We have been overwhelmed by the interest in the Now and Future of Data Publishing and the venue is full! The same applies (nearly) for the ORCID Outreach meeting and the Joint ORCID – Dryad Symposium on Research Attribution.

However, there are still some places for the Dryad ‘Open’ Meeting (membership and more) on Friday 24 May. This meeting is open to Dryad members, prospective members and other interested parties and provides a wonderful opportunity to learn about recent developments, get a preview of upcoming features, have a say in the governance of the organization, exchange ideas and experience with other members and Dryad staff, and help chart the future of data archiving. For a place at the event, register here.

So in response to the demand, it will be possible to follow all four events (over three days) online!  Click on the links below.  The NFDP13 meeting is using Webex, provided by Dryad through Duke University.  Instructions are at the foot of this post.

Now and Future of Data Publication, all day, Wed 22 May

ORCID Outreach Meeting, am, Thu 23 May

Joint ORCID – Dryad Symposium on Research Attribution, pm, Thu 23 May

Dryad Membership Meeting, all day, Fri 24 May

Webex Details for Now and Future of Data Publishing, Wed 22 May

——————————————————-
Meeting information
——————————————————-
Topic: Now and Future of Data Publication
Date: Wednesday, May 22, 2013
Time: 9:00 am, GMT Summer Time (London, GMT+01:00)
Meeting Number: 732 521 534
Meeting Password: opendata

——————————————————-
To start or join the online meeting
——————————————————-
Go to http://bit.ly/nowfuturedata

——————————————————-
Audio conference information
——————————————————-
Call-in toll number (US/Canada): 1-650-479-3207
Global call-in numbers: https://dukeuniversity.webex.com/dukeuniversity/globalcallin.php?serviceType=MC&ED=214875007&tollFree=0
Access code:732 521 534

——————————————————-
For assistance
——————————————————-
1. Go to https://dukeuniversity.webex.com/dukeuniversity/mc
2. On the left navigation bar, click “Support”.
To add this meeting to your calendar program (for example Microsoft Outlook), click this link:
https://dukeuniversity.webex.com/dukeuniversity/j.php?ED=214875007&UID=508030682&ICS=MS&LD=1&RD=2&ST=1&SHA2=AAAAApqHAqzVD5sBvuTAMJCzVQ-9SucmhXm/yhzgPUa9S7rJ
To check whether you have the appropriate players installed for UCF (Universal Communications Format) rich media files, go to https://dukeuniversity.webex.com/dukeuniversity/systemdiagnosis.php.
http://www.webex.com
CCM:+16504793207×732521534#

IMPORTANT NOTICE: This WebEx service includes a feature that allows audio and any documents and other materials exchanged or viewed during the session to be recorded. You should inform all meeting attendees prior to recording if you intend to record the meeting. Please note that any such recordings may be subject to discovery in the event of litigation.

The Canadian philosopher of communication and media, Marshall McLuhan, famously argued:

We see the world through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future

In the early days of the web it was common for retailers to replicate paper brochures online, so called ‘brochureware’, missing the interactivity and format opportunities the web provides (and losing customers in the process too!). We continue to transpose our experiences of physical paper and books online, with little or no adaptation to the opportunities for interaction and multi-media.

While mobile technology has been available for decades, its current ubiquity and power (both socially and technologically) mean we find ourselves at the edge of a technological shift. As we move from a desk top to a mobile lifestyle we must be careful not to succumb to the rear-view mirror effect and replicate the desk top experience in the services and systems we design for the mobile user.

We find ourselves inhabiting a very different environment to a few years ago. Where once our computing power was located in one place, it now travels with us, capturing and distracting us no matter where we find ourselves. It connects us to people, places and things in ways not previously possible.

With this mobile lifestyle in mind I want to explore 4 challenges that mobile technologies present to libraries. In articulating these challenges I hope it will become increasingly clear what strategies and opportunities there are for libraries, and their services, systems and collections.

Simplicity

When you take a look at some of the best mobile experiences, whether apps or websites they usually have one thing in common: They do one thing extremely well. Everything extraneous is stripped away to leave only the most essential and relevant information.

Exemplars include Rise, an alarm clock app that incorporates visually simple interfaces, combined with gesture recognition and your music playlists. Or Clear, a ‘to do’ app, with intuitive gesture controls and the use of colour to denote urgency – nothing else.

Amazon’s stripped down app is a good example of a website that has adapted its presence to a mobile experience: Only the relevant information is included and all the complexity is hidden away from sight (although you can dig deeper if you wish).

The Amazon example is an interesting one. It invites comparisons with the library catalogue, and it certainly provides an effective template for mobile discovery. However, libraries have a physical infrastructure, processes and technologies that mean refining the mobile experience to a single thing can be hard. When we use a phrase like ‘discovery’ in a library or information-seeking context we often mean a set of interrelated actions, such as: search, select, find and use. Is it possible to break these down into their component parts and still deliver a positive experience for the user, both in terms of the mobile experience and of using the library?

The challenge the mobile devices present to libraries in this context is one of needs over solutions. The challenge is to think beyond the solutions already in place (the catalogue, discovery layer), to articulating the actual need. In the case of discovery maybe, ‘I need to answer a question’, or; ‘I need to find something’. Formulated in this way it is clear that a solution may be very different to the ones already available.

It forces us to consider the context we’re operating in; it invites us to invent, not retro-fit!

People and Place

Increasingly, the mobile device is a bridge between our online social connectivity and our localised real-world interactions. If you explore a map on your phone you don’t have to tell it where you are, the internal GPS has already told it. Similarly, it can tell you when a friend is near-by through apps like Facebook, FourSquare and so on.

There are a number of interesting examples where libraries and others have exploited these inherent benefits of mobile devices. Mendeley, the reference manager, is a good example of a service that is explicitly looking to build a social layer on top of the bibliographic data they have crowdsourced from the academic community in the form of bibliographies. You can follow academics with similar research interests, build groups and curate and build your own, personalised discovery network.
Increasingly, the discovery experience unfolds and is led by the content itself. What used to be the destination, the content or resource, is now the beginning of the journey.

For example, projects like Bomb Site, from the National Archives, have taken bomb site map data and made it available as a responsive website so that academics, researchers and members of the public can explore where bombs fell. This data is augmented over a map and includes images, descriptions and people’s memories.

Bomb Sight App

Similarly, the PhoneBooth project from the London School of Economics mobilised the Charles Booth poverty maps of London so that students and researchers could use and annotate the maps in context, i.e., on the streets of London as part of their learning experience.

PhoneBooth app

Increasingly the discovery process will find itself facilitating peer-to-peer and social recommendation experiences.

The traditional catalogue will itself begin to disappear from these interactions. Instead, the discovery experience will have an intimacy and personalisation associated with it that mirrors the intimately personal experience of the mobile device itself.

Personal

The web provides unparalleled opportunities for scale. The local bric-a-brac shop becomes eBay, the bookshop Amazon, the University becomes the massively open online course (MOOC) such as Cousera. Similarly the library begins to operate at ‘web-scale’ with its systems and services.

Yet, the mobile experience is an intimately personal one. It challenges libraries and information providers to find a balance between these two types of scale: the singular (the personal) and the ‘web-scale’. It is not enough simply to adopt web-scale systems and services: mobile challenges us to think about how that web-based interaction is transformed into real-world action.

One opportunity for libraries is in the data that circulates through their systems, both the management data and the user-generated interaction data. There are an increasing number of services and projects looking at exploiting this data for the personalisation of the user experience. These include commercial offerings, of which the best known is bX from Ex Libris.

There are also a number of academic libraries exploring the use of this data, including: SALT (surfacing the academic long tail) and RISE (Recommendations improve the search experience) which are exploring how different sets of data can be used to enhance and personalise the library experience.

The ability of libraries to exploit this data will grow increasingly important. The data provides a way for libraries to continue delivering services to hundreds and thousands of users, while providing a personalised experience that users expect from web-based services.

New models

If the mobile shift challenges libraries to invent new experiences, it also invites us to rethink how we develop and implement these.

As information becomes abundant and digital, the models for how libraries develop and implement new services and systems will radically change too. Libraries are no longer comparing themselves and their services to other libraries; instead they are being compared to the web, and the types of services and resources users can access there. Increasingly libraries will find themselves needing to adopt approaches that would normally be more associated with web start-ups.

This implies a greater focus on ideas (ideas from everywhere: librarians, users et al), rapid iteration and testing, and implementation of the idea (or quick relegation of ideas). This more entrepreneurial approach recognises that there is no simple crossing between how things are now and the future. There is not a simple roadmap from the complexities of the information environment as they are now, to some stable future; disruption is a feature, not a bug of the system.

While the change in a libraries approach to the user and the work it undertakes is significant, and not easy, there are some straightforward starting points. There are already great examples and case studies of mobile innovation in libraries. The M-Libraries community support blog, for example, includes a large amount of information, including case-studies, best practice guides and inspiration from other organisations on how they have transformed services with mobile technology.

Indeed, as many of the examples on the M-Libraries blog demonstrate, the financial overhead for this type of change should be low. Rethinking your approach to design of mobile services shouldn’t include significant barriers, either financial or technical. A good place to start is by borrowing ideas from other domains, like software development and design. The example of paper-prototyping, used in a recent mobile development workshop, provides a good place to start.

What many of these examples share is a renewed focus on the user. It moves us away from a focus on internal systems and processes, toward the behaviours and requirements of the user. The centre of gravity moves away from the technology and toward the user; the mobile-turn is one where the technology is overshadowed by the needs of the user.

The challenges mobile technologies present to libraries are ones drenched in paradox. The hardware (the phone, tablet, ereader) gradually fades from view, and it is the user, with their intricate behaviours and requirements that remain the focus of our attention.

Unlike so many other technologies, mobile enables the library to rethink its services, systems and processes to ensure that it is the user that remains at their heart. This does not mean business as usual, however. But it does mean that by understanding these challenges and their implications, libraries are in a position to design and deliver mobile experiences that users will want to engage with.

The programme for the Now and Future of Data Publishing Symposium is now available! It features keynotes from Peter Fox, of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, an erudite and engaging thinker on matters of data publication; and from Unni Karunakara, President of Médicins Sans Frontières.  The closing address will be delivered by John Wood, Secretary General, The Association of Commonwealth Universities and Research Data Alliance Council.

The bulk of the day comprises a series of panel sessions, some in plenary, some in parallel, in which a host of experts involved in various ways with data publication will address a series of key issues.  This is a format that we hope will encourage discussion and allow participants to set an agenda of issues to be tackled to help shape data publishing over the next few years.

Unfortunately, the event is already full but a waitlist has been set up.  That the event should have reached capacity even before the programme was finalised demonstrates how lively the interest in data publishing is across a range of communities.

Dryad Membership Meeting and other events

Should you be disappointed and not able to attend NFDP13, do not despair: there is a series of exciting events in Oxford in the same week.  In particularly, I would like to draw readers attention to the Dryad Membership Meeting, on Friday 24 May, which it should be stressed is not just restricted to Dryad members.  In fact, it is open to Dryad members, prospective members and other interested parties!  The meeting provides an opportunity to learn about recent developments, get a preview of upcoming features, have a say in the governance of the organization, exchange ideas and experience with other members and Dryad staff, and help chart the future of data archiving.  The programme for the Dryad Membership Meeting is now available and you can register here.

We look forward to seeing you in Oxford at any of the associated meetings: the Now and Future of Data Publishing Symposium 2013; the ORCID Outreach Meeting; the Joint Dryad-ORCID Symposium on Research Attribution; and the Dryad Membership (and more) Meeting.

In the first of two posts I wanted to briefly introduce you to the two recently published reports, and their main findings/recommendations. In the second post I want to highlight some of the other developments on the shared library systems landscape, and highlight some of the implications.

A Shared LMS for Wales (WHELF)

The  Welsh Shared Service Library Management System Feasibility Report focussed on the most prevalent and practical issues for a shared all Wales HE library management system in broad terms:

• A set of high-level agreed consortium requirements for a shared LMS.

• A proposed governance model for the consortium.

• High level recommendations on integration requirements for local systems; map communications standards which are applicable to the project against standards in use by suppliers.

• A business case for a Wales-wide consortium LMS, including cost matrices for the different approaches presented.

• Recommendations on the most cost-effective approach for software, hosting and ongoing management of the LMS.

The report makes the following recommendations:

The Project recommended setting up an All-Wales Consortium with formal governance. This requires the consortium to formally agree which processes, working practices and configurations will be adhered to by all members as a whole.

A cloud solution hosted by a vendor (or open source vendor) is the preferred option, because this will provide the most cost-effective resilient solution.

Further work will be required to develop a clear statement on the vision for shared LMS services in Wales, ensuring clarity of purpose and providing a compelling statement of intent for senior stakeholders and staff to achieve buy-in to the strategic direction proposed.

Next steps…

The report suggests a phased approach to implementation; anticipating that the first implementations will be no sooner than Summer 2014.

The report also suggests a task and finish group should be convened to quickly put together a high level plan, costs and cost allocation (i.e. funding) for the establishment of a project team.

The Benefits of Sharing (SCURL)

The Benefits of Sharing project has also just released a summary report of its work exploring a simple question:

How would a shared library management system improve services in Scotland?

While the question is simple, the answer is a little more complex. Indeed, the project began looking at the question with an initial workshop and subsequent report.

It then broke the problem into 3 parts:

1. Users

2. Systems, and;

3. Content

The project also published a summary report which concludes with a number of recommendations, including the following:

From a systems perspective, sharing technical infrastructure and support structures would offer benefits of economies of scale, with more efficient use of staffing and greater expertise than any single library could offer. System options such as Open Source (OS) alternatives to ‘off the shelf’ commercial products could, therefore, become viable. It is recommended that at the tender and procurement phases of a shared LMS, all options, including OS systems, are reviewed and assessed.

————————————-

Both reports make very interesting reading – and also tell us a lot about the current library systems landscape. In particular there is a renewed vigour in the potential for sharing and collaborating around services and systems between libraries and institutions.

There is also a clear recognition that open source solutions are viable options for the community, and may represent a feature of this new library landscape.

In the second post on shared library services and systems I’ll explore some of the other developments within this landscape, and the implications they have for institutions, libraries and systems vendors.

The problem we are addressing
Research teams and administrators must retype the same information repeatedly when applying for grants and reporting to funders. Research policy-makers, managers and evaluators are consistently frustrated by an inability to draw meaningful conclusions from a growing mass of disconnected data. The problem and a way to reduce this administrative duplication for the research community are nicely illustrated in the CASRAI video:

The Solution
The solution suggested by CASRAI is compiling a common, international dictionary. The dictionary contains definitions of key terms or information elements which relate to the management of e.g. research grants, CVs or data management plans and documents controlled vocabularies, authoritative lists and identifiers that are relevant for these terms.  The dictionary thereby provides the basis for data profiles to ease the exchange of information within and between organisations.  As a single, open and unambiguous reference source for data profiles, the CASRAI dictionary can be used by multiple technology suppliers – including those using CERIF or VIVO – thereby forming a basis for interoperability and allowing information to be exchanged smoothly.

The ‘CASRAI approach’ to developing this dictionary and building agreement around key terms is generating more and more interest in the UK research community and we are excited about trialling it here in the UK.

CASRAI-UK
CASRAI and Jisc are piloting three National working groups (NWGs) around a number of priority areas identified at the CASRAI-UK summit organised by Jisc and CASRAI last December. These pilot projects are exploring both the methods and the particular content that is the focus of this work.

The people on the working groups (i.e. funders, research managers, standards experts) will identify and document agreements on vocabularies. While these agreements will build on and have defined relationships with an international core, they will reflect UK requirements. A CASRAI analyst will help to develop ‘data profiles’ which are defined  as a harmonized standard that specifies a subset of information required by the users of an inter-organisational work process.

This approach can prevent us from reinventing wheels and offer a sustainable home for these agreements –  for example also for the outputs of the Jisc UK Research Information Shared Service project.

Three pilot National Working Groups will focus on
1. Data Management Plans

• Developing an initial data profile reflecting the current version of the Digital Curation Centre’s “DMP-Online” tool.
• Concurrently, developing a potential further version of the data profile derived from harmonization and discussions among the UK Research Councils.

2. Organisational Lists

• Assessment and recommendation on the suitability of the planned FundRef list for adoption as a standard authoritative list for international funding organizations.
• Exploring possible sources of authoritative lists of organisations involved in UK research, including research performing organisations, charities, industry, etc.
• Develop a sustainable process for maintaining authoritative lists of organisations in the CASRAI dictionary.

3. Research Reporting

• Data profile supporting institutional report to UK funders for the new policy on Open Access, and for research contributions / outputs more generally

While other areas identified at the CASRAI-UK Summit – Ethics Review and Research Equipment profiles – are also important, we think that these need more discussion before we can convene and set the scope for working groups. For now, these discussions will be continued in a special online forum for each of these topics.

How it works and how you can get invovled
Due to the pilot status of the working groups, the CASRAI governance arrangements and membership model will not be applied to its full extent this year. An objective of the pilot is to develop – together with the people participating in the working groups – a mechanism that works appropriately for the UK.

At the same time as we are starting the working groups we are also convening the CASRAI-UK National Review Circle. This group includes a wider group of people that are interested in the progress of CASRAI-UK and is open for anyone interested to join.

The National Working Groups (NWGs) will, in the course of their work, produce drafts, announcements and other outputs. These will be posted to a dedicated forum for the National Review Circle. This wider group can keep up-to-date on progress but also contribute advice and feedback to the NWGs as they evolve new national standards for the UK research community.
The purpose of the National review Circle is to ensure that the resulting standards are applicable and multi-disciplinary and that valid diverged views are communicated.

Please email info@casrai.org if you are interested in joining the National Review Circle or the discussion forum on Ethics Review or Research Equipment profiles.

These materials were originally developed by the DMTpsych Project, part of the training strand of the first Jisc Managing Research Data programme.  Richard Plant, who led this project went on to work on the Data Management Planning and Storage for Psychology at Sheffield.

The materials have been reused and adapted by the current TraD RDM training project at the University of East London.

Unfortunately, the server which housed these materials at the former Higher Education Academy Psychology Subject Centre at York apparently ‘exploded’ in the Autumn and these materials – valuable, reusable and the product of much hard work and investment – have not been available for the last few months.

Now – happily – the training materials have been deposited in Jorum and they are once again available for download and reuse.  Would it be over egging the pudding to suggest that an analogy can be made here with the data produced by research projects…?

Here is the Jorum description:

DMTpsych: Data Management Training for the Psychological Sciences provides resources to help postgraduates and researchers in psychology learn about data management and develop the skills to prepare data management plans. Such plans are being increasingly required by research funders. A workbook is provided that guides the reader through developing a discipline specific plan in accordance with the guidance available on digital curation provided by the Digital Curation Centre (see http://www.dcc.ac.uk/dmponline). Powerpoint slides are also available for use in training and can be adapted by lecturers for use in their own research methods training programmes.

The highlight of this weeks endNotes is something that happened at the end of last week (I know it’s cheating, but there wasn’t an endNote last week!).

The International Discovery Summit, held at the British Library, saw delegates from the UK and across the world come together to discuss ways of collaborating to address the common technical, political and social challenges that are preventing us realising our grand visions for better resource discovery.

All the presentations and resources from the day can be found on the website.

On tuesday this week the Ithaka S+R and Jisc published a report into the Changing Research Pracitices of Chemists.  The report describes the findings of research into academic chemists’ research habits and research support needs. the report covers themes such as data management, research collaboration, library use, discovery, publication practices, and research funding with a number of recommendations for new support service models.

This week also saw two workshops take place that explored the challenges of new technologies on libraries and teaching and learning. The University of Huddersfield hosted a HIKE project workshop that explored the impact of new library technologies (like next generation systems and services like KB+) on workflows and processes.

The second workshop was on the challenges of eBooks  and is part of a report exploring the challenges ebooks (and e-textbooks) pose to teaching and learning as well as beginning to map some of the ways institutions are addressing and solving these issues. the case studies developed with institutions are particularly interesting in mapping out potential ways forward in this fluid and complex space.

Finally…

My final link this week is for a documentary that is part of the BBC’s Storyville series. Google and the World Brain is about the campaign by authors to put a stop to the Google Books website after Google scanned millions of books, over half of which were still in copyright. Fascinating stuff.

There are a growing number of initiatives around data publication and these respond in part to changing research practices but also to changing policies and advocacy of more open research.  The symposium will provide an overview of the current landscape, interrogate the apparent benefits for researchers and research more generally and examine visions of the future of data publication. Above all, what sort of data publication will most engage researchers and most benefit research?

The event will be open to over 100 participants, comprising key stakeholder groups: researchers, research funders, policy makers, journal editors, publishers, data curators. The day will feature a number of provocative and inspiring keynotes.  In addition, there will be panel sessions addressing key themes around data publication.  Further details and a full programme will appear here soon.  Registration is already open here!

Dryad and ORCID Events

‘The Now and Future of Data Publishing’ is just one of a number of exciting events taking place at St. Anne’s College, Oxford, UK from Wednesday 22 May to Friday 24 May 2013.

Also taking place are the ORCID Outreach Meeting (Thursday 23 May, am only); Getting Credit for Your Work: A Symposium on Research Attribution jointly organised by Dryad and ORCID (Thursday 23 May, pm only); and the Dryad Membership Meeting (Friday 24 May, all day).  You can register for all these events, and The Now and Future of Data Publishing here!

ORCID CodeFest

In addition to these events, ORCID will host a CodeFest May 23-24, 2013 at St. Anne’s College in Oxford, UK. The event theme is Connections: Mash ups with the ORCID API. Meet ORCID technical staff, learn about our development resources, and bring your ideas for new tools.  Prizes will be awarded to top contributors. Register today!

The Now and Future of Data Publishing is supported by:

It seems that all the cool kids produce weekly notes on their blogs reflecting back on the work that’s taken place over the week! Take a look at the Government’s Digital Service, Berg and Doug Belshaw’s blog for some really good examples.

So, with these Week endNotes the plan is to reflect over the past week of work, events and general happenings from the Digital infrastructure team. This first week will have a definite library flavour about it…

Library Systems

• First up is a slight cheat as this KualiOLE announcement was from last week! The community source library system Kuali Open Library Environment announced a further $750,000 in funding to help finish the development of the project. An important announcement for the project and for those institutions, in the US and elsewhere, who are watching the progress of the project.
• The LMS Change landscape document has been published on the project blog which provides a very good overview of the current Library Systems landscape. Well worth a read if you can.

Library Analytics

• This week saw the announcement of the very exciting Library Analytics and Metrics Project (jiscLAMP). The project will develop a shared library analytics service for UK HE. Stay tuned for more information soon!
• There has also been the recent release of the Activity Data Report entitled: Delivering benefits from the data deluge. This is a great report and worth taking a look at for both background to the issues as well as the use-cases and implications for institutions in being able to effectively analyse and act upon data.
• Finally, but by no means least, one of the most interesting posts on the blog last week was on Observing the Web by my colleague Neil Grindley. The post describes the work of the Web Science Trust and their aim to build a global network of Web Observatories providing an open analytics environment to drive new forms of Web research. The implications of this work seem significant – and is something of particular importance to the LAMP project and its aim to aggregate different data sets in order to under cover and describe new and useful narratives.

Then up pops Tom Barnett from Switch Concepts Ltd. at a meeting yesterday to tell us that ‘Google has a file the size of an encyclopedia on everyone in this room.’

Hmmm … that’s not a particularly comfortable idea for someone to put in your head. I start to feel a vague sense of paranoia creeping through my mind.

And then I think, c’mon Neil, pull yourself together! Google really doesn’t care who you are. They just want to put things in your line of sight that are more rather than less likely to get you to open your wallet and part with your wages!!

Such were the thoughts that were buzzing around my head yesterday at an event organised by the Web Science Trust (http://webscience.org).

The meeting was entitled ‘Observing the Web’ and the purpose was to highlight some of the work that the Web Science Trust and their partners and collaborators are doing to build a global network of Web Observatories providing an open analytics environment to drive new forms of Web research. We went round the room doing introductions and Dame Wendy Hall ended up branding us a ‘motley crew’. Academics, industry players, not-for-profits, technologists, funders, charities, a lawyer. (Quite a respectable looking motley crew in the very smart surroundings of the Royal Society I might add). But ‘motley crew’ felt about right for a topic and a collaborative, academic, open activity that is still exploring the territory and testing new ground. Presumably in contrast to the well-resourced, sophisticated and highly developed (but opaque) methods employed by the corporate observers of the Web (Facebook, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo etc.).

The point of all of this ‘observing’ is not to try and take account of every little bit of data and content on the web, but rather to understand what the aggregated use of the Web can tell us; how trends and fashions and changes of behaviour in relation to the Web might illuminate aspects of our society and culture, both now and for future students and researchers.

This was all of great interest to Jisc. We are currently working with the British Library, the Oxford Internet Institute and the Institute of Historical Research on an initiative that aligns very well with the notion of the Web Observatory.

The Big Data project (http://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/research/projects/?id=88)

and

the AADDA project (http://www.history.ac.uk/projects/digital/AADDA)

are both using a copy of the Internet Archive’s collection of UK domain websites collected over the period 1996-2010, to examine new ways to engage with the web at domain level, and develop new forms of research that leverage the scale of the web. As the name of the Oxford project says … it’s all about using ‘Big Data’.

This was work that emerged from influential JISC-funded reports commissioned in 2010 -

Researcher Engagement with Web Archives
http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/preservation/researcherengagementwithWA.aspx

As we heard at the meeting, the academic observatory is a very different proposition to the corporate observatory and comes with enormous challenges including: interoperability (how do we link observatories?); access (asides from Twitter which of the big corporates will let us use their data?); privacy (will people feel spied upon?); and sustainability (what is the business model?).

A fascinating meeting and big topic. There will be more discussion in Early May at the ACM Web Science Meeting in Paris.

http://www.websci13.org/registration/

Indianapolis Museum of Art analytics dashboard

The current buzz and enthusiasm around data is difficult to avoid. Whether it’s the challenges of ‘big data’, the potential of data-driven techniques, or simply the power and clarity of data visualisations; data is inescapably entwined with much of what we do, and the systems and services we provide and use.

Long before we were all swept up in this data euphoria, libraries have understood the potential and opportunities of collecting, managing and acting on the myriad sources of data they create through their systems and services. A recent survey of libraries by Mimas highlighted that the use of data to inform decision making was a top priority within the next 5 years. At the same time it is clear from Jisc’s Activity Data programme that there is a lack of viable tools and services for libraries to effectively exploit the broad range of data available.

A new project has just started at Jisc called the Library Analytics and Metrics project (jiscLAMP) which aims to enable libraries to capitalise on this data and support the improvement and development of new services (enhanced collections management, personalised services, tailored student support) and demonstrate value and impact in new ways across the institution (student attainment and satisfaction, identify changing research patterns, for example).

Besides LAMP providing ample opportunities for nice puns around shining a light onto library data, the project will be developing a prototype shared library analytics service for UK academic libraries. Initially this is being envisioned as a kind of data dashboard, bringing together disparate data sets and visualising them in an attractive and meaningful way.

The project is a partnership between Jisc, Mimas (at the University of Manchester) and the University of Huddersfield running until October this year when it will deliver a prototype service for use by the community.

While the project will establish specific analytics use-cases for the data, the project intends to initially focus on services and projects such as Copac activity data, the Library Impact Data project, JUSP, and IRUS. As the project iterates through prototypes and use-cases so the depth and breadth of data sources and services will change too.

Ultimately the project will be exploiting the potential that bringing these various services and emerging data sets together will have: unearthing new narratives and unforeseen connections. While individually these services and data sets are powerful, the opportunities for new insights and evidence grow exponentially as these data sets are brought together and interrogated as a group.

So that was a very brief introduction to LAMP.

At this point I was going to simply end this post with some of the aims and objectives of the project. But, instead I thought I’d do something a little different and give you a ‘vision’ and goals for the eventual prototype. Come October, this is what you can expect….

The vision of the library analytics and metrics project is to put data at the fingertips of librarians to improve student attainment and satisfaction and achieve new efficiencies and economies through innovative services and tailored support.

To achieve this the project will meet the following goals:

• Provide insight: Will enable analysis that provides new insights which result in new services and practices providing additional value to students and researchers
• Diversity of data: Delivers data from a minimum of three distinct data sources to meet a range of use-cases such as, improving student retention and attainment, personalised services and demonstrating value
• Sustainable: Ensure the project is based on a sustainable foundation to ensure long-term support for the academic library community
• Community based: The service will enable the library community to do things together not possible separately. Through the community advisory group users will be in from the beginning, and the prototype service will engage a minimum of 8 institutions in the initial prototype

If you would like to find out more then take a look at the project website.

While the KualiOLE project is a partnership between US research libraries, it is also a project which is generating some interest within the UK library community.

I don’t think it would be an overstatement to claim that the Library Systems landscape is in a particularly interesting phase at the moment.

A few years ago, 2007/8, Jisc and SCONUL released their LMS landscape report which reflected on the library communities frustration at the perceived lack of visible innovation with the systems space.

Over the past few years that landscape has been somewhat transformed with new proprietary systems from all the major library systems vendors, as well as the first implementation of an open source solution at Staffordshire University.

And, we shouldn’t forget the impact of  the sale of Talis group’s Library Division to Capita.

This agitation of the fragile library systems ecology has continued apace, and things do not seem to be slowing down…

Late last year, the Bloomsbury Library Management Systems Consortium made a decision in principle to develop a new, 21st century Library Systems with KualiOLE as its platform. There is a great post by John Robinson of SOAS  on what led them to the decision and what the library systems landscape looks like from their perspective at the moment.

At the same time some of the projects involved in the Jisc Library Systems programme have had their interest sparked by the KualiOLE project.

This interest and general awareness was catalysed by the SCONUL KualiOLE seminar held prior to the SCONUL Winter conference in December 2012, which a number of institutions attended.

A number of projects and libraries posted thoughts on the work of KualiOLE, a sample of some are below:

• The Benefits of Sharing project in Scotland, blogged some thoughts on the project.
• Richard Nurse of the OU reflected on the seminar.

There has also been a very fruitful partnership between KualiOLE, Jisc and JISC Collections to build an open web service that provides electronic resource information on a global scale.

The Global Open knowledgebase (GOKb) project is working in partnership with knowledgebase+ (KB+)  and sharing a common data model to help address those global electronic resource management issues, such as data accuracy, transfer formats and so on. As well as helping establish a global library community working together to solve some of these everyday frustrations and challenges.

GOKb is set to deliver an open, community-based, international data repository that will provide libraries with publication information about electronic resources, supporting libraries in providing efficient and effective services to their users and ensuring that critical electronic collections are available to their students and researchers.

It will help underpin both the KualiOLE management system, and provide valuable data and collaboration for KB+ and the UK library community.

So these are very exciting times for libraries (in both the UK and elsewhere) as they reflect on the requirements of their users and the functionality and agility of their systems. And, while libraries find themselves navigating through these constantly treacherous technological waters, it may be worth keeping an eye on the work of the LMS Change project.

Like a bright star in the sky, it may help guide you to slightly calmer waters!

Listening to the delegates talk, it was pretty much the old story of everything is the same, everything is different. I’ve tried to capture some of main discussion points below.

POLICY AND CONFORMANCE

When rolling services out globally, there are always going to be local variations, issues and quirks associated with culture, history and environment. Within identity federations, that have grown up in a more distributed fashion to eduroam, I have often commented that the differences in our policy documents and approaches reflects more about our different cultures that our technical competences. Over the years, eduroam has seen a variety of different issues relating to non-conformance or areas of development that have evolved differently in different places, which tends to lead to one thing – confused and disenfranchised users. For the ‘magic’ of eduroam to happen, consistency is ultimately important.

This means that eduroam have taken measures to add a central control to the infrastructure, meaning that anyone signing up has to adhere to a certain set of policy and technical requirements. Such a centralized control mechanism, emanating from Europe, can seem uncomfortable to large US institutions looking to sign-up to eduroam-US and presents challenges for the Global eduroam Governance Committee. A significant problem for the US at the moment is the non-hierarchical nature of .edu domain names…unlike the practice for research and education seen elsewhere in the world. These problems are not insurmountable, but do impact on the support requirements for the US.

LEGAL ISSUES

One of the things that struck me immediately was the focus on being able to trace and track users, and concerns over indemnification clauses that I don’t see so much in Europe. This is because, as one delegate put it, “we all have our laws that are difficult but we just have to comply with”. In the US, this is the DMCA which places a significant burden on US institutions in terms of their responsibility should there be a copyright breach. It was interesting to note that the room then quickly identified privacy laws as the equivalent pesky problem in Europe, presenting challenges at the other end of the trace the user / protect the user conundrum.

THE PROBLEM WITH ANONYMOUS

The DMCA means that US institutions have more of a problem with multiple users arriving as anonymous@domain, which is common in the eduroam set up. This is why there is significant interest in the US in CUI, or Chargeable User Identity, which is a mechanism that allows a user to be identified consistently regardless of the device they use – handy for event organisers to view people like me who are logged on at events on a laptop, tablet and phone and different times. Scott Armitage has recently written about this over on the JANET blog. The participants had an interesting conversation about whether CUI should be required for US participants in eduroam – a familiar conversation across all our work as we look to balance compliance and best practice with coverage and usage.

BEYOND EDUCATION

As eduroam becomes more and more successful, demand has grown for it to be implemented in locations outside of research and education. It is quite common for event organisers to implement eduroam at education events run in hotels at the moment, but this is just the tip of the iceberg.

A common request is for eduroam to be supported for travelling users. eduroam on buses, trains and at airports would be of significant benefits to many people. Airport access and beyond is now a reality in Sweden thanks to an experimental arrangement organized by Sunet in partnership with The Cloud. Delegates at the conference also discussed people signing up to open their home broadband up as eduroam hotspots.

Whilst increasing the number of locations that the research and education community can access eduroam may seem a no-brainer, things get slightly more complex when we start talking about allowing non-educational users to act as Identity Providers. eduroam has typically been offered under a scheme of reciprocity – you act as service provider from my users, I’ll do the same for your users. However, if McDonalds wished to provide eduroam at each of its outlets, would eduroam sites be happy to allow McDonalds employees access? The extent of the growth of roaming patterns for eduroam will be an interesting journey.

BUSINESS MODELS

Like many initiatives, eduroam US needs to be able to support itself moving forward and has to consider a business model and as usual attaching appropriate costs to eduroam whilst trying to expand the coverage is a different balancing trick. An interesting suggestion from one of the delegates was to simply cost the service at State level, and then work to find an appropriate party within a State who is willing to either a) act as a broker to recoup costs locally or b) accept the costs internally due to the benefits it might bring to the State. This is a model we have seen often in play with the NRENS across Europe supporting TERENA services in different ways. This could see, for example, a State University willingly paying the costs for State-wide eduroam and also supporting local colleges and schools to adopt eduroam due to the added benefit of increased eduroam coverage and decreasing the need to support guests locally at the State University. I think this is a really interesting model and one I hope gets explored.

ROAMING PARAMETERS

The discussion around business models got me thinking about the roaming parameters of different individuals and the business case for support the could be built up around that as coverage affects different people in different ways.

If I had ever bothered to map the different locations in which I had accessed eduroam, it would be far-flung and global. I’ve accessed eduroam from an island in the middle of Sydney Harbour to a bus in Malaga through many conference facilities, offices and institutions across Europe. Interestingly enough, my requirements are often event driven and have required local NRENS to work with hotels and venues to facilitate eduroam access at a cost. Is this something I’d be willing to pay an acknowledge premium fee for whilst attending events?

Back home, I use eduroam often in the JISC offices as I worked from my personal laptop more often than not. I don’t travel often in the UK anymore, so my roaming parameters are very different from colleagues in JISC who have taken advantage of the availability of eduroam in educational institutions across the country on site visits. This is perhaps the more traditional eduroam profile, where central funding from the UK NREN and local effort is a good fit.

I often work from home, and when I do will often sit in a coffee shop and work for part of the day to break up the monotony. Luckily, there is good coverage of The Cloud in my village, which I get free access to as part of my home broadband deal so increased local coverage probably would not make much difference to me.

However the roaming parameters of a student at my local College would be very different. Even if they did have free deals with home broadband, these accounts are most likely to be used by parents. eduroam in local coffee shops, the local library, sports venues, as well as the reciprocal arrangements with other local colleges and universities could make a real difference to a user within these roaming parameters and attracts different models for funding and support. The density of access within a 30-mile radius for these users presents a different use case and challenge to my 7000 mile radius to attract an equal number of supported access events.

My thanks to Philippe Hanset for running the session and colleagues from APAN and I2 for a different view on an established service.

The strangest thing happened on the way to the conference…

A stranger appeared as if from nowhere and presented me with a usb stick. He told me I had to play the video contained on the stick at the conference instead of the slides I had prepared.

He said it was of the utmost importance.

So, here is the video I played:

As I am sure you can imagine, I was very surprised! But, despite the surprise I was able to jot down a few notes on what I thought were the implications for the future of library skills.

Librarians need to learn how to code?

A number of interesting themes emerged during the conference. One of the most interesting discussions actually moved from the conference hall onto Twitter, and centered on whether or not librarians would need technical (i.e., programming/developer) type skill sets in the future.

This is an interesting thought – and one that reflects my personal opinion that many of the skills we’ll associate with librarians in the not too distant future (say 2020), will be very different from the ones we currently associate with the profession. While ‘soft’ skills, like communication etc, are essential, they do not differentiate the profession from any other.

What are the skills that really define the profession and its future? 

I plan to blog about these ideas and some of the other themes that emerged during the conference in another post – there are far too may nuances for me to do them justice quickly here. But I suspect that the profession will become increasingly associated with aspects of technical development that we currently see as still separate from librarianship.

These differences will begin to break down, and the technical development and librarianship roles will converge to such an extent that there will be no meaningful distinction. 

However, if you want some reading for over the break there’s a great post by the LMS Change project on New Skills for a New Era which does a good job of summing up the conference and some of the themes and discussions that took place.

 Imitation is the greatest form of flattery: So thanks to my colleague Andy McGregor who graciously allowed me to steal his idea!

The report was written by David Kay of Sero Consulting and Mark van Harmelen of Headtek and it builds on the work we have been doing with activity data over the last couple of years. Over those two years it has felt that activity data has moved from being a relatively fringe and immature area in universities to something that is likely to be of vital importance in the next few years.

I think that this is emphasised by a flurry of exciting new developments. My colleague Myles Danson has worked with CETIS to release the Analytics Series. This is a series of seven useful and interesting reports that explore analytics from a number of different angles. This includes thinking about the implications for research and teaching and learning.

I’ll pause here to explain what I see as the difference between analytics and activity data. Analytics is a broad heading for the mining of data to inform business decisions or provide improved services to end users. Activity data is one type of data that falls under the analytics heading. Activity data specifically focuses on the data recorded about a user’s actions when they interact with a website or software or even a physical space.

Another exciting development is a project to explore a shared library analytics service. This project is seeking to develop a pilot shared service that builds on some of the experiments we have been doing in our activity data work. It is expected to complete in Autumn 2013 and should provide libraries with a useful new way to study how their services are working and to gather data to inform crucial decisions over allocation of resources. More detail will be available on this soon.

One project that will be an important part of delivering the library analytics suite will be Huddersfield’s Library Impact Data project. They released version 2 of their toolkit last week. So if you can’t wait for the library analytics suite to start exploring your library activity data then head over to their blog for more information.

So, there is a lot going on. That makes the Activity Data report even more timely since it provides an accessible and useful introduction to the topic. The report discusses the benefits that are on offer to institutions. It includes case studies on UK and US institutions who are leading the way with activity data. It finishes by offering some pointers on strategies that may be useful in getting ready to seize the opportunities offered by activity data.

This is a fast moving area and it looks like 2013 should see some even more exciting developments.

The workshop programme is available here.

I gave presentations to introduce and conclude the workshop and I have made these available via SlideShare.

Introduction

Conclusion

ELIXIR EGA AAI Pilot – Mikael Linden

ELIXI EGA AAI project is part of the work of the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI). EBI has specific requirement regarding release of data sets relating to genomes, where permission has not been granted by the individuals involved in the study. This is the focus of the European Genome-phenome Archive (EGA). The data is over 400TB, with over 200,000 samples. EBI is effectively a secure broker for making this information available effectively.

ELIXIR itself is a large umbrella project with this work forming a small element. The EGA AAI work is due to end in April 2013.

EGA currently issues a password to each individual researcher involved. This has created a scenario where usernames are actively shared within each research groups – and these credentials are often used by researchers who have left the project, and whose access should have been revoked. There is a large incentive to stop this common practice given the sensitivity of the data involved.

To support this requirement, the pliot is integrating the EGA web portal with a SAML2 SP. EBI has joined the Haka federation, and the intention is to interfederate using eduGain and Kalmar.

The authorization flow for EGA is complex because of the approval points needed for each individual. There have been many manual steps involved, and the pilot project is trying to automate these processes.

The project has identified 3ways in which the authorization can be expressed:

1. With the web portal acting as a SAML proxy, injecting an eduPersonEntitlement to the authentication flow. This is the one that has been implemented at the moment using SimpleSAMLphp.
2. With the web portal acting as a SAML AP attaching eduPersonEntitlement to an attribute query.
3. Using XACML with the portal (Argus).

The software created for the project will be released under an opensource license.

Discussion from the group was around two themes that will come up repeatedly within the VAMP programme: the need for all the home organizations of the researchers to be participating in identity federations and the reuse and applicability of the software created in the project – could we reduce overheads and development time by facilitating the sharing of software developed to support VO workflows?

EUDAT: Towards a European Collaborative Data Infrastructure – Federated Identity Management and Access Control – Mark van de Sanden

EUDAT is a European Commission programme with a focus on data infrastructure. It has been in operation since 1st October 2011 and will run for 36 months.

Partners involved in the project include:

• EPOS – European Plate Observatory System – which has a large and complex dataset with distributed data sensors, largescale statistics and a full metadata schema unique to EPOS.
• CLARIN – Common Language Resources and Technology Infrastructure – CLARIN have a specific problem with having users spread over 300 centers within the EU. CLARIN have been working with Identity Federations for some time to try and find a common solution and experience for their users.
• ENES – Service for Climate Modeling in Europe – ENES again want to provide a consistent experience for its users and want to be able to work with other climate groups

.

• VPH – Virtual Physiological Human – this project currently has a complex dataset with both structured and unstructured data, and complex environments to work with through typical hospital infrastructure.
• LifeWatch – Biodiversity Data and Observatories – users within this project can often in place for a short time, and the solution for AAI needs to be flexible, transient and immediate.

EUDAT are looking to provide common services to these varied VO projects, and federated identity is clearly a key component as a enabling service for the data. EUDAT has to work with many different identity domains, including community domains, federated NRENS, existing indfrastructures (EGI, PRACE, eduGain), local institutions, OpenID providers etc. Each of the communities are supported by different technologies including OAuth, OpenID, RADIUS, SAML2, X.509, XACML. EUDAT is keen to distinguish between leveraging IdPs and APs, with community provided APs. EUDAT ask the commomn question, what about homeless and citizen scientists?

The two projects, at York and at Leicester, are using outputs from the JISC Managing Research Data programme.  Both projects have blogs which are linked below:

University of York, Tools for RDM Development: http://uoy-rdmproject.blogspot.co.uk/

University of Leicester, RDM Support Service: http://amburnham.jiscinvolve.org/wp/

There is a recognised need to increase skills in managing research data among staff in  HEIs , including researchers, librarians and research support staff.  Important work was accomplished by projects in the first Managing Research Data Programme, which developed discipline-specific training materials, but this work was limited to certain research areas.

The present strand aims to build on previous achievements by addressing remaining gaps in availability of discipline-focussed training materials, targeting disciplines not covered by previous JISC projects or other work.  In particular, there is a need for training for subject or research librarians whose role will increasingly include providing support for researchers in making best use of the research data infrastructure and services which may be available (inter-)nationally or at an institutional level.

The JISC Managing Research Data Programme 2011-13 has funded four projects to design, pilot and test training materials for research data management adapted for the needs of discipline-focussed post-graduate courses and for subject or discipline liaison librarians.

RDMRose, University of Sheffield

RDMRose will develop and adapt learning materials about RDM to meet the specific needs of liaison librarians in university libraries, both for practitioners’ CPD and for embedding into the postgraduate taught (PGT) curriculum. Its deliverables will include OER materials suitable for learning in multiple modes, including face to face and self-directed learning.

JISC Webpage: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/di_researchmanagement/managingresearchdata/research-data-management-training/rdmrose.aspx

Project Website: http://www.shef.ac.uk/is/research/projects/rdmrose

RDMTPA: Research Data Management Training for the whole project lifecycle in Physics & Astronomy research, University of Hertfordshire

The RDMTPA project will build on existing JISCMRD work, both within and outwith the University of Hertfordshire, and will work with the Centre for Astrophysics Research (CAR) and the Centre for Atmospheric & Instrumentation Research (CAIR) to develop a short course in Research Data  Management, directed at Post-Graduate and early career researchers in the physical sciences.

JISC Webpage: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/di_researchmanagement/managingresearchdata/research-data-management-training/rdmtpa.aspx

Project Blog: http://research-data-toolkit.herts.ac.uk/category/training/

SoDaMaT: Sound Data Management Training

SoDaMaT will develop discipline-specific research data management training materials for postgraduate research students, researchers and academics working in the area of digital music and audio research.

JISC Webpage: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/di_researchmanagement/managingresearchdata/research-data-management-training/sodamat.aspx

Project Blog: http://rdm.c4dm.eecs.qmul.ac.uk/category/project/sodamat

TraD: Training for Data Management at UEL

TraD will embed good practice in data management (DM) at UEL by developing disciplinary training material for postgraduate curricula, adapting existing materials in the area of psychology and developing new materials for computer science.  The project will provide training opportunities for research staff and a learning module for library support staff.

JISC Webpage: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/di_researchmanagement/managingresearchdata/research-data-management-training/trad.aspx

Project Blog: http://datamanagementuel.wordpress.com/

A fifth project – DaMSSI-ABC – will provide a support function, to assist projects in following best practice, ensure reusability, engage stakeholders and synthesise outcomes.

DaMSSI-ABC, DCC, University of Glasgow, University of Manchester, RIN and Vitae

DaMSSI will support and improve coherence in the development, dissemination and reuse of research data management training materials developed by the JISC RDMTrain projects.  Specifically, DaMSSI will:

• work with relevant professional bodies / learned societies and funders, to endorse and promote good data management practice;
• classify course offerings, by ensuring that the anticipated outcomes of training interventions are clearly set out to allow participants to select the training that best meets their learning objectives;
• identify and agree benchmarks on learning outcomes on learning outcomes and means of assessment so that courses from a range of training providers can be effectively compared.

JISC Webpage: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/di_researchmanagement/managingresearchdata/research-data-management-training/damssi-abc.aspx

Project Website: http://www.dcc.ac.uk/training/damssi-abc

Project Blog: http://damssiabc.jiscinvolve.org/wp/

With a sizeable national investment and an impressive coordinated approach, Australia – in the form of the Australian National Data Service and a host of institutional projects – is providing useful examples of how these questions may be answered.

Natasha Simons, Griffiths University: Enabling data capture, management, aggregation, discovery and reuse

Natasha described the development of the Griffith University Research Hub, a metadata store solution designed as far as possible to automate the collation of new research data held in the university.

Metadata relating to research data created by Griffiths researchers and largely curated in the Griffiths research data repository is exposed by the Research Hub for harvesting to the ANDS Research Data Australia service ‘a set of web pages describing data collections produced by or relevant to Australian researchers. Research Data Australia is designed to promote visibility of research data collections in search discovery engines such as Google and Yahoo, to encourage their re-use.’

Metadata is exposed using RIF-CS (Repository Interchange Format – Collections and Services) a high level schema structured around four classes of objects: collections, parties, activities and services.

For more on RIF-CS see the ANDS pages about RIF-CS, in particular Learn about RIF-CS.

The Griffiths Research Hub metadata store is based on VIVO, a triple-store solution, and  uses the ANDS-VITRO ontology for describing research activity.  VIVO-VITRO is one of a number of metadata store solutions encouraged by ANDS and being implemented by ANDS funded projects.  For more detail about the Griffiths implementation of VITRO see the DLib article Wolski et al 2011, Building an Institutional Discovery Layer for Virtual Research Collections.

As well as contributing to ANDS’s broader objectives in Research Data Australia, the benefits of the Griffiths Research Hub are to provide a platform of linked information about the university’s research activities – potentially a rich and valuable resource for the management of research information, grant funded projects and the development of collaborations and new initiatives.

Just as the Griffiths Research Hub exposes information about researchers, projects and research data, so Research Data Australia provides a platform to discover information about research data created by Australian researchers.  It remains early days – analytics do not yet exist to show to what extent this platform is assisting discovery and reuse – but the potential is clear.

Anthony Beitz, Monash University, Institutional infrastructure for research data management

Anthony described an integrated and strategic approach to supporting researchers eResearch and data management needs.  Fundamental to the Monash approach is the recognition that researchers, for good reason, tend to prefer more bespoke, community developed solutions to blunt and generic platforms that are often the wares of centralised IT services.  Anthony was unequivocal: ‘If a research community already has an RDM solution, or an emerging one, then it is this which should be adopted and supported.’

One suspects that few would disagree with this in principle…  But at a time when in the UK IT support is being withdrawn from research departments, the cry from IT directors will be: ‘Great, but how is this to be resourced.’  A good and pertinent question.  But equally, real attention needs to be paid to researchers needs.  There is little point in providing generic solutions if these do not respond sufficiently to researchers requirements and are scarcely fit for purpose.

I took Anthony’s point to be that it is of fundamental importance to be sensitive to the objectives and requirements of specific research areas.

For a RDM platform to be effective and have high utility, it must fit in with researchers’ tools, workflows, instrumentation, methodologies, environment, and most importantly culture.  As most of these features vary from discipline to discipline, it is unrealistic to believe that a singular approach to RDM will consistently meet researchers’ needs.  Indeed, research institutions should expect that a range of RDM platforms will be required in order to accommodate their researchers.

Monash uses a team of developers and agile software development methodology to support this.  And the onus is upon engaging with specific research groups and communities.  The Monash approach is to work along a decision tree: if possible adopt a third party product; if necessary adapt a product to disciplinary or local needs; and if these options fail to develop the product locally.

The focus on the requirements of reach communities applies both to the support of research activity (data capture, analysis etc; the active data phase) and the curation and archiving of data which in some sense is complete (the data publication phase).  For the archiving and publication phase, the Monash approach is manage locally, and promote discovery (inter-)nationally by propagating metadata to national registries such as Research Data Australia, or such disciplinary hubs as may exist.  Once again, this seems to push a great deal of responsibility for curation and archiving the way of the institution.  The Monash response is to meet this challenge and ‘form a separate specialised support group for RDM infrastructure’.

A lot of institutions will find this approach daunting.  But many of the arguments about utility and the need for products that are fit for purpose are fundamentally persuasive.  It will be important to understand more about and to learn from the Monash model.

Both these presentations are available on the OR2012 website and may be viewed through the OR2012 YouTube Channel

Hannah Lloyd-Jones, Open Exeter Project, University of Exeter: post-graduate research data, a new challenge for repositories?

Hannah gave a clear and comprehensive overview of the work of Open Exeter.  The presentation is available from the first data management session on the OR2012 Conference website.

The project is divided into four areas of work:

Technical development: focussing providing a DSpace instance for research data, with underlying storage, and ensuring integration of document and data repositories.

Creation of training materials and guidance: to support researchers and research support staff in the use of the data infrastructure.  Exeter’s guidance pages are currently in construction.

Advocacy and governance: to establish the institutional policies around the management, retention and publication of research data.

The fourth strand of the project is a distinctive feature of the Open Exeter project.  ‘Follow the Data’ describes the detailed work the project is doing to understand researcher requirements.  This has involved research based on the DCC’s data asset framework methodology (comprising an online survey and follow-up interviews).  A report summarising findings has recently been published.

Open Exeter is also working closely with a cohort of post-graduate research students: this approach has the dual benefit of helping the project understand research practice and RDM requirements, while also assisting advocacy and dissemination of project objectives.

This focus also emanates from a widespread concern – prevalent at Exeter and other institutions – with what happens to PGR research data at completion.  At the moment, Exeter requires the deposit of post-graduate theses in the institutional repository, but – surprisingly – not the data substantiating the theses’ findings.  This is a matter of concern – potentially of frustration and consternation – in departments where the research data may form part of the ongoing research initiatives, part of the department’s research assets, its institutional memory.

The Open Exeter has prepared separate draft RDM policies for researchers and for PGR students.  The draft policy for PGR research data notes: ‘The security of PhD students’ data is of particular importance when it is embedded in a larger research project and will need to be accessed after the completion of the students’ degree.’

To support the objectives of these draft policies, the Open Exeter project will offer an infrastructure to allow the following: deposit of data with thesis with a simple deposit mechanism; the repository will assign a persistent ID, linking the data to the thesis.  The project is also focussing on awareness raising and embedding cultural change in research community through a PGR focussed support network.

The Open Exeter Summary of Findings from the Open Exeter Data Asset Framework Survey, provides some interesting insights.  The overwhelming message is that the university cannot just provide an RDM service for those researchers with externally funded research.  In all schools and at all career stages, there is a substantial amount of research being conducted which does not have an external funder and is funded by the university itself.  Non-grant funded research at Exeter includes research involving commercially or personally sensitive data, and includes some post graduate research data also.  For an institution that endorses the view that ‘good practice in research data management is a key part of research excellence’ it is scarcely conceivable that an RDM service and infrastructure could be limited to those researchers and projects with external sources of funding.  The data produced by internally funded research is an institutional asset requiring careful management and, where appropriate, archiving, publication and dissemination.  However, the challenging conclusion from this observation is that ‘there could only ever be partial cost recovery from grants (via direct or indirect costs) for future staffing and infrastructure for research data management.’ [p.4]  Following from this, the report observes that ‘new responsibilities will need to be accepted into central and college teams’.  Sustainability models for institutional RDM services ‘are likely to include recommendations for additional dedicated staffing to help manage and monitor institutional research data management policy and practice.’ [p.6]

The Exeter report provides some grounds for the view that costs of an RDM service may be offset by indirect means: avoiding the loss of research income [p.16]; reducing data loss [p.32]; cost and efficiency savings through better management and more effective data disposal [p.35].  Most importantly, the costs of the RDM service might be controlled – and good practice made more effective – by providing ‘clarification regarding when to archive and what to archive (criteria for retention or disposal)’. [p.35]

In recognition of this a number of journals have recommended or mandated that research data be deposited in appropriate data repositories prior to publication.  Parallel to this, there are a growing number of initiatives that explicitly link journal articles with the underlying data or that may be characterised as data journals, championing the publication of research data sets with commentary, analysis and visualisation.

Technical, procedural and cultural challenges exist around the use of identifiers, exchange of metadata, effective linking and data citation.  There is also a need to establish sustainable partnerships between journals, data centres and research organisations which are necessary to underpin innovative forms of data publication.

Innovative data publications are likely to provide researchers with recognition and reward for making datasets available and thus encourage data to be viewed as a first class research output, for data publication to be considered an essential part of the scholarly process.  Likewise, it seems likely that as well as making it easier for researchers to locate and access datasets, linking between publications and supporting data will provide a means for established data centres, or even institutional data repositories to enhance and draw attention to well-curated research outputs.

For partnerships around data publication to become established, there are important questions to be considered:

• What policies are required on the behalf of journals’ editorial boards to achieve greater levels on data sharing, citation and linkages between publications and datasets?
• What partnerships between journals, data centres and research organisations are necessary to establish sustainable solutions, and what business models are appropriate?
• How may the costs of long term data archiving be met and appropriately distributed in models that stress the importance of publishing data and linking data sets to published outputs?
• What characterises a suitable repository and what criteria of quality and assurance are necessary of the data archive underpinning such collaborations?
• What, if any, peer review of data is appropriate before publication?

The JISC Managing Research Data Programme 2011-13 has, therefore, funded two projects to design and implement innovative technical models and organisational partnerships to encourage and enable publication of research data.  These projects will also explore these questions listed above and thereby shed light on solutions which will enable the greater development of data publication.

PREPARDE: Peer REview for Publication & Accreditation of Research Data in the Earth sciences

PREPARDE will capture the processes and procedures required to publish a scientific dataset, ranging from ingestion into a data repository, through to formal publication in a data journal. It will also address key issues arising in the data publication paradigm, namely, how does one peer-review a dataset, what criteria are needed for a repository to be considered objectively trustworthy, and how can datasets and journal publications be effectively cross-linked for the benefit of the wider research community.

JISC webpage: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/di_researchmanagement/managingresearchdata/research-data-publication/preparde.aspx

Project website: http://proj.badc.rl.ac.uk/preparde

PRIME: Publisher, Repository and Institutional Metadata Exchange

PRIME will enable the automated exchange of metadata between publishers, subject-based and institutional repositories. A partnership between UCL, the Archaeology Data Service and Ubiquity Press, a campus-based open access publisher located at UCL, PRIME will ensure that each stakeholder has a record of content relevant to them, even when the data itself is held elsewhere.

JISC webpage: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/di_researchmanagement/managingresearchdata/research-data-publication/prime.aspx

As previously noted, scholarly journals are increasingly recommending or requiring as a condition of publication that research data should be made available in an appropriate repository.  A service to collate and summarise journal research data policies would serve the purpose of providing researchers, managers of research data services and other stakeholders with an easy source of reference to understand the requirements and recommendations made by journal editorial board with regard to data sharing.  Such a service would provide a useful information and advocacy tool for a variety of stakeholders in this area (including exponents of open data, research data infrastructure providers, institutional managers with responsibilities for research data management etc).  It is also likely to provide a helpful incentive for the increasing systematisation and codification of such policies and for their more regular review.

JISC and other stakeholders need to understand precisely what is required in such a service and what business models are available to maintain a sustainable service, including a consideration of sources of funding and cost recovery.

The third project funded by the JISC Managing Research Data Programme in the area of data publication is feasibility study for a service to collate and summarise journal data policies, which will consider requirements and present possible business models.

JoRD: Journal Research Data Policy Bank

The Journal Research Data Policy Bank (JoRD) project will conduct a feasibility study into the scope and shape of a sustainable service to collate and summarise journal policies on Research Data. The aim of this service will be to provide researchers, managers of research data and other stakeholders with an easy source of reference to understand and comply with Research Data policies.

JISC webpage: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/di_researchmanagement/managingresearchdata/research-data-publication/jord.aspx

Project website: http://crc.nottingham.ac.uk/projects/jord.php

One of the things that struck me at the meeting was a comment from David Kelsey on the oxymoron of ‘Identity Provider’ as a name. David pointed out that one of the last things that Identity Providers in our community do is provide identity information, and I think this is a very fair point – we are currently sticking to the modern day equivalent of name,rank and number. I don’t have any detailed information on the attribute release policies of members of the UK federation, but I am fairly certain that most do not release much more that ScopedAffiliation (i.e. staff@…, student@…) and TargetedID (an opaque identifier). I think there are several reasons for this:

• The UK federation rules only specifically mention 4 attributes. These are intended to be a minimum set of attributes to support, but have become by default a maximum.
• Major concerns about the data protection act make most institutions very reluctant to release any data at all. It is better to do nothing than fall foul of the law.
• Although there was a real buzz around getting federated access implemented in 2007 – 09, there has not been enough follow up to really exploit the uses that attribute management can be put to. IdM is not being prioritised in the current funding climate within institutions.
• There are not sufficient tools in place to delegate attribute management and population well across the institution, which is desperately needed for the process to work effectively.
• The UK has focused on the publisher use case, and publishers are not asking for more complex attributes. There is a catch-22 for other scenarios where researchers, for example, are not using federations because they don’t supply attributes and institutions aren’t providing attributes because they do not see the demand.

There are a couple of efforts under way to try and address this problem and encourage institutions to a) more effectively manage their attribute release policies and b) feel confident releasing attributes to certains groups. One is being lead by the edugain team and is called the ‘Code of Conduct‘. The idea is that Service Providers will be able to self declare that they will abide by a conduct statement when it comes to handling attributes. Compliance with the code will be registered in metadata and the intention is that the presence of this flag will give IdPs more confidence in passing information to the SP. There is a consultation open on this at the moment and edugain would really like to here from Identity Provider organisations in particular.

Another approach is more local to the federation. The idea of ‘SP cateogries’ is that when joining the federation, an SP can ask to be added to a certain type of category described by the federation. This might be, for example, ‘student services’ or ‘scholarly publishing’ or ‘research and scholarship’. The federation would provide some minimal vetting, and on completion would assign the SP to that group. IdPs would be asked to automatically release attributes of a certain type to all members of that group. InCommon are currently piloting this approach.

So will either of these processes work and help us to build a richer attribute economy? The Code of Conduct is a clean approach that has the backing of lawyers involved in the project, and is easily described and actioned in current metadata. However it still requires IdPs to have a separate interaction about the attribute requirements of each and every SP, and I am not sure if there is much incentive for SPs to volunteer to sign up to such an agreement.

Member categories are nice as they would allow a simple way for IdPs to manage attribute release for large groups of SPs, but it will have its limitations in attempts to make the groups manageable. It also introduces a new overhead for the federations and its member SPs at point of registration, and it could be difficult to retrospectively get existing members to sign-up to categories.

I’d be really interested to hear from Identity Providers in the UK as to whether either of these approaches would convince them to provide richer attribute release, what we could do to help faciliate this and any other ideas you might have in this space. I’d also encourage you to reply to both of the consultations I mention in the post as they would love your feedback.

Functional Requirements (new)

In the comments, Andy has rightly pointed out that this post does not identify any functional requirements. So here are just a few to get started:

• The CERN lead FIM report is explicit that attribute release on a ganular level is essential if the research communities are going to make proper use of federated access. To quote: “Many of use cases identified by the research communities call for personal information to be aggregated with community defined attributes in order to grant access to digital resources and services.”
• European projects CLARIN, DARIAH and Project Bamboo have all cited limited attribute release as a barrier for them in adopted federated access.
• JISC Services, such as JUSP have asked institutions to release additional attributes and have been unsuccessful in getting the majority of institutions to achieve this.
• In discussion with many blogging and wiki platforms, lack of release of email address has been cited as a reluctance to use federated access.

As I do state in the original text for this blog, I feel there is a really large chicken and egg problem here. There are many many services that want richer attribute release but reject access via the UK federation as they don’t believe they wil achive this level of granularity. These organisations therefore don’t join, which leads to an impression that this is not a requirement and therefore institutions do not perceive a need to manage this, which is the point Andy makes below in describingthe two approaches to development. I am however convinced that there is real demand and there are drivers. We actually need to be tackling both schools of thought to provide a service that meets community need.

Bob Jones starts us off by talking about the changing nature of identity. He points out that his first electronic identity was given to him because of his work. This simply isn’t true anymore. Within the research space, the multiplicity of identity, source and ownership is truly complex.

Bob and many others have been working on a paper talking about the issues of using federated identity management for research, which is available from TERENA core.

What do they want:

a common policy and trust framework for IDM based on existing structure.

unique electronic identities authentication in multiple administrative domains, across national boundaries.

community defined attributes to authorise access to digital resources.

The group is making recommendations to as many people as possible including research communites, technology providers and funding agencies. It is interesting to note that the group has highlighted the importance of a risk analysis around the study – focusing on the need to get buy in from security staff within organisations. Other factors include communities that are using data that is so sensitive they have an ethics committe that sets who can have access. Sensitive data is also going to drive the use cases for different assurance profiles.

One of the points raised in discussion was whether we need an eScience federation of SPs to help us deal with some of these questions. What would the future of our work look like if we moved to such a model?

The REFEDS group is already considering how best it can support the recommendations in this paper, as is the study team leading the EU study on AAA for scientific data and information resoures.

Next up is Jim Basney talking about CILogin that is looking at the problem of getting small numbers of researchers from numerous institutions effectively authenticated and authorised using a federated approach. CILogin is using a SAML workflow to mash-up technologies such as Shibboleth, OAuth, X.509 certificates and a whole bunch of other stuff to achieve this. Using campus identities was important as CLLogin do not have the capacity to identity vet, and don’t want to put researchers through separate steps. This places a focus on development of assurance profiles at identity federations for this to work. Currently CILogin is working only with InCommon.

Jim is starting to look at SAML ECP (Enhanced Client or Proxy) to look at solutions for non-web applications.

Another thing CILogin is looking at is testing and monitoring to make sure that people don’t get error pages. For researchers who want to get work today, getting stuck at an unhelpful error page is not acceptable.

Permission to access academic resources is typically either achieved in one of two ways (ignoring some of the more spurious access approaches out there):

1. Via IP recognition. This approach does not in any way authenticate the user, but the user’s apparent location based on the IP address of the device being used at the time, or;
2. Via username and password (or other credentials). These enable a individual user to be identified but do not typically carry information about user location in the same transaction.

Whilst it is of course possible for a resource to check both, it is difficult to make complex or granular decisions based on this information alone as an IP ‘authentication’ is typically an all or nothing binary decision. If you are in that IP range, you get access to everything….if you are not, you get access to nothing.

The UK federation has recently been exploring use cases where location information is both important AND granular alongside an individual unique authentication. There are some good use cases for this:

• Resources that can only be used by a named individual when they are in a specific room – such as an exam resource or a highly protected research resource;
• Walk-in access – where only specific resources are permitted to people who ‘walk-in’ to the library or campus.

To meet this demand, the UK federation has developed a ‘location assertion’ extension to the Shibboleth software. This can be downloaded and implemented by your IT department. The plugin creates attributes by checking if the IP address of the user agent, at the time of authentication, matches a given range of IP addresses identified
by “CIDR blocks”, which you will more commonly recognise as IP range figures such as: “192.0.2.0/24″.

To demonstrate how it works, this is one of the rare examples where showing the metadata can actually help provide clarity. Within the metadata configuration for your IdP, there will be a new section with the id ‘userAgentAttributes’ – like this:

resolver:DataConnector id=”userAgentAttributes”
xsi:type=”uadc:UserAgentMappedAttributes”*

A range of different CIDR blocks can then be cited, for example:

uadc:Mapping cidrBlock=”217.155.0.0/16″
attributeId=”userAgent”
attributeValue=”http://iay.org.uk/networks/zenInternet”/
uadc:Mapping cidrBlock=”82.68.0.0/14″
attributeId=”userAgent”
attributeValue=”http://iay.org.uk/networks/zenInternet”/*

Individual machines can be expressed as entitlement values, for example:

uadc:Mapping cidrBlock=”192.168.117.19/32″
attributeId=”eduPersonEntitlement”
attributeValue=”http://iay.org.uk/entitlements/kestrel”/*

For walk-in access, this would mean that you could safely manage a couple of guest accounts for library access on campus and hand them out to walk-in users, knowing that if they attempt to use the resource off-campus the correct location assertion will not be passed.

The UK federation already has uptake from the schools sector for this extension and would be very interested in feedback and possible use cases from UK HE and FE. We invite you all to download and explore the extension and its possible use.

So what are the possible drawbacks? The main risk I can see with this is general publisher apathy, which we struggle against all the time. Whilst the education sector is developing more and more sophisticated tools to ensure that the complex terms and conditions of academic licenses are met, publishers are repeatedly failing to make proper use of the technology, meaning that the wrong groups are gaining access to the resources. A classic example of this is publishers who ignore the values expressed in ScopedAffiliation fields (i.e. affiliate, member, student) and grant equal access to those groups. It is easy to imagine such a publisher ignoring the location assertion and making the technology development irrelevant.

I don’t have any magic answers to how to improve publisher behaviour and engagement, but I do think this extension is a great piece of work designed and developed to address a real community need – which is exactly what the federation should be doing. It’s now over to you to see what we can make of these tools.

*angle brackets have been harmed during the making of this blog post for formatting reasons. Money has been donated to the society for orphaned angle brackets.

Shibboleth is now a mature product, used in a significant number of organizations worldwide. As a mature product – this presents new challenges to the team. Firstly, it is seen as a Product and people expect a level of support – there are currently more than 1500 on the Shibboleth users list. It also means more maintenance requirements, more reliance on ensuring the standards space is up to scratch and more new feature demands. It also means that it is harder to justify the reliance on the current three funding partners. Overall, now is an appropriate time for Shibboleth to be reviewing its models.

So what are the issues?

1. Huh, money? But it’s free!

This is still strangely one of the first questions I get from people who probably should know better. Of course the software is freely available, but there is always a cost involved in creating it – the service of development (I’ve argued elsewhere that academic publishers could well adopt a similar model rather than paid for content). For most open source products this happens in three ways:

1. It’s done in spare time by completely dedicated developers. Whilst this is a fantastic way for innovative projects to start, it is difficult to make the decision to rely on such software in production environments. What happens when the enthusiasm runs thin?
2. Time donated by organisations. This has been the model that Shibboleth has predominantly operated on to-date. There are many challenges here – it can be difficult for developers to justify the use of their time in such a way, ‘big institutional projects’ come crushing down and divert the attention of developers and it can place the burden of financing developing unevenly on a handful of organisations. It is also very difficult to find the perfect balance of the talent you want at an organisation that is willing to release.
3. Funded developers. The majority of mainstream opensource efforts do rely on formal funding streams to keep their products usable and relevant. There are many models for this: foundations, paid for support, limited releases…but money is found somewhere to make for reliability and resilience.

Most organisations end up operating a hybrid model, and this is where we will be taking Shibboleth. Whilst asking for direct funds through membership and donations, we still have many developers donating code on their own time and contributions direct from organisations.

2. Why bother with support?

Providing support for users (as in people implementing the software, not lost students) is currently where the biggest percentage of developer time is spent…which causes much debate. We do have a good community of practise on the Shibboleth lists and several really good people in the community who will answer queries to the list, but the emphasis for support often falls back on the primary developer. As a project, we seem to be stuck between a rock and a hard place with some people calling for developers to stop providing any support and focus their attention completely on new features, and other people being, well quite rude, as we don’t offer a full service helpdesk. I’m not sure that people are fully aware that the Shibboleth project supports SEVEN different products in its current form – that’s an awful lot of stuff to simply coordinate and manage before we even get to support.

One solution to this would be to look at providing commercial grade support as a project, but this is something we have held back on. For a start, there are other companies out there already offering this and it would be rude to tread on their toes…although we might call on them for membership donations! Secondly this could cause a conflict with the focus of the project.

Personally I’m quite happy with the balance of support, maintenance and development we currently have but would love the opportunity to address more of the new features we get requests for. To do this, we really need new blood. To do this, we really need those membership fees.

3. Why bother, what will I get?

It’s true it can be a difficult case to sell. If you can pick up the software for free, then why bother offering money back to the project? It is worth reiterating again that we are all totally committed to keeping Shibboleth as an open source project. It’s also true you don’t get all that much for your membership beyond the right to vote for Board Members and listen in on consortium calls (although I am trying to convince people of the value of the Shibboleth Cuddly Griffy Toy for all new members). We’ve attempted to document the membership benefits here and I’ve created a slightly wacky pdf of where the money goes to.

Its probably easier with this project to try and frame it as what might you NOT get if funding dries up. We’ve had to issue a couple of security advisories this year, and the developers were extremely quick to react to these external dependencies. If the developers aren’t there, the patches won’t happen and we are in risk managment territory. It’s a sobering thought but risk management is a sensible approach for any institution using open source.

So those are some of the major issues we are discussing and will continue to discuss within the Consortium. I hope you find it generally useful and I really look forward to working with some of you as part of the Consortium membership in the year to come.

• Mujina: a way of testing your SAML IdP and SP from Surfnet
• Encryption and Cryptography for Filesender: something I have talked about before from the nice people at AARnet.
• An Italian pilot to test the use of twitter to support astronomy pedagogy (note Andy McGregor and the Elevator people).
• A new approach to provisioning with SAML from Yaco, who also wrote the code for PEER.
• A presentation on Unhosted, another project looking at breaking the cycle of giving data to third party providers. Sounds a lot like UMA – SMART people!
• Peter on the (federated) TERENA Trusted Cloud Drive project that might be of interest to Eduserv cloud people.
• Another shiny R&E federation in the form of Tuakiri (New Zealand). I’ve had to register an entity with Tuakiri and can confirm they are a nice federation to join.
• A useful talk by Scott Rea on managing the risks presented by the recent CA attacks and failure. Definitely worth a look at the Dartmouth College report if you are an IT manager in R&E.
• Chris Phillips on SCIM beating up SPML. I think it is too early to say if any of these standards will be useful in cloud provisioning, but happy to sit tight wait and see at the moment.
• Bjarni talking about PageKite, another project starting to question the way the web is being used and whether it achieves the aims of ‘freedom and privacy’. This chimes with the talk I will be giving tomorrow (plug plug).
• Shooting more moons with a collaboration between JANET and PowerFolder to federate up their product(s)….which is a bit like a private dropbox on acid. So more handwaving towards the cloud folks.

I’ve been trying to find a common theme to cunningly link all of the talks. It’s difficult but I think most of the speakers were saying:

• here’s some stuff.
• we’ve done it for you.
• it works.
• go play!

We’ve all become so used to having a stready stream of collaborative and multimedia tools and apps provided ‘free’ to our finger tips that we’ve become lazy consumers. I was amused this week at the outcry when Facebook acquired Instagram – the comments reflecting an emotional response to ‘don’t take my tool’ rather than a logical analysis of the fact that services we don’t pay for cannot live forever on Angel investment. (Here I could write another whole post on funding models through Angel investment, crowdsource kick starters, open foundations, national funding and commercial approaches – but I won’t. Phew!) I won’t do the hackneyed ‘if you are not the customer you are the product’ thing, but we do need to be rational about the longevity of services we rely on, but don’t pay for.

What then is a sensible approach to funding collaborative tools? There is a general lack of interest in paying for a platform – particularly when you can never be sure where you should be, which you should be on, and most importantly know where your potential collaborators are. If there is less interest in buying these tools, does national level funding for research and education make sense?

There is certainly evidence that we are using social and collaboration tools in the JISC community a lot. This ranges from the everyday on Twitter, hosted blogs in a variety of formats, wiki spaces, poll tools, voting tools, Google Apps, Dropbox, tools to take and manage photos, tools to edit videos…need I go on? The sustainability / reliance question is different in every case – sometimes we are relying on institutionally hosted tools, in other cases we are creating, storing and hosting our stuff on public sites where we are less sure of future service, and indeed service terms like ownership, data protection etc.

Other academic communities certainly think there is power in nationally provided services, and are frankly doing it a lot better than the UK. The excellent Foodle service (which is far and above Meetomatic in terms of features) and Filesender are obvious examples.

Another thing that is common for all of these is the need to login. Again the way in which we do this varies with the platform, the host, and its links. Many of the tools use oAuth or oAuth style permissions via Twitter, Facebook and Google credentials. Sometimes we use our professional email address to register, sometimes we use our personal addresses. Generally though, there isn’t much consistency. A question I often get asked is if there is any value in providing an R&E OpenID instance (or instances). I don’t really have an answer to this – I generally ask for the use cases and more information, do researchers, students, staff members want it? What is clear though is that we are mixing and matching our login approaches, which in turn affects the profile or persona we present when we are logged in. Whilst there is an argument to be made that reducing and consolidating the number of credentials used on these services, there is certainly a good argument to be made to supporting a consistent approach to persona across these services.

I’m wondering if supporting the management of persona (and in turn credentials) is a good argument for providing such services at a national level? Could this be less about what platform but about a better approach to presenting and using academic identity?

Here I’m talking about something like a mash-up of VIVO, and SSO, and reputation services, and openID concepts, and author (and non author) identifiers. A full on proper identity layer for the R&E community, powered by federated access management via your institution. Is that an achieveable vision? Here are some of my wants around this:

• I’m sick of uploading the same photo again and again and again in to every new system that wants it from me. Can’t I have a profile that just provides this? Ditto for all my other ‘profile’ data.
• I want to be able to be very clear about the fact I am presenting my professional profile on this service, and my personal profile on that service. Ideally, I would like to have a link to guidelines about how that profile will be used that can be set by my institution for my professional account (i.e. the social media guidelines we all have) and by me for my personal account.
• I want to be able to track my activity across all the tools I use for my job – I need some sort of identifier to achieve this.
• I want this to be moveable across institutions.
• I want to know my collaborators can provision themselves in to the social and collaborative tools I’m using quickly and easily.

I could go on, but I don’t want to make this post endless or a use case specification for a non-existent service.

One of the things that would absolutely have to change is how we think about the importance of identity management within our services. I get endlessly depressed by the number of times I get told ‘oh we are going to sort out the access management stuff in phase 2′. Essential workflows within your services should never be relegated to phase 2. Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey did not get where they are by thinking of the identity elements of their service as a phase 2 tack-on. We are endlessly shooting oursleves and our users in the foot by rolling out services with random approaches to login, profile and identity management without thinking about where the service sits in the everyday workflow of a user, and how many other times some other site has asked them to login.

So to get back to my original question, maybe if we could provide a decent, full, comprehensive identity approach to these services there would be value in a national something…but if it was built, would they come? Do researchers, students, staff members at insitutions have any interest in such an approach? What do you think?

*Updated*

Today I saw this post via @ppetej, which is an interesting take on the Facebook / Instagram / Identity message. It’s the perfect reflection on the difficulty of managing usability, security and privacy – which is the theme of my talk at the rapidly upcoming TNC2012 (gulp). Whereas many people would say that being able to consistently use your Facebook account to provide your digital foortprint – this also means handing over all of our personal information and behaviours to Facebook. So what are the options?

• Keeping accounts on each and every tool we want to use. This is all fine if you can be smart about it, but the problem is that most people end up using the same username (email) and password combo on all of them. From a security perspective, this is clearly problematic.
• Accept the rise of big brother and go with the flow. Most sites allow you to log in with Facebook / Twitter / Google now…but certainly not all. There is also the the problem between what the site might accept as a credential and the permissions your credentials carry. There isn’t much point an academic publisher accepting Facebook when Facebook doesn’t give a verifiable statement of institutional affiliation.
• Work on our personas so that we use the appropriate credentials in the appropriate place, and they reflect who we are in that context.

Amanda’s piece seems to make some of what I talk about above make sense, considering the management of an professional academic persona separately from a personal one, but identity is a complex area. Can we ever get the flow right so that the user experience is good, the site secure, and the management and use of personal data acceptable to all?

The trouble with pesky standards are in the way they are interpreted and implemented in real world settings. It is natural for organisations to adopt different approaches to elements such as these – a basic level making different elements required or optional, and adding different parameters around the elements (length, size etc.). There is also the problem that different parties will want to have an opinion on this – particularly federations that need to collect and distribute the information, but also software implementations that use the information. Rod has done an excellent job of collecting recommendations on MDUI from software developers and federations on the REFEDS wiki.

So could we look to standardise our approaches to MDUI? Is it possible to come up with a REFEDS set of recommendations around its use? I’m not so sure. It’s worth breaking down the elements to see if this is possible.

———————————————————————————————

DisplayName and Description

The idea that an entity should have a display name and a description of what it is seems fairly non-contentious…but there are differences. One of the obvious differences is in the allowed length of each elements – but an obvious way to amend that would be to recommend the shortest set amount for each.

Then is it sensible to say that federations should require these elements to be populated? They are certainly not required elements across the board within federations at the moment. My gut feeling would be that everything recommended would have to be optional…although that significantly waters down the potential impact of MDUI. A useful approach adopted by several federations for DisplayName is to use what is already there. Federations already register md:OrganizationDisplayName for entities – and using this as a fallback for non-populated mdui:DisplayName is imminently sensible.

So if we were to try and make a recommendation around this? It would have to be:

mduiDisplayName: optional, max 33 characters. Fallback to md:OrganizationDisplayName.
mduiDescription: optional, max 100 characters.

———————————————————————————————

Logo

Logo is quite simply the hardest element to deal with. It’s hard to define the requirements, its hard to get organizations to submit due to corporate branding concerns. Moreover, the exact recommendations made are going to depend on the software used by the service in question. These means that if you optimise for a Shibboleth Embedded Discovery Service, your logos aren’t going to look so great in DiscoJuice. There are also more generic guidelines to consider, such as the work done on recommendations for social media buttons. Whilst lots of organisations have taken the step of developing favicons which tend to support this kind of work, it is by no means ubiquitous.

So what could we say regarding a recommendation? At the moment, there seem to be three common elements – provide a link to an image that is on an https page, an image that has a transparent background and an image that is a .gif or a .png. There is also general agreement that there are different requirements for IdP logos and SP logos.

Will we ever resolve the size issue? I’m not sure. Federations are likely to make recommendations based on what looks best in their Central Discovery Service or WAYF, or that looks best in the software implementations that they most widely support. Once we get in to the realm of sharing metadata via interfederation, this is going to create all sorts of problems. However, there is simply nothing close to a pattern in the recommendations currently being made.

If forced to make a recommendation, it would look something like this. This would mean a change in practise for some federations and may not satisfy some sofware approaches.

IdPLogo: optional, close to 60 x 80 pixels, .gif or .png, transparent backgroud, provide a link on an https page.
SPLogo: optional, in the range of 64/150h x 64/350w pixels, .gif or .png, transparent background, provide a link on an https page.

I’d also want to discourage federations from adding additional requirements to the logo formatting – would this create problems for anyone?

———————————————————————————————
Keywords

There are no specific use cases for keywords active within federations at the moment so I would think any recommendations would want to say silent on keyword use or discourage use at this point in time.

———————————————————————————————-
InformationURL

There are currently debates around the interpretation and use of InformationURL at this point in time. As any potential users of this information would need to have a good, clear, understanding of what the URL was for I would think any recommendations would want to say silent on InformationURL use or discourage use at this point in time.

———————————————————————————————–
PrivacyStatementURL

The use of a PrivacyStatementURL is less ambiguous than InformationURL and there is no need to make specific recommendations around structure as it is simply a URL. On a practical level, however, it would be useful to point to guidance as to what a PrivacyStatementURL should lead to. Other working groups within REFEDS are looking at proposed wording and advice for such a statement and it would be sensible to combine this work.

———————————————————————————————–
IPHint, DomainHint and GeolocationHint

RFC recommendations for each of these elements are well described in the Metadata Extensions specification. It would be sensible for any REFEDS recommendations to use these directly without change. In terms of use, inaccurate data in these fields can create significant user confusion so it would be appropriate for accuracy checks to be run on this information before including in metadata. This creates a new overhead regarding management of entity data.
———————————————————————————————–

So that’s it! The main problem area is the use of logos and it will take some debate to get this to a comfortable resolution. It is of course typical that use of logos is one of the key benefits of the MDUI information in supporting user interfaces.

I don’t think that REFEDS making any recommendations around these elements in particularly going to help or drive uptake. I think it is clear that it is going to take a long long time to get a decent percentage of entities using MDUI.

Do we need to do something now, though, to prevent differing recommendations being made by federations and software providers? If we make some recommendations, will anyone listen and change their current practises? Is there any value to be placed in such a coordination exercise?

We would dearly love to hear your thoughts.