JISC Report Gives Insight Into E-book Usage
JISC has recently released preliminary results of one of the largest investigations ever undertaken into the usage of e-books by students. The results provide useful lessons for all of us and suggest that unlimited use models are the way to go. This data will help information providers and librarians alike clarify what is needed. JISC’s view is that current e-book models are not working for librarians.
During the last two years, the JISC national e-books observatory has collaborated with universities in the UK, gathering real time evidence on how course text e-books are actually used by students and teachers. The project
commenced in 2007 with the licensing of 36 course text e-books for students on business management, media studies, engineering and medicine courses. These e-books were selected by the higher education community and made available free of charge to all users in UK higher education. 127 universities, 76% of all higher education, participated in the project and worked with JISC Collections and CIBER at University College London on the deep log analysis study.
JISC Digital Content Conference 2009
A date for your diary: June 30th to July 1st 2009
JISC warmly invites delegates to attend its Digital Content Conference. In the context of the completion of Phase 2 of the JISC Digitisation Programme the conference will look at the issues facing the UK’s colleges and universities as they deal with creating, delivering, sustaining and using a range of digital content as well as looking into future opportunities and challenges.
The conference will gather key players from both the UK and beyond to stimulate debate and discussion with aim of deciding the next steps that need to be taken to ensure the sustained integration of digitised content into research and education.
Who should attend
This event will be of interest to all decision makers involved in the provision and delivery of digital content to the education sector in the UK and internationally, including:
Senior Librarians in higher and further education
The librarians of the future - the next generation of librarians
Managers of electronic resources and digital content provision
Policy makers in charge of digital content strategies
National and international Government body representatives and policy makers
Teachers, lecturers and researchers with an interest in digital content
The conference will be held over two days at the Cotswold Water Park Four Pillars Hotel, starting at 11.30 (registration from 10.00) on 30 June and finishing at 15.30 on 1 July. Shuttle transportation will be provided free of charge by the organisers for arrival on day 1 and after the close of the event on day 2.
There is no charge to attend the conference and accommodation on Tuesday 30 June, refreshments, lunch and dinner are all included. Delegates will be able to book their place at the conference online from Monday 4 May 2009. See conference website for full details.
We will contact you again to alert you when registration opens, to make sure that you don’t miss out!
Enquiries
For all enquiries relating to this event please contact the JISC Digital Content Conference Support Team:
Tel: +44 (0)2476 369 736
Email: content@conferencecare.com
Video from the Oxford debate is now on the website
Videos of the presentations at the recent Libraries of the Future debate held in Oxford last week are now live on the JISC libraries of the future web site <http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/campaigns/librariesofthefuture/debate.aspx>. This event has generated tremendous feedback and discussion and I hope that this continues. Other activities are planned to support the debate and I would be very interested to hear your opinions on the direction that these should take; certainly I would say that more attention on the the young librarian of the future is needed.
JISC’s Libraries of the Future Guardian supplement
A Guardian supplement published yesterday explores the achievements of academic libraries in the UK, assesses current challenges and looks forward to the future.
Sponsored by JISC and published free with yesterday’s Education Guardian, the supplement begins with some of the questions raised by the recently published Google Generation report, commissioned by JISC and the British Library, which explored the issue of ‘information literacy’. The report called for libraries to respond urgently to the changing needs of their users and to understand the new means of searching and navigating information.
In a lead article, editor Stephen Hoare says that academic libraries are indeed rising to the challenges and, he writes, ‘changing faster than at any time in their history. Information technology, online databases, and catalogues and digitised archives have put the library back at the heart of teaching, learning and academic research on campus.’
The supplement also explores the ways in which libraries are changing physically as they incorporate functions more commonly associated with leisure activities and become more flexible and technology-rich ‘learning spaces’. Other articles explores open access, the phenomenon of ‘Library 2.0 – the integration of user generated content with traditional library content – e-books, new business models, digitisation, digital preservation and much more.
Among the areas of activity funded or supported by JISC covered in the supplement are: the repositories partnership Sherpa; JISC’s student expectations research; services such as Intute, copac and the Archives Hub; the digitisation programme, including projects such as the Archival Sound Recordings and the British Library 19th century newspapers project; the LOCKSS journals preservation project; the electronic e-theses online service EThOS; the national e-books observatory project, and a number of others.
The supplement marks the start of ‘Libraries of the Future’, an attempt by JISC to initiate a debate about academic libraries and to open up - with partner organisations and librarians themselves - a debate about the future of the academic and research library.
See the online version of the supplement here.
“From eLib to the Library of the future” audio
Here is the recorded audio from the “From eLib to the Library of the Future” session at the JISC Conference 2008. For further information please read the post: Library of the future debate: live now
e-Textbook Debate audio
Here is the recorded audio from the e-Textbook Debate held on 14/4/2008. For further information please see the earlier post: The e-textbook debate: live now
JISC conference - summary and close, Dr Malcolm Read
Dr Malcolm Read, executive secretary, JISC
In his opening talk this morning, Sir Ron Cooke mentioned some political challenges we’re likely to face in a few years time. Our main activity is and remains the funding of services and the growing amount of work JISC collections does. During the coming year we’ll be concentrating on the advisory services and getting greater integration, to enable us to offer advice in the use of IT across education and research, whatever that area of advice may be. That will be a particular focus.
An area that’s moving fast from research into development is repositories. Institutions are increasingly building their own, as part of the open access movement, but we are also interested in them as places for storing research data. An awful lot of data isn’t in the open domain or even preserved; I’m thinking of lab-based research done by small teams and individuals. Repositories will be a growing place to store learning resources, and we’re hoping to work in that area in the coming year. We feel that if we’re to achieve the vision of an open layer of scholarly academic resources, then we have to find ways of getting repositories linked up and working together. We’ll be looking to build a virtual national repository. Other main areas of activity will be more shared services, and green computing.
Next year’s conference is in Edinburgh on Tuesday 24 March at the EICC. I hope you’ll all be able to come along to that. we are holding a joint conference with CNI in Belfast on 10-11 July, to which again everyone is invited.
Finally, it’s my pleasure to thank all the speakers, the organisers, and all of you for attending.
JISC conference - closing keynote speech, Angela Beesley
Angela Beesley, vice-president community relations and co-founder, Wikia; chair of Wikimedia Foundation Advisory Board
A wiki is a website that you can edit - a simple definition. They’re not new, but although they’ve only reached consciousness in the past couple of years, they first went online in 1995. It’s a quick way to collaborate with other people.
The Wikimedia Foundation is completely funded by donation; people who read it make small contributions.
‘Imagine a world in which every person can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. That’s our commitment.’
Wikimedia isn’t just an English language project, but exists in 230 other languages, including Gaelic, Welsh and even Cornish. The most well-known project is Wikipedia. It started in 2001, and is the eighth most visited site in the world. There are 10 million articles, completely created by volunteers, built completely bottom-up by the community. It is openly editable; you don’t have to apply to become an editor - just click ‘edit this page’ and you’re an editor straight away. There are problems with inaccuracies, particularly deliberate or malicious. Everyone is permitted to use it for any purpose, commercial or non-commercial. People can take Wikipedia and use it in other contexts.
Wikiversity is a sister project, and the word comes from “wiki university”. It’s not an institution, and we don’t award degrees. It’s a place where students can explore their learning goals and teachers can share lesson plans. The Wikibooks project ties into this, and is aimed at high-school students.
Wikipedia is a community made up of millions of people. A core of thousands are there on site regularly, keeping it up-to-date and accurate and welcoming new users in. It remains cohesive because we’re working towards a shared goal, which is why so many people volunteer their own time. It’s collaborative between people who are very involved in the site and discuss how to improve the quality of articles. It’s very welcoming to newcomers; existing members will talk you through the guidelines and suggest how you can improve your article. It’s rewarding to old-timers, with awards that can be put on users’ pages. However, people don’t always get along, so we’ve developed dispute resolution processes to deal with that, for example getting a third party in to assist.
One big question people always ask is - can you trust user-generated content? The answer is no. But you can trust the process. On average, the articles are fairly high quality, and they are useful. As long as you’re aware of the downside, it can be a useful starting point for your research - never an end point. It’s open to correction and improvement. If there’s a bad edit made, someone else can come along and correct it. Everything is reversible. Someone might make a bad edit, but that can be changed. All the changes are transparent. It’s hard to disguise if you’re doing something bad, because it’s recorded in the history. Every edit is logged - it shows who edited what and when. We tag problematic content; we say that we have particular problems. It warns the reader, so they are aware that the article might have a bias, and it helps particular groups of editors, who might like doing particular tasks, such as making text more neutral.
A big development that hasn’t actually happened until now is stable versions. At the moment, you’ve no idea if someone else has checked the article you’re reading. Now, we’ll be able to mark if something’s been checked for quality or if it’s not been read at all. Someone might do a basic check to make sure it’s coherent, and that will be marked as ’sighted’. If you’re looking at a current event, you might want the most up-to-date article, not the one that’s been checked for accuracy. It won’t make it 100% accurate, but at least the content has been checked, making it more reliable.
You can have unchecked bad edits, which is something stable versions is hoping to correct. There is the problem of spam, and marketers creating entries about their companies. With smaller wikis, one of the problems is inactivity. Occasionally a lack of focus creates an unorganised entry. And community disputes can impact on the entries.
Wikipedia has 1.7 billion words, whereas libraries have tens of trillions of words. This is where Wikia comes in. Wikipedia is the reference shelf; Wikia is the rest of the library. There is so much content out there that isn’t on Wikipedia and isn’t in libraries. Wikia uses the same software and is based on the same principles. We enable communities to go into greater depth, for example the World of Warcraft Wiki - people who play the game a lot and want to write about their world create the content. There are a lot of wikis on environmental topics, and an academic publishing wiki.
Social tools are one way that Wikia are different. You can invite your friends to the wiki; you can see what they’ve done recently; you can add polls, quizzes and games. We’re also integrating with third-party tools, allowing people to pull content they’ve created elsewhere into the wiki, for example pictures from Flickr.
Something that’s new this year is Wikia search. We are trying to apply a Wiki model to search. Thousands of volunteers have downloaded web-crawling software, and all the information they get is released back into the open access community. You can even make your own search engine if you want to. It’s the start of a roject to open up the whole idea of search.
If you want to start your own wiki, there’s a number of different options. It’s easiest to get a hosted option, where someone else hosts the site for you (such as Google Wiki or WikiSpaces). The other option is to install the software yourself. It’s easy to get your own wiki set up. Some of the uses you might want to put it to - documentation, fan sites, user-to-user support, and communities of practice. In the corporate setting, people find it’s a cost-effective knowledge management tool, it can decrease email, proposals can be drafted. In education, you can write collaboratively, share research, plan courses, or peer-review students’ work. A wiki doesn’t need to be as open as Wikipedia; you can lock it down just to your class or research group, or you can open it up so it’s cross-curricular or cross-institutional.
Once you’ve got your wiki, the question is how do you get anyone to use it? Have a clear goal and focus to your wiki, so people know what they should and shouldn’t do there. Encourage new editors and welcome them; bring people in. You can provide editing suggestions, because often people don’t know where to start. It’s also useful to have helpers to organise the wiki, just linking articles together, adding categories and navigation.
What are the futures of wikis? I think formats will change. Now, it’s text-based, but we’re introducing video editing, so people can mash up segments. People are using images more to illustrate articles, and we’re beginning to see tools where people can collaborate on diagrams. The semantic web is perhaps the future of the internet in general; we’re seeing tools allowing the introduction of structured data. I think stable versions are really important, as they become more reliable, and people have more trust in a wiki - they’ll see whether something’s been checked and who it’s been checked by.
I’d like to leave you with the thought - how can you use a wiki?
Question and answer session
Q: There’s suspicion in universities about Wikipedia - what would you say to them?
AB: You can’t stop them from using it. Students shouldn’t be citing Wikipedia as a source, they should be trained how to verify information against other sources.
Q: Is there a straightforward peer review model of editing on Wikipedia?
AB: Stable versions hasn’t gone live yet, but what it’s likely to be is a subset of the community - people who know what a good article is and know what problems to look out for.
Q: What is the commercial thinking behind Wikia?
AB: What we’re doing is not trying to gain content from existing companies, but build up that content from scratch. We’re finding very passionate people who want to write about a particular topic.
Q: Would it still leave commercial content out?
AB: Yes. We’re not trying to replace content that’s out there, but build up an alternative to it.
Q: What if Britannica became open source?
AB: If Britannica became open source, that would mean we could take their content! So it wouldn’t mark our demise. We’re keen for more material to be open source. It can never been taken away or locked up. The content will live on.
Challenges for the digital librarian
In an increasingly complex, ICT-intensive world, digital libraries face multiple challenges, but perhaps the greatest is to achieve a recognised and indeed indispensable presence within the workflow of their user communities. With the increased emphasis on Web 2.0 technologies, digital library developers will need to be agile to ensure that they demonstrate both ease of interoperability across disparate end user systems and added value in terms of the content they can deliver. This session will reflect on key strategies to achieve long-term success within this scenario. On the panel here at the JISC conference in Birmingham are:
Ian Dolphin, Head of eStrategy & eServices, University of Hull - Session Chair
Peter Brophy, Director, Centre for Research in Library & Information Management, Manchester Metropolitan University
David Kay, Director, Sero Consulting
Read on for the debate
The e-textbook debate: live now
As part of the National E-books Observatory Project and the first in a series of events for JISC’s Libraries of the Future programme, the JISC National E-textbook Debate provides a unique opportunity to quiz a panel of experts and to openly debate the future role of the library in the provision of electronic textbooks. Gathered here in Birmingham on the panel are:
Tom Davy, CEO of Cengage
Dominic Knight, MD of Palgrave
Sue McKnight, Director of Libraries and Knowledge Resources at Nottingham Trent University
Mandy Phillips, Information Resources Manager at Edge Hill University
Chair: Malcolm Read
Read on to follow the debate as it happens… Read more