*UNIVERSITY OF LONDON*

*Digital Repositories Specialist*

*Fixed term for 18 months*

We are looking for a suitably experienced individual to join our Digital Archives & Repositories Team. You will be responsible for assisting our Senior Repositories Specialist in the technical development and maintenance of our repository service, liaising with external and internal customers and with our network and hosting services team.

This is a new post, for 18 months in the first instance. The role is predominantly a technical one and requires a experience of implementing and supporting institutional repositories, and a good understanding of related issues such as digital preservation, linked data and research information management.

In addition to managing the requirements of existing customers we expect you to contribute to the maintenance and enhancement of the service infrastructure. We also actively encourage participation in innovative project opportunities, often in participation with other institutions.

To apply, please follow the link

http://bit.ly/sQG7pY

The closing date for receipt of completed applications is *on Wednesday, 30 November 2011*. Interviews are scheduled to take place *in early December 2011*.

/The University offers membership to the Universities’ Superannuation Scheme (USS)./

The event will bring together delegates from the SWAT4LS workshop and tutorials (taking place on the 8-9 December 2011) and researchers, developers and anyone else interested in the Life Sciences to work together in teams or individually to use and enhance existing Open Science semantic web applications and tools and possibly develop new ones.

The event will be suitable for:
- Researchers in the Life Sciences
- Software developers in the Life Sciences
- Those interested in Open Research Reporting
- Software developers / researchers developing Semantic Web
- Applications / Tools / Mashups / Visualisations from the Life Sciences and other domains
- Anyone interested in developing and using Open Science tools particularly in the Life Sciences
- Those offering support for using data sets, APIs and tools to be used for the delegates
Some ideas already being floated are in Malaria, Cancer and Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease (CJD).

For more information and for booking, please visit:

http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/events/devcsi/life-sciences-hackdays/index.html

Remember this…

Click here to view the embedded video.

This video shows just one of the great projects to come out of Dev8D 2011.

We need YOU to make Dev8D 2012 even better!

Dev8D 2012 will take place at the University of London Union between 14-16th February 2012. Places are limited and filling up fast, so make sure you book soon.

We recently launched a brand new website for Dev8D, where you will find useful resources to help you convince your boss to let you attend, answers to your frequently asked questions, and lots of reminders why you love Dev8D.

Let us know what you think of the new site and get your booking in quick to make sure you’ll be at Dev8D in 2012.

Need more convincing?

If you’ve never been to Dev8D before and are wondering what all the fuss is about, here’s just one of many ringing endorsements…

“I found Dev8D awesome and very well organised: I’ve learnt a lot of stuff, met a lot of interesting people, and definitely got a lot out of it! I think there should be more events like these, this is fantastic! The expert zone was great to get an overview of what’s going on. As to back such events politically, I would argue that mixing talented people together in such a fashion is definitely very good for the software industry in the UK!”

Get Involved

If you would like to get involved with Dev8D 2012 in anyway, as a speaker, facilitator, workshop leader or even as a sponsor, please get in touch with Mahendra Mahey.

Are you interested in scientific workflows? Would you like to see how scientific workflows can be used in digitisation and related fields? Would you like to spend a couple of days looking at use cases and having a go at hacking a set of new tools?  Would you like to hear more about  myGrid  and their suite of tools including Taverna, and myExperiment?

Bookings are now open for a free 2-day developer workshop/hackathon which aims to encourage take-up and further development of tools developed by the IMPACT  Project, an EU project which looks at improving access to text using Optical Character Recognition (OCR). The workshop will explore how these tools interact within the Taverna platform and will then lead exploration of some advanced use cases and technical challenges. It is intended for technical staff, for example, developers and implementers. It will allow them to take a closer look at the tools available and investigate new solutions and features that could be developed for the benefit of the wider community.

The workshop will held from 14 to 15 November 2011 at the Kilburn Building, Oxford Road, University of Manchester. It is being run by technical staff from the IMPACT Project in conjunction with the Taverna developers at myGrid. More information on the workshop including location and programme details is available from the Workshop Wiki. The event is free but spaces are limited.

During the workshop IMPACT staff will showcase the IMPACT Web service and workflow development platform and look at how scientific workflows can be used in digitisation and related fields. Developers will use a number of tools which have been developed by the IMPACT project and will explore how they interact within the Taverna workflow management system and the related myExperiment environment. Related issues such as long-term preservation and natural language processing will also be considered.

IMPACT



IMPACT is a European project that aims to speed up the process and enhance the quality of mass digitisation in Europe. The IMPACT research programme will significantly improve digital access to historical printed text through the development and use of innovative Optical Character Recognition software and linguistic technologies. UKOLN’s main role in the project has been to work on the externally facing parts of IMPACT, primarily in helping to produce and disseminate documentation (best practice guides, briefings, case studies, etc.) on text digitisation frameworks and IMPACT tools together with a series of training events.

myGrid

The myGrid team produces and uses a suite of tools designed to “help e-Scientists get on with science and get on with scientists”. The tools support the creation of e-laboratories and have been used in domains as diverse as systems biology, social science, music, astronomy, multimedia and chemistry. myExperiment makes it easy to find, use and share scientific workflows and other Research Objects, and to build communities.

Taverna

Taverna is an open source and domain-independent Workflow Management System – a suite of tools used to design and execute scientific workflows and aid in silico experimentation. Taverna has been created by the myGrid team and funded through the OMII-UK. The project has guaranteed funding till 2014. The Taverna suite is written in Java and includes the Taverna Engine (used for enacting workflows) that powers both the Taverna Workbench (the desktop client application) and the Taverna Server (which allows remote execution of workflows). Taverna is also available as a Command Line Tool for a quick execution of workflows from a terminal.

If you require more information email Ed Bremner, UKOLN.

Enter simply by blogging about your application and emailing the blog post URI to joy.palmer@manchester.ac.uk by the deadline of 2359 (your local time) on Monday 1 August 2011.

What’s it about?

UK Discovery is working with libraries, archives and museums to open up data about their resources for free re-use and aggregation. DevCSI is working with developers in the education sector, many of who will have innovative ideas about how to exploit this open data in new applications.

This Developer Competition runs throughout July 2011. It starts on Monday 4 July – Independence Day, a good day for liberating data – and closes on Monday 1 August. It’s open to anyone anywhere in the world and there are several prizes long as you follow the simple rules

The Competition

1. You build a software application / tool
2. You must use at least one of our 10 data sources
3. You may optionally combine our data with any other data
4. Your code should be Open Source – available for others to use, perhaps at Github, Googlecode or Sourceforge
5. You finish by 2359 your local time on Monday 1 August
6. You make your final entry by blogging it and emailing the blog URI to joy.palmer@manchester.ac.uk (or send the details for us to blog)
7. The judges will select the winners to be announced on 5 September, 2011.
8. If your entry works, it will be linked from the Discovery and DevCSI websites
9. You can ask questions at http://getthedata.org and directly to m.mahey@ukoln.ac.uk (DevCSI Project Manager)
10. Tweet #discodev and #devcsi

The 10 Data Sources – Use one or as many as you like

We’ve gathered data from 10 sources in libraries and archives and museums, all licensed for you to reuse freely and to aggregate with any other data. The data describes things ranging from books and electronic journals to archival collections and museum artefacts. Some of the sources are from famous places, some are quite technical, some are very descriptive.

We created a directory (or catalogue) to tell you more about each resource, how to access the data (APIs etc) and what format it’s in.

Why not start by looking at this.

THIRTEEN Prizes

We are offering 13 prizes. Here are the three ways you can win a prize and bear in mind that your entry can win more than one!

• Best entry for each dataset – there are 10 datasets so there could be 10 winners of £30 Amazon vouchers and an aggregation could win more than one!
• Data Munging – Best example of Consolidating or Aggregating or De-duplicating or Entity matching or … one prize of £100 Amazon voucher.
• Overall winners – An EEE Pad Transformer for the overall winner and a £200 Amazon voucher for the Runner Up.

Full Information

Read on to find out about

• How to enter
• Judging Criteria
• Supporting Information
• Rules & Small Print

How to enter

• Produce a browser based application that uses one or more of our data sources
• Include the URI for your application in an introductory blog post (or a document which we can blog)
• If you wish to provide any documentation, make it available either in your blog post or within the application web pages
• An entry will be deemed to have been submitted only when an email pointing to the blog post (or containing equivalent text) and including your name and contact details has been received at joy.palmer@manchester.ac.uk
• The closing date stamp for emails is 2359 hours (your time) on Monday 1 August 2011.

Judging Criteria

What will win? We are interested in entries that genuinely improve the utility of libraries, archives and museums for their users. Entries should be browser-based applications that make use of one or more of the listed data sources. They will be evaluated on FOUR broad criteria, which are loosely defined, in order not to constrain innovative and wide-ranging ideas.

1. How easy is it to use?
2. How useful is it?
3. What potential does it have?
4. How engaging is it?

These criteria are a guide to entrants and to judges, whose decision will be final.

Supporting Information

The following may be helpful

• List of useful resources compiled for a previous competition at http://www.talis.com/tdn/competition_sources
• More about data munging is at http://codekata.pragprog.com/2007/01/kata_four_data_.html

Looking for ideas? Check out previous competitions and entries

• The 6 commended entries to the JISC activity data competition – http://www.sero.co.uk/jisc-mosaic-visions.html,
• Dev8D – http://wiki.2011.dev8d.org/w/Bounties, http://wiki.2010.dev8d.org/w/Bounties, http://dev8d.org/dev8d-2009/
• Open Repositories – OR08 (Southampton), OR09 (Atlanta), OR10 (Madrid), OR11(Austin)
• Linked Data Hackdays – http://devcsi.ukoln.ac.uk/blog/2011/01/26/linked-data-hack-days-13th-14th-january-2010-bristol/

Rules & Small Print

1. Entrants must be over 18 years of age.
2. There is no limit to the number of entries that an entrant may submit.
3. Entries may be submitted by an individual or by groups working together. In the latter case, a single email contact should be specified and any prize will be sent to this individual, with the expectation that it will be distributed amongst the group.
4. An entry will be deemed to have been submitted only when a complying email has received at joy.palmer@manchester.ac.uk by the closing date of 2359 hours (entrant local tine) on Monday 1 August 2011.
5. An eligible entry must include the following in a blog post or in a text file

Entrants(s) contact details

Introductory text including such as the data source(s) used

A link to the entry URL, which must be a web accessible application

Statement of any runtime requirements (such as browsers, Java, etc)

Any further information that might assist in making the most of the idea

1. No responsibility can be accepted for entries sent but not received.
2. Eligible entries must clearly make use of at least one of the listed data sources
3. All prizes are available to any entrant, except the competition judges.
4. None of parties involved in the Discovery programme or the DevCSI project nor the judges will be liable for any damage, loss or disappointment suffered by any person taking part or not being able to take part in this competition.
5. Competition winners may be required to take part in publicity and to share their code for re-use under an Open Source licence.
6. We reserve the right to amend these rules and prizes at any time and entry in the competition implies acceptance of these rules in their final form.
7. The decision of the judges is final.
8. United Kingdom law applies.

We have the definitive list of judges for the DevCSI Developer Challenge at Open Repositories 11, they are:

• Balviar Notay (JISC and Chair of Judges)
• Wolfram Horstmann (Bielefeld University, Germany)
• Dorthea Salo (University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA)
• Elin Stangeland (Cambridge University Library, UK)
• Sarah Fuchs (Georgia Tech Library, USA)
• Richard Jones (Chair of SWORD Challenge and Cottage Labs, UK)
• Alex Wade (Chair of Microsoft Research Challenge, Microsoft Research, UK)
• William Nixon (University of Glasgow Library, UK)
• Sarah Shreeves (University of Illinois @Urbana-Champaign, USA)

We interviewed the judges for the Developer Challenge and they identified the kinds of issues they were personally interested in and what they were looking for in terms of the ‘Future of Repositories’:

Sara Fuchs
Digital Initiatives Librarian at Georgia Institute of Technology

Click here to view the embedded video.

Elin Stangeland
Repository Manager for DSpace@Cambridge, University of Cambridge

Click here to view the embedded video.

Richard Jones
Software Developer, Cottage Labs

Click here to view the embedded video.

Sarah Shreeves
University of Illinois @Urbana-Champaign

Click here to view the embedded video.

Dorothea Salo
University of Wisconsin-Madison

Click here to view the embedded video.

William Nixon
University of Glasgow

Click here to view the embedded video.

Copyright Peter Sefton and Mahendra Mahey, 2011-06-07. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Australia. <http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/au/>

The Challenge is:

Show us the future of repositories

There are two additional prizes, one for the most innovative use of the SWORD protocol and one for the most innovative use of Microsoft Technology.

For further information and clarification about the challenge, click on the Developer Challenge Tab on this blog.

The DevCSI project sponsored a number of key developers to attend the Collaborations Workshop. We hear from one of these developers, Rob Allan (pictured right), who talks about his experience of the workshop.

I had known about the work of the Software Sustainability Institute for some time. I found out about the Collaborations Workshop from Neil Chue-Hong and Tim Parkinson who are involved in JISC-funded National e-Infrastructure for Social Simulation (NeISS) project, which I work on. I wanted to tell people about how we are using Sakai in NeISS to build Web interfaces for collaboration in private social networks, which also support Grid based data-management tools, simulation and workflow. I also wanted to represent the work of our department in supporting open-source development and the proposed Hartree Centre. So I registered for the workshop and somewhat to my surprise was chosen to receive a DevCSI award.

I was at the CRIB project review meeting in Lancaster on 2nd March – another project using Sakai, this time for managing networks of interacting researchers from business and management schools working with owner managers of small companies. So I was already on my way to Edinburgh and continued up in the evening. I met Hugh Glaser and a few other residents in the hotel bar. This was the first of a number of very stimulating conversations.

At the start of the first morning I put up a poster about the work of the Hartree Centre and gave a lightening talk. Among other things, I mentioned the Collaborative Computational Projects, which since 1979 have brought together groups across the UK to develop and sustain research software in a variety of science and engineering domains. The CCP model is successful in the UK, but software development is always tensioned against novel research, making sustainability hard. I also met colleagues over coffee – David Worth, Bryan Matthews and Neil Geddes from the Rutherford Lab. It turned out that I knew about half of the attendees as I have worked in e-Science for around 7 years (and wrote a book about my experiences). Hugh found it fun to chase down my other publications and network of colleagues from that period using his on-line linked data tools.

I participated in some breakout groups including the following. In the CRMs breakout, I explained our use of the Sakai groupware and social networking tools in addition to CRMs. At What are the benefits of collaboration?, I discussed the difficulties of managing large collaborations, particularly those with multiple sites or at an EU level. Smaller collaborations bringing together different skills to tackle a problem can be very beneficial. Some are unexpected but productive.

We were also going to have a breakout session on training Ph.D. students in programming methods, but there wasn’t time to schedule it. I would have been interested in this as I am a partner in a collaboration recently funded by EPSRC to deliver short course for Ph.D. students on High Performance Computing which will cover this and some related topics.

I think one of the most significant statements of the day, actually from Mahendra Mahey’s talk, was ‘if you out source development, you don’t have innovation’. Personally I believe that innovation is a key component of research, especially if we want to realise the potential impacts. That is as true in using software as in any other research methodology. Development should not be prescriptive. We want to bring together successful and focussed collaborations linking innovative software engineers with users in challenging research areas.

Thanks once again to the team at NeSC for their hospitality – it is always a pleasure to visit Edinburgh.

• Rob Allen
• Miro Keller
• Asif Akram
• Mark MacGillivray
• Hugh Glaser

The workshop will enable developers to work with researchers from any discipline. This could be to provide extra development effort on interesting open-development projects, partnering with research groups or simply attracting users for the software that has been developed. Each developer will report back about their experiences via the DevCSI and Software Sustainability Institute blogs.