Tabbloid #9: 26 November 2011

Open publication - Free publishing - More lmsmash

'Post of the week' has to go to the #salfmeri team - if you spotted their fairly inocuous looking blogpost and clicked on the link to google docs you will have been treated to the same sight I saw:


In a single document (5 pages long) they've managed to map out their whole e-resource management process in (to my eyes at least) an elegant and understandable manner. The map is the result of many hours of interviews and investigations but it looks like that time has been a worthwhile investment.

Tabbloid #7 and #8: Double Bonanza

I have been away on holiday in a remote Northumbrian cottage so there's a double dose of Tabbloid delights for you this week:

Open publication - Free publishing - More lmsmash

Some noteworthy points are as follows:

- the #SALFMERI project are part of the Electronic Resource Management (ERM) strand and have been looking at their current procedures in preparation for identifying ERM use cases and requirements. This investigation has been a very useful exercise for them which has revealed that information on electronic resources within Salford University (and the people who use them/have a strategic interest in them) is highly dispersed and hard to find - in fact often the information is invisible because it is locked inside one person's head. The team are working towards a single process map which will draw together all of this tacit and explicit knowledge ... it should be quite a sight to behold once it's complete!

- the #CULWIDGETS team at Cambridge have been working on a set of 'permanent' webpages for their website which will act as guide for any future intrepid widget authors. The fruits of their labour look to be a pretty extensive and clearly written guide which will be accessible to non-technical staff ... quite frankly it's an inspiring piece of work and a good legacy for the project to leave behind. It will be interesting to know whether there is an appointed guardian in place to update the guide as things move forward. There's also a very handy link to the Google guide to widgets. It's interesting to note that Google have named them 'gadgets' rather than widgets ... perhaps to get over the perception of frivolity that is conjoured up by the word 'widget' (which is identified as an issue within the CULWIDGETS guide)?

Open publication - Free publishing - More lmsmash

Last weeks Tabbloid could pretty much be renamed the 'Culwidget Weekly' it features their final project posts and some widget usage graphs that offer some fairly compelling evidence for the success of a couple of their widgets (albeit with plenty of room for further improvement in the coming year). In their final project blogpost the team put their finger on something that we've observed as outside observers; namely that the end of the JISC project doesnot mean the end of the project blog (or project tweets). It will be interesting to see how many of the projects remain active after their project funding has come to an end. From our point of view it may well mean that there is more to synthesis than we'd initially anticipated and no doubt these post-project reflections and progress reports will provide us with some much valued content to draw on as we start to consider our final report. All good stuff!
The #UX2 team posted a useful reflection on their usability testing experience and provided a link to their final report. Usability testing is another of those times when we are reminded that if it weren't for those pesky users (in this case recruiting volunteers and then dealing with the sometimes inevitable number of no shows) then the task would be much simpler. Of course without the users there would be no user testing so it's a challenge that has to be overcome. And of course with a small usability study every no show has a bigger impact so we'll be on the look out for any tips around ensuring the maximum turnout and we'll share what we find. As a big fan of word clouds, I was pleased to see the inclusion of one in Lorraine's post - it really brings out the overall tone of users' feedback in an effective way.

Tabbloid #6 5-11-2010

Open publication - Free publishing - More lmsmash

Last weeks Tabbloid is on the lean side with just three entries but as always it proves that quality, not quantity, wins the day - If you are interested in the techie side of VuFind then the #vufindkeven 'Developer's View of VuFind' will be an illuminating read and certainly shows that even a good piece of software leaves plenty of room for improvement when being implemented. The #blathull team hit an important final milestone in their project last week and had a big aha/doh moment of enlightenment when they implemented a single, unified search index and their experience provides the programme with a useful cautionary tale for anyone else hoping to do the same - happily it sounds like they solved the mystery without too much head scratching :)

Last Thursday David Kay and I had a catch up meeting with Ben Showers and over a cup of hot ginger cordial we discussed the following:
- Now that a good number of the projects have submitted their final report blogposts we'll start drawing together and reporting back on any emerging themes. Those emerging themes will be posted on this blog and comments and input from the projects will be very welcome - particularly suggestions for any additional themes that you feel are key for us to include in our final report.
- In the next couple of weeks Ben will be inviting you all to complete a survey to tease out further questions that we can explore in our synthesis report and also give you the opportunity to give feedback on the JISC LMS project process (i.e. using blogs to report on your progress, and the Google code site etc).
- All projects are welcome to attend the strand events. The closest to confirmation is the OSS strand event which will take place on the 25 - 26 January in Edinburgh. The event is piggybacking on the Haggis & Mash Mashed Library event on the 25th January. The 25th will be a very much hands on event and the 26th will be a strategy-level event aimed at drawing senior library and information services staff into the discussion.

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.