But what happens when a team of higher education developers hear when things go right? The result is not just happier, more productive developers but an innovative tool to help academics, students and librarians to manage reading lists, and great publicity for their university. This is the List8D story.

The Dev8D effect

It began a year ago, in February 2009, when a group of six software developers from the University of Kent were sent to Dev8D, a four-day developer conference in London, an event which has been organised by DevCSI for the last two years. “We didn’t really know what to expect,” says Ben Charlton, the university’s computing officer. “We wondered if it was all a bit of a jolly…” he admits, slightly sheepishly. In the event, the outcome of those four days far exceeded the expectations of not only the developers but also their managers and university. The catalyst was that, alongside the workshops, training sessions, talks by industry experts and code labs, one of the key elements of Dev8D was a rapid prototyping competition where developers came up with speedy solutions to technological problems.  The Kent team chose to focus on an area that had been an issue at their institution for some time: reading list management.

The problem space

Reading lists are crucial for effective teaching and learning but Kent’s system was failing on many levels. Some academics would upload Word documents or PDFs, others webspages, and others nothing at all, as Katie Edwards, faculty assistant coordinator at Kent’s Templeman Library, explains: “Library staff used to try to put up the lists themselves but we weren’t getting the reading lists in from departments. This meant that we were not getting the full data about books, we didn’t know whether to buy books, and as the system couldn’t run reports we couldn’t find out about the usage of a book across modules.”

Through talking to other developers at Dev8D, the Kent team soon realised that it was not just a problem for their institution but a wider issue across the sector. They came up with what they thought was a useful solution: a web 2.0-friendly system with software that makes it easy for academics to create reading lists, libraries to manage stock and students to access the lists on a variety of devices. Although the developers had long known that there was an issue with reading list management at Kent, Dev8D provided the ideal environment to think creatively about the problem for the first time.

“We were completely away from our normal environment so there were no distractions like email, the telephone…” says Ben Charlton. “By having other people you don’t normally work with to bounce ideas off you get people suggesting things that you wouldn’t ordinarily have thought about. Being able to talk over those ideas with people from a completely different background was very useful.”

Screenshot of the Reading List Admin Screen

Prizes!

The Dev8D community agreed and awarded the Kent developers the top prize for their List8D user-friendly reading list management system. The prize provided funding for the team to continue developing their idea back at their home institution but also, and perhaps more important for the developers than the cash itself, the award showed that their peers understood, appreciated and were prepared to reward what they were doing.

“It was great that as well as the Dev8D prize we seemed to have a lot of people here getting excited about the idea,” says Ben Charlton. “When you come up with an idea with a collection of people that you work with on a regular basis and you enjoy working with then it’s nice when, collectively, you all feel appreciated.”

His colleague, Matt Spencer, agrees:

“It’s really important to get validation. When you design stuff for end users, often if you’ve done your job properly and the application works then it should be seamless and the users aren’t really aware of it, and therefore the only positive feedback you get is no feedback.  If you haven’t got any emails in your inbox moaning about how something isn’t working that’s generally the only validation you get from users. It’s rare for them to step forward and say this is a really good project, thank you for delivering the solution.  To actually get some positive feedback from our peers and for them to give an idea the rubberstamp of approval and say this is good stuff and we’re going to invest some money in it to allow you to develop it further for the community, well, it lets you know that what you are doing is good and that people want to see more of it.”

The Kent team with their winnings

Further support

It was also vital to the project and its developers that the support continued once they were out of the Dev8D environment and back in their regular workplace. The team were fortunate that they had a manager, Michael Wilcox, Kent’s head of web development and support services, who appreciated the effort they had put into Dev8D and the skills and knowledge they had gained. He was keen to see his developers integrate what they had learnt over the four days into their day-to-day work.

“They gained a huge amount. They came back very enthusiastic and full of good ideas. It did a great deal for morale and motivation…. It’s a very powerful thing when your peers say that you are doing something the best,” says Wilcox.

He decided to use the momentum of Dev8D to move forward with agile working and the List8D project by providing the development team with two very important assets: physical and mental space.

A room in the library was repurposed as ‘The Hub’. Kitted out with whiteboards and caffeine supplies, it has become a dedicated space for developers to get together to work on projects in the style of Dev8D, where the team had discovered that development doesn’t only happen behind a computer but also through intensive collaborative brainstorming, scribbling code on whiteboards and bouncing ideas off each other. Moving towards that process has also required a shift in priorities, away from working on a number of different projects at the same time and towards dedicating concentrated  time to a specific project and making real achievements on it before moving on to the next one. The team agree that it has fundamentally changed the way that they work, and for the better.

“We get more done as we are not having to do so much swapping between projects,” says developer Simon Yeldon. “Dev8D inspired us all to take back what we’d learnt and to refocus us on achieving rather than maintaining and our managers listened to what we had learned there. It is so important to have that validation from your boss and know that they are willing to make the leap of faith of committing all of their resources to something, more than they would have in the past, because they know that the approach we are taking works and they will get a project at the end of it.”

Dev8D also helped Wilcox to manage his team more effectively. He had been keen to experiment with agile development techniques and Dev8D offered an opportunity for his team to find out more from other developers and try it out on a small scale. “As they were at the heart of the change it really helped me to move things forward because I wasn’t trying to impose something on them they didn’t know much about or weren’t interested in,” explains Wilcox.

JISC Rapid Innovation support

List8D benefited immensely from the new agile approach introduced at Kent after Dev8D, with the developers’ dedicated time facilitated by a grant from the JISC Rapid Innovation programme. This enabled six developers to do two days work a week on the project for three months.

“The fact that List8D was JISC-funded and therefore given money and a deadline with a responsibility to meet that deadline has really given us focus and stopped other projects parachuting in and shifting the focus,” says Matt Spencer.

The JISC funding also helped Wilcox and his team to make the decision to go down the open source route with List8D. The team are building a community around the software to encourage developers in other institutions to pick it up, adapt it for their own particular needs and create a better product for everyone along the way. It makes sense for Kent as it helps to build a readymade IT support group for the software – “the more people we can get involved the better it is for everybody,” explains Ben Charlton -  while having Kent-designed software talked about throughout the sector is also a great boost for the university’s reputation.

“The publicity about the Dev8D prize went to various websites and it was in the JISC Inform newsletter. That got the attention of some of the senior managers at the university and, reportedly, it was in the in-tray of the vice-chancellor,” says Michael Wilcox.  “I think it’s very important to be able to show the influences in the place that we’ve got a good team and we’re getting recognition.”

The benefits

Most importantly, though, List8D benefits the users. Katie Edwards, who has been working with the development team and the academic faculties to ‘Kentify’ the system ready for rollout, explains:

“It’s really going to help the students as we will have full reading lists in the new system so we will know what books we need in the library and what books we need to order. It will be easier for academics to manage their list and send messages to library staff through the system. It benefits all parties.”

And the developers? Ben Charlton sums up the team’s experiences enthusiastically:

“For a start, we’re all a lot happier, which is no bad thing! We feel that we’ve gained a lot in that we’ve learnt some techniques such as prototyping mechanisms we wouldn’t otherwise have done, and been shown them by people who really know what they’re doing. We came back with a good idea we may not otherwise have done and that’s going to provide value to the university. As a result of Dev8D we’re developing a system that’s hopefully going to massively improve the management of our reading lists. And without Dev8D that probably wouldn’t have happened.”

Hear More From the Kent Team

The team’s manager, Michael Wilcox, speaks to Michelle Pauli about why he sent his staff to Dev8D and what he feels they gained from the experience in this video interview…

Click here to view the embedded video.

Developers Simon Yeldon and Matt Spencer speak to Michelle about their perspective of the Dev8D and List8D experiences in this video interview…

Click here to view the embedded video.

Computing Officer Ben Charlton discusses his involvement in the List8D project and how Dev8D helped to make the project happen in this video interview…

Click here to view the embedded video.

You can also hear a full interview with Katie Edwards here.

Reading lists can have a huge impact on achievements within institutions – a good reading list for a module on a course can make all the difference when it comes to obtaining the best degree. They can work wonders for the prestige of an institution and individual academics – a very good way to gain citations is to have your works recommended. They can also have a significant impact on budgets: libraries often first find out which new books they need to buy when they get a reading list from an academic.

Yet while they are useful, reading lists can also be problematic. They have the potential to give libraries fantastic information about what books are being used (and which aren’t) and so guide future purchasing policies, but few are working as well as they might. Inefficiencies within existing systems and problems within the three way communication process between libraries, academics and students have the potential to cost the education sector millions of pounds every year. And that’s not to mention the academic problems and frustrations that arise when books are inaccessible.  Certainly, it’s a subject worthy of serious investigation – which the 2010 Reading Lists Hackday set out to provide. The organisers hoped that the event would also serve as a useful template for potential future events around other topics.

For hundreds of years Cambridge colleges have got the best out of students and academics by placing them in close proximity to each other, encouraging them to exchange ideas over the dining table as well as the more formal surroundings of lecture theatres and seminar rooms, and making them to work damn hard. The Reading Lists Hackday which took place on July 22 and 23 in the Moller Centre, in the grounds of Churchill College Cambridge, operated on the same principles.

For those that haven’t experienced the uniquely intense and creative atmosphere of a hackday, a brief explanation:

A hackday does all the important work of a normal conference. It’s an opportunity for developers, and professionals to break out of their usual surroundings and see what lies beyond the parapets of the office environment. It provides a place where ideas can be shared and colleagues can be brought up to date on recent developments and projects within the field. It’s an opportunity to make valuable contacts that will save time and money in the future.

Click here to view the embedded video.

A hackday also provides an environment in which real practical work is done: in terms of coming up with solutions for technical problems, in terms of thinking up new ideas and ways to deliver better services and, in terms of the distribution of knowledge, expertise and even (at least in the case of this event) memory sticks full of code.

Click here to view the embedded video.

So, hackdays are events in which a lot of work is done. Indeed, plenty had been achieved even before things started in Cambridge, with the establishment of an email list to discuss and highlight related issues. During his introduction to the event, hackday organiser Mahendra Mahey put up a slide of the main areas for improvement discussed on the list. These included:

• Questions about the interoperability of different reading list systems to other systems such as Library Management Systems.
• Debates about the intended purpose and usefulness of reading lists, how much students use some of them and how well they could work as a purchasing and collection management tool.
• The possibility of integrating lists and social networking.
• How to maintain reliable stable links and keep lists up to date.
• Duplication of effort (i.e. how to avoid the need to input information from a word doc, for example, onto another reading list system).
• Metadata magic (i.e. ways to generate  rich information from single sources such as ISBNs).
• Prediction of demand of resources (e.g. impact of estimated class sizes etc for library and bookshop).
• How to extend the content on lists to include multimedia.
• How to track usage patterns, generate stats from lists and work out what students actually use. (With particular interest generated by the way students like to be able to find out what their predecessors who gained firsts had been reading…)
• Tools to aid communication between academics and the library.
• Marketing tool for libraries – i.e. promoting collections, recruitment tools for prospective students.
• A debate about the desirability of uniform standards for creating lists.

Delegates watch a presentation

Importantly, however, this was an event about solutions as much as problems. Before the serious work of hacking began, a number of delegates gave brief presentations on the projects they have been working on:

Telstar

Introduced by Owen Stephens and Jason Platts, Telstar is a project looking at how to integrate academic referencing into the Open University’s learning environment (which is based on open source moodle software). It offers high levels of automation and time saving tools to make entering references (and potentially, by extension reading list citations) easier. There’s  a nifty demo of the project available here.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

List8D

Ben Charlton and Matthew Spence gave the next talk on List8d, a project currently in development (started with JISC funding, and which Kent University now supports) intended to help with reading list management. It is designed to user friendly and will communicate with many platforms (such as voyager, amazon and google books), allows multiple searches, will organise metadata according to user-specified hierarchies, and has the ability to allow academics to send instructions to librarians (e.g. “this is an important text, please buy 100″). They also introduced the concept of the ‘metatron’ – a piece of code that enables List8d to connect to other systems, especially for providing items for a Reading List. Unfortunately, there was a technical fault with the camera and the alternative produced pretty poor quality video, so we have decided not to include it.

Talis Aspire

Chris Clarke talked about Talis Aspire, a resource list management service, and how to use collective intelligence to improve software and services. Chris said that academic engagement is key in the management of library resources – and in order to persuade academics to engage with a system, that system has to be as easy as possible to use, and useful to them. He also brought up some interesting ideas that they have been working on relating to collective intelligence. The experience of mining data from Talis Apsire customers suggests that there seems to be real potential in using masses of data to discover patterns relating to what students actually borrow (as opposed to what they are simply told to borrow). It would be possible, for instance, to provide recommendations for further reading based on borrowing patterns – and about avoiding the purchase of books that no one actually reads.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Mendeley

Ian Mulvany introduced Mendely, which has been described as a kind of Last FM for research papers (unsurprisingly, since the creators of Mendeley also created Last FM. It helps users to organise their papers, automatically generates bibliographies, allows sharing within groups and generates information about – say- which articles are read most frequently. It’s 16 months old, has 400,000 users, and real-time data on 28million research papers They’re currently developing their API and Ian said he hoped: “to find out if there are things within it we can make more useful for you. And what do you think is cool?” He then took the brave step of doing some live hacking of Mendeley using YQL (Yahoo Query Language).

Click here to view the embedded video.

Emerald

Cristina Irving and Alan Glasspool spoke about Emerald Reference, a product the publisher is developing as a free of charge service designed to help create peer reviewed reading lists, including, interestingly, lists reviewed by students. They hope it will improve workflow and offer a level of quality assurance not always present on reading lists drawn up by disinterested academics. They said that they only wanted to be one of such content providers and were pioneering the product as a service institutions.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Dawsoncenter.com

Finally, Heather Sherman from Dawson’s spoke about the ‘reading list’ funcitonality in the dawsonenter application, which allows items to be added to reading lists from Dawson’s database of bibliographic records (relating to books and ebooks), and then turned into orders directly – without the need to re-key data.

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Even while the presentations were going on and before the hacking began, useful links were being forged. It became clear from the presentations for instance that worries several delegates had about citations had already been tackled by others. And so a lot of time, effort, worry and money was immediately saved – as John Salter from Leeds University explains:

Click here to view the embedded video.

However, “the real work”, as many attendees termed it, began after 5pm. Delegates each wrote on post it notes what they saw important issues that had arisen on the day, as well as ideas offering interesting potential:

These were then stuck to a wall…

… and re-organised into relevant groupings.

These were:

1. Feedback and quality control issues
2. Repositories
3. Mendeley
4. Interoperability
5, “Random”
6. Purchasing and Usage
7. Styling

… Delegates mulled them over…

… decided which areas they were interested in and split up into teams (generally containing at least one non-developer alongside developers)…

… each team started working through the post-it notes related to the theme they had chosen and began to thrash out ideas…

… working deep into the night.

To someone unaccustomed to hackdays (like myself) the intensity of the work was striking – as was the solidity of the results that the various groups produced. By the middle of the afternoon on Friday, less than 24 hours after discussions about potential ideas had begun, a large number of projects were presented to the conference.

Two non-developers (Mark Jones and Cristina Irving), working in a group dealing with ideas about feedback about reading lists and using reading lists to improve communication between academics and librarians, had managed to upload data from Emerald’s RSS feeds into yahoo pipes, building up a database that could be developed to provide academics with a useful list of feeds and articles.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Ben Charlton gave a demonstration of a metatron which searches and retrieves results from kittenwar.com to show how easy it is to create the necessary code. More seriously, alongside all the data about Miss Princess Lady Meow Meow and co, he also demonstrated a metatron querying Kent’s Eprints Repository. This found journal articles written by Kent academics, but published in journals that Kent doesn’t have a subscription to – as Ben explains here:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Next, Ben O’Steen presented an idea called the 6 degrees of Harry Potter, designed to check through borrowing records to prove that almost every book borrowed from an institutional library is likely to be only six steps away from one of the books in the Harry Potter series. He devised a programme that checked through the ISBNs of Harry Potter books and then began to find related items, then items related to those and so on, as explained on Ben’s blog. The idea sounds frivolous, and won plenty of laughs from the delegates at hackday, but it potentially has serious and useful applications, as Ben himself suggests here:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Then, speaking on behalf of a group that had tackled the post-its related to styling issues and purchasing and usage, Jason Platts from The Open University demonstrated a programme designed to teach students how to write references by giving them forms to fill in and generating various styles as they do so.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Owen Stephens and John Salter, meanwhile, demonstrated a programme that used availability data from library catalogues to drive the acquisitions process. The idea is that when a student looks at a book that isn’t available within the library catalogue (generally because it is already out on loan) a notification of the problem is sent to library staff. At the same time, alternative methods of access are offered to the student, such as buying ebooks, or looking for copies in other libraries.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Matt Spence then showed off a programme that helped users swap around between citation styles (i.e. from Harvard to Chicago style) and another attractive demonstration of interoperability using the Talis API in List8d.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Last but not least, Chris Clarke from Talis introduced a project aiming to take a reading list, draw out the unique identifiers and re-order the list based on social data drawn from several sources. That’s to say, it mashes data from as many places as possible (such as Open Library, Talis Aspire, Google books for ISBN, and PLOS and Mendeley) to create a google gadget that takes a reading list and re-orders it based on popularity, how many loans have been made and similar. Chris said his team had had “mixed results” when it came to gathering data and finishing the gadget, but the concept well on the way to success and the group have already established a domain name and set up a website explaining the concept further.

Click here to view the embedded video.

There’s no doubt that the above makes for an impressive roster of ideas and outcomes, but, of course, these projects only tell half the story of the conference. As Angie Donoghue from Sheffield Hallam University suggests here, a great many of the benefits of hackday relate to other intangibles like the contacts forged, questions answered and concepts explained:

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These were sentiments I heard repeated often, alongside general satisfaction with the way the conference had unfolded. No one wanted to claim that the reading lists hackday wasn’t hard work , but for that reason it was also thought all the more rewarding and enjoyable. It was, in short, time well spent.

The success of the event also promises great things for the future. DevCSI will be bringing many more stakeholders, problem solvers and innovators together in the near future. Watch this space!

Click here to view the embedded video.