RSP Event Doing it differently November 1, 2010
Posted by vickimcgarvey in : Comms , trackbackLast week I attended RSP’s one day conference Doing It Differently at Sheffield Cathedral. The invited speakers covered a range of areas with respect to repository usage. After an introduction by Bill Hubbard from the Centre for Research Communications at Nottingham University, Stephanie Taylor Research Officer for UKOLN provided in insightful history of repositories and provided some considerations for future repository developments, including hidden repositories, subject and national repositories, aggregation and finding out what end users want. This was followed by Beyond SNEEP: Ideas for Creative Repository Management – Richard Davis, Repository Service and Development Manager, ULCC. Richard considered the use of tagging, enhancing the user experience, through personalisation and customisation and the use of feeds, providing an overview of SNEEP - Social Networking Extnersions for Eprints. Richard said that Newsfeeds can provide links to datasets within the repository, they can be dynamically updated, and encourage the use of the repository as the single place to deposit. He suggested the use of repository stats, to demonstrate effectiveness, areas of interest, to support research exercises and encourage healthy competition, as well as putting links in abstracts to related resources.
After the morning break Pat Lockley, Learning Support Development Officer, University of Nottingham presented on Xpert: creating a repository using RSS. Xpert is a JISC funded rapid innovation project (summer 2009) to explore the potential of delivering and supporting a distributed repository of e-learning resources created and seamlessly published through the open source e-learning development tool called Xerte Online Toolkits. The aim of XPERT is to progress the vision of a distributed architecture of e-learning resources for sharing and re-use. Learners and educators can use XPERT to search a growing database of open learning resources suitable for students at all levels of study in a wide range of different subjects.Creators of learning resources can also contribute to XPERT via RSS feeds created seamlessly through local installations of Xerte Online Toolkits. Xpert has been fully integrated into Xerte Online Toolkits, an open source content authoring tool from The University of Nottingham. Xpert, Free to use, web based, open source (PHP / MySQL), lightweight (3 files), OAI harvester (as well as RSS), similar to the MIMAS demonstrator. Future developments include, Facebook Integration, VLE Integration, Wordpress Integration , “Searching” and “Serendipity”, Library Integration, Xpaper – linking OER and research. This was followed by Practice-based research in repositories: representing non-textual artefacts as research outputs – Stephanie Meece, Manager, UAL Research Online, University of the Arts London. As the title states Stephanie provided an overview of the challenges associated with depositing non-textual objects within a repository. Overcoming this challenge required consultation with endusers who would be depositing and retrieving resources with respect to how the artefacts should be best presented and the supporting resources required to contextualise the artefacts.
After lunch Jason Hoyt, Vice-President, Research & Development, Mendeley Ltd provided an overview of the reference manager and academic social network Mendeley. Mendeley aims to help researchers work smarter, make science collaborative and transparent and to create an open research database. Taking an approach similar toLast.fm it connects researchers to related libraries, researchers and papers- by aggregating research data in the cloud. The largest users of the database are Cambridge and Stanford Uni, overall it has 500,00 users. This was followed by RSS in, RSS out. Experimenting with WordPress for scholarly publishing – Joss Winn, University of Lincoln. Joss described how Wordpress can be an excellent feed generator and can be used as a content management system and provided an overview of http://jiscpress.org/ a document authoring, publishing, discussion and syndication platform for JISC’s funding calls and final project reports.
The day was concluded by iTunesU at Nottingham – Sally Hanford, Audio-Visual Media Development Officer, University of Nottingham. This presentation provided some useful observations with regards the resources and processes required to launch an iTunesU reflecting on Nottingham University’s experiences. Sally presented some impressive statistics on the Nottingham iTunesU which is a public site only and since its launch in June of this year has had 110,000 previes, 44,000 downloads, 67 albums, 300 tracks, 14 GB of data. The university had been podcasting since 2006 and saw iTunesU as an opportunity to reach/build a global audience for some the resources their inspiring educators produces. Its implementation was managed by a multi-disciplinary team which included staff from senior levels, marketing and media production. Sally said that success was dependent on a clear plan and ongoing resourcing and institutions should not underestimate the time it takes to upload a back catalogue.
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[...] catch the final speakers as I had to catch my train, but I commend to you Vicki McGarvey’s post on the SHARE project blog at Nottingham Trent [...]