Semantic Living: Enhanced or Distracted?

I have always been fascinated by the organisation of information and the endless doors it unlocks, leading me onto pathways to new places - maybe that's why a I became librarian

When I was a girl I used to wait eagerly for my mum's seasonal catalogue. I spent hours scouring the pages, imagining what I would look like in the new outfits, choosing my toys for Christmas, looking at how much it would cost me over 12 weeks, 24 weeks for items I could never afford and comparing the details of the electric appliances. I would closely scrutinise the index finding related items, bags in the ladies section, bags in sport, bags in travel, I still read brochures, catalogues and magazine back to front, a legacy of those days.

My fascination with catalogues I think is analogous with my fascination with the digitally networked world we now live in, illustrated in my endless pursuit for connections with the information I find. A regular activity of mine is watching a film or TV programme with my tablet and laptop, surfing for details of the actors, information about their lives, the films they have been in, production details, box office stats and how many tomatoes received. Sounds familiar? It appears to me that we are living a semantic lifestyle, music services such as Spotify and Deezer, will create playlists based on your tracks and will suggest similar artists. Facebook and Twitter make recommendations of who or what to follow based on our online relationships, and web sites drop jars of cookies offering you products associated with the items we are browsing. Some may know the term semantic web was introduced by Tim Berners Lee and according to W3C "refers to the vision of the web of linked data". Although what I am describing may not be considered the semantic web in its purest sense I do think we are living a semantic existence, as increasingly the power of metadata and the integration of technologies facilitates our gold run of connections.

So this has led me to question if my semantic existence is enhancing my life or is it merely a momentary distraction. In one sense it has been a distraction when watching films and TV as I parallel surf, failing to give either one my full attention. On the other hand I think I have become more informed. One example is what happened last week. I watched the Punk Singer a Film about Kathleen Hanna   although I would class myself as a feminist and was pretty active in the late 80s and 90s, I  found that I was not very knowledgeable of the Riot Grrl punk movement, in particular the early work of Kathleen Hanna http://www.kathleenhanna.com/,  although,I had picked up on Le Tigre about 5 years ago via Deezer when I was looking for artists similar to Stereolab. The range of sites and apps I now have to hand has uncovered a treasury for the Riot Grrl movement. I have been able to connect with similar artists via Deezer, find out tour dates for via Song Kick, find old gigs on YouTube and art works via Google images. I also found academic articles via Google scholar. For somebody like myself who is fascinated in feminism and culture these semantic tools have enabled me to create my own multimedia catalogue. My own semantic approach and distracted curiosity has led to a unexpected enhancement to my existing knowledge.  
 

I thought I knew about technology....but sometimes it gets cloudy

I can see clearly now

I am a member of a natural voices women's choir and when I joined just over three years ago I volunteered to do their web site. They had a domain name and I thought I could do a simple google site and use a redirect to the domain name. This was all straightforward and the url worked fine until I failed to see the subscription for the domain name had expired. I quickly renewed the subscription for another 4 years eager to make sure that nobody else took our url, I thought once I had done this the url would work again, but I was wrong, when I entered the url it failed to recognise it. First I went to Google sites to see if I could do the redirect like I had done before but our domain provider was not on the recognised list, and the alternative option was very complicated and did not work for me. I decided to leave things as they were until had time to do some more investigating.

Inevitably things got in the way and my further investigating became an ever moving place holder. Anyway a few weeks I got a nudge from the one of the choir members that the web site needed updating, so I put aside some time to do this. When I had finished updating the site I decided to see if I could do anything about the url. The first thing I did was to enter the url into a browser and to my shock and horror it went to a page of adverts, advertising services that we would not want associating with a women' choir...I leave it up to your imagination with respect to the type of adverts. I reported this to the domain providers and once I had calmed down I did some more investigating and found that the site that was hosting the adds was a domain parking site, I had never heard of domain parking site, after some further research I found that these sites offer web site domain holders who are not using their urls opportunities to advertise to make money. It looks like they give advertising suggestions associated with the name of your site. I could not prove that the domain host had set up this redirect but it looked like a possibility, however, this gave me the impetus to pursue the redirect to my choir's site. After unsuccessfully waiting over 30 minutes on an 0800 number and some exchanges to email providers ta dah...the site is redirecting once more...phew, I no longer have a redundant url but I have definitely learnt something about the cloudy, possibly murky world of internet advertising.

#walktowork

Over the last year after changing my job I have had the pleasure of walking to work instead of an hour and 30 mins commute both ways by car. It seems like I am not the only the one and over the last few weeks I have found a small crowd of walktowork hastaggers tweeting pictures of their daily stroll. I still enjoy walking to work but it is mostly the same route so I thought a way to liven this up was to take a picture with my ipad and tweet this along with the track I was listening to when entered the door to work. The challenge I gave myself was to take a picture of the first thing that I thought was worth capturing, to not change my mind and to take an old fashioned approach by only taking the one picture and not to look at it until I got to work, thus not getting myself into the perfectionist digital spiral we all seem to get ourselves into. To be honest not looking at the picture was a greater challenge then I expected, initially it was a digital itch almost an automatic reaction to look and ponder whether I could have taken a better picture. The other antagonism was seeing something else as I walked to work that I thought would have made a better picture and to resist the temptation of taking picture of that.

It's interesting in days of yore before the digital camera explosion, the opportunities for perfectionism were particularly limited unless you had a really expensive polaroid instant. In fact taking a picture was almost a luxury, could I afford black and white or colour; should I buy a 400 or 100 film because I was not sure if I was going to be mainly inside or out, in shade or sun and finally shall I get a 24 or 36, as I was unsure the amount of poorly exposed pictures I would take and how many copies I would want. In fact I do not think I would have taken any pictures of my sojourn to work as I would have accepted the repetitive scene as an acceptable background to my walkman soundtrack.

Increasingly individuals are turning to mindfulness  living in the present as a means of dealing with this fast paced world that we live in and often there are recommendations that we drop our digital baggage to enable this. However, listening to my music and taking my pictures has helped me to focus on the fascinating elements of my walk to work thus eradicating some of my relaxed mundanity. It is also fascinating to see that other fellow walking commuters are doing the same all over the world. I am really enjoying starting my day with posting my picture together with my soundtrack and my seeing what other passing scenes are being captured by the people in my #walktowork gang - so keep taking the pictures, I will.

Here is my current collection together with the tune I was listening to when I stepped into work

Soft Shot Yeah Yeah Yeahs

Why Don't You Love Me No More John Grant

I'm Aquarius Metronomy

Ysebeidiau Heulog Super Furry Animals

Newton's Cradle Enaudi

Houdini Kate Bush

Black Belt John/Grant Dido My Life

It's the time of the season for reading lists

https://www.flickr.com/photos/kristykay/63408853/sizes/o/

Manically preparing for this year's induction and for the 14-15 academic year, as students all over the country shout with glee with their A Level results or ponder their future academic path because they have not been so successful, my mind turns to reading lists. I am about to start a project with my colleagues to implement more widely our Rebus reading list software after a successful pilot. This is open source and provides an online reading list the url for which can be put in various locations for students. Academic staff when creating the list can pull information from our library catalogue which should help mitigate errors.

Our reading lists don't look like Kirsty's 1998 Reading list on the left but the illustration is analogous of the difficulties some students have finding and using their reading lists, for example I have encountered  a situation where the reading list was midway through the module handbook, we also still have occasions where reading lists have not been proof checked and students struggle to find the title on the library catalogue. Admittedly, as staff increasingly put their content into the VLE and can see the benefits of linking straight to resources some have created their own interactive reading lists using  MS Word.  The benefits of having software to creating reading lists are similar to having anything online in a web format it can be viewed anywhere, you don't need a viewer for MS products, although tablets are pretty savvy re: this these days. However, linking to the existing collection provides a more streamlined approach for students accessing their resources, for example they may be one or two clicks away from viewing the availability of the title and reserving it if it is on loan.

For students about to start their courses acquiring their reading lists is a part of their rights of passage when starting their HE career, along with getting their key to their accommodation, joining clubs, finding the nearest supermarket and bar, meeting fellow students and teaching staff and the library induction. I was trying to find some articles on reading lists and pedagogy, a challenge that seemed to equal the challenge some students have with finding their reading list. I did however find this presentation from the University of Northampton Reading List Revolution: Exploring the Value of Reading Lists as a Pedagogic Tool (2012) by Sidall and Rose, it contains some insightful quotes from students about the value of reading lists, in particular this quote from a 1st year student:
particularly with students that have been out of the education system for a number of years, styles of learning have changed dramatically from when I was at school. So reading this [list] gives me some sort of idea as to where I can begin, where I can start, even what things to look at..
Lea and Jones (2010) in their research for their article Digital literacies in higher education: exploring textual and technological practice (Studies in Higher Education Volume 36, Issue 4, 2011) also found for students
guidance given by their tutor is the starting point for their studies, following links on reading lists, lecture notes and PowerPoint presentations, and supplementing these with searches using their own chosen applications, usually Google and Wikipedia. (p.387)
I think the last word should be left to Brewerton and O'Neil's at the University of Loughborough, in their presentation The Reading List Challenge: Implementing the Loughborough Online Reading List System (LORLS) (2014) they reveal ambiguous nature of reading lists
Academics aren’t aware of how (or even if) their Reading Lists are being used; The Library can only provide access to resources it knows about ; The institution’s reputation may suffer if Reading Lists aren’t doing their job.

Tracking the User Journey

Tracking the User Journey

In the latter half of the spring term I ran small project to track the user journey, we wanted to see where students went to first when they begin their research and we also wanted some feedback in on our library homepage. We use two methods to survey students. For the survey to find out where students went to first we use an iPAD and Qualtrics we only asked them 4 questions. With survey on our library homepage we also used Qualtrics but this was a lengthier survey that was in Blackboard. (Infograph to the left)

The response to both surveys was pretty good given that students may well be experiencing survey fatigue.

For the on the spot survey we had 116 respondents 46% of respondents go to Google first followed by Google Scholar (21%) and Library Resource 24%. The majority of respondents had accessed electronic journals (78%) and electronic books (73%), mostly via the library resources page (67%), 24% accessed electronic resources once a week (24%), followed by 2-3 times a month (20%) and 2-3 times a week (19%).

For the survey in Blackboard overall most of the responses were positive with respect to the library resources web page. The statement that received that highest number of agrees (61%) was the ease of understanding of the information on the web page, followed by 51% agreeing that the organisation is clear. However, 33% found the web site cumbersome, 32% disagreed that is clear and simple, followed by 31% finding it difficult to find information. The closest number of agrees and disagrees, was whether the web site is intuitive, 38% agreed and 35% disagreed.

With respect to describing the library resources page the highest percentage of agrees were that the webpage is credible (61%), followed by it being helpful (51%) and easy to use (47%). However, 40% disagreed that it is engaging and 31% agreed that it is frustrating.

66% thought the number of links is about right but 25% thought that there are too many, 9 % thought there are not enough. 68% thought that the content is about right where 20% thought that there is too much, where as 13% thought there is not enough. With respect to colour and image 36% thought that this does make a difference where as 38% responded that it makes no difference.

When asked to give an overall opinion 41% stated they were happy with the library resources page where as 12% were unhappy and 8% very unhappy.

When respondents were asked how they would change the library resource page most said they would change the way resources are found, followed by the look and feel and layout. Most of the respondents’ thought that the best feature is the information resources, whereas the worst feature is that there is too much content.

Although we took quite a simple approach it has helped to confirm that our library resources page requires a redesign. We had an inkling that a lot of students start with Google when they begin their research but it was reassuring that students were also using the library resources page as much as or really slightly more than Google scholar.

We are currently undertaking a redesign of the library resources page using the libguides platform. We have also decided to undertake some further tracking in the latter half of the next academic year but this time focusing on discipline and level.

User takes control - Spring Term PDA Pilot

PDA Infograph

In Spring term I managed a Patron Driven Acquisition Pilot Project at my institution.

For those unfamiliar with PDA, PDA is an example of the ‘Just-in-time’ acquisitions model which is a reaction by the library to ensure the needs of the user are met, as opposed to the ‘Just-in-case’ acquisitions model which is the traditional way in which materials are selected by a Librarian or teacher in anticipation of the user’s needs.  (Hike Project Huddersfield ) We also wanted to use analytics to review user behaviour with respect to their use of eBooks and eventual use of those purchased via PDA. We thought that we if we decided to fully implement it this would have a positive impact on user satisfaction. In addition, was also  opportunity for us to promote eBooks.

The PDA pilot is part of our resources for courses strategy where purchasing focuses on the demands of all users within the context of learning and teaching. Using a model similar to Liverpool University we had already begun to implement Rebus Reading Lists and working closer with academics and students with respect to purchasing of resources for modules. So to create a fully developed model look into PDA, however but before formally implementing we decided to fully test from a user and acquisitions perspective, so that we could develop appropriate processes and practices.

We opted for quite a simple approach, rather than selecting titles for the pilot we gave users access to all of the ebook collection provided by one of our suppliers. A title was automatically purchased after 5 minutes of viewing, if the title was below £150 if it was over the title purchase would require our approval. The amount we allocated was small in comparison to those in the 2012 SCONUL study  and the money was predictably spent very quickly - in 3 weeks.

The pilot was seamless for librarians as once PDA was set-up no further intervention was required after configuration the pilot seemed to run smoothly and PDA was automatically de-activated once the limit had been met. Most to the titles chosen appeared to be appropriate. The administration was straightforward and it was a good public relations exercise for eBooks

The main challenges were on the acquisitions side there was a delay in the sending of some of the invoices and it was less automated than the usual eBook acquisition process as records had to manually downloaded and the order had to be entered from the beginning, which might be difficult to manage if there were a lot of purchases Some of the eBooks were earlier editions than those already in the University collection

The PDA usage stats will be reviewed after 6 months within the context of our existing eBook collection to examine and compare usage. It has been recommended that a PDA exercise be undertaken on annual basis to enable our “Resources for Courses” strategy but to trial with a different supplier and undertake the following:

• Switch off access to old editions
• Ask the supplier to assist with building a collection
• Investigate automating the import of records

The PDA Infograph above provides an overview of the pilot stats.

OER14 Conference Overview

OER 14: building communities of open practice took place at the Centre for Life a science village in Newcastle upon Tyne.  The conference has been going since 2010 and I actually presented at the first one where the focus was on Open Educational Resources. Since the first conference there have been many developments in the open education world with the increase of open access repositories, institutional and national policies, international movements such as OER Africa and of course the growth in MOOCs . As well as these themes the conference also focused on research and open practice communities.  What I particularly like about this conference are the unexpected gems that illustrate practice in the field, for example Leeds Metropolitan’s work on promoting OERs to improve digital literacy and Alistair Clark’s presentation on the Skills Funding Agency’s Innovative Community Learning project to share resources, via its Project in a Box .   

I presented on day 2.  My paper was in a session of three, the first paper focused on the work of the CODARN learning portal, which will showcase online resources from across Wales. The second paper provided an overview of an open practice Masters unit at the University of Arts.  The theme of my paper was embedding open practice using the open knowledge framework, which had been developed by the Universities of Salamanca and Alicante in Spain to conceptualise open practice activities at the universities. I used this framework to benchmark our own institutional open practice activities, proposing that we could call Staffordshire an “Open Knowledge University” suggesting that this could be a new unique selling point for our institution. The presentation was well received and the audience seemed particularly interested that I had not focused solely on content sharing and creation but I included opening up physical spaces too. 

All the conference resources are available on the OER14 web site including my presentation http://www.medev.ac.uk/oer14/115/view/. You will also see a link to a tag cloud of tweets by conference delegates; you can just about see my name and activity - 43 tweets, 6 replies and 18 mentions.  

I would like to thank the conference organisers for putting together a varied and thought provoking programme in an excellent location. It was good to see that delegates represented technical, teaching and information professions. Comparing this to the first conference where the focus was on innovative practice it is fascinating to see how open practice activities continue to develop and be embedded in institutions far and wide. I suppose in the only threat to a conference like this is that open practice becomes so much part of the regular practice it might not been necessary to promote separately.  

OER14 Pre-conference

Had a lovely afternoon train ride up to Newcastle through such varied countryside and looking at the programme for OER14 the journey was symbolic of the varied presentation in store for conference delegates. I first attended the conference in 2010 when much of the discussion was about OERs, licensing, repositories, OCW and sustainability. Since then MOOCs have taken off big time, more and more institutions have open access mandates, discussions now turn to policy and navigating the murky landscape of research publishing. In parallel there is still considerable innovation taking place internationally with OER use and reuse, the stories often giving a reality check for many of us working in funded resourced institutions, despite the challenges we have had to face more recently. However, my challenge for next couple of days is deciding which presentation to go to and finding a power point to charge my devices, which are much smaller than in 2010.