eFoundations

Memento and negotiating on time

Via Twitter, initially in a post by Lorcan Dempsey, I came across the work of Herbert Van de Sompel and his comrades from LANL and Old Dominion University on the Memento project:

The project has since been the topic of an article in New Scientist.

The technical details of the Memento approach are probably best summarised in the paper "Memento: Time Travel for the Web", and Herbert has recently made available a presentation which I'll embed here, since it includes some helpful graphics illustrating some of the messaging in detail:

Memento: Time Travel for the Web

View more documents from Herbert Van de Sompel.

Memento seeks to take advantage of the Web Architecture concept that interactions on the Web are concerned with exchanging representations of resources. And for any single resource, representations may vary - at a single point in time, variant representations may be provided, e.g. in different formats or languages, and over time, variant representations may be provided reflecting changes in the state of the resource. The HTTP protocol incorporates a feature called content negotiation which can be used to determine the most appropriate representation of a resource - typically according to variables such as content type, language, character set or encoding. The innovation that Memento brings to this scenario is the proposition that content negotiation may also be applied to the axis of date-time. i.e. in the same way that a client might express a preference for the language of the representation based on a standard request header, it could also express a preference that the representation should reflect resource state at a specified point in time, using a custom accept header (X-Accept-Datetime).

More specifically, Memento uses a flavour of content negotiation called "transparent content negotiation" where the server provides details of the variant representations available, from which the client can choose. Slides 26-50 in Herbert's presentation above illustrate how this technique might be applied to two different cases: one in which the server to which the initial request is sent is itself capable of providing the set of time-variant representations, and a second in which that server does not have those "archive" capabilities but redirects to (a URI supported by) a second server which does.

This does seem quite an ingenious approach to the problem, and one that potentially has many interesting applications, several of which Herbert alludes to in his presentation.

What I want to focus on here is the technical approach, which did raise a question in my mind. And here I must emphasise that I'm really just trying to articulate a question that I've been trying to formulate and answer for myself: I'm not in a position to say that Memento is getting anything "wrong", just trying to compare the Memento proposition with my understanding of Web architecture and the HTTP protocol, or at least the use of that protocol in accordance with the REST architectural style, and understand whether there are any divergences (and if there are, what the implications are).

In his dissertation in which he defines the REST architectural style, Roy Fielding defines a resource as follows:

More precisely, a resource R is a temporally varying membership function M_R(t), which for time t maps to a set of entities, or values, which are equivalent. The values in the set may be resource representations and/or resource identifiers. A resource can map to the empty set, which allows references to be made to a concept before any realization of that concept exists -- a notion that was foreign to most hypertext systems prior to the Web. Some resources are static in the sense that, when examined at any time after their creation, they always correspond to the same value set. Others have a high degree of variance in their value over time. The only thing that is required to be static for a resource is the semantics of the mapping, since the semantics is what distinguishes one resource from another.

On representations, Fielding says the following, which I think is worth quoting in full. The emphasis in the first and last sentences is mine.

REST components perform actions on a resource by using a representation to capture the current or intended state of that resource and transferring that representation between components. A representation is a sequence of bytes, plus representation metadata to describe those bytes. Other commonly used but less precise names for a representation include: document, file, and HTTP message entity, instance, or variant.

A representation consists of data, metadata describing the data, and, on occasion, metadata to describe the metadata (usually for the purpose of verifying message integrity). Metadata is in the form of name-value pairs, where the name corresponds to a standard that defines the value's structure and semantics. Response messages may include both representation metadata and resource metadata: information about the resource that is not specific to the supplied representation.

Control data defines the purpose of a message between components, such as the action being requested or the meaning of a response. It is also used to parameterize requests and override the default behavior of some connecting elements. For example, cache behavior can be modified by control data included in the request or response message.

Depending on the message control data, a given representation may indicate the current state of the requested resource, the desired state for the requested resource, or the value of some other resource, such as a representation of the input data within a client's query form, or a representation of some error condition for a response. For example, remote authoring of a resource requires that the author send a representation to the server, thus establishing a value for that resource that can be retrieved by later requests. If the value set of a resource at a given time consists of multiple representations, content negotiation may be used to select the best representation for inclusion in a given message.

So at a point in time t1, the "temporally varying membership function" maps to one set of values, and - in the case of a resource whose representations vary over time - at another point in time t2, it may map to another, different set of values. To take a concrete example, suppose at the start of 2009, I launch a "quote of the day", and I define a single resource that is my "quote of the day", to which I assign the URI http://example.org/qotd/. And I provide variant representations in XHTML and plain text. On 1 January 2009 (time t1), my quote is "From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs", and I provide variant representations in those two formats, i.e. the set of values for 1 January 2009 is those two documents. On 2 January 2009 (time t2), my quote is "Those who do not move, do not notice their chains", and again I provide variant representations in those two formats, i.e. the set of values for 2 January 2009 (time t2) is two XHTML and plain text documents with different content from those provided at time t1.

So, moving on to that second piece of text I cited, my interpretation of the final sentence as it applies to HTTP (and, as I say, I could be wrong about this) would be that the RESTful use of the HTTP GET method is intended to retrieve a representation of the current state of the resource. It is the value set at that point in time which provides the basis for negotiation. So, in my example here, on 1 January 2009, I offer XHTML and plain text versions of my "From each according to his abilities..." quote via content negotiation, and on 2 January 2009, I offer XHTML and plain text versions of my "Those who do not move..." quotations. i.e. At two different points in time t1 and t2, different (sets of) representations may be provided for a single resource, reflecting the different state of that resource at those two different points in time, but at either of those points in time, the expectation is that each representation of the set available represents the state of the resource at that point in time, and only members of that set are available via content negotiation. So although representations may vary by language, content-type etc, they should be in some sense "equivalent" (Roy Fielding's term) in terms of their representation of the current state of the resource.

I think the Memento approach suggests that on 2 January 2009, I could, using the date-time-based negotiation convention, offer all four of those variants listed above (and on each day into the future, a set which increases in membership as I add new quotes). But it seems to me that is at odds with the REST style, because the Memento approach requires that representations of different states of the resource (i.e. the state of the resource at different points in time) are all made available as representations at a single point in time.

I appreciate that (even if my interpretation is correct, which it may not be) the constraints specified by the REST architectural style are just that: a set of constraints which, if observed, generate certain properties/characteristics in a system. And if some of those constraints are relaxed or ignored, then those properties change. My understanding is not good enough to pinpoint exactly what the implications of this particular point of divergence (if indeed it is one!) would be - though as Herbert notes in hs presentation, it would appear that there would be implications for cacheing.

But as I said, I'm really just trying to raise the questions which have been running around my head and which I haven't really been able to answer to my own satisfaction.

As an aside, I think Memento could probably achieve quite similar results by providing some metadata (or a link to another document providing that metadata) which expressed the relationships between the time-variant resource and all the time-specific variant resources, rather than seeking to manage this via HTTP content negotiation.

Postscript: I notice that, in the time it has taken me to draft this post, Mark Baker has made what I think is a similar point in a couple of messages (first, second) to the W3C public-lod mailing list.

SharePoint in UK universities event

We've just announced an event (in London on 25 November 2009) based on the work that's been done by Northumbria University (and others) as part of the Investigation into the Uptake and use of Microsoft SharePoint by HEIs study that we funded a while back.

• Do you want to learn about how and why HEIs are using SharePoint? What worked well, lessons learned?
• Do you want to hear from some HEIs about their experience of implementing SharePoint?
• Do you want the opportunity to network and learn about real experiences with SharePoint in HEIs and benchmark yourself?

The event will provide a chance to hear from the project team about their findings, as well as from 4 university-based case-studies (Peter Yeadon, UWE, University of Glasgow, and University of Kent).

Please go to the registration page to sign-up - places are limited.

Open, social and linked - what do current Web trends tell us about the future of digital libraries?

About a month ago I travelled to Trento in Italy to speak at a Workshop on Advanced Technologies for Digital Libraries organised by the EU-funded CACOA project.

My talk was entitled "Open, social and linked - what do current Web trends tell us about the future of digital libraries?" and I've been holding off blogging about it or sharing my slides because I was hoping to create a slidecast of them. Well... I finally got round to it and here is the result:

Open, social and linked - what do current Web trends tell us about the future of digital libraries?

View more presentations from Andy Powell.

Like any 'live' talk, there are bits where I don't get my point across quite as I would have liked but I've left things exactly as they came out when I recorded it. I particularly like my use of "these are all very bog standard... err... standards"! :-)

Towards the end, I refer to David White's 'visitors vs. residents' stuff, about which I note he has just published a video. Nice one.

Anyway... the talk captures a number of threads that I've been thinking and speaking about for the last while. I hope it is of interest.

SharePoint in UK universities - literature review

We are currently funding the University of Northumbria to undertake some work for us looking at the uptake of Microsoft SharePoint in UK universities.  As part of this work we have just published a literature review [PDF] by James Lappin and Julie McLeod:

SharePoint 2007 has spread rapidly in the Higher Education (HE) sector, as in most other market sectors. It is an extra-ordinarily wide ranging piece of software and it has been put to a wide variety of different uses by different UK Higher Education Institutions (HEIs). This literature review is based upon what HEIs have been willing to say about their implementations in public.

Implementations range from the provision of team sites supporting team collaboration, through the use of SharePoint to support specific functions, to its use as an institutional portal, providing staff and/or students with a single site from which to access key information sources and tools.

By far the most common usage of SharePoint in UK HEIs is for team collaboration. This sees SharePoint team sites replacing, or supplementing, network shared drives as the area in which staff collaborate on documents and share information with each other.

Edinburgh publish guidance on research data management

The University of Edinburgh has published some local guidance about the way that research data should be managed, Research data management guidance, covering How to manage research data and Data sharing and preservation, as well as detailing local training, support and advice options.

One assumes that this kind of thing will become much more common at universities over the next few years.

Having had a very quick look, it feels like the material is more descriptive than prescriptive - which isn't meant as a negative comment, it just reflects the current state of play. The section on Data documentation & metadata for example, gives advice as simple as:

Have you created a "readme.txt" file to describe the contents of files in a folder? Such a simple act can be invaluable at a later date.

but also provides a link to the UK Data Archive's guidance on Data Documentation and Metadata, which at first sight appears hugely complex. I'm not sure what your average research will make of it?

(In passing, I note that the UKDA seem to be promoting the use of the Data Documentation Initiative standard at what they call the 'catalogue' level, a standard that I've not come across before but one that appears to be rooted firmly outside the world of linked data, which is a shame.)

Similarly, the section on Methods for data sharing lists a wide range of possible options (from "posting on a University website" thru to "depositing in a data repository") without being particularly prescriptive about which is better and why.

(As a second aside, I am continually amazed by this firm distinction in the repository world between 'posting on the website' and 'depositing in a repository' - from the perspective of the researcher, both can, and should, achieve the same aims, i.e. improved management, more chance of persistence and better exposure.)

As we have found with repositories of research publications, it seems to me that research data repositories (the Edinburgh DataShare in this case) need to hide much of this kind of complexity, and do most of the necessary legwork, in order to turn what appears to be a simple and obvious 'content management' workflow (from the point of view of the individual researcher) into a well managed, openly shared, long term resource for the community.

The management of website content in UK universities - report available

The final report from the Investigation into the management of website content in higher education institutions (undertaken by SIRC and funded by us) is now available.

We funded the investigation for two reasons: firstly, to help the community (particularly those involved with university 'web teams') to understand itself a little better and secondly, to help us understand the space in order that we can think about tailoring our own content management, web hosting and other services to the needs of UK higher education in line with our charitable mission.  I think/hope we've succeeded on both counts.

So what have we learned?  Well, first off, it's a long report, 58 pages, so it's not easy to summarise in a few words.  At the Care in the community session we ran at IWMW a week or so ago, Simon Bradley from SIRC presented these slides, which give a nice overview:

Trying to look past the raw numbers a little, here are my thoughts...

The management of university Web content (and associated provision of Web applications more generally) continues to mature as an area of professional activity and there is a growing recognition of the value that the Web and the Web team bring to the institution. That said, there appears to be a continued emphasis (particularly amongst senior members of HEIs) on using the Web as a way of “marketing the institution to new audiences” rather than meeting the ‘business’ needs of existing members of the institution (lecturers, students and researchers and other staff). Furthermore, despite the growing recognition of value there is a perceived mismatch between the expectations put on the Web team and the level of resources made available to them leading to significant ‘time pressures’ for many teams.

Web teams need to be as good at writing plain English as they are at writing code and the challenges they face are at least as much ‘managerial’ as they are ‘technical’. Given that many Web teams remain quite small that seems to imply that flexible people with a broad skills-base are quite valuable. Web strategies are seen as very important but need to be adopted institution-wide to be properly effective. Sitting at the cross-roads between new media, ‘old school’ university culture and the more hard-nosed world of marketing and business requires good communication skills. Such positioning makes Web teams crucial to the successful functioning of HEIs but can also leave them vulnerable to the kinds of issues and challenges faced by such large, complex organisations. The wide variety of job titles, job descriptions and organisational positioning for those with responsibility for the management of Web content leads to a somewhat confusing picture across the UK as a whole – something that is indicative of a profession that, while continuing to mature, is still relatively young.

Despite the indicated shift towards greater recognition of the importance of the Web in universities, there remains a need for broad 'cultural shifts' in Higher Education. Attitudes and perspectives are changing, but academics and senior management alike still need to develop a better understanding the nature of the web as a context for academic practice, as a platform for sharing knowledge, and as an avenue for economic development.

The use of Content Management Systems is wide-spread, with about half having been deployed since 2006. Major factors in the decision-making process appear to be usability, reliability and scalability while familiarity and popularity are not deemed to be important. In general, HEIs seem reasonably happy with their choice of CMS with the majority not currently considering a change. Where change is being considered, technical limitations and changing institutional requirements are cited as the reason. There seems to be little evidence that the university community takes a particular view ‘for’ or ‘against’ open source or proprietary software CMS solutions.

There seems to be a similarly balanced attitude to outsourcing. Whilst valid reasons are presented for developing skills in-house, it is clear that Web teams are willing to consider outsourcing work to external consultants (e.g. where there are skills gaps) not least because it is sometimes the case that senior management seem to be prepared to take more notice of an ‘impartial’ external view. That said, the survey data does not suggest overwhelming satisfaction with the use of external consultants in the work of the Web team.

It is clear that most university Web teams now monitor user behaviour in some way in order to inform the future design of the website. However, most teams indicated that such monitoring is not comprehensive enough.

Web teams seem to be broadly optimistic about the future of Web content management, recognising several key areas as short-term drivers for development (growing use of rich media and social networking and the need for a more personalised website offering for example). However, there appears to be a more cautious response when asked to consider the institution’s ability to keep pace with the current and future rate of technological change, the implication being that more investment in resources is required if universities are to continue to maximise the effectiveness of their use of the Web in the future.

A big thank you to all those people who contributed to the report, either thru the interviews or by completeing the Web survey. It is much appreciated. The report is dotted with some pretty pithy comments from those interviewed, some of which I've been tweeting over the last few days. Here are two of my favorites:

I think universities have a habit of going “Yes, the web is the future” without actually giving it any resource because it’s seen as being free and actually it’s a huge entity involving a lot of people, underlying technologies, and it needs managing in the same way as any other resource.

and:

I think there are several opposites that I naturally find myself in the middle of with understanding of both; so mediation is an enormous part of the role because I’ve got quite extreme marketing coming in one ear and the usual academic way of just talking in really quite difficult language and sounding very clever for five pages without any paragraph breaks in another.

Happy reading... I really hope people find this report to be of value. Let us know how you get on with it.

Care in the community

I was at UKOLN's Institutional Web Management Workshop 2009 event at the University of Essex earlier this week to run a workshop session with Ed Barker and Simon Bradley (of SIRC) entitled Care in the community... how do you manage your Web content?. The session, and the workshop more generally for that matter, went pretty well I think.  We used our 90 minutes for a mix of presentation, Simon giving a whirlwind tour of the major findings of the Investigation into the management of website content in higher education institutions that they've been undertaking on our behalf, and group discussion.

For the discussion groups we split people randomly into 3 groups to discuss a range of propositions based loosely on the findings of the investigation. The groups were asked to consider each proposition and to either agree with it or to offer an alternative version. They were than asked to write down 3 consequences (issues, actions or conclusions) that arose from their agreed proposition.

16 propositions were available, inside sealed envelopes labelled with one of 5 broad topic areas:

• The Web Team,
• Institutional Issues,
• CMS,
• End Users,
• The Future.

Of the available propositions, 13 were discussed by the groups in the time available. Note that the propositions were chosen to stimulate discussion. They do not necessarily represent the views of Eduserv or SIRC. Perhaps more importantly, they should not be taken as a direct representation of the findings of the study.

The outputs from the group discussions are now available on Google Docs. The report of the investigation itself will be published on Thursday 6th August.

How do you manage yours?

You may recall that we are currently funding an Investigation into the management of website content in higher education institutions, an activity being undertaken on our behalf by SIRC.

As part of this work, SIRC have put together a Web-based survey looking at various issues associated with the management of website content in UK HEIs.

As part of the project we are seeking the assistance of those involved in the management of web content within HEIs in completing an online survey. The following survey has been informed by over 20 hours of in-depth interviews with members of web teams and individuals from Computing Services and Marketing in HEIs more generally.

The survey should take approximately 15-20 minutes to complete. We would be extremely grateful if you could take the time to complete the questionnaire. With your input we hope to be able to provide the most comprehensive picture to date of web content management within UK HEIs – in terms of the structure of content management, the technologies used and the challenges faced by those working in the sector.

After completing all questions in the survey applicable to you, you will be entered in a random draw to win one of four flip video cameras for some instant user generated Web 2.0 content on a University webpage. In order to be eligible for the draw, you must fill out your full name and email address on the last page of the survey so that we may contact you. We will not use your personal information for any other purposes. The survey will close at midnight on Wednesday 8th July, 2009. To be eligible for the draw all surveys must be completed and submitted by that time.

We are interested in the opinions of anyone that is involved in the management of web content within HEIs. Completed surveys will be welcome from different individuals / departments within the same institution. Please feel free to pass on the details of the survey to colleagues / peers who you think might be able to contribute. If you have contacts outside of your institution whom you think might be interested in the research please feel forward this link to them. Please note that the results of the survey will be anonymous.

Two things are worth noting...

Firstly, as a not-for-profit provider of 'content management' services we (Eduserv) are very keen that people understand that this is not just a bit of traditional 'commercial' market research from which only we benefit. We want the community to benefit from this work (as well as us of course!). On that basis, we will make the final report openly available to the community and we have asked SIRC not to provide us with any raw material from the survey that can tie responses back to an individual or institution. That means you can be sure that if/when you fill out this survey (and we hope you will) your privacy and confidentiality is assured.

Secondly, the survey looks like it is going to be quite long at the outset. Please don't panic... parts of the survey get skipped depending on the answers you give and in any case, many of the answers are selected from lists. On that basis, we hope it won't take longer to complete than the estimated 15-20 minutes.

So, if you are in any way involved with the creation or management of website content in a UK HEI, please take time to complete the survey.  Thanks.

PS. Brian Kelly has remined me that this study will also lead to a workshop session, "Care in the community... how do you manage your Web content?", at the forthcoming IWMW 2009 event (bookings for which close tomorrow).

SharePoint study

We're commissioning a study looking at the uptake and use of Microsoft SharePoint by Higher Education Institutions and currently have an ITT available.

This is an unusual study for us - in the sense that it focuses on an individual product - a fact that hasn't gone unnoticed either internally or in the community. When we announced the study on the WEBSITE-INFO-MGT@JISCMAIL.AC.UK mailing list, David Newman (Queen's University Management School, Belfast) responded with:

What a remarkably narrow research scope. It would be interesting to find out what groupware HEI institutions are using to support particular functions (co-ordinating international research projects, helping students work together in group projects, joint report editing, keeping track of expenses, ...). But just one product from one supplier?

I think David is right to raise this as an issue but there are reasons why we've done things in the way that we have and I think those reasons are worth sharing. Here's a copy of my response to David:

Hi David,
Firstly, I agree with you that this looks to be a rather narrowly scoped piece of work. It is the kind of study that we haven't funded to date and it's something that we didn't fund without a certain amount of internal angst! On that basis, I think it is worth me trying to explain where we are coming from with it.

You should note that this study comes out of our new Research Programme

http://www.eduserv.org.uk/research/

rather than the previous Eduserv Foundation (which has now been wrapped up, except in the sense that we are continuing to support projects that we previously funded under the Foundation). Our previously announced ITT for a study looking at the way Web content is managed by HEIs (currently being undertaken by SIRC)

http://www.eduserv.org.uk/research/studies/wcm2009

came from the same place.

The change from a Foundation to a Research Programme brought with it a subtle, but significant, change of emphasis. Eduserv is a non-profit IT services company. We have a charitable mission to "realise the benefits of ICT for learners and researchers", something we believe we do most effectively thru the services we deliver, e.g. those provided for the education community (particularly HE). Because of that, we felt we would get better 'value' from our research funding (more bang-per-buck if you like) if we tried to align it more closely with the kinds of services we offer. That is what we are trying to do thru the new Research Programme.

Our services to HE currently include OpenAthens and Chest, though we have a desire to improve our Web hosting/development offer within the sector as well (something we currently sell primarily into the public sector). For info... we are also in the final stages of developing a new data centre in Swindon and we hope to use that as the basis for new services to the HE sector in the future.

As a service provider, we sense a significant (and growing) interest in the use of MS SharePoint as the basis for the provision of a fairly wide range of solutions. This is particularly true in the public sector, where we also operate, but also in HE (for example, the HEA are just in the process of initiating a SharePoint project). Please note, I'm not saying this is necessarily good thing - my personal view is that it is not (though my personal view on all this is largely irrelevant!).

We tried to broaden the scope of the ITT in line with the kind of "groupware" suggestion you make below [above] but ultimately we felt that in doing so it was hard to capture the breadth of things that people are trying to do in SharePoint without ending up with something quite fuzzy and unfocused. On that basis, we reluctantly narrowed in on a specific technology - something we are not used to doing.

Let me be quite clear. We are not looking for a study that says MS SharePoint is the answer to everything (or indeed anything). Nor, that it is the answer to nothing. We are looking to understand what people in HE are doing with SharePoint, what they think works well, what they think is broken, why they have considered but rejected it and so on.

In that sense, it is a piece of market research... pure and simple. However, we believed (perhaps wrongly?) that the community would also be interested in this topic, which is why the findings of the work will be made openly available under a CC licence. The intention is to help both us and the community make better long term deployment decisions and, rightly or wrongly, we felt that decisions about one particular piece of software, i.e. SharePoint, was a significant enough part of that in this particular case to make the study worthwhile.

Hope that helps?

Note, I'm very happy to continue to hear if people think we have gone badly wrong on this because it will help us to spend our money more wisely (i.e. more effectively for the benefit of both us and the community) in the future.

Best,

Andy

Investigation into the management of website content in higher education institutions

I'm very pleased to announce that work has now started on a short study looking at the issues around the management of website content in higher education institutions. Full details are available on the website so I won't repeat them here. The work is being undertaken by the Social Issues Research Centre (SIRC) on our behalf and will culminate in an openly available report (released under Creative Commons). We also plan to run an interactive session at the next Institutional Web Management Workshop in Essex in July, tentatively entitled Care in the community... how do you manage your Web content?

Unlocking Audio

I spent the first couple of days this week at the British Library in London, attending the Unlocking Audio 2 conference.  I was there primarily to give an invited talk on the second day.

You might notice that I didn't have a great deal to say about audio, other than to note that what strikes me as interesting about the newer ways in which I listen to music online (specifically Blip.fm and Spotify) is that they are both highly social (almost playful) in their approach and that they are very much of the Web (as opposed to just being 'on' the Web).

What do I mean by that last phrase?  Essentially, it's about an attitude.  It's about seeing being mashed as a virtue.  It's about an expectation that your content, URLs and APIs will be picked up by other people and re-used in ways you could never have foreseen.  Or, as Charles Leadbeater put it on the first day of the conference, it's about "being an ingredient".

I went on to talk about the JISC Information Environment (which is surprisingly(?) not that far off its 10th birthday if you count from the initiation of the DNER), using it as an example of digital library thinking more generally and suggesting where I think we have parted company with the mainstream Web (in a generally "not good" way).  I noted that while digital library folks can discuss identifiers forever (if you let them!) we generally don't think a great deal about identity.  And even where we do think about it, the approach is primarily one of, "who are you and what are you allowed to access?", whereas on the social Web identity is at least as much about, "this is me, this is who I know, and this is what I have contributed". 

I think that is a very significant difference - it's a fundamentally different world-view - and it underpins one critical aspect of the difference between, say, Shibboleth and OpenID.  In digital libraries we haven't tended to focus on the social activity that needs to grow around our content and (as I've said in the past) our institutional approach to repositories is a classic example of how this causes 'social networking' issues with our solutions.

I stole a lot of the ideas for this talk, not least Lorcan Dempsey's use of concentration and diffusion.  As an aside... on the first day of the conference, Charles Leadbeater introduced a beach analogy for the 'media' industries, suggesting that in the past the beach was full of a small number of large boulders and that everything had to happen through those.  What the social Web has done is to make the beach into a place where we can all throw our pebbles.  I quite like this analogy.  My one concern is that many of us do our pebble throwing in the context of large, highly concentrated services like Flickr, YouTube, Google and so on.  There are still boulders - just different ones?  Anyway... I ended with Dave White's notions of visitors vs. residents, suggesting that in the cultural heritage sector we have traditionally focused on building services for visitors but that we need to focus more on residents from now on.  I admit that I don't quite know what this means in practice... but it certainly feels to me like the right direction of travel.

I concluded by offering my thoughts on how I would approach something like the JISC IE if I was asked to do so again now.  My gut feeling is that I would try to stay much more mainstream and focus firmly on the basics, by which I mean adopting the principles of linked data (about which there is now a TED talk by Tim Berners-Lee), cool URIs and REST and focusing much more firmly on the social aspects of the environment (OpenID, OAuth, and so on).

Prior to giving my talk I attended a session about iTunesU and how it is being implemented at the University of Oxford.  I confess a strong dislike of iTunes (and iTunesU by implication) and it worries me that so many UK universities are seeing it as an appropriate way forward.  Yes, it has a lot of concentration (and the benefits that come from that) but its diffusion capabilities are very limited (i.e. it's a very closed system), resulting in the need to build parallel Web interfaces to the same content.  That feels very messy to me.  That said, it was an interesting session with more potential for debate than time allowed.  If nothing else, the adoption of systems about which people can get religious serves to get people talking/arguing.

Overall then, I thought it was an interesting conference.  I suspect that my contribution wasn't liked by everyone there - but I hope it added usefully to the debate.  My live-blogging notes from the two days are here and here.

A National Research Data Service for the UK?

I attended the A National Research Data Service for the UK? meeting at the Royal Society in London last week and my live-blogged notes are available for those who want more detail.  Chris Rusbridge also blogged the day on the Digital Curation Blog - session 1, session 2, session 3 and session 4.  FWIW, I think that Chris's posts are more comprehensive and better than my live-blogged notes.

The day was both interesting and somewhat disappointing...

Interesting primarily because of the obvious political tension in the room (which I characterised on Twitter as a potential bun-fight between librarians and the rest but which in fact is probably better summed up as a lack of shared agreement around centralist (discipline-based) solutions vs. institutional solutions).

Disappointing because the day struck me more as a way of presenting a done-deal than as a real opportunity for debate.

The other thing that I found annoying was the constant parroting of the view that "researchers want to share their data openly" as though this is an obvious position.  The uncomfortable fact is that even the UKRDS report's own figures suggest that less than half (43%) of those surveyed "expressed the need to access other researchers' data" - my assumption therefore is that the proportion currently willing to share their data openly will be much smaller.

Don't take this as a vote against open access, something that I'm very much in favour of.  But, as we've found with eprint archives, a top-down "thou shalt deposit because it is good for you" approach doesn't cut it with researchers - it doesn't result in cultural change.  Much better to look for, and actively support, those areas where open sharing of data occurs naturally within a community or discipline, thus demonstrating its value to others.

That said, a much more fundamental problem facing the provision of collaborative services to the research community is that funding happens nationally but research happens globally (or at least across geographic/funding boundaries) - institutions are largely irrelevant whichever way you look at it [except possibly as an agent of long term preservation - added 6 March 2009].  Resolving that tension seems paramount to me though I have no suggestions as to how it can be done.  It does strike me however that shared discipline-based services come closer to the realities of the research world than do institutional services.

Web content management in UK universities

We've decided to fund a study looking at the way in which UK universities manage their Web content. There are two primary reasons for this...

Firstly, we think that sharing knowledge about current practice across the community is likely to be both of interest to people and beneficial in terms of moving things forward. Secondly, we offer content management systems as part of our charitable portfolio of services but we have not, to date, been very successful at convincing HE institutions that our offer is a good one. Consequently, we'd like to understand better what we can offer that is seen to be valuable.

We're undertaking this activity as part of our new Research Programme, which means that all the findings will be openly available to the community (including to our CMS competitors). We think this is a good thing. We're also hoping to use the findings of the study to seed a discussion session at the next Institutional Web Management Workshop.