Last week saw the 15th Institutional Web Management workshop, which was held at the University of Reading. DevCSI ran an open data workshop as an extension of the event and Mike Nolan fed back on behalf of the group during the opening talk to describe what we got up to. A full event report will be available shortly.
Paul Walk was also invited to give the closing plenary presentation at IWMW, in which he outlined the idea of the Strategic Developer and the work of the DevCSI project. Paul encouraged web managers to consider the benefits of local developers and to work with them to deliver greater value to their institutions. He cited a number of our recent case studies as examples of how this works in practice.
If you have a story about how a local developer has helped with the work of your web team, please contact Mahendra Mahey so we can add you to our list of case studies providing evidence for the impact of local developers.
Scott Prater from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Adam Soroka from the University of Virginia, presenting a brief demonstration of collaborative and distributed, real-time and failsafe, low-cost and easy-as-pie backups of digital objects using common household items from the comfort of your own home in their submission: “Federated Fedora Flows – Why Not?”
Michael Gutherie from Open Repositories presenting a collaboration between himself and Hayden Young of Wijiti focusing on integrating Joomla! CMS with institutional repositories.
Dave Tarrant from the University of Southampton presenting a prototype which questions the role of complex workflows and requirement for a full PC in the repository space.
Patrick McSweeney and Matt Taylor from the University of Southampton presenting their distributed research object creator, which creates value for the researcher and the institution from existing web resources.
Bess Sadler from Stanford University presenting on behalf of her team Chris Beer (WGBH), Michael Klein (Stanford) and Jessie Keck (Stanford), who developed a Ruby implementation of curation microservices.
Sam Adams from the University of Cambridge presenting solutions to some of the issues in Chempound – a semantic repository for linked chemical (and other scientific) data.
Rebecca Sutton Koeser from Emory University Libraries demonstrating a protype for doing dynamic deep-zoom on images and collections of images in Fedora, using the Djatoka image service and Python/Django to dynamically generate the DZI and DZC image content.
Peter Nuernberg from the Texas Digital Library presenting a prototype system using SWORD to build a second repository based on access patterns to items in a first repository.
Stuart Lewis from the University of Auckland, presenting on behalf of his team, Kim Shepherd, Adam Field, Andrea Schweer and Yin Yin Latt, who proposed an RaaS (Repositories as a Service) system.
The event is aimed at developers, web developers, information specialists, data managers and policy makers who are interested in the provision of open data to support a variety of institutional activities.
What’s going to happen?
The day will include presentations which outline various examples if use of open data such as:
Several open institutional data case studies
Surveying data of institutional use of social media services
Time has also been allocated for a number of lightning sessions where delegates can talk about projects, technologies or issues that they think other attendees will find interesting.
In addition to the talks, there will be opportunity for participants to suggest ideas for open development activities which could be developed during the workshop. Results from the event will be presented at the Institutional Web Management Workshop 2011.
A quick preview…
The opening talk will be presented by Chris Guttridge from the University of Southampton. Here is Chris waxing lyrical about the potential for open, linked data at our Linked Data Hack Day earlier in the year…
Inspired?
There are still a few places available for the workshop, which include FREE accommodation. Make sure you visit the event website to find out more and book your place now.
If you have any questions about the event, please email m.mahey@ukoln.ac.uk.
Our recent Accessibility Hack Days in Birmingham brought together developers, user experience designers, accessibility specialists and first hand users of assistive technologies with both visible and invisible disabilities. The event aimed to generate ideas and discussion about the issues involved with designing technology solutions for people with disabilities. This diverse mixture of perspectives helped to produce a range of projects and debates, which led to tangible solutions and even some working code.
In this event report we aim to summarise the key developments and give you a flavour of the event. Our thanks go to our partners at OpenDirective, supported us with the organisation of the event.
Open Accessibility
Steve Lee, OpenDirective
Steve Lee opened the event by discussing the benefits of open development, including agility, diversity and, ultimately, sustainability. This leads to user innovation, as the users are first class citizens in the development process. He expressed the hope that this event will act as a taster of this process.
To inspire us, he showed a video about GPII – a global public inclusive infrastructure, which will use the cloud to help more devices become accessible for more users by giving users a personalised interface.
Keynote 1:
Assistive Technology: Impact and Trends
Banes provided us with a wider picture of accessibility, noting that whilst we talk about issues like inclusive infrastructure and global solutions we often don’t questioning what that actually means. He showed a video to provide a sense of scale and to explore the links between poverty and disability. This made the powerful point that if you have a disability you are part of the largest minority in the world.
Banes identified several key trends, including a demand for portable solutions (not just mobile), a demand for cloud-based solutions, a demand for global solutions that allow people to move around the world, and a demand for personal solutions, as the disability is only one part of that person. He noted that fewer people now use just one product, they have systemic solutions.
He provided us with several case studies, including Mohamed from Doha, who was filmed speaking in Arabic. Banes used this to emphasise that language and culture are really important when considering global accessibility. He highlighted the limited amount of free open source developmental work available to turn to in developing countries, as it can be very difficult to adapt existing systems into languages like Arabic. Designing for people means not just thinking about the disability that someone has, but also the whole person – their age, their experience, their language and culture, the cost, the platform and the setting.
Banes gave the group some practical advice to consider issues such as how the product will be localised, how it will be distributed, how potential users will be informed and how will training and support be provided. He noted that most of the cost of a solution is not taken up by development, but instead by the distribution and support infrastructure surrounding the product, so we it is important to think about the whole assisted technology ecosystem when designing.
He emphasised that open source is very good at producing unique and interoperable solutions which are modular and easily customised. However, if we are going to grow global access, we need to design “vanilla”, language-free technology that we can flavour.
He concluded by issuing the rally cry: “Let’s not design for a market: let’s design for communities, regardless of location.”
Lightning Talks
Participants were invited to give a lightning talk to describe their area of work or interest by way of introduction.
How people with cerebral palsy use online social networks Makayla Lewis, PhD researcher, City University London
Lewis introduced her lightning talk by highlighting that 49% of the 16.46m internet users in the UK use online social networks, but many of these sites are not easily accessible by people with disabilities. She focussed particularly on people with more severe cases of Cerebral Palsy who struggle with communication, making online social networks a potential route to greater integration into a community.
She discussed the interviews she conducted with Cerebral Palsy sufferers as part of her PhD research to examine how they use social networks. Many reported this was the only way they could maintain independent communication, communicate privately and reduce isolation.
Lewis concluded by briefly examining some of the contexts in which social networks are used and the problems her interview subjects identified, which included: slow input speed, poor UI features, lack of appropriate help, frequent and abrupt OSN changes, which mean that they suddenly find they cannot use a network and have to rely on a carer.
BNCI BrainAble project Clare Folkes, Abilitynet
Folkes introduced us to the BrainAble project, which is a brain-Computer interface designed to capture, amplify and digitise brain signals to help provide commands to a computer. This can be used by people with locked-in syndrome, who wear an electrocap which identifies brain signals generated when they recognise things on a screen.
Folkes, explained that she is interested in the application of this for the deaf-blind, as the necessary brain signals are generated though recognition, which could be generated by touch recognition. Her aim is to to find people interested in making accessible semantic web tools to collate resources about deaf-blind across the world and the different ways they communicate to help further this and similar work.
WAC Mobile Device APIs Scott Wilson, JISC CETIS
Wilson introduced us to W3C widgets, which support cross-device applications, providing one package for an application which can then run in all sorts of contexts. He provided an an overview of the .wgt file used to create a widget, which includes HTML javascript, CSS, a config.xml file and an icon, which get wrapped in a zip file.
Discussed some of the key features, including extensibility, deep i18n l10n support and user preferences, and listed some implementations, including Opera 11, Apache Wookie, Blackberry, Android, Nokia S40 series devices and interactive white boards.
He also outlined how widgets can use device APIs to help a website gain programmatic access to native features without requiring native code.
Templates for accessible W3C Widgets Ross Gardler, OpenDirective
Following on from Wilson’s description of W3C widgets, Gardler outlined the Rave in Context project, which aims to build useful widget templates that have accessibility baked in and embed good practice. They hope these will help to address accessibility issues, even when developer doesn’t care that much about accessibility. He observed that making the widgets accessible can also help people without a disability, but who are working in an environment which poses a similar problem (e.g. loud environment).
Gardler appealed to participants for their help so he can understand the biggest issues and therefore see what they should be tackling first. Some templates were available for people to play with throughout the event.
Sense and the SenseBoard Shirley Evans, JISC Techdis Associate
Evans provided an outline of her work in connection with the Open University’s new level one course “My Digital Life” which presents a range of accessibility issues in the context of distance learning. The course uses a piece of software called Sense, together with a piece of hardware called the SenseBoard. These are designed to help give people a grounding in software development as an introduction to further programming courses.
A SenseBoard
Evans observed that this is very visual interface, designed to make it easier to learn programming concepts. However, it can be very difficult for people with a variety of disabilities. She is investigating whether there is a solution within this environment by adding accessibility features to the software, or whether there may be an alternative solution to make introductory programming more accessible without relying on the traditional linear way of teaching. She appealed for any ideas and suggestions to help her with this.
In this video interview, Shirley describes some of the ideas that were generated by the event following her lightning talk…
A full transcript of this interview is available at Vimeo.
Accessibility Block for Moodle Mark Johnson, Taunton’s College, Southampton
Johnson introduced his work to create an accessibility block for the virtual learning environment, Moodle. He had observed that there were some obvious features missing that would make Moodle more accessible. Many of the relevant features were hidden away, so the aim of his plugin is to bring these “into the user’s faces” more.
He demonstrated his accessibility plugin, which saves your preferences for future visits to the site. In the new version of Moodle he has also introduced an ATbar, developed at the University of Southampton, which is a javascript tool allowing you to add a toolbar into any page with any functions you like. This is relatively new, so it only has a few features so far, including zooming, text-to-speech and font changing.
He emphasised that he would like to hear ideas about ways of integrating further or better tools, or if anyone would be interested in translating the tool.
Keynote 2:
Accessibility of native HTML5 multimedia
Bruce Lawson, Open Web Evangelist for Opera
Lawson provided an overview of the features of the HTML 5 specification which aim to make multimedia on the web more accessible, focussing on the new video tag.
He began by examining the current embed code used for video, which he described as “minging”, violating the DRY (don’t repeat yourself) rule, just for starters.
“It is what your grandmother would use!”
He compared this to the new HTML 5 tag, discussing the functionality this provides, the fall back mechanisms for browsers which do not support HTML 5 and recommended techniques to maximise efficiency when designing for mobile.
Lawson went on to emphasis why video as a native object is an important thing. Native video gives you full control, including keyboard access to the video, which is difficult to do with Flash movies in non-IE browsers. He also noted that you can control it using other web standards such as CSS 3 and described how you can use HTML 5 form features to create some custom controls that look good and are automatically keyboard accessible.
Not all browsers support these features yet, but Lawson emphasised that the golden rule behind HTML5 is that you can do feature detection behind all of the cool stuff and patch with javascript if it isn’t supported. He used the example of the subtitles feature, which is currently in development. This enables you to add subtitles in the browser, which is done using a WebVTT file, which is just text, rather than burning the subtitles into the video. You can style it, increase the font size, use vertical text for Chinese, and index it. This is effectively internationally accessible out of the box, in the browser.
He concluded by providing an overview of other features in development, including synchronised videos, which would provide the functionality to synchronise multiple videos on the same web page, allowing the user to play two videos (one providing sign language interpretation for the other) in synch with each other.
Bruce’s slides from this talk are available below…
Participants brainstormed and debated various ideas, including toolbars, widgets, Moodle, Mavis, HTML5 and other very specific problems and issues. This video visualises the process.
Keynote 3:
Accessibility, Inclusivity and Interoperability
Sandi Wassmer, Copious Ltd
In her motivational keynote, Wassmer reflected the dynamic of the day. She emphasised that accessibility should be a right for all, and that whereas most people see accessibility as about disabled people, it is actually about everybody.
Wassmer observed that whilst we have come a long way – citing the example from web development, where most content management systems now tend to separate style from content – accessibility is still associated with things that people don’t get, as it is very subjective. However, in her own work, accessibility is not something Wassmer considers in and of itself. Instead, her approach is to connect accessibility with content strategy, user experience and how people interact with your brand when they visit the website. The aim is to deliver the best website they can that is accessible to as many people as possible, noting that a website that is accessible to everyone would just be text, which would be ugly.
Wassmer went on to make clear the connection between open standards and accessibility. She explained that open standards should be at the core, as this will lead to greater accessibility and interoperability, but this is not just the responsibility of the developers. Even the AT companies do not necessarily engage with open standards at present, but this will be crucial if we are to achieve proper accessibility, rather than silo solutions.
In conclusion, Wassmer emphasised that there were some really interesting ideas shared on day one. However, she observed a discord between the developers who want to get on and fix problems, whilst others want to talk about the issues and the users. She urged the developers to explain what they are doing and for the non-technical domain experts to look for the manageable things to solve. This led to an open discussion about articulating processes to help generate further ideas.
In this video interview, Sandi elaborates on these ideas and expresses her hopes for the event…
A full transcript of this interview is available at Vimeo.
Keynote 4:
Experiences of Open Accessibility Projects
Julian Harty, eBay
Harty, who has been involved in open source development since around 2007, began by giving us a practical example of an open source project by describing the evolution of his DAISY reader project, which now exists in three versions. He moved on to discuss the difficulties faced when attempting to include disabled people in open source development, highlighting the barriers that exist and the benefits to the individual that can be gained if they are able to contribute.
Harty observed that to get a sighted person set up and ready to contribute to an open source project can take about two days. By comparison, getting a visually impaired person involved is more difficult due to the variety of websites and tools required to make a useful contribution. These may not be easy to use with a screen reader, particularly if they are very rich, command driven-editors.
He described his attempts to make it easier to contribute to his project, including creating a wiki page to explain how to contribute translations easily, highlighting that key success factors include finding ways to make contribution as quick and easy as possible, and encouraging people to feel like part of the development team.
Harty observed that open source work can act as a testimony to the quality of your work, which can help in job interviews. There are tools that aggregate these contributions, which create a trustworthy testimony of your work and can help you get a better job. This makes it important to ensure that such projects are accessible to contributors with disabilities.
He concluded by discussing the considerable licensing and intellectual property issues associated with making contributions to open source projects. He noted the responsibility of the developer to know what they are giving away and to check what contractual restrictions may apply with their current employer before contributing.
In this short video interview, Julian discusses how he developed the DAISY reader project during the event…
A full transcript of this interview is available at Vimeo.
A Word of Warning
Neil Williams from Toby Churchill Ltd provided a commercial perspective on the developments at the event by observing that it is important to consider the assumptions you are making at the earliest stages in the design process. He noted that reality has to come into the design, as it can be difficult to unpick design assumptions later which may affect how useful the tool is in practice.
Ross Gardler made the point that it is easy to assume that everyone knows what we know, but it is important to remember and communicate with those who don’t have the time to become domain experts. He described himself as part of this problem space, but hopes he is becoming part of the solution.
In this video interview, Ross explains what he feels he has learnt as a result of the event…
Scott Wilson explained his moment of revelation following Bruce Lawson’s presentation about HTML 5 video. He hadn’t realised before that video on the web was not video in the web, whereas HTML5 makes it really part of the web. To exploit this, he created a prototype video subtitle editor VTT Caption Creator, which enables users to play a video, stop it, add a caption and then resume, generating a subtitle text file at the end to use with in their HTML.
He hopes this will make it easier to get more video content subtitled, which is currently an expensive and laborious process.
In this video interview, Scott explains how the event led him to develop the VTT Caption Creator, and how easy it actually was…
Mark Johnson worked with others to adapt his Moodle accessibility block, turning it into a W3C widget and hosting it on the Wookie server. This means it can now be embedded in other environments. Laura Dickinson also helped to style it so it looks more attractive.
This development helps the user by enabling them to customise any site using the widget to suit their needs, and helps web designers by providing a simple plugin to make their site more accessible.
ATbar
Sebastian created a bookmarklet to add the ATbar toolbar to a browser, including a function to create a list of all headings and links on a webpage. He hopes this will help people who want keystroke functionality but can’t install JAWS for any reason, as it works through the browser, or as a mouse alternative to help people get the JAWS-style functionality. Code is already available on Github.
JAWS Menu System
David Yates developed a JAWS menu system to help beginners, which, as Mark Wassmer pointed out, could be extended to help developers test their websites without knowing the keystrokes. He is going to pursue this as a result of the event.
Text Communication
David Banes identified a real life scenario he had been trying to solve for two deaf people in Qatar, who wanted to communicate with each other using text through handheld devices, preferably via a bluetooth connection, as wifi isn’t always available.
Through discussions at the event, he found the solution, which involved using iPhone/iTouch, installing the Arabic keyboard layout, then using existing applications to connect and facilitate the chat. This problem had taken weeks of research, but was solved quickly through the fresh perspective of other participants at the event.
In this video interview, David explains how the event helped him solve this problem, and summarises his key points from his keynote presentation…
A group of developers produced a prototype tool for testing websites against WAC standards to see if the site is accessible. They hope to launch this as a toolkit or web service, which could be run against very large sites automatically.
DAISY Reader Keyboard Control
Julian Harty demonstrated his extension to the DAISY reader project, providing keyboard support which in turn will enable users with motor impairments to control the system using click pads.
This video shows the system in action, accompanied by an explanation of some of the issues encountered during development.
FriendlySpaces
The FriendlySpaces project follows on from the Spot It, Share It Android app developed at an event last week. The group carried out user research to examined how people experience difficulties accessing different spaces and devised a way of people finding friendly spaces to suit their needs, then share information about those spaces. They produced a mock up of a recommendation system that can take previously stored preferences and compare them with information about a particular room to determine if that space is suitable for the person.
In this short video interview, Makayla Lewis explains in more detail how the project evolved, and highlights what she hopes to have achieved through the event….
Brian Kelly discussed the ways in which people have collaborated throughout the event and the sustainability of the communities which have formed. He looked at how we can provide mechanisms for participants to help them curate their own communities, including identifying contacts that have been taking part, looking at their profile of usage over the event, their use of geo location, the applications they use and the resources they shared.
Web developer Laura Dickinson was inspired to develop FocusIn directly after attending the event. The tool works within a web browser to highlight a selected area, making the text easier to read. You can try the demo here.
Screenshot of Laura Dickinson's FocusIn tool
Conclusions
The event aimed to give a taste of what open development is about and generate dialogue about accessibility issues by bringing together developers and accessibility experts.
Whilst there were concerns about the ways and extent to which the developer community currently engages with users with disabilities, the outcomes of this event demonstrated the wide range of innovative solutions that can be created when such a diverse group of people come together to talk and learn from each other. We are very keen to learn from this event and welcome all feedback.
UK Discovery and the DevCSI are running a global Developer Competition throughout July 2011 to build open source software applications / tools, using at least one of our 10 open data sources collected from libraries, museums and archives.
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
You build a software application / tool
You must use at least one of our 10 data sources
You may optionally combine our data with any other data
Your code should be Open Source – available for others to use, perhaps at Github, Googlecode or Sourceforge
You finish by 2359 your local time on Monday 1 August
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)
The judges will select the winners to be announced on 5 September, 2011.
If your entry works, it will be linked from the Discovery and DevCSI websites
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.
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.
How easy is it to use?
How useful is it?
What potential does it have?
How engaging is it?
These criteria are a guide to entrants and to judges, whose decision will be final.
There is no limit to the number of entries that an entrant may submit.
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.
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.
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
No responsibility can be accepted for entries sent but not received.
Eligible entries must clearly make use of at least one of the listed data sources
All prizes are available to any entrant, except the competition judges.
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.
Competition winners may be required to take part in publicity and to share their code for re-use under an Open Source licence.
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.
Pitching for the DevCSI Developer Challenge at Open Repositories 11
On the first day of pre-conference meetings at Open Repositories 2011 we started promoting the DevCSI Developer Challenge. We visited all of the meetings we could and encouraged people, to:
if at all possible, enter
come along to the Developer Lounge during the conference and at the final ’Show and Tell Session’ on Thursday afternoon to see ‘the future of repostiories’
encourage any of their colleagues who might have good ideas and some development skills to step up.
Each of the meetings had a different mood. The Fedora Commons committers were committed to solving fundamental architectural questions around authentication, authorisation, modularity and so on. The Hydra Partners were heads-down bringing together threads of work that have been going on all over the world on a major application. The Curate Camp, was set up as a kind of unconference where delegates had to choose/vote from a list of topics (e.g. community consensus on the tools, specifications, and microservices that are most needed; use cases for those tools, specs, and services; and interoperability among tools and repositories/digital asset management systems) in the area of curation, either presented prior to the meeting or during and discuss them for 30 minutes. If discussions were deemed valuable enough to continue, they did, if not, they moved on to the next one
And the DSpace group had started their session with some blue-sky dreaming. They compiled a list of points on “What’s the modern Repo?”. This is pretty close to our developer challenge theme of “The Future of Repositories”. Below, see a transcript of a whiteboard, taken from an EtherPad document from the DSpace meeting that we were not attending, via Tim Donohue. Might lack a little context, but worth glancing through for inspiration.
There are some key words and phrases here we might have heard 5 years ago at the first OR in Sydney, such as “submission should be much much easier” or “preservation”. But back then we would not have been hearing about Dropbox, the beautifully simple cloud-based file replication system or the SWORD deposit protocol because they were not invented yet and nobody knew we wanted them until developers made them.
One thing on the list is “new name”. A potential entry in could be built around that. Think of a new name instead of repository and show something that demonstrates what it would look like.
Or could you re-imagine the repository as set of small pieces that all “do one thing, [&] do it well”? Get one piece working, and tell us about the rest.
“What’s the modern repo?” Brainstorm
Link (including photo: https://wiki.duraspace.org/display/DSPACE/Brainstorming+Activity)
- not just research: photos, music, data, etc
– More different kinds of content and metadata
- research management systems
– CRIS moves the repository to the back-end. As CRIS will be the front end
– In edinburgh, PURE is being used with the LNI to ingest
- simple (visual?) import — think dropbox?
- DepositMO
- SWORD / SWORD2
- Scott: submission should be much much easier.
- Bram: ScribD also had very easy upload, but poor in metadata. Nice feature in embedding lists & collections in other applications
- automated metadata capture
- content easy to use / reuse
- CRUD
- branding / theming
- customisations (metadata and metadata structure)
- storage system integrations
- flexible content workflows
- versioning / relationships
- flexible authorisation
- give control to user communities (branding, etc)
- complex objects (representation of), human- and machine-readable
- scientific data sets
- reporting
- content reuse (“open” data)
- eg. embed in dept website
- search (easy)
- faceting / filtering
- statistics: regular reports to item authors (like Digital Commons), plus usage/admin reporting
- bot filtering
- getting stuff out
- disciplinary aggregation
- creating adhoc “sets” of content
- (this made me think of http://www.apsr.edu.au/orca/ - Kim)
- shareable metadata
- different metadata “views”
- shared version vs local use
- new name: just “repository” or “storage”?
- preservation
- identifiers / persistance (flexible, granular, parts of items, people, collections)
- the perils of handles…
- DOIs vs Handles
- Truly *external* IDs
- access / privacy
- “repository / DAM system that can display stuff vs. CMS that can do DAM”
Interviews with some of the Developer Challenge Judges
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
Elin Stangeland
Repository Manager for DSpace@Cambridge, University of Cambridge
Richard Jones
Software Developer, Cottage Labs
Sarah Shreeves
University of Illinois @Urbana-Champaign
Dorothea Salo
University of Wisconsin-Madison
William Nixon
University of Glasgow
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/>
Developer overhauls a time-wasting library reporting system and upskills library staff to make better software decisions in one fell swoop.
In this DevCSI case study, Michelle Pauli explores a local developer success story from the University of Cambridge, examining how the developer improved the online reporting services for college and departmental libraries within the institution, and provided valuable education about future software sourcing…
The problem space
The University of Cambridge libraries team was using a commercial library management system that could not cope with the demands of specialised reporting for the 70+ libraries it supported.
Librarians need reports – the basic information to run libraries, such as details of all the items on a specific shelf or a list of outstanding fines. However, Cambridge’s librarians were unable to run these reports themselves as it had to be done through an access client. Every time a librarian needed a report they had to request it from the libraries@cambridge team who would run the report and email it to the librarian.
It was resource-intensive for the system support team – taking up about 70% of two people’s time – and frustrating for the librarians who had to wait for emails for figures they urgently needed to go about their work.
What the developer did
Huw Jones, a systems support librarian with developer experience, had been brought into the libraries@cambridge team from a college library on a part-time basis. He quickly identified the issue and spotted the way out.
Using a rapid, agile development cycle, he talked to librarians and started to develop a web-based automated service based on demand, tackling the librarians’ most-requested reports first. It was an iterative process and included feedback from those who created reports in the team as well as the librarians. Extensions to the system came through request by librarians, who were asked to let the development team know about anything causing them problems.
The result was a web interface that took the onus off librarians to wait for an email and turned running reports into something they could control and manage themselves.
Screenshot from Libraries@Cambridge
Tangible business benefits
“We were locked in a cycle of spending all our time running to keep up and not having time to look around and see what could be done better. It was an investment in time to get time back,” says Jones.
This investment in time-saving has allowed the two members of staff who had previously been spending the majority of their time running reports to focus on other areas of activity instead, including record quality, bibliographic control, more training courses, looking into improving quality of data, and branching out to new areas. New services include stock checking and an FAQ database as well as service improvements.
It has saved the IT staff time, as they no longer have to print out stock checks and walk over to librarians with them, and the new system can identify and correct cataloguing errors automatically.
And it has saved librarians time as they no longer have to send out requests and wait for emails. They can access information about their services at any time.
In addition, librarians are able to access far more information as they are no longer restricted by the capacity of the support team. As a result, the number of ad hoc reports produced has increased from approx 2,000 a year when run manually, to 3,437 last year under the new system.
A total of 57,000 reports across all the libraries were produced last year, of which 36,500 were scheduled reports, including daily circulation stats which were previously run monthly with far less detail.
Why use a local developer?
Cambridge’s in-house solution to its libraries problem was responsive and organic and removed the issues of annual maintenance fees and quality support that would have arisen had it outsourced.
“With outsourcing the costs are not just financial, with licenses and support fees, but also in staff time supporting and communicating with vendors,” says Jones. “It also makes sense to have local control over the system. Once seen as separate, we now see it as a network of things we have available eg the library management system, access to student data and other systems. So now when we build interfaces we think of these systems as a network of resources we can build on top of.”
The experience of local development has “upskilled” all the staff involved to the extent that Jones believes that they will be able to make a much more informed choice about commercial v local development in the future having now had the experience of going down both routes.
Furthermore, it has had a positive impact on the development team’s wider ambitions and aspirations. “We are now much more involved with trying to get funding for collaborative partnerships to do interesting things – having done some local development and having more project expertise and collaborative experience as a result, we now want to expand outwards,” says Jones.
A local developer turns a time-consuming and resource-intensive process into an efficient, flexible system that exactly meets the user’s needs.
In this DevCSI case study, Michelle Pauli reports on a local developer success story from the University of Exeter, where local developer Jamie Aylward created an online Student Ambassador system to manage the process of advertising and allocating student ambassador opportunities…
The problem space
The University of Exeter employs students to perform a variety of “ambassadorial” roles for the institution, from stewarding open days and marshalling events to leading campus tours.
Organising this workforce involves a series of administrative tasks. A pool of potential student ambassadors must be sourced and their job history and experience recorded, the jobs need to be advertised and then allocated in a fair way, students must be notified and reminded, and payroll details need to be shared across departments.
All these tasks were being done manually, via lengthy emails detailing work opportunities and, says Karl Devincenzi, Exeter’s Student Ambassador Development Officer, by “printing off spreadsheets, laying them all across the floor, and hovering over them with a highlighter pen”.
Errors inevitably crept in and it was also hugely time-consuming and resource-intensive. “I could be doing better things with the time, especially if the university was looking to expand its activities,” explains Devincenzi.
What the developer did
Soon after taking on the role and recognising the problem, Devincenzi approached in-house developer Jamie Aylward, showed him the current system and outlined his requirements. Working closely with Devincenzi, Aylward was able to produce a product that exactly met his needs. The online Student Ambassador System now covers:
events with varying numbers of jobs, locations and experience,
payroll information,
claims for work done outside the listed events,
equitable job allocation,
evaluation of ambassador performance,
email reminders,
automatic job allocation that can be adjusted by the administrator,
student management system that incorporates photos to help administrators recognise the ambassadors,
event templates for where regular events such as open days that always need a set of different jobs.
Screenshot from the Student Ambassador system
Tangible business benefits
The new system has had a clear impact on the efficiency and output of Devincenzi’s department. “I’m now doing more than double the activities and I would not be able to deliver that without having this system in place,” he says.
Capacity has increased with the number of students employed rising to over 200, and the service provided to the students has improved.
“It’s a fairer system for students as it collates real statistics about what they have applied for,” Devincenzi explains. “That consistency and fairness makes a massive difference. It also reduces error – I used to end up allocating the same student three times but, luckily, the computer knows that you cannot split a person in three!”
With the reduction in admin time – Devincenzi estimates that he is saving three to four days a month on admin – the department is freed up to expand into other ambassadorial activities, to the benefit of the institution as a whole. The benefits also spread beyond Devincenzi’s own department. The automated payroll element of the new system means that the finance team are no longer having to manually process paper timesheets, saving them time each month, too.
The system is now also being used on Exeter’s campus in Cornwall, and other institutions have expressed an interest in finding out more about how it works.
Why use a local developer?
Building locally to a clear and detailed remit rather than using an off-the-shelf solution meant that the system could exactly match the needs of the client.
Aylward pinpoints the value of the flexibility of the local developer – as and when new features were needed in the system he could easily and quickly add them. For example, a year after the system was in place it became clear that it would be useful to have email reminders sent out a week before the event. This function was swiftly added.
The data is owned by the institution which also allows greater flexibility. It can be integrated easily with Exeter’s other systems without the cost of going back to a commercial company.
For Devincenzi, ease of access to a developer with local knowledge was a key factor in the success of the project. “Jamie is a stone’s throw away so could easily discuss what needed to be done,” he explains. “He knows the resources that currently exist and has an understanding of how the university works, such as the payroll system, and so I didn’t have to spend time trying to explain all that.”
“Having Jamie working on this in-house made a huge difference and meant we could jump a lot of hurdles,” concludes Devincenzi.
Local developer uses trust to overcome requirements disconnect, creating a system which saves time and helps staff to make smarter decisions.
In this DevCSI case study, Michelle Pauli explores the successful work of the local developer who created the British Antarctic Survey SOUTH Travel Database…
The problem space
Staff from the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) make more than 400 journeys a year to and from the Antarctic. The BAS administration team were managing and tracking staff movements through an access database that was laborious, didn’t tie into any other systems and did not keep the history of previous years. Only the core admin team were able to access the information so staff had to be notified of travel plans by letter or email, and the admin team were also dealing with a time-consuming number of travel queries by phone.
What the developer did
Developer Dave Connor was embedded in the team and implemented a rapid, iterative workflow which began with a detailed requirements analysis. This was followed by small chunkable pieces of the system being brought online week to week and tested out with the users with an instant feedback loop.
“We could mock things up really quickly and they could trial it against the old system and see how it would work,” explains Connor. “It introduced an element of trust between the developer and the user, a sense that ‘you are invested in my concerns’ as opposed to ‘here’s a new thing, use it’.”
The result was a new web-based system that allows all staff to view the travel reports, that retains information history year-to-year and is integrated into the organisation’s finance and personnel system.
The project was well-documented with one set of documentation aimed at any newly hired developer who may be thrown in at the deep end and told to fix a bug; and a basic guide for administrators detailing how to set up log-ins and processes.
Passenger Movements on RRS James Clark Ross
Tangible business benefits
The time-saving benefits of the new system have enabled administration staff to branch out into new areas of work, allowing them to shift their focus from dealing with mundane requests to planning and improvements.
“It also helps others to know when people will be around, and not in the Antarctic as they can now look online and check itineraries instead of pestering other people for information. It’s one of the great benefits that this data is now freely available to everyone in the organisation,” says Ellen Bazeley-White, Archives Manager at BAS.
In addition, the availability of information about flight and other travel costs from previous years has aided with financial planning.
“At any point in year the team can make a quick judgement on how much they spent on flights based on past knowledge and current estimates. This means that administrators don’t have to go through a layer of bureaucracy to get running figures and it has increased their ability to make smarter decisions during the year or planning for the next year,” explains Connor.
Why use a local developer?
BAS had made two failed attempts to change the system using external companies before finding success by using local development. In both previous cases the project faltered because of a disconnect at the requirements stage – external companies did not have the insider knowledge to ask the right questions to capture all the crucial small details about the exceptions to the norm, the “what ifs”.
“It’s not that the requirements for sending people to the Antarctic are so unique, I think it’s that they are so similar to existing travel systems that the exceptions in travel we absolutely required were often skipped or poorly implemented or misinterpreted by outside developers,” comments Connor.
BAS found that an embedded local developer had the flexibility to respond to the little problems that crop up, and they could also suggest changes to the user’s workflow through understanding the goals they were trying to accomplish.
An alternative to outsourcing the whole project would have been to hire in a consultant through a contracting company and then embed them. While this removes some of the risks of self-hiring as the quality of these consultants is generally high, it would have been a more expensive route and left BAS with little control over the hiring process.
“By recruiting our local developer ourselves we found Dave who is easy to talk to and can communicate the development process really well – we can discover that through an interview. It is much easier for us when the developer is approachable and can use day-to-day language,” explains Ellen Bazeley-White.
Developer overhauls a time-wasting library reporting system and upskills library staff to make better software decisions in one fell swoop.
A local developer turns a time-consuming and resource-intensive process into an efficient, flexible system that exactly meets the user’s needs.
Screenshot from the Student Ambassador system
Local developer uses trust to overcome requirements disconnect, creating a system which saves time and helps staff to make smarter decisions.
Passenger Movements on RRS James Clark Ross
