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Kuali OLE, one of the largest academic library software collaborations in the United States, and JISC, the UK’s expert on digital technologies for education and research, announce a collaboration that will make data about e-resources—such as publication and licensing information—more easily available.
Together, Kuali OLE and JISC will develop an international open data repository that will give academic libraries a broader view of subscribed resources.The effort, known as the Global Open Knowledgebase (GOKb) project, is funded in part by a $499,000 grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. North Carolina State University will serve as lead institution for the project.
GOKb will be an open, community-based, international data repository that will provide libraries with publication information about electronic resources. This information will support libraries in providing efficient and effective services to their users and ensure that critical electronic collections are available to their students and researchers."This Kuali OLE – JISC partnership adds momentum to our efforts to create an open library system and offers benefits to all participants. We are pleased at the way our projects have come together toward a common goal, and look forward to sharing the results widely,” said Deborah Jakubs, university librarian and vice provost for library affairs at Duke University and co-chair of the Kuali OLE board.
Robert H. McDonald, Executive Director of Kuali OLE, says, "With the start-up of the GOKb Project, Kuali OLE as an organization is showcasing the strengths and opportunities that come from deep collaborative engagements with our peer academic libraries both in the US and in the UK. The role for libraries in collaboration around electronic content can't be dismissed. Libraries need better supply-chain options for our electronic content management workflows and the GOKb Project will provide solutions.""Nowhere are the advantages and possibilities of data better understood and more keenly felt than in academic libraries,” says Rachel Bruce, JISC Innovation Director. “Data underpins the services and systems that libraries provide to their students and researchers.”
The GOKb cloud service will provide data for “subscribed resources” from a higher education perspective. It will include data such as publication information, related organizations, and model licences, and will be accessible across all US and UK academic libraries.Many of the concerns libraries have in the management of electronic resources are the same across the world. Indeed, there are a number of projects, such as the Kuali OLE (Open library Environment) in the U.S. and the Knowledge Base+ service in the UK, that are exploring community-based solutions.
Kuali OLE is a community of nine research libraries working together to build the first open-source system designed by and for academic and research libraries for managing and delivering intellectual information.Among JISC's objectives are to provide cost-effective shared national services and resources and to help institutions improve the efficiency and effectiveness of their business systems.
A JISC study (PDF) has found that learners develop a variety of digital literacies often through a social trial-and-error process, without the direct support or advice of their educational institutions.
Ben Showers JISC programme manager said: “By understanding and recognising students’ hidden behaviours and motivations, JISC is in a position to help universities and colleges develop better digital services and resources, with the student experience significantly improved.”
Watch a video interview with the two project leads David White (University of Oxford) and Lynn Silipigni Connaway (OCLC Research)
To understand learners’ engagement with digital technologies, JISC is now funding the next phase of the project which uses the concept of visitors and residents to describe their online journey.
The visitor sees the internet as a toolbox that they use for a specific task and then leave the web without leaving a footprint. The resident partially lives out their life online; they see the web as somewhere they can express themselves.
It’s the next phase in a longitudinal study into US and UK learners at different stages of their education in a partnership between the University of Oxford and OCLC Online Computer Library Center, Inc., in collaboration with the University of North Carolina, Charlotte.
The study says that there is now a learning ‘black market’ where learners use non-traditional sources of information online, which may lack academic credibility. While these practices can be effective for their studies, students are often wary of citing such resources.
Gaining an understanding of these emerging practices will help ensure that projects and institutions provide effective advice and guidance in the ongoing development of digital skills.
Ben Showers said: “It is difficult to overestimate the importance of the Visitors and Residents work. It is not only challenging assumptions about how students use technology, but it is shedding light on those practices, attitudes and techniques students employ online.”
There are more intriguing findings from the study, including that LinkedIn becomes more important to people in the later stages of their education; that there is more skepticism in the US than the UK education system over students’ use of Wikipedia; and that students prefer email over instant messenger and other tools for ‘administrative’ tasks such as contacting a researcher.
“We are very excited to continue this work,” said co-principal investigator Lynn Silipigni Connaway. “We believe our preliminary findings will have a great impact on the development of services and systems for teaching and learning.”
“The project is discovering the extent to which the embedding of the web in both personal and institutional contexts is changing the way we learn, teach and research,” said co-principal investigator David White. “We are delighted to be able to explore this further and to have the opportunity to create resources that can be used to reflect on, and experiment with, new forms of professional practice.”
The Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) today issued the first public appraisal of the Digging into Data Challenge, an international grant programme first funded by JISC, the US National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), the US National Science Foundation and the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.
Their findings are presented in One Culture, along with a series of recommendations for researchers, administrators, scholarly societies, academic publishers, research libraries, and funding agencies. The recommendations are “urgent, pointed, and even disruptive,” write the authors. “To address them, we must recognize the impediments of tradition that hinder the contemporary university’s ability to adapt to, support, or sustain this emerging research over time.”
The Digging into Data Challenge was launched in 2009 to better understand how “big data” changes the research landscape for the humanities and social sciences. Scholars in these disciplines now use massive databases of materials that range from digitized books, newspapers, and music to transactional data such as web searches, sensor data, or cell phone records. The Challenge seeks to discover what new, computationally based research methods might be applied to these sources.
In its first year, the Digging into Data Challenge made awards to eight teams of scholars, librarians, and computer and information scientists. Over the following two years, report authors Christa Williford and Charles Henry conducted site visits, interviews, and focus groups to understand how these complex international projects were being managed, what challenges they faced, and what project teams were learning from the experience.
Brett Bobley, chief information officer and director of the NEH Office of Digital Humanities, heads the Digging into Data Challenge. "Do we have big data in the humanities and social sciences? Yes—buckets of it,” he says. “But our ability to produce huge quantities of digital data has outstripped our ability to analyze and understand it. One Culture helps us to see not only why we would want a computer to assist us with our work, but how big data is changing the very nature of traditional humanistic research."
Co-author and CLIR president Charles Henry said, "This report discloses the complexity and sophistication of humanities and social sciences research in a digital era. It underscores the excitement and potential of new discovery through deep collaboration across disciplines and affirms the continuity of traditional values and perspectives of scholarly communication in a data-dependent milieu. The report also seeks to animate a collective responsibility to more concertedly appreciate, extend, fund, and provide adequate services to sustain this remarkable research."
In 2011, four additional funding bodies joined the four original cooperating agencies in support of fourteen new international collaborative research projects. These funders include the Institute of Museum and Library Services (US); the Arts and Humanities Research Council (UK); the Economic and Social Research Council (UK); and the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research.
Stuart Dempster, director at JISC, said, “We are proud to be a partner in this trans-Atlantic endeavor which aims to assist individual researchers, academic departments, and research institutions to succeed with the ‘data deluge’ in the humanities. For the UK to continue to punch above its weight in terms of digital scholarship and research it is vital for it to collaborate in ‘smart partnerships,’ which foster innovation in the development of tools, skills, and new research findings. This report shows that success in action.”
“The CLIR report is an excellent assessment of this unique and exciting international partnership,” said Gisèle Yasmeen, Vice-President, Research, at the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. “The Digging into Data Challenge project is generating innovative computation and data analysis techniques to better advance research and we look forward to its continued success.”
"NSF has found the Digging into Data Challenge to be an excellent mechanism for enabling collaborative, data-intensive research in the social sciences and humanities," said Elizabeth Tran, programme officer in NSF's Office of International Science and Engineering. "It has significantly reduced some the key barriers to conducting research across borders and has resulted in a number of truly international outstanding research projects."
The report is available online in pdf format; an extended version with case studies is also available in html format. Print copies are available for ordering through the website.
The report, One Culture. Computationally Intensive Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences, was made public today at the Joint Conference on Digital Libraries JCDL 2012 conference in Washington, DC.
CLIR is an independent, nonprofit organization that forges strategies to enhance research, teaching, and learning environments in collaboration with libraries, cultural institutions, and communities of higher learning.
A_L_T: Call for 2 new Editors of Research in Learning Technology http://t.co/upje7iCF
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A_L_T: Educational Technology and Education Conferences, June to December 2012: Wright, Clayton R. Educational Technolo... http://t.co/ChhzU4k7
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A_L_T: Call for 2 new Editors of Research in Learning Technology http://t.co/upje7iCF
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A_L_T: ALT News Issue 27: Aaron Sloman, Is education research a form of alchemy? - http://t.co/sBzI4pRN
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A_L_T: ALT News Issue 27: The SCARLET Project: Marrying Augmented Reality and Special Collections - http://t.co/WrXTnMFx
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A_L_T: ALT News Issue 27: Peter Wren, Staff Development through Tightly Integrated Blended Learning - http://t.co/0dVFOHRy
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A_L_T: ALT News Issue 27: Simon Kear, Using Blackboard Collaborate 11 to deliver a global online conference - http://t.co/FH6I95wV
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A_L_T: ALT News Issue 27: Adel Gordon & Julie Usher, Blackboard Teaching and Learning Conference 2012 - http://t.co/QT2Ayegp
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A_L_T: ALT News Issue 27: James Clay, Over the Irish Sea: Moodlemoot 2012 - http://t.co/zqWQOgD3
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Wright, Clayton R. Educational Technology and Education Conferences, June to December 2012. ALT. (Unpublished)
A_L_T: ALT News Issue 27: Video in Teaching And Learning Special Interest Group (ViTAL SIG) Update - http://t.co/SYbYmBWf
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