LMS programmes and been picked up by CILIP’s Multimedia Information Technology Group.

Perhaps for the remaining projects it might be worth taking a few minutes to set up Google Alerts (http://www.google.com/alerts) so that you can monitor what is being said about your project and join in the conversations as they are happening.

Tabbloid #4: 15 Oct 2010

Open publication - Free publishing - More lmsmash

One blogpost of note which just missed being included in the round up of news from last week was #YOCALCAT's final report blogpost which Helen Westmancoat valiantly managed to finish before heading off for a well-earned break. It will of course be included in next week's Tabbloid but here's a link just in case you can't wait: http://yocalcat.wordpress.com/2010/10/15/yocalcat-final-progress-post/

There are some really useful reccomendations and conclusions for other institutions who might go down the WorldCat Local route in the future. Some of those lessons will be equally useful for any project which involves change that impacts on the library e.g. "Ensure that all staff are involved with the processes whether on the acquisitions and cataloguing side or are involved in preparing material for induction."

Being relatively diminutive in terms of their size has clearly been a major challenge for York St John so it will be interesting to see how other larger libraries get on with adopting WorldCat Local in the future.

Growing Knowledge {British Library + JISC et al}

This 'Growing Knowledge' exhibition looks interesting - The main focus is on the role of digital technology for researchers who use the British Library but there are some interesting points about the changing expectations of researchers which I'm sure will resonate for those within academic libraries. If anyone gets the chance to visit the exhibition I'd be interested to find out whether any of the tools and gadgets they're exhibiting make it onto your library wishlist.

There are some more videos on the exhibition website: http://www.growingknowledge.bl.uk/ (not in an embeddable format alas).

There's a chance to see some of the tech on this Reuters video about the exhibition: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6A1hpXkMmvM [embedding has been disabled unfortunately]

If you haven't seen it already then it's also worth taking a look at the British Library's 2020 Vision which was crafted as the result of a year long consultation exercise: http://www.bl.uk/aboutus/stratpolprog/2020vision/2020A3.pdf

100% Open Source - All Good?

The following observations (September 2010) from a large US university library with a strong commitment to open and community source may be of interest to jiscLMS colleagues …

We, and several other academic sites, tried to get Evergreen to run under RHEL (Red Hat Linux). We managed but it broke with every upgrade and we had concluded that we would have to pay for someone to modify the open source software to run under RHEL before we could put it into production.

We were considering Postgre but … we could not have run it without finding a support vendor. Think about it, if the RDBMS broke because of an operating system or other upgrade we don't have the programmers to go into the code, even if it is open source, to fix that so we could keep running. Since we have a campus license for Oracle it would not necessarily be cheaper for the library to run an open source RDBMS.

[Therefore] based on our preliminary evaluation of Evergreen, it was a problem for us that it was not developed under RHEL and Oracle. Practically speaking it may sound like a good approach to go with all "open source" software but it is not always. For mission critical systems you need to be sure the software is supported since you do not have programming staff to be writing security and other types of patches that are essential. This is not to say you absolutely can't use Postgre or MY SQL, but it does need investigation and justification to make the correct choice.

News from out there in the Solr system

The following news will be of interest to jiscLMS colleagues working with Blacklight or VuFind or with Solr in other contexts.

October 8, 2010 – Message to Code4Lib list from Joshua Greben, Systems Librarian/Analyst, Florida Center for Library Automation (jgreben@ufl.edu)

Florida Center for Library Automation (FCLA), supporting the 11 State Universities of Florida, has switched search engines from Endeca to Solr. We went live with the Solr version of our locally developed discovery application (which we call Mango) in August. The motivation to switch to Solr was driven primarily by cost cutting efforts, not only to save the ongoing maintenance fees but additional fees that would have been incurred with increasing size of our data base, currently 11 million records.

We used Blacklight as a jumping off point for our implementation of Solr, changing it quite a bit to work with our existing Mango discovery application, and Mango required some modification to adapt the calls to the Solr search engine. Mango is a Tomcat application that also uses various APIs and data service layers to bring in outside content such as Google Book covers, journal article metadata, and real time ILS (Ex Libris Aleph) item availability.

We work closely with public and technical service librarians at the eleven State University Libraries in Florida to develop new features and services in Mango that make it a useful and informative service for our users. The State University Union Catalog can be found here with links to the eleven University Library catalogs: http://union.catalog.fcla.edu/

Tabbloid #3: 8 Oct 2010

Open publication - Free publishing - More lmsmash

Last week's round up of JISC LMS blogposts was slim in terms of pages but weighty in terms of content. The stand out points for me were:

- The #VUFINDKEVEN team at Kent had to deal with an overloaded server which was caused by a "carelessly placed tome of Blackstone’s Statutes" which had been left on the OPAC terminal keyboard. Their tale of woe has inspired me to invent the 'Blackstone Principle' which is a sister of Murphy's Law and states that not everything that will go wrong can be anticipated or tested for.

- The #CULWIDGETS team proved once again that a picture can say a thousand words ... their Google Analytics graph shows that usage of their widget has taken off in a most pleasing manner now that the students are back on campus. They're hoping to get 2,000 unique users a month by Xmas so it will be interesting to see how the graph alters as each month passes.

- The #AQUABROWSERUX blog delivered another admirably thorough post - the focus of this one was on interview-based tasks vs pre-defined scavanger hunt tasks, the article argues that the interview-based task gives more valid results but that you sacrifice the opportunity for quantitative results ... in the past I've worked on projects which have successfully blended both approaches within a test session so I'd be interested in hearing other people's experience too.

- Both the #JANGLEFB and the #VUFINDKEVEN blogs gave their reflections on the Programme meeting which was held in Glasgow last month. It is encouraging that they both found the two day event useful for the realisation that other projects are facing the same challenges that they're facing. Hopefully this blog and the forthcoming thematic events will continue to provide that useful function.

Pondering the One Minute Pitches

I've been thinking about the 'One Minute Pitches' that each project was asked to complete following the Glasgow event. Given that I did a (short) Three Minute Pitch at the event it only seems fair that I give the One Minute Pitch a go too.

I felt that Cambridge Uni used imagery very effectively to explain their #CULWIDGETS project in Glasgow so I'm having a go at that approach too:



Just in case you need a hand with the visual metaphors, here's what I think we're aiming to do with our project synthesis liaison work:
- look at things from a different angle and share that view with the programme.
- adjust our lense so that sometimes we're picking up on detail and sometimes the whole picture.
- share any external messages which seem appropriate (however tangentially).
- and, at the risk of getting a bit deep, to 'look through a glass, darkly' across the programme strands and within each project to reveal the gems that you're all unearthing as your projects progress.

I am a big fan of Wordles as a method of getting to the heart of what is being said ... the wordle below was made by taking the text from all the One Minute Pitches that were featured in the Tabbloid in my last post:


It's possibly not an artefact that should be subjected to hours of academic scrutiny and analysis to distil its hidden depths but the things that stand out at first glance are interesting - I'm taking it as a good sign that 'students' feature so prominently, given the user centred nature of the programme

Tabbloid #1: 29 Sept 2010

As promised, here is the first Tabbloid which is made up of recent JISC LMS project blogposts. The eagle-eyed among you will notice that it was produced a couple of days ago ... there is a reason for that but it's not a very interesting story. There is a version with today's date but it only has two news items in it {say no more, best laid plans and all that}

The wonders of modern technology mean that I can embed the document here, so I will:

Open publication

The version with only two stories in it is also available to read or download from Issuu.com.

This is the first time I've seen a Tabbloid publication so I'd be interested in getting your feedback on how useful/readable it is. Ben Showers is looking at creating an email list so that this can be emailed to you hot off the digital presses every Friday. I'll also post it here for your perusal and as a virtual archive.