Two new JISC-funded projects

Just a short note to record that in the last week, I’ve been informed that both our recent bids to JISC will be funded. The projects start on February 1st, just as Total ReCal is formally closing. As you can imagine, we’re all extremely pleased to be able to undertake this work over the next few months and are grateful for the backing that the funding provides.

Here are summaries of the project bids. You can read the full bid documents by clicking on the links.

Linking You << get it? ‘Lincoln U’ :-) (Google doc) (blog)

Like most other HEIs, Lincoln’s web presence has grown ‘organically’ over the years, utilising a range of authoring and content management technologies to satisfy long-term business requirements while meeting the short-term demands of staff and students. We recognise the value of our .ac.uk domain as an integral part of our ‘Learning Landscape’ and, building on recent innovations in our Online Services Team, intend to re-evaluate the overall underlying architecture of our websites with a range of stakeholders and engage with others in the sector around the structure, persistence and use of the open data we publish on the web. Some preliminary work has already been undertaken in this area and we wish to use this opportunity to consolidate what we have learned as well as inform our own work through a series of wider consultations and engagement with the JISC community.

Jerome (Google doc) (blog)

Jerome began in the summer of 2010, as an informal ‘un-project’, with the aim of radically integrating data available to the University of Lincoln’s library services and offering a uniquely personalised service to staff and students through the use of new APIs, open data and machine learning. Jerome addresses many of the challenges highlighted in the Resource Discovery Taskforce report, including the need to develop scale at the data and user levels, the use of third-party data and services and a better understanding of ‘user journeys’. Here, we propose to formalise Jerome as a project, consolidating the lessons we have learned over the last few months by developing a sustainable, institutional service for open bibliographic metadata, complemented with well documented APIs and an ‘intelligent’, personalised interface for library users.

Working on the web

Each month, David, Paul and I offer workshops for ‘Working on the web’, aimed at introducing staff to different aspects of Web 2.0 which might be useful in their research and teaching. Our original outline for these sessions can be seen over on the Learning Lab wiki.

A couple of things have reminded me recently that it might be useful to describe how I work on the web.

First of all, I use an up-to-date browser (Firefox or Chrome) with a few extensions. I block all advertising, using AdBlock, all trackers, using Ghostery and a password management extension, so I never use the same password on any two websites. Chrome allows me to synchronise all my preferences, bookmarks, passwords and other bits and pieces across different computers, so my experience on my desktop, laptop or home computer is the same. When using Firefox, I have the Sync extension installed, for the same reason.

Next, in terms of my basic set up, I have four useful ‘bookmarklets’: One for j.mp, which allows me to create a short URL for the current site, another for Readability, that makes reading long articles somewhat easier, one for delicious, to bookmark or ‘favourite’ sites, and a Posterous bookmarklet that allows me to quickly take clippings from web pages and post them to my Posterous site.

My Posterous site ‘things that stick’, is one of a few ways that I organise information on the web. I use Posterous almost exclusively for posting selected text (‘clippings’) from websites or PDF articles that make an impression on me. I use delicious for straightforward social bookmarking of a website, usually copying a piece of text from the site that best describes what it’s about. I use Google Reader to ‘Share’ whatever crops up in my feed reader that interest me. Whether I clip, bookmark or share, none of these actions is any kind of endorsement of the content but simply means the information is, in some way, of interest to me and I might want to come back to.

I share what is of interest to me by creating a ‘bundle’ from the RSS feeds of these three services in Google Reader. That bundle has a public web page and atom feed. However, all the items are presented in full text and therefore a hassle to get a quick overview of what’s been recently shared. So, I also aggregate the three sources to my own blog, ‘Elsewhere‘, where anyone can get a quick summary of the information I gather each day (and you can grab an RSS feed, too). I do this using the lifestream plugin for WordPress. This also means that through this process, the links I’m collecting ultimately come back to a site that I own and I have some kind of control over the retention of that data.

Google Reader is central to how I work on the web. I subscribe to news feeds from anywhere between 200 and 400 sites at any one time. Currently, it’s at a comfortable 230 subscriptions, which I read on my walk to and from work and occasionally during the day. I scan a couple of hundred headlines a day and click on about 10% of those headlines to read the article. This is my main method of reading the web.

I also use Google Reader to subscribe to every service I use on the web, so it’s a way of aggregating my own footprint on the web and keeping track of services I have used. The other reason for doing this is that Google Reader is searchable, so I can search over any of my activity on the web if I want to go back to something I read, create, shared or wrote.

Next, I have this work blog, which I use as a notebook more than anything else. I regularly refer back to it and search through it to remind me of the work I’ve done, ideas I’ve had and events I’ve been involved in. Whenever I have to report on my work, I refer back to this blog.

I use an Amazon ‘wishlist’ to maintain a list of books that look interesting and I might buy in the future. It’s a shame that there’s no RSS feed from wishlists. If there was, I’d add it to my daily bookmarks and clippings on my Elsewhere blog.

I use Mendeley to organise research papers in PDF format. Currently, I have over 500 PDF files synchronised across my work desktop and laptop (about 1.3GB). I moved to Mendeley, not for its social features, but simply because it renames and organises the files nicely on my hard drive and synchronises across computers. Before using it, I was in a mess.

I visit Wikipedia more than any other single website. It’s not perfect but its imperfections merely reflect our own imperfections and it is more perfect than any other collected source of information on the web.

I use Google docs for most of my non-blog writing these days. Funding applications, conference papers and articles I’m working on, all start off on Google docs and only move to Open Office if formatting requires.

I use slideshare to publish any presentations I give. I used to use Scribd until they starting charging people to download content from their site. When slideshare start charging, as I suspect they will, I’ll delete my account there, too.

On the subject of deleting accounts, I stopped using Twitter at the weekend. I’ve been trying to wean myself away from Twitter for months, having moved to using it largely for sharing links and as a news aggregator, picking up links from other people. I’ve never really liked it for conversation, finding the 140 character limit, well, limiting, in a demeaning sort of way. More recently, I’d created a private list of 20 or so people out of the 400 or so that I followed, who regularly pick up on sources of information I value, and this had become the extent of my experience using Twitter as I intentionally tried to wind down my use of it. Last weekend, I felt particularly overwhelmed with work and the intrusion that it can become at home, and so I deleted my account altogether. I know from past experience that not using it, rather than deleting it, wasn’t an option for me. I’d have simply ‘done a Stephen Fry’ and returned to it before too long, sorry addict that I’d become.

I’ve been on Twitter for a couple of years and had over 1000 followers, a few of whom are now real friends, though about half looked like people simply looking for re-follows, another large percentage were people who subscribed on mass to lists of people (usually EdTech lists) and quite a few more were people I’ve never had any contact with whatsoever. I’ve also found that my ability to concentrate has severely diminished over the last couple of years, with the constant distraction of having email/SMS/Twitter present in the back of my mind. Even turning off all notifications on my phone and computers hasn’t helped. Now I just use Google Reader to follow the RSS feeds of about 10 people on Twitter. It’s a bloody relief, to be honest. Here’s to being able to concentrate a little better from now on.

As with Twitter, I stopped using Facebook at the end of last year. The web is my social network and the above tools, my personal working learning environment.

RSS in, RSS out. Experimenting with WordPress for scholarly publishing

My presentation for the RSP event: Doing it differently. No slides, just a live demo using the outline below.

1. WordPress is an excellent feed generator:

https://joss.blogs.lincoln.ac.uk/2009/04/15/addicted-to-feeds/

2. It's also an excellent, personal, scholarly CMS

https://joss.blogs.lincoln.ac.uk/2009/08/25/scholarly-publishing-with-wordpress/

3. If you have an RSS feed, you can create other document types, too

https://joss.blogs.lincoln.ac.uk/2010/01/04/creating-a-pdf-or-ebook-from-an-rss-feed/

4. We conceived a WordPress site as a document (and a WordPress
Multisite install as a personal/team/dept/institutional multi-document
authoring environment)

http://jiscpress.blogs.lincoln.ac.uk
http://jiscpress.org

5. Here's my MA Dissertation as a WordPress site using digress.it

http://tait.josswinn.org/

6. WordPress allows you to perform certain actions on feeds, such as
reversing the post/section order

http://tait.josswinn.org/feed/?orderby=post_date&order=ASC

7. EPrints allows you to 'capture' data from a URI

http://eprints.lincoln.ac.uk/2004/

8. Suck it into your feed reader, for storage/reading - it's searchable
there, too.

https://www.google.com/reader/view/feed/http://eprints.lincoln.ac.uk/2004/2/index.html%253Forderby%253Dpost_date%2526order%253DASC

9. And use another service to create an ebook or PDF version

http://www.feedbooks.com/news

10. RSS. Loosely joined services:

Author: WordPress -->
                   Preserve: EPrints -->
                                        Read: GReader
                                              Feedbooks
                                              etc...

11. p.s. How about using EPrints to drive a WordPress site, too? Why extend a perfectly good preservation and storage application to include web 2.0 features, when it can be used to populate a cutting edge CMS with repo data?

Two weeks with a Kindle 3

I have a Kindle 3 (wifi only). Here’s what I think about it after two weeks. I should say that I have absolutely no interest in reading eBooks bought from Amazon on it. What interests me is the ability to read newspapers and academic articles on it.

+ Size, weight and general form are good. Feels nice to hold. I also have the leather case for it, but it doubles the weight and is awkward to hold so I only use it when the Kindle is shoved into my bag.

+ The screen is excellent for reading text in the .mobi and native amazon format. I appreciate the ability to change the font size more than I imagined I would and have found myself wishing that I could change the font size on print books now. The screen appears sharper the more light that is shining on it (i.e. daylight) but is unreadable in poor light/darkness (much like a book).

– Despite the screen being the main strength of the Kindle, looking at a grey scale screen still feels like a distinct step backwards. I’m reminded of using my mid-90s laptop. Page turns/screen refreshes are about as fast as turning a page in a print book, which sounds satisfactory but the experience is all wrong. Page turns are clearly visible screen refreshes/flashes.

– The speed of the device feels retrograde. My touch screen phone feels faster despite having roughly the same 500MHz processor speed.

+ Having said that, from an engineering point of view, the device is apparently a thing of beauty. I can appreciate that.

– The screen is poor for reading A4 sized PDF files. It’s just not big enough and the font on a full page view is too small. On landscape mode, it is better but requires lots of button pressing to scroll through the text and is generally not worth the bother because…

+ You can email .doc and .pdf files (and other text formats) to your @kindle.com or @free.kindle.com email address and Amazon will immediately send you a nicely formatted conversion of the PDF to your device.

+ Feedbooks is a nice way to get out of copyright (i.e. classics) books on the Kindle for free.

– All content is homogenized to become ‘Kindle Content’. Newspapers, books, articles, whatever they originally might have looked like, become the same standardised text on the screen, surrounded by a dull graphite border. I tried to tell myself that it strips away the fluff to reveal the true essence of the book/newspaper/article, but I find the experience of reading otherwise creatively designed content (i.e. a newspaper) on the Kindle quite dispiriting. Even images become washed out and gray. Thankfully, for academic papers, it doesn’t matter so much because they tend to include little more than text in the first place.

+ The battery life is excellent. Over a week with wifi turned on all the time. Apparently a month if turned off, but that’s not how I use it.

– The 3.0 software was very unstable and the device froze regularly. However…

+ The 3.0.1 software upgrade fixes any software issues I experienced.

-/+ The browser is OK. Mobile sites are bearable. I would usually choose using my touch screen phone to browse the web over the Kindle. Web browsing on a slow device with a black and white screen isn’t much fun. However, the ‘Article Mode’ option, which is based on the same idea as Readability, is a nice touch and makes reading a long article a pleasure. Better than using my phone or my laptop or PC. I was already in the habit of saving long print view versions of articles on the web to PDF for reading and now I can email them to my Kindle to read or browse to the web page on the Kindle itself.

-/+ The keyboard is OK. I wish there were keys for numbers. Initially I found the keyboard awkward and navigation around the device and content, a hassle. I’ve got used to it and it’s beginning to make sense to me now. It’s no match for touch screen navigation on the iPhone or Android phones though. The keyboard buttons make a noise so it’s irritating if you’re in a quiet room (i.e. reading in bed with your partner).

– It’s linked to my Amazon account and so it’s yet another device I have to password protect.  I hate the fact that I have to login to the device just to read something.

– The annotation and sharing features are very basic. You can make notes on selected text using the fiddly keyboard but it’s no match whatsoever for the convenience of scribbling in the margins with a pencil. Sharing to Twitter simply tweets a note and link to some selected text on an Amazon web page. I would much prefer a ‘share by email’ feature, like I have on my phone, so I could send myself or others, annotated text by email.

– I wish I had the 3G version. There are times when logging into wifi or having no wifi at all is a minor inconvenience. I thought I’d be able to tether it to my phone but the Kindle wifi won’t work with enterprise/P2P wifi networks. Given the cost, I would trade the leather case for the addition of 3G.

+ Calibre is a fantastic bit of open source software for creating newspapers and delivering them to your device. I have it set up so that my laptop at home wakes at 6am, opens Calibre, downloads three newspapers and sends them to my Kindle ready for when I wake up at 6.30ish. The papers are nicely formatted, with images, and easy to read on the way to work. This somewhat makes up for the complaint about homogenized content I mentioned above. You can pay for Amazon to deliver newspapers to you, too, but by most accounts I’ve seen, they are poorly presented and expensive compared to the print editions. Why bother when Calibre does it for you (and much more)?

– I haven’t used the text-to-speech feature yet. The music player on it is very basic. It’s like using an iPod Shuffle. Stop, start, forward, backwards.

– Already having a smart phone, iPod Touch, home laptop, work laptop and work desktop, the Kindle is an improvement in some areas (straight forward reading of natively formatted text), but is yet another device to throw in my bag. I was sat at a conference recently with my phone, laptop and Kindle all at hand, feeling like a bit of an idiot.

WordPress: Beyond Blogging session at IWMW10

Together with our Web Manager, Chris Goddard, I ran a session on the use of WordPress in HE at the Institutional Web Management Workshop 2010. It was good to see all chairs taken and people seemed to get something out of it. It was useful for me, too, to find out about how WordPress is being used at other universities. A video interview followed.

WordPress beyond blogging from UKOLN on Vimeo.

Total ReCal (or Calendar Combiner C^2). A proposed JISC Rapid Innovation project

I’ve just submitted this funding proposal to JISC, under their Flexible Service Delivery programme call. As usual, I’m keen to share bids sooner rather than later, whether they are successful or not. Go here for the full bid or just read the summary below. Comments always welcome. Thanks.

Building on a university-wide initiative to improve collaborative, undergraduate research, this student-driven project will discuss, document and develop API plugins for a number of common corporate applications in the HE sector. The plugins will expose space-time data in an open, standardised format that can then be queried and aggregated by a student-centred calendaring service, which will also be developed during the course of the project.

The work undertaken by the project will improve the student experience by providing end-users with a cutting-edge, centrally supported calendaring service driven by existing aggregate services at the University of Lincoln. The plugins, full documentation and further libraries and code examples for the service will be offered to the JISC community for use by their own institutions.

UPDATE: I’m pleased to say that this funding application was successful. 🙂

A few slides about Virtual Research Environments (VRE)

Just a few slides I threw together that might save someone else the effort. The links on the penultimate slide are a useful quick reference to JISC’s work on VREs. Useful if you’re trying to introduce the idea in your university. It’s interesting to see VREs described as ‘socio-technical systems’ and the emphasis that is put on community in a bottom-up approach to building a VRE.

ePub downloads from EPrints

I’m at JISC’s #dev8D conference. There’s no end of developer challenges but I’m not a developer. Still, here’s an idea that maybe someone will pick up and run with:

The use of eBook readers is on the rise. Anyone with an iPhone, Android phone, as well as Kindles and Sony Readers, has an eBook reader.

Institutional Repositories provide scholarly articles in PDF format, which eBook readers don’t handle very well at all, especially the phone versions.

Why not provide a Word-to-PDF conversion facility in your repository? EPrints currently offers Word-to-PDF conversion durinng the deposit process. Why not Word-to-ePub format, too?

Why not provide an ePub file as an alternative to the PDF download? ePub is a free, open, standards-based (XHTML/CSS) file format for eBook Readers. There are many advantages for the reader to having an ePub version rather than a PDF version when using an e-Book reader. i.e. better page navigation, search, bookmarks, variable font sizing.

There are PDF-to-ePub converters on the web, so technically it’s possible. They are  a bit hit and miss, but so are the Word-to-PDF converters.

Anyone interested? I’d be keen to help if required.