Tag: web2.0

Web 2.0 in the workplace

Joss Winn / / Software, Web

David, who works in the University Research Office, posted this 26 minute video on his blog. It’s a useful overview of how online social media might be used in the workplace (and, by extension, within the HE institution).

I can attest to some of the benefits outlined in the video. In my previous work at Amnesty International, we used Confluence, an open source enterprise wiki that also includes blogging tools, tagging, commenting and meta-searching across disparate wiki spaces.

I used Confluence for managing formal project documentation, updating team members on the outcomes from meetings, providing online help and support documentation, note-taking and bookmarking useful external resources. As a wiki, it was useful for drafting documentation and inviting others (from around the world) to contribute and comment. Other staff could also subscribe to RSS feeds and receive email alerts when pages they were interested in were updated. As a result, I’m currently looking at how Confluence might be useful to project teams here at the university.

One of the difficulties staff had with using the wiki was the transition from writing in MS Word to writing directly to the wiki. To begin with, staff would write in Word and then upload documents to the wiki, which is a very unproductive way of working. Fortunately, Confluence can export to Word, PDF and other formats, so that documents created in Confluence could be ‘taken’ from the wiki and used elsewhere. The only other issue I recall was that the wiki was seen as yet another application to login to, but this problem eased as more staff used Confluence and other Intranet applications for their own work and were permanently logged into the Intranet each day, anyway.

Session 2: Social Networking

Joss Winn / / Conferences, Open Access, Repositories

Carrying on from the morning’s Web 2.0 session, in the afternoon I attended a session on how social networking tools are being developed for and integrated into repositories.

Jane Hunter, from the University of Queensland, discussed the HarvANA project, a system which supports and exploits repository users’ tags, comments and other annotations through the development of separate collections of user contributed metadata. It seems like an interesting and ultimately useful idea, acknowledging the ‘added value’ that user annotations can make to repository objects. Significantly,users can annotate sections of text, images and other media, allowing annotations to be created for parts of the repository object, rather than just the whole.

David Millard, from The University of Southampton, presented the Faroes project, a development of EPrints for teachers wishing to deposit learning resources. He said that their experience on previous projects had shown that users were not interested in nor required content packaging standards and that repository user interfaces needed to provide similar functionality to other repositories such as Flickr and YouTube. Their project aims to provide a simple, attractive interface to EPrints (called ‘PuffinShare’) aimed at teachers sharing documents, images and other single files (or ‘learning assets’), rather than packages of learning objects. It looked like a great project, highlighting some of the challenges we’ve faced on the LIROLEM project and one which I think we would be interested in trying. A public beta is due this summer. He pointed out that the growth of Web 2.0 is due to the popularity of personal services (Flickr, YouTube, Delicious), which also have an optional, additional social value to them, too.

Carol Minton, from the National Science Digital Library, discussed the work they have done on embedding Web 2.0 applications such as MediaWiki and WordPress, into their repository service. Essentially, they have created services that link blog articles and wiki pages to repository objects, enriching the objects with these community ‘annotations’.

Session 1: Web 2.0

Joss Winn / / Conferences, Open Access, Repositories

Ian Mulvaney, from Nature Publishing, gave a presentation on Connotea. He discussed how their earlier ‘Tagging Tool’, EPrints plugin required repository users to register and sign-in to Connotea, in order to use the service from participating repositories. This, they found, created a barrier to entry which he thinks the use of OpenID and OAuth may overcome.

Richard Davis, from the University of London Computer Centre, gave a presentation on SNEEP, the JISC project to develop Web 2.0 plugins for EPrints. They are developing Comments, Bookmarks and Tags (CBT) plugins, which we’re actually going to be using in one form or another in our own repository at Lincoln. He raised the question of whether we really need this functionality of not in our repositories, and I’d argue that the functionality should be there, or else they remain read-only alternatives to publishing. With a ‘user space’ for commenting, bookmarking and tagging, an informal method of peer-review is introduced that could mature into something very valuable.

Daniel Smith, from The University of Southampton, presented Rich Tags, a web application for cross-browsing repositories. It uses the mSpace faceted browser for exploration of multiple repositories in an interface similar to iTunes. It’s a nice interface, a bit heavy on resources when I loaded it in my browser, but provides a more enjoyable interface than the default EPrints UI, with the addition of searching more than one repository.