Tagged: technology
CAUL Publishing-X 2017
Earlier this week we ran the CAUL Publishing-X event at UTS. This is the first time that a number of Australian university library scholarly publishers have combined to run a self-help event like this. As well as library publishers from Adelaide, ANU, Monash, Sydney and UTS universities, we had other participants who generously came to speak and share knowledge from PKP, W3C, tekReader and SOS print+media.
We will be progressively uploading the presentations given to the event’s github site (linked above).
Here’s my summary of the two days:
We heard about what each of the presses do and how they do it. There are several very different approaches but also some similarities and common challenges. I think we established at a working level that there is much valuable experience and wisdom that can and should be shared. How do we best do that now?
We had several updates and technical workshop demonstrations from the likes of PKP, Sydney University Press (re IGP) and from the tekReader folks. UTS ePRESS staff provided a revealing review of the process of accreditation (with COPE, DOAJ and OASPA) covering the basics and benefits of this.
There were two important and revealing environmental scans/updates: on developments in Open Access (from Scott Abbott) and future trends and issues in content technologies, web development & apps and portable web publishing technology from David Wood representing W3C.
We were appraised on some very realistic solutions to common issues by the people from eGloo and SOS. And we heard and saw some very inspiring things from Fiona Salisbury of La Trobe University re OER publications and from Michael Schultz (SOS) and Zoë Sadokierski (UTS) re the new capabilities of digital printing and print-on-demand services. These presentations were all impressive and should result in all of us doing better things with online and open access scholarly publishing.
Hopefully there was something for everyone and I was really happy with the voluntary input from our relatively small community of scholarly publishers and our partners.
What is Inevitable about UTS Library (Pt 2 of 3)
Open Access is something we strongly believe in at UTS Library. We have taken action in many dimensions: to improve our institutional repository; as an advocate for OA at UTS (& the sponsor of our institution’s OA policy); through our active OA publishing arm – UTS ePRESS; by participating in various OA related events and initiatives; and though our advice and assistance on all things OA to students, researchers and academics at UTS. UTS ePRESS has experimented with new forms of scholarly publishing that harness the potential of the web and digital communications and therefore question the very nature of traditional publishing. We’ve encouraged and modelled more open licensing to permit reuse and we continue to support the early days of the OA movement. Some examples of all of this are found in the following images.
Our institutional repository was substantially remodelled and fully integrated with the University’s research management system recently. We established new workflows to decrease or eliminate manual processes and the ingest outputs, made UTS research outputs far easier to find on the open web and have substantially increased our reach accordingly.
http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/books/anatomy-quizbook
The Anatomy Quizbook was our first OER. This was also our first experiment with interactive text and importantly we were learning while making this happen. We have more OERs planned and will build on this initial adventure.
http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/books/lace-narratives
Lace Narratives was an ambitious and complex publication: it incorporated multi-media and was a major experiment in offering several different formats for a creative and scholarly work. An artistic process was openly shared through this publication and in a very limited edition high-quality hard cover version we were able to offer fabric swatches of the author’s textile art. This was one of our first experiments with different business models and distribution methods.
http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/pmrp
Project Management Research and Practice is a journal that is both unique in its field and which has evolved over time. The editorial board believes in OA research output and like our other journals have now achieved rigorous COPE and DOAJ standards. Their latest innovation is to publish as articles are submitted and reviewed. This “unbundling” of publishing containers reduces delays in research articles getting published and is much like the unbundling of albums on iTunes or the streaming of movies and series on demand like Netflix.
https://www.lib.uts.edu.au/open-access/learn
Our OA advocacy continues as suggested in the image above. We help others to understand OA, collaborate across boarders with like-minded people and organisations, and we raise awareness of the benefits and processes surrounding the OA movement.
End of Part 2. And Part 3 is right here. Don’t stop now.
What is Inevitable about UTS Library (Pt 1 of 3)
This is the guts of a presentation I gave at EduTECHAU on 9 June 2017. It’ll be a bunch of images, text to explain those images and a few links.
Thanks to my colleague Dr Belinda Tiffen for her assistance with this presentation: she is much smarter than me.
Last year I read Kevin Kelly’s book The Inevitable and I was struck by the way he described the 12 technological forces that he thinks will shape our future. The forces are named in the image above, but they’re not all that easy to understand. I’ve thought more about them and believe that at UTS Library we are actually making progress in all these areas, not always exactly as he describes, so I’ll outline what some of our initiatives are in the following images and text. For the sake of brevity, the only force I won’t be illustrating is Tracking, but rest assured that we are already doing some of that too and in fact you can see it in some of the examples I am using.
I am concentrating on three major areas: discovery and search; open access; and cultural and artistic stimulation.
For Discovery & Search I see our efforts are consistent with the four forces and examples illustrated above: Becoming; Accessing; Cognifying; and Filtering. We are in the process of completely redesigning our discovery interface on the basis of some in-depth UX research that we conducted ourselves. We have long taken an iterative approach to website and digital services development, and our latest work builds on that. In our UX work we have recognised that there is a spectrum of user needs and behaviours from search to discovery, so we are adding new features to aid and enhance discovery, but they are designed in a way that will not distract or delay those searching for known items and wanting to get out of there fast. Our collection development has seen major improvements with regard to collaborative borrowing arrangements and these options needed to be carefully included and distinguished in the search/discovery catalogue in order to increase the options available to our users, while not confusing them with respect to immediate availability. Finally as others like Amazon, Uber and Netflix have done we are introducing features that allow for a more personalised and tailored search and discovery experience, should the users opt in.
In response to our research insights and user feedback, the following slides outline the initial user interface concepts for UTS Library’s new search and discovery system. These solutions have been designed from the responses and feedback gathered from our previous wireframe prototypes.
The following design concepts will be developed into a working prototype where the new search engine can undergo further user testing in conjunction with the user interface.
Overall search page results in our catalogue. From left to right you see columns arranged to show search filter options; search results list and a new contextual discovery panel.
The addition of a contextual discovery side panel to provide the user with results that are personalized to the individual. This feature will assist the user in the discovery of information that the system believes will be helpful to them. Information will be displayed based on their search request and will provide related content matched to a logged in users profile.
Article results intergration: A common request amongst users of our current system is for the ability to combine Article results in a search with Books and Journals.
Using the default ‘All’ search, the new system will combine the top 3 Article results alongside Books and Journals.
This slide shows a few new features related to the item display within search results:
- Ribbon colour display: (LHS of record) Integrating the colour ribbon into the catalogue items establishes the direct link between the two. For users, this creates a better understanding of the search functionality the ribbon has. It also more directly displays the relationship between the search results and the items physical location within the library
- Shelf view: Shelf view button is located under the book cover display; this better suggests shelf views functionality to the user.
- Save item: Save item button enables a logged in user to quickly save an item of interest to a list.
- Item status: Improving the clarity of an items status means a user can quickly see an item’s availability and its location.
- Locate item: Simple and clear call to action buttons has been added to each item. This button describes the necessary action to preform in order to get the item.
- Call to action buttons (options are shown in the lower image above) The description on the call to action button indicates to the user where that item is located. For example, an item on the shelf will indicate where to “Locate item” or if an item is in the LRS it will indicate to “Request from LRS”. If an item is unavailable the call to action button describes to the user what further options are available to receive that item. When multiple resources are available for one item the button will display a drop down menu. This drop down will display the available recourse types to choose from.
Discovery of related items: The contextual discovery panel (“You may also like …” on RHS of full item page) will have the flexibility to provide related content to a particular item. On the Item page, the discovery panel can suggest related books by the same author or display items other people have viewed or borrowed.
It is of course fully responsive design, meaning the experience is fully optimised for mobile devices.
End of Part 1. Part 2 is here. Go there now. Do it. You know you want to.
“The Inevitable” by Kevin Kelly (and what it means for libraries)
I recently read The Inevitable by Kevin Kelly and was taken by his description of the technological forces busy shaping our future. I’ve given a couple of talks based on what I got out of this book and what some of these forces mean for libraries. Below are the slides I used in those talks (you’ll need to download from the pdf link below the image). I’ll progressively add some notes explaining my points.
1. Becoming
- Get used to constant change
- Get used to our users or clients creating and making their own things
- Big pointer to personalisation and anticipating user needs – but what are we doing about that in libraries – discovery & services?
- Stop waiting for perfect before releasing new services – people understand that now.
- Do we even notice what has happened when the changes are incremental. Can we do some of that ourselves?
2. Cognifying
- In an age of robots and self-driving cars, what work will matter for us? How do we add real value?
- There are more pointers here to providing deeper, richer and more personalised services for our clients.
3. Flowing
- We need to stop relying on static collection growth and start providing just-in-time services and understand subscriptions better.
- I think UTS ePRESS has already started experimenting with the fluidity of the page, edition, container and format, but maybe we can go even further with things like open peer-review, constant improvement, broader collaboration?
- Maybe understanding how the stages of flowing impact on all media (towards being more open) is a new form of digital literacy.
4. Screening
- Can we look at our libraries as a platform for cultural life within our communities and how do we do that effectively – finding more audiences and giving them a deeper, improved understanding with context for knowledge?
5. Accessing
- Using without owning is a concept that actually comes from libraries, but maybe now it is being pushed even further through platform synergy. I guess with things like ILL and Bonus+ we are already there too, but perhaps these things can be massively improved and decentralised even further using new technologies and concepts – shared collections, single platform LMS, rethinking “membership”?
6. Sharing
- I guess this relates heavily to #5 for libraries as it talks about more collaboration and then extreme decentralisation – maybe we need to get our act together and start thinking more imaginatively about how we do that.
- Understanding how the “crowd” works and how we can participate in some of those crowd activities may well be increasingly important. Maybe we even become a bit of a hub for some crowd activities or movements?
7. Filtering
- Again he talks about the importance of harnessing personalisation to anticipate and meet user needs. I don’t think we have done a great deal yet in libraries to match services offered like those of Netflix and Amazon. We could and we should.
- It also relates to the real experiences we offer our users in library spaces – with real people. This is a layer that will be increasingly appreciated in an age where screening is convenient, but where people still want face-to-face services and physical experiences. I think that the programs we offer in our spaces (training, assistance and curations) need to go much further than what can be gained from page or screen.
8. Remixing
- This relates to us in a couple of ways – firstly helping others to understand the complex legal issues and secondly in assisting people to safely use and remix different types of media for all kinds of reasons. I see this as part of the new need for libraries to provide assistance and training in digital literacies (not just information literacies).
9. Interacting
- Maybe there is something for us to learn from here in terms of maximising engagement with our programs (we’ve already started doing that at UTS Library with our orientation programs) and in terms of engaging more openly with games as they for part of contemporary culture and literacies.
- The other interesting aspect is the research showing that immersion into VR worlds is helping some people to re-establish neural pathways and connections after injury, so perhaps we need to throw out those awful; static personas and understand that our audiences will increasingly have more fluid identities?
10. Tracking
- This seems inevitable already, so again I think we need to be aware of what is happening so that we can help people understand some of the benefits and also how to protect their privacy.
- We are the kings of metadata and as there is more data becoming available every day perhaps where we come in is giving that data context through reliable metadata.
11. Questioning
- We must understand that questions are much more powerful than answers and maybe we start to harness them and learn how to use them in libraries? Sure we need to help people find and use data as well, but we also need to see that so many more things are possible now through constant questioning – like why not or how can we?
12. Beginning
- There is even more here pointing to massive scale convergence, but we still need to help people negotiate some of the challenges and I think also become advocates for the changes needed to deliver the full potential pf this brave new world.
UTS Library Retrieval System
The slide show above illustrates the progress from excavation and building to loading of the operational LRS itself.
As you read this UTS Library staff are busy overseeing the load of more than 400,000 books into the Library’s new automated retrieval system (LRS) under Alumni Green. It is exciting to see years of planning come to fruition and to be so close to realising the benefits of the LRS.
By storing low-use physical items in this purpose-built retrieval system we will be able to relieve overcrowding on book shelves in the Library and make room to continue to expand our collection of print resources. Regular library visitors will have noticed the tightly-packed shelves and perhaps occasionally been frustrated by difficulty in locating books. From the end of 2014, only the newest and most highly-used physical items will be housed on open shelves, making it easier to browse and locate items amongst the most popular books from our collection. The LRS also allows for the merger of the Blake and Kuring-Gai libraries at the end of 2015.
We realize that older items in our collection continue to have value and need to remain easily accessible. This was the rationale behind building an on-site retrieval system, rather than using off-site storage from which books could only be retrieved irregularly. Material in our LRS will be delivered regularly, with deliveries scheduled several times each day. It is also the reason we’ve been busy making enhancements to our catalogue so you can find new ways to discover items in our collections by searching and browsing online. Shelf View lets you browse a ‘bookshelf’ displaying book covers, our ‘collection ribbon’ is a unique way to delve in to our collection by subject, and we are working on recommendations and personalisation.
The LRS will therefore let us continue to build our collections, with room to expand to at least 2040, in a carefully controlled and secure environment ensuring the long-term preservation and protection of this valuable resource. It will also help us make our collection accessible by relieving overcrowding on book shelves. Of equal importance, it will help us meet the needs of our clients from study spaces as teaching and learning changes and our student population grows. Currently library space is dominated by book shelves, but increasingly we hear from clients, and observe ourselves, that there are not enough places to study in the Library. And we know we need diverse spaces to facilitate different types of learning from quiet, individual study to participatory group learning. This is why, once the lower use items in our collection are relocated to the LRS, we will be working on delivering new types of spaces for learning and research. We hope as well to provide spaces and technologies that facilitate access to productive activities such as multi-media, gaming and “maker” technologies because many of our students are no longer assessed purely on written output: they are making things like models, videos, games, etc.
We’ve tried to build sustainability into every aspect of the LRS. The building itself has major sustainability features*, and will store books in a highly compact format; storing the same amount of books in a traditional library would require a building 4-5 times larger. We’ve also paid attention to smaller details to reduce the environmental impact of our operations. That’s why, for example, our staff will walk between the LRS and the Blake Library using trollies and backpacks to deliver books, rather than rely on cars which add to traffic congestion and pollution.
The LRS presents an exciting opportunity to expand library services and collections for the future, helping the library play a central role in the learning, teaching and research activities of UTS. You can learn more about the LRS on our website http://www.lib.uts.edu.au/future-library/library-retrieval-system-lrs
* Sustainability Features:
There is no Green Star rating category for a facility such as the LRS, but it benefitted greatly from being constructed under the same project works as the 5 Green Star design rated Thomas St Building (an extension for the Science Faculty and Graduate School of Health). For example, the project utilised the sustainable concrete (required to be made with recycled rainwater) poured on the Thomas St Project for the LRS project. Other elements were the very strict waste management requirements, providing evidence of waste minimisation during construction. The design also incorporates significant natural lighting brought into the LRS picking station area via the large skylight that will double as a viewing lens from Alumni Green.
The LRS itself contains high-grade insulation which minimises energy consumption to the building to control thermal issues. A number of measures have been employed to ensure an easily maintained constant temperature in the book storage Vault. The LRS has been constructed under the Alumni Green with the 600mm of earth together with the insulated concrete providing excellent insulation, far exceeding the insulation requirements. The Vault is also insulated from the Plenum via lightweight insulated panels and insulated concrete and blockwork.
The Plenum itself pre-cools the air to be used in the facility by exposure to the constant cool temperature of exposed rock and concrete that surrounds it. The air path through the plenum is long and winding to ensure the maximum exposure to the surfaces and therefore maximum reduction of outside air temperature. The use of pre-cooled air reduces the energy required by the mechanical plant substantially.
Note: I’ve also posted this here https://www.lib.uts.edu.au/blog/university-librarian/2014/07/our-library-retrieval-system#
Libraries and the digital future
This is the presentation I gave to a City of Sydney Libraries seminar on 27 June 2013. It was only a short presentation so it isn’t comprehensive. Presenter’s notes are included in the pdf file.
THETA 2013, Sunday in Hobart
FromMelbin 