For a summary of the key points discussed both during the plenary and parallel sessions, check out the blog posts that were written during the conference by our team of bloggers on the JISC Digitisation blog, where videos of the all the plenary sessions have also been added.

Many thanks to all of you who took the time to complete an evaluation form on the day. We have received some very positive feedback and some excellent suggestions for taking this event forward. If you have not yet completed a feedback form, you can still do so online. Your feedback form is very important to us.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Stuart Lee took as his theme “Content is king, but we are in a republic”. After raising several laughs with his Star Trek ‘library of the future’ (where apparently there will be no enforced retirement age for librarians), he went on to call for a move towards community digitisation.

Stewart, the director of Computing Systems and Services at the University of Oxford, started off by making several key points:

• content will always be king – a library without content is an empty room
• there has always been and always will be lots and lots of content – so the important question is: how do we access it? (illustrated beautifully by Alfred the Great!)
• enriching access is important (for example by using timelines, Flickr, podcasts, mobile access etc). However, you can build it, but you will then need to encourage people to use it.

He pointed out that people now do have the capability to use new methods – over the last 10 years, the population has acquired digital cameras, mobile phones etc

Stewart said that we need to move away from the traditional view of digitisation (concentrating on rare/unique content from major collections):

• we’re looking at the same thing again and again and again
• we’re broke – we need to maximise social outcomes while working with less money
• it’s not sustainable

So to combat this, Stuart suggested that we need the public to do it – that there should be a move towards community digitisation. We should utilise mass amateur digitisation, release new material and engage the public – they do provide excellent value for money, and it would enable widespread coverage and community involvement and engagement.

There’s a caveat – can we trust the public? Yes: they’re enthusiastic, and have an immense amount of knowledge. However, they may concentrate on strange stuff (aardvarks, for example…), and the things they cover may be unique, but not rare.

Stuart closed by saying that we shouldn’t underestimate the community, and called for JISC to set up a mass observation service/community collection service.

Click here to view the embedded video.

This session saw Sarah Porter put JISC’s work in context (encompassing everything from bourbon biscuits to global infrastructure). Quoting Nick Poole, she told us it was “time to stop thinking and get on and do”.

Sarah focused on JISC’s contribution to the UK e-infrastructure and work in progress, making the point that JISC’s work needs to be seen in a global context. Global issues are now affecting the way people learn/teach/run their lives. We’re in a world of content, not just a UK – content comes from everywhere (whether digitised, commercial or user-generated) and everything is distributed (and also people can search from everywhere). Business models are being turned upside down.

So what is JISC trying to do? The enabling bit:

• infrastructure (eg JANET, middleware)
• policy and strategy – helps to make the decisions (eg Open Access)
• practice (what should be driving infrastructure decisions) eg understanding learning and teaching through tehcnology, digital content in an educational context, new models for sharing scholarly knowledge

Sarah said that JISC was in the process of producing a new strategy, but the challenges included:

• the open agenda (eg Open Access, Open Source)
• sustainability (business models and environmental sustainability)
• efficiency (through shared services)
• innovation to support user needs (we don’t provide the perfect solution)

She then went on to outline the vision (which had to be done in partnership):

• crowd-sourced, user-selected content
• accessible, engaging
• more value from the wonderful resources that we have in the UK – we don’t make enough of them because of fragmentation

However, we can only achieve all this through active, focused collaboration.

Finally, Sarah rounded off her whistle-stop tour by quoting Nick Poole: “time to stop thinking and get on and do”.

Simon Whittemore from JISC gave some background on JISC’s £6m business and community engagement programme. Sarah O’Donnell from MMU discussed their wide-ranging community engagement programme. And Paul Lowe from the London College of Communication talked about three projects currently underway to engage the local community and the global community of photojournalists.

The session was introduced by Joanna Newman from the British Library, who made the point that this session was extremely timely, given the transformation of DIUS into DBIS.

First up was Simon Whittemore from JISC, talking about JISC’s business and community engagement programme. It was a fast and furious tour through JISC’s work to enhance partnerships, including a brief guide to the business information resources project with the British Library.

He started by asking the question: What is business and community engagement? The answer was, in a nutshell: partnerships, particularly strategic partnerships. There are several closely related strategic areas: knowledge transfer/exchange, employer engagement, public/community engagement and lifelong learning. And in terms of institutional activities or services, that means things like CPD, consultancy, public lectures/events/festivals, community-based learning – it’s a huge range.

JISC is trying to encourage institutions to understand who their customers/partners are, with the end objective of benefiting society as a whole (for example an innovative business economy, social cohesion, etc). Simon also gave a swift overview of the policy documents driving this area, and the diversity and scope of engagement.

JISC programme

The JISC programme itself is a £6m, three-year rolling programme, across six streams. Its key aims are:

• improve efficiency/effectiveness in business and community activities
• improve access to institutions’ knowledge and expertise for business and community organisations

The key principles include cross-pollination, co-creation and co-development. And the benefits are many – competitive advantage, helps with managing and adapting to change, added value to name but a few.

There are challenges:

• there’s a gap between what’s in an institution’s strategic objectives, and what’s operational reality
• creating awareness in areas outside the traditional JISC communities (JISC is trying to bring together disparate areas that need to understand what business and community engagement involves – for example libraries, IT, finance, marketing)
• it’s happening already…so it needs to be managed.

So far, JISC has run workshops to try and understand where people need support (externally and within institutions). Issues that have shown up are access to resources and expertise, developing capability, FE-HE good practice exchange (FE is ahead in employer engagement area for example). The barriers are often perceptual (ie cultural and organsiational) rather than technical – it’s often an issue of packaging/presentation and terminology. There’s also a discoverability and demand issue.

Simon then touched on the SCG Grey Literature Report, followed by the British Library Business Information Resources study project. The latter aims to explore the feasibility of institutions acting as regional hubs for the provision of business resources in partnership with public libraries and RDAs – providing things like business metrics, economic data and expertise. It needs to enable both remote and walk-in access, and also faces the issue that there’s a vast amount of information available, but navigation can be difficult.

Other important projects include: Digitisation, curation and two-way engagement (a feasibility study on the advantages of collaboration on digitisation), and SME e-empowerment.

More information is available on the JISC website.

Manchester Metropolitan University case studies

Simon was followed by Sarah O’Donnell, head of corporate development at Manchester Metropolitan University (MMU), who explored some of the benefits, challenges and opportunities involved in public engagement, focusing on three projects run by MMU.

She told us that MMU sits in the middle of a deprived part of Manchester, and that community engagement is central to the university’s mission.

Benefits of public engagement

• civic responsibility
• opening up of spaces for communication
• being open to influence

Sarah made the point that the benefit of social media in public engagement was very significant, as it increases the possibility of new voices and ideas being heard. MMU is part of the Beacons for Public Engagement partnership – it’s a £9.2m public engagement project that focuses on how you change the culture in your institution to reward academics who want to take part in this kind of work.

Manchester’s focus (and this includes Salford University and Manchester University, as well as MMU) is listening to its community. They took the stance of not defining who their community was.

What are the challenges?

• doing things differently – needs to be a two-way exchange of knowledge
• changing the culture of HE, and opening locked spaces
• embedding HE in the community

The projects

MMU decided to use new methodologies, particularly in their Mapping Creativity project to map Manchester.

Using social media networks (blogging/twittering etc) it sent out message to everyone to ask: what are your ideas? A £25,000 prize was on offer to deliver their project, with academics working alongside. A simple criteria (250 words and an image) lowered barriers to entry. A ‘Dragons’ Den’ style competition was held where 12 finalists pitched their ideas, and the winning project is now up and running, led by a community group.

MMU has also built a MMU community website, with the concept of “looking over the wall”, and asking “what on earth goes on there?”. It’s hoped that the new campus which MMU is building will be a big feature of the community website.

MMU’s third project used X-factor methodology, to choose a community project. They held a competition for six ‘public engagement fellows’ who would each get £10,000 to take forward a project – but only if the project was developed with the community. People sent ideas in, and it was put to a public vote on their website.

Sarah concluded with some important lessons:

• Don’t hang your social media jacket up on a peg when you come in to work!
• Social media techniques are important!

London College of Communication case studies

The third speaker was Paul Lowe from the London College of Communication, part of the University of Arts London. He presented us with three case studies of projects:

• Elephant Project
• Open-i: Open Photojournalism Education network
• Knowledge Transfer Partnerships (Press Association)

Paul first of all gave us some background – lots of websites are now appearing where the interface between journalists/amateurs is not mediated by gatekeepers (eg traditional media like The Guardian). Some examples include:

• DEMOTIX (News by You)
• socialdocumentary.net
• PhotoVoice

Elephant Project

London College of Communication is based in the Elephant and Castle area, which is in the middle of a multimillion pound regeneration project.

Their documentary project (the Elephant Project) came out of the practice-led MA, and will run for around 10 years. Each year a theme is set, and students go out into the vicinity around college and shoot their story. The students go out and interact with community to determine the concepts behind what’s photographed. An exhibition is then shown each year in the local museum to draw the community in.

Open-i

This project aims to build an online community of practice around photojournalism. Paul made the point that there’s critical debates going on at the moment over issues like truth and ethics, but there’s very few spaces in which this type of thinking and critical reflection can take place.

The project sits in the middle of 4 major players:

• freelance practitioners (fragmented globally)
• industry (agencies, publications)
• aspiring entrants (students, early career photographers)
• education (not just university but other institutions like Reuters Foundation)

Knowledge Transfer partnerships: Bringing creativity to business

Three KT associates are working with the Press Association on futurecasting, to help with producing a new business model. They are looking at where new technology can take the Press Association, and leave a legacy of change and innovation when the KTP closes down.

Questions

A short question and answer session followed.

Q: To Sarah: You had to drive people to the website because they wouldn’t fall over the MMU website normally – how did you do that?

Sarah: Using social media: we got the community groups that were working with the academics to twitter, and use social media networks to spread it out as wide as possible.

Q: To Sarah/Paul: How much are your initiatives are embedded within an institution, or do they depend on project funding (and are therefore more likely to be axed in the current economic climate)?

Paul: The KT partnership is government-funded. The Elephant Project is an assessed part of the curriculum, so goes on even if people don’t fund it. The dissemination, however, is project-funded and this can be a struggle (even within the institution). The Open-i community is JISC-funded, with the hope of it becoming self-supporting when that ends.

Sarah: We don’t envisage doing our projects again, but the beacon has helped us realise it’s about the change within the institution rather than the particular project. So from the start we’ve engaged with the absolute top of the university to make sure this change is embedded. We’re also considering using the contribution point to reward people for financially for doing this, or releasing them time-wise.

Simon: It’s a 20-year change programme, that can’t be achieved in the short term – a slow process.

Q: How do you reduce the risk of this sort of community engagement actually enlarging the digital divide rather than reducing it (eg the MMU project making large use of social networking)?

Sarah: The public engagement project was driven by technology to bring new audiences, but yes, not always the whole audience. So there’s lots of face-to-face stuff that needs to be done too, that we do at lots of different levels.

Paul: Some of the Elephant Project will be focused on going into community with the technology (media labs) to overcome this.

Session 2 of the User Engagement strand looked at what makes a well-used resource, and how you go about measuring the impact your resource is having on its users using qualitative and quantitative metrics. Claire Davies from Curtis and Cartwright focused on the benefits of audience research, and Eric Meyer from their Oxford Internet Institute talked about the Toolkit for the Impact of Digitised Scholarly Resources (TIDSR) and different methods of measuring impacts. Finally, Susan Whitfield from the British Library gave an overview of the International Dunhuang Project to put the Silk Road online.

The session was chaired by Paola Marchionni, JISC Digitisation Programme Manager. She began by saying that how users engage with resources is very important, particularly if content is consolidated (how do you cater for a plurality of users?).

Claire Davies from Curtis and Cartwright kicked off by asking: Who are your audiences? She focused on the benefits of audience research, and gave an interesting case study of where audience research had been used.

Why research your audiences – what are the benefits?

• It gives you an evidence base to help you make better decisions, and is useful for bids for funding.

• It allows you to find out where there’s a market. What do your audiences want?

• It can help with deciding if you’ve got a pilot right: is it usable? Does the search engine work, is it accessible?

• Project/service transition: it’s especially useful for future funding – have you reached your audiences? Are they satisfied?

• It can help with ongoing improvements – what could make your service better? It can also help give priorities if you’ve got a limited budget, and target appropriate groups for marketing.

What is audience research?

Claire explained that audience research was a process of planning and conducting a programme of work to better understand audiences and audience behaviour. It’s more than just demonstrating a certain number of visitors or website hits – it can give you a rich picture of information (on customer satisfaction, for example).

She took as a case study, the British Library Archival Sound Recordings, a JISC-funded digitisation project.

They used audience research to:

• develop and test website

• promote the service

• monitor use of the website

• ensure the service is fulfulling its role

• gather and test ideas for the future (what future collections should be digitised?)

Audience Research Lifecycle – some good practice guidance

1. Define the target audience (who is it for? – you may have groups with different needs)

2. Plan the research (set clear objectives, what questions do you need to answer – are you researching funding models? Who doesn’t use your service?)

3. Collect the research data (DIY or buy? What research methods – survey, focus groups, ethnography? Needs to be a complementary.)

4. Analyse the data to model your audience – ie model persona of a user

5. Apply and make use of research?

Claire also made the point that whether digital or non-digital, the principles of audience research are the same. There’s obviously additional research techniques available digitally (eg web statistics), and the audience is remote.

Co-existence is an interesting consideration when looking at digital and non-digital resources – some have both. The London Museums Hub looked at the primary use of its websites, and discovered that most people were coming to see when museums were open, and how to get there etc – so there was no point developing online collections.

Claire also warned against taking advantage of new technical possibilities (eg podcasts) if it wasn’t something the audience was interested in – an enhanced search engine may be more useful. Developments need to be user-led, not technology-led.

Key points

To sum up, her key points included:

• know your audience!!

• audience research doesn’t need to be perfect to be useful.

• doesn’t have to be a massive project – even a small audience research project can have a big impact

• many techniques can be implemented cheaply (piggyback on what you’re already doing – workshops, feedback from helpdesks etc)

• audience research should be an ongoing process – it’s much more effective when it’s built into the project lifecycle

• can help you prove value, and is useful for programme management

More information and guidance is available at http://sca.jiscinvolve.org/audience-publications/

Toolkit for the Impact of Digitised Scholarly Resources (TIDSR)

Eric Meyer from the Oxford Internet Institute then talked about the Toolkit for the Impact of Digitised Scholarly Resources, which focused on the usage and impact of a selection of JISC Phase 1 Digitisation Projects.The key recommendations to JISC and presentation/slides are available on their website, http://microsites.oii.ox.ac.uk/tidsr

The Phase 1 projects studied were:

• Online Historical Population Reports
• British Library 19^th century newspaper project
• British Library archival sound recordings (phase 1)
• BOPCRIS (British Official Publications Collaborative Reader Information Service)
• Wellcome Medical Journals: Backfiles Project

The goal is for the TIDSR toolkit to grow over time and become a knowledge-base. It provides a series of articles,sources of data, etc about the different methods/different ways of measuring impacts. Eric made the point that by combining a number of methods you get a nuanced picture of the impacts.

Quantitative methods

• analytics (eg Google analytics – really useful if you have your own website). But don’t be too bogged down in these things – look at it over time, say three months or six months.

• bibliometrics/science metrics (ie citations). This can be hard because there’s a bias against electronic citation in some fields (you might cite a physical newspaper rather than a digitised version of it for example). Including a recommended URL for citation on your site helps.

• log file analysis - can help understand how people move through a website, how long people spend on pages etc – can be combined with focus groups and questionnaires/surveys.

• webometrics – like bibliometrics but for links (inward and outward) for sites. These can help if you’re trying to understand relative importance/value of sites.

Qualitative methods

• content analysis of news reports (unique names are easier!)

• focus groups

• interviews with project personnel, users and non-users

• referrer analysis (for example from reading lists and libraries)

• user feedback (need to track patterns)

• audience analysis

Eric also pointed to some small, unexpected impacts that had come out of the interviews that they’d carried out:

1. The quality of undergraduate dissertation work was improved by early contact with digitised primary sources (you can virtually use materials that you’d never have been able to get access to until much later as a postgrad).

2. The types of research projects being presented at conferences were increasingly quantitative (eg text analysis on large collections).

3. There were new possibilities for serendipitous research – you can see what else is in a collection quite easily.

International Dunhuang Project

Finally, Susan Whitfield from the British Library spoke about the International Dunhuang Project to put the Silk Road online.

In the early 20^th century, the Silk Road route saw a period of imperial archaeological expeditions and exploration (especially in the eastern Gobi area, where desert conditions had preserved materials).Finds were packed up and sent by camel/ship to the countries of the explorers and most ended up in public institutions.

One particular site, Dunhuang, contained a hidden, sealed cave (around 900 years old), which contained 40,000 manuscripts and paintings. Most of these are in the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris. The finds are a very rich resource dispersed worldwide and very fragile, so an obvious one for digitsation so they can be looked at as a single entity.

The IDP was formed in 1994 to collaborate on conservation, cataloguing, digitsation, research and education. There are around 10 holding institutions worldwide with major collections and 30 other smaller holding institutions, covering over 200 archaeological sites and 300,000 (maybe 500,000) manuscripts/paintings/artefacts (of which around 100,000 are online)

The first online resource went live in 1998. The website is in all the user languages (Chinese, Russian, French, English etc), with others coming online soon. There isn’t a single definitive catalogue online – all the historical catalogues (published and unpublished) are used, and users encouraged to submit their own work too.

What makes a well-used resource?

The IDP are primary users of the site, and are very close to their users – they spend a lot of time with them at conferences etc. Susan said a well-used resource was one that was:

• visible – people have to know about it
• quality – in design and content
• usable – including issues of access
• reliable – the site must stay up
• had a clear set of users, and a clear reason for digitsation

She also made the point that while the IDP’s core set of users were researchers/academics and educators at all levels, the general public and SMEs were also targets (particularly when chasing European funding)

But there are some problems:

• you can’t try to please everyone
• some projects may not want to get more and more and more users (network capacity and servers are a problem)
• predicting the future – it’s impossible!

Questions

A lively question and answer session followed, that probed into the issues a little deeper.

Q: To the IDP project – have you considered links to research output that’s related to the subject? Or collaborate on projects like the one funded by three UK universities to create a wikipedia-style resource on the Silk Road?

Susan: Yes, we do link to research output, and invite them to send us their research projects which we put online – whether that’s projects done by ourselves, in collaboration or by people using our material. We’re also a partner with Golden Web.

Q: There’s a tension/paradox here – the more specific your collection is, and the more specific stuff you know about your audience and can use to prove funding etc the better. But what do you do about economies of scale/collaboration?

Eric: It can be hard once things are federated – are you putting them in the right places where the people you want to attract are going? Are the materials well linked to? It can be hard to get people to do things in a different way.

Q: Leeds university library were surprised to find some of their online material on leather bindings very popular….so wondering whether some of metrics can be skewed?!

Eric: This can be shown up in the qualitative data. You can then put something on your site to say – we’re really not the right place for what you’re looking for! (HistPop did this for genealogy searchers).

Claire: Don’t rely on web statistics! Combining all the data is very important, and can help with this.

Q: Can you talk about societal impact (important for ESRC-funded services, for example)?

Susan: In terms of public use of the resource- we haven’t done this formally. We’ve done it informally – via mailings, talks/lectures in the various geographical areas. Most of our sense of public use is done via logs, and feedback (80% of feedback on the site is from the general public).

Claire: Non-usage and unintentional usage is hardest to get a handle on. You have to be quite innovative (where do you stop?). You could use broader surveys (you could piggy back on for one question), rather than do the impossible.

Susan: It concerns us for EU funding bids – especially as they are focusing on increasing knowledge of this with the general public in Europe.

Q: For Claire: you use the term audience research – is this different to market research (which can have slightly negative connotations!) Do we have to be careful about approaching market research firms, and are there words of caution?

Claire: In terms of what it’s called market research seems to be a private-sector term. There’s not a huge amount of difference. If you do hire people in, you need a good knowledge of what you want out of it. The onus is on you to find out what you want, and make sure people deliver.

Q: Looking at this research and evaluation, we’ve not talked about whether there’s a policy on open access to raw/digested data?

Eric: We’re all for openness: our data/results are there for all to use. There is a general trend towards more openness.

Summary: some top tips from the panel!

Eric: Have people involved who are users/creators of the resource, and experts in the content.

Claire: Don’t underestimate the challenge of developing digital services – it’s every bit as hard as the physical world. But get stuck in, and do stuff within your limitations.

Susan: Listen to your users but don’t be bullied by them (it’s like letters to newspapers – they’re not a representative sample!).

Amber kicked off with a brief history of OERs.  Over the last 10 years the push has been from holding material privately to more sharing inside institutions. Around 2001-3 there was a lot of talk about content packaging and reusing and the language was about learning objects and repackagaing – taking more of an organisational approach and tutors sharing their materials and resources. The focus was on workflows from creation to curation. Then along came web 2.0 and a different environment where people mix and match the huge range of services, along with creative commons licences and  a change in what you do with content online. Now the focus is on discovery to delivery workflow. The OECD report 2007 was the landmark report into a worldwide approach into OERs.

Amber pointed to three dimensions of openness:

• social (open access)
• technical (open formats)
• legal (open licensed)

and commented that it is not just about openness within formal education but, through projects like Wikipedia and Wikiversity, also making content available to the general public.

OER Pilot Programme

The OER Pilot Programme is funded by Hefce and run by the HE academy and JISC. It has three strands – subjects, institutions and individuals – and a crucial element is  synthesising and evaluating what is happening.

There are 30 pilot projects in total with over 80 institutions involved and the aim to release a significant amount of resources openly; prompt change and clarity; adapt processes and policies; act as a pilot to inform design of next phase.

Technical requirements have been kept quite minimal – there is no single platform or metadata profile. Projects must publish by open institutional repositories; and or web 2.0 and or other channels. However, there is a mandated metatdata tag: UKOER

According to Amber, the key point is that it is about releasing existing content, enabling culture change and making it sustainable; providing support from experts in the sector on IPR, accessibility

“There are no easy answers as some of this is new – that’s why it’s a pilot,” said. “We are looking for bold, innovative experimentation, and we will see a variety of platforms and approaches.”

One of these approaches was next described by Andy Lane, director of OpenLearn at the Open University.

Promoting the view that “content is content – it is not about giving away the family silver,” he set out some of the reasons why the OU decided that it is worth making content open. These include:

• It is consistent with university’s commitment to social justice and widening participation
• It can be a way of building markets and reputation
• It can be a testbed for new developments
• It is a way to learn more about the university’s own business model
• It can be a way of drawing materials from other organisations
• It can provide basis for world-wide collaborations

He mentioned that there was institutional buy-in from day one, which made a great difference. A feasibility report was agreed mid 2005 to undertake a pilot project, of which the major aims were:

• enhanced learning experiences for users of open content (self study content plus open learning environment)
• greater involvement in HE by under-represented groups
• enhanced knowledge and understanding of open content delivery, how it can be effective (research and evaluation a big element)

The results are impressive. OpenLearn, as LabSpace and LearningSpace, have seen 5m browsing visitors since launch October 2006, while there are 100,000 registered users. A browsing visitor can see nearly everything while registration is needed to post on forums or use tools). Content is accessed and used online, added to online, referred to from another VLE or website; taken away and used elsewhere. It is available in a number of different formats from print and zip file to Moodle Backup. It is also available as an  RSS feed which can be used to pull it into other platforms such as a Wordpress blog.

Andy offered some examples of how OpenLearn is supporting widening collaboration, including introducing black and ethinic minority students to learning; providing learning to offenders at 15 prisons; and developing thinking skills for Openings students; partnerships with UnionLearn and NIACE. There are also partnership activities, such as with Sussex Lifelong Learning; University of the Third Age; microsites for Wales and Scotland, and international activities including an OCW consortium and informal partnerships such as TESSA (Teacher Education on Sub Saharan Africa)

In conclusion, Andy said that:

• OERs attract people because they can do something with them
• many people want more than just the content
• OERs have been assessed against the OU’s own mission and strategic priorities
• OpenLearn has been run as an active research project
• Educators need strong commitment and continued support
• Being involved in networks has been important
• OER work needs to align with both day to day and longer term activities
• There is the possibility of exploring new business models – advertising, value added services, disaggregated services?

With little time left to run in this shortened session, Peter Burnhill then gave a whirlwind tour of Jorum.

Unusually, Jorum is not an acronym (etymological origins include ‘drinking vessel’) and it began as a keep-safe commissioned and grant-funded by JISC for content developed as output from UK publicly-funded projects.

It launched in 2006 as a repurposed JISC national repository and has 3,300 resources, 6,500 registered users at 320 universities and colleges. It is now being adapted for ‘open sharing’ and a catalyst for effective collaboration between learning technologists and tutors, JISC and the community of use it serves, EDINA and MIMAS.

Jorum is going open access with lots of new, open content to be available via Jorum. The key targets for reshaping Jorum are:

• community bay and OER deposit too
• deploy Dspace alongside Intralibrary
• Customised Dspace used by Jorum team
• Service preparation, autumn 2009-06-30
• Ready to launch Jan 2010

With the reshaping, Jorum will become:

• a place for sharing learning and teaching materials
• a place for finding learning and teaching materials
• a place to come and exchange views and tools

This is a pivotal moment for film and sound in education. Digital Britain was the last gasp of an ancien regime. We need Robespierres not Bourbons to do this future mapping.  For the students of the future, multimedia will be their way of working. We will not distract them from Facebook unless we can offer a more compelling experience.

This was the radical message that came out of a lively session on the use of digital media in education, featuring the work of the JISC Film and Sound Think Tank (Peter Kaufman, Paul Gerhard) and JISC Digital Media (Zak Mensah).

New Yorker Peter Kaufman, president and executive producer of Intelligent Television, immediately got the British audience on side in this session on using digital media in education. To appreciative smiles he commented that, having driven through a series of pretty Cotswolds villages to reach the conference, he has a certain amount of regrets about the War of Independence. He also noted that there is nothing like JISC in the US – even if the name does sound like “a mysterious Soviet agency from Lenin’s plan from the 1920s”.

Pleasantries over, he offered an inspiring vision of what we could do to create a system to prepare cultural and educational institutions for participating more fully in screen culture and the great global conversation online. He argued that with ‘internetistas’ calling for an unregulated, neutral internet against fierce industry-led opposition, the competition for voice and audience will be fought among us like alley cats or a pub brawl with weapons close at hand.

“What tools can we give culture and education so it can hold its own in that fight?” he asked. “Can we create a system of support for the great libraries and museums and journalists and truth-seeking documentarians just as the great studios have done for film-makers, and can we do it at a time when people are losing faith in the schemes that are governing communication on the web?”

It is ambitious, he said, but no more ambitious than the work that the techies are doing now to make all the information in the world fit onto an iPod, or the cameras that can make every political event in China or Iran instantly recorded and uploaded.

“This is a pivotal moment for film and sound in education. The industry-led Digital Britain was the last gasp of an ancien regime. We need Robespierres, not Bourbons, to do this future mapping,” he declared.

Is the JISC Film and Sound Think Tank one such Robespierre?

Paul Gerhardt from Archives for Creativity and co-chair of the JISC Film and Sound Think Tank went on to explain its work.

The group aims to widen formal and informal participation in digital media, accelerate the use of media, improve the quality of teaching learning and distribute the benefits of cutting edge research. Over six stages there will be 12 deliverables, including:

• Imagine – a film antidote to the dystopian visions portrayed by Michael Wesch in his YouTube hit A Vision of Students Today

• studies of the anatomy of IP rights

• showreels highlighting the timeline of JISC’s investments

• case studies like those produced at Hull and shown yesterday

• podcasts of the think tank sessions

The Think Tank is looking at five key areas:

Media integration
The work of the Strategic Content Alliance is very important aspect of this activity. Outside JISC, we can see the way that the BBC has already transformed consumption of media and TV through the introduction of the iPlayer and to come, BBC’s Project Canvas to bring internet into living room via open IPTV standard. The tipping point between on demand television and channel-scheduled TV has been reached. It also involves ITV, and Channels 4 and 5. There will be a profound step in the integration of media in the UK.

Origination and re-use of content
It is not just about the creation of new broadcast programmes but also how the value established in the archives can be opened up for the future. Some of the BBC archive team have likened this value to the coal seams established millennia ago whose value could only be recognised when we had the skills to mine them.

Open production methods
One of the most exciting developments is the possibility of truly open video where a number of people can become involved in its production and conclusion and use. There are now entire feature films made through open production methods. Wikipedia is working on an open video system and it is a very exciting development. The source code and all material will be open to be re-edited and re-used, just like the items within Wikipedia itself.

Academic community involvement
This is critical. The wisdom of crowds has to involve the academic community in revealing film and sound material. BBC has to tackle the issue of how it releases the one million items in its cultural archive. At the moment it is locked up within programme definitions – science or natural history or news etc – the BBC needs involvement of communities who can look across the collections and say what theme they are interested in – transport, biodiversity and so on – so the collections can be broken down and tagged. The BBC needs that involvement otherwise the release of archive becomes nothing more than release of old programmes you missed 20 years ago.

Enabling structures
We need to be able to deliver trends and developments. The Open University was created in the late 1960s. If it was rebuilt today it would not be a bricks and mortar institution to deliver distance learning and media. Today’s enabling structures have to be lightweight and build in the ability to enable and involve their audience.

Paul mentioned Steeple, a collaboration across universities to form a  portal aggregation of material from Oxford, Cambridge, OU and UCL:

“It is a vision of what might be the future of work to similar standards and metadata and working together and aggregate material across different institutions to allow institutions to encode and deliver the material efficiently and quickly.”

A delegate in the audience from UCL said that he was involved in a Steeple pilot project with film students. The issues was that while they could see material on the web, the students wanted to put it on their iPods and download it, play it. “We’ve got to get it on iTunes U and flash stream it and so on. It’s a big area and the more we can collaborate the better,” he said.

“This is a pivotal moment in film and sound – how can we cascade out all the good things that are being down to the sector as a whole so that people can be learn quickly? For the students of the future, multimedia will be their way of working. We will not distract them from Facebook unless we can offer a more compelling experience,” added Catherine Grout

An example of how JISC can help was offered by Zak Mensah from JISC Digital Media (formerly TASI), a service to help further and higher education with all their digital media needs. It has an email helpdesk plus training workshops, blog, advice papers, and consultancy.

Watch Zac’s presentation on Slideshare

David Flanders’ talk was a glimpse into the world of efficient technology design and implementation. Matthew White talked about his experience in marketing, and Shelley Hales and Nic Earle spoke of their success with Second Life.

David Flanders, JISC Programme Manager, Digital Libraries/e-Learning

David began his talk by talking about form factors.

Form factors are all about the way that things fit into each other. Whether they are microchips, servers, or ipods, all objects have been designed to fit specific forms (in these examples computer motherboards, other server components and human hands).

Identifying what your users’ needs are will inform the form factors.

For example, the Google Android phone allows the following uses:

• Reading news on the tube, while still holding onto hand rail
• Reading news on train without taking over too much space
• Reading tweets in the night without turning on light

Once a form factor has been identified, the next step is to create a storyboard of how the device will be used, and then build a wire frame to identify what code and information is needed at each stage of the development.

David then went through some work strategies for building systems or devices. He explained techniques such as standing up during a meeting instead of sitting down, speaking from the point of view of the user, and resisting the temptation to plan every stage of a process from start to finish. These techniques are commonly used in software companies, and academia could benefit from adopting them too.

Mathew White, ShadowPlay

‘Technology is anything invented after you left school’, began Matthew. Growing up with technology generally means that people don’t struggle to use. it.

Matthew explained how marketing online is becoming increasingly attractive, and how not only is internet advertising spending increasing, paid search now makes up half of online spending.

The key to successful marketing is to understand the difference between what people need and what they want, and then to engage users, tell stories, get involved and add value.
Resurrecting the Past Project, University of Bristol

Shelley Hales and Nic Earle explained the work they have been doing at the University of Bristol involving Second Life.

A quick poll of the room revealed that about a fifth of people had used virtual worlds, and everyone knew what they were, and we were also treated to a demonstration of the 3D world on the plasma screens.

The project team have recreated a Pompeii villa in Second Life, and then populated it with digital images of Roman art. Students can explore the villa using their avatars, and then they can click on the art to examine it in more detail. Students can read information about the art, and they can also follow links to external content.

Shelley and Nic admitted that virtual worlds are not right for everyone, but they can provide a new opportunity to integrate content into a meaningful context.

Second Life can be useful because t has a meaningful spacial context. It can bring to life spaces which are difficult to conceptualise, such as cells or galaxies. It is also a good way to explain difficult abstract ideas.

Q & A

Ben Showers: to quote Wayne’s World, ‘build it and they will come’. Except that’s not true any more. We need to reach out and engage people.

Ben Showers: “Would you agree that commercial companies have a commercial interest not to innovate?”
Matthew White: “No, big brands do innovate.”
David Flanders: “It scares me that Bill Gates, the Google lot and Steve Jobs all left the academic sector in order to innovate. Uiversities will have to embrace different innovative practices to advance.”

Click here to view the embedded video.

In a global academic culture of sharing resources and expertise, collaboration is an essential part of many higher education projects.

Each of the 3 speakers had vastly different experiences, but there were a few common threads that ran through all the talks:

• The importance of clear and frequent communication
• A need for mutual respect and trust in all parties
• Fair distribution of resources and responsibilities

Sarah Porter began this Plenary Session on the ‘urge and surge of international collaborations’ by introducing the three speakers:

Michael Popham, Shakespeare Quartos Archive project, University of Oxford
Susan Whitfield, International Dunhuang Project (IDP), British Library
Saskia de Vries,  (Open Access Publishing in European Networks)

Click here to view the embedded video.

Shakespeare Quartos Archive project

Michael began by explaining his project, which involved creating a virtual collection of early Shakespeare texts. The project was a collaborative effort with a US partner plus Octavo and the British Library.

The texts aren’t actually Shakespeare’s original manuscripts – instead they are records of plays which were most likely printed by actors or audience members. For this reason there is a huge variation in our records of Shakespeare’s work.

Octavo produced the images of the manuscripts, and then they needed to be managed so that British Library could mount them.

The Shakespeare Quartos Archive project sent 32 copies of Hamlet to India, where they were typed up as accurately as possible, proofread and enriched with XML markup. This searchable data was then placed under the images.

In terms of collaboration, the team found wikis useful, but documented conference calls were most effective.

Click here to view the embedded video.

International Dunhuang Project

The IDP relates to the Silk Road, which is now western China. The area is mainly desert, and this desert has preserved ancient cities from the 1st millennium AD.

Dunhuang is a Buddhist cave temple site. It was rediscovered in 1900, and 40,000 manuscripts were found. The manuscripts have never been studied as a library, as the materials were dispersed around the world.

International collaboration was always essential to the project, and there are lot of sensitive areas to consider, particularly as the original archaeologists are still considered imperialist thieves by some.

The IDP formed in 1994 with 3 aims:

• Conservation
• Cataloguing
• Digitisation

There are currently 8 full time partners and 20 collaborating institutions.

The project could only start after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of communism, as the project depended on dialogue with Russia and China.

Lessons learnt about collaboration:

• There needs to be shared goals
• There should be benefits for all sides
• There must be respect, trust and flexibility

“International collaborations are like marriages – we’re in it for the long term. We have to work at it,” said Susan, with a wry smile.

A key aspect of the project is that it is based on collaboration and not colonialistion. The project must always adapt to local conditions, and there must always be a native language speaker.

In terms of how the teams work together, Susan explained that conference calls and wikis were useful, but face to face communication was essential. They visit all partners at least once a year.

A key part of the project is about passing on skills and sharing knowledge. Everything is in local languages. never just English. Full members host their website locally, and this creates a sense of shared ownership and responsibility.

General issues faced by the project:

• Quality control
• Finding suitable staff
• Keeping up with technology
• Archiving
• Funding

Click here to view the embedded video.

Saskia spoke about OAPEN and its work with open access monographs. Open access makes sense in this context because it increases visibility and allows the text to reach a worldwide audience. This is good for authors and users, and funders also see a greater return on investment.

It’s not a new idea – the national academies press have been putting up pdfs of their work for 20 years.

OAPEN provides open access publishing for academic books in humanities and social sciences.

A great number of publishers have joined – and that includes commercial publishers as well as academic.

Looking forward, Saskia saw a hybrid model of online and print, where online texts would be free, and print would be sold. She strongly thinks that the funders of the research should pay for the publication, as the research and dissemination of results belong together. so research funders should fund publication.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Q & A

Ahmed Abu-Zayed, University of Exeter: “Is the platform expandable for other institutions?”
Michael Popham: “Yes, it’s all open source.”

David Baker, JISC: “What changes are being made to the scholarly peer review process as part of this?”
Saskia de Vries: “All the network publishers have to adhere to our standards of peer review.”

Delegate: “What about monographs that can’t be printed? What about people who want online versions?”
Saskia de Vries: “In 10 years time most of the content will be online and not printed.”

Sarah Porter: “If you could change one thing in the world related to your projects, what would it be?”
Susan Whitfield: “Money. Actually no, restrictions on finding funds make tighter models. Cheaper airfares maybe.”
Michael Popham: “There are still basic communication and outreach issues. There is probably information we could have shared with others.”
Saskia de Vries: “Language is a very big problem for our project. It’s one of the reasons why the EU gives us money. When work is in Polish or Hungarian it’s difficult to reach wider audiences.

Key points raised in the session:

• We need to rethink our attitudes towards what libraries are: what they look like, what they contain, who work in them and what they are used for
• Information literacy is an essential component of library use, but how should it be taught? Is it up to teachers or librarians to help people learn to access and interpret information?

Richard Ovenden from Oxford University began by explaining how technology is changing the nature of libraries, and the issue is particularly relevant in HE.

Questions Richard believes we should be asking:

• How will the role of the library as content provider change?
• How might the physical space of the library change?
• What functions and facilities will the library provide?
• Will relationships with publisher change?
• What will be the role of the librarians of the future, and how will they be trained and recruited?

Richard then raised a few chuckles with some gentle humour at Oxford’s expense:

Q: How many Oxford dons does it take to change a lightbulb?
A: Change? What’s change?
Or, alternatively:
A: Lightbulb? What’s a lightbulb?

Oxford has, of course, a reputation as a very traditional institution. But despite this, it has taken a very forward-thinking attitude towards its libraries.

Oxford is planning a new humanities library, a special collections library, and a book depository in Swindon. It has also just scanned 400million pages of academic journals through a collaboration with Google.

People worry that students are abandoning libraries in favour of Google and other search engines, but we should remember that Google doesn’t create or store information – it is only a gateway to information. It is an opportunity, not a threat.

Technology can help enable change, but also people have to adapt to the technology changes. To illustrate the issue, we were then shown an excellent short film from JISC, which you can watch here:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Educational adviser Les Watson then began his talk.

People talk about the ‘information age’, but Les believes that we’re actually moving away from this ‘information age’ to a ‘conceptual age’ where it’s all about ideas. Education is how we will move from information age to conceptual age.

When we think about designing spaces we need to think of the needs of 21st century learning. Libraries are part of learning infrastructure.

‘The best things in life are not things, they’re experiences’.

We need to think about how to make libraries more experiential – what happens outside the classroom is more important than what happens inside.

Les read a passage from a book describing a grim visit to a McDonalds as an illustration of how spaces can have an emotional effect on us, and then he quoted John Ruskins: “buildings should shelter us but also speak to us.”

Libraries should speak to us about our ideas about education – we should play to the diversity of our students.

Libraries shouldn’t be based primarily around library operations, but neither should they contain gratuitous social spaces. They should be ‘third spaces’ – spaces that are not work or home, and where people can be part of communities.

Peter Godwin from the University of Bedford then took the floor.

Peter began by declaring that librarianship was a paranoid profession, and that librarians worried for their place in the future of libraries.

The aim of a library is to: guide, challenge, provide access and educate.

But the key to the future of libraries is the changing needs of students. Student technology use is often ahead of libraries – a point Peter backed up with a photograph of a student sitting on the floor of a library so that her laptop could reach a plug socket. ‘Clearly not a use the library architects had intended,’ noted Peter.

We must embrace outside technologies: Facebook, Youtube, Instant Messaging, Podcasting, Vodcasting. Library catalogues are going to have to become more like Amazon and Google. We need to be compatible with mobile technologies.

Learners need to have a solid understanding of information literacy – they need to understand how to find information, and how to evaluate the information once they do find it.

Information literacy isn’t a subject, it’s a way of embedding learning. Peter accepted that the topic was big and messy as it involved trying to change learners’ habits.

“We need to be doing more for children in schools, and school librarians’ relationship with teachers is a crucial part of that,” said Peter.

Despite the clear importance of information literacy, Peter was disappointed at how little coverage it had in the media – and a quick poll of the delegates in the room revealed that no one has seen the logo for information literacy.

To summarise – we need a library 2.0 mentality that has its foundations in the new and evolving needs of learners.

Q&A

Richard Ovenden: “Les, are there any useful exemplars of libraries that have been doing it well?”

Les Watson: “The Glasgow Caledonian Saltire Centre ‘rewrote the guidebook for academic libraries’, according to the Guardian. The TLC in Bedford is another good example. However, any library should be seen in the context of learning and teaching strategy. It’s about diversity and difference.”

Delegate: “I see echoes with the newspaper industry. There is anxiety and rage about the new technpology, and the anxiety is about irrelevance.”

Delegate: “What’s missing in the video is anyone who looks like a senior politician supporting the issues. Where will the future funding come from? It’s a critical issue. The libraries will need to react to the changes in the universities as well as reacting to students.

“And as for the McDonalds example – McDonalds is very successful, and they don’t need to give lessons in ‘eatery’. So perhaps the notion of emotional reactions to spaces is a subjective view. And finally – if libraries didn’t exist, would anyone bother to invent them?”

Les: “I wouldn’t invent them in their current form. We need to rethink the whole thing. The McDonalds example was to demonstrate the emotional effect places can have on people. People need a space to be lifelong learners.”

Peter: “No we wouldn’t invent them as they are. Libraries are centres for learning: in groups and also individually. Things are going to change, but we don’t know how quickly things will change. librarians have to brand themselves.”

James Curral, University of Glasgow: “I wouldn’t call the Soltan Centre a library.”
Les: “It is a library.”
James “We’re talking about teaching and learning space, about study spaces. Why call it library? Peter is very keen to badge and label information literacy, but to me as a teacher it’s not something that librarians have to be involved in.”
Les: “It had to be a library – it would not have received funding otherwise. It is a hybrid building. It is flexible, it could be anything. it has to fit the future.”
James: “You built in space and transition, so it can mutate into something else.”
Peter: “Not all academics are good teachers. we need to help them with information literacy.”

Delegate: “Should we look at shifting libraries from physical spaces to virtual spaces, and colonising others spaces?”

Peter: “The library is where you want it to be, wherever you are. Students expect us to fit their workflow, not their educational providers.”

John Naughton at Open University: “This discussion is at the wrong level. Regarding the analogy with journalism – print journalists insist that what they do is really valuable and society needs it. Same applies to librarians. Society needs education, but the form in which it takes will have to change. Librarians have a serious role to play in a reconceptualised education process. And no one is thinking hard about that process.”