Or08 on nostuff.org archive | Chris Keene

Event: The Data Imperative: Libraries and Research Data

Wed, 03 Jun 2009 17:26:06 +0000

Today I’m at the one day event ‘The Data Imperative: Libraries and Research Data’ at the Oxford e-research Centre. As usual, these are my own rough notes. There are mistakes, gaps and my own interpretation of what was said.

Paul Jeffreys : Director of IT, Oxford University.

Started off giving an overview of where this has come from. e-Research is more than just e-Infrastructure. e-Research is not just about outputs, but outputs (articles/data) are a part of this, and an discreet area to work on.

or08: eprints track, session 2

Thu, 03 Apr 2008 11:44:32 +0000

After coffee a little more talk about new features and the future as we ran out of time before. Christopher Gutteridge has now turned up, he may have had a few grown up fizzy drinks last night.

(lost concentration here: salt grain take) Eprints plugin will try and pick when people enter their names wrong (e.g. get first/lastnames mixed up). Report an eprint (or report an issue with an eprint) link on item/record pages?

or08: Eprints 3.1

Thu, 03 Apr 2008 09:35:18 +0000

At the sucks-less-than-dspace Eprints track today. First up Eprints 3.1 and Future. Haven’t seen anything about 3.1 before this, v3 was released over a year a go so looking forward to seeing what is new.

9:10am: Les Carr is talking. reviewing v3 released last year. Talking about the large amount of work surrounding a repository (for all), which he experienced first hand running the soton ecs repository, and the work they have put in to help this. He found that when he contacted academics to point out problems he has fixed with their items/records they seemed pleased glad that someone was doing this. Last year they (eprints team) wanted to focus on ‘things on the ground’ to make things easier and not focus too much on rejiging the internals.

or08: live blogging experiment

Tue, 01 Apr 2008 21:20:10 +0000

Today – as you probably have seen – I posted some badly written notes that meant nothing to no one, and interested even fewer. This was my experiment in live blogging. I’ve seen others do it quite a bit recently and always thought it worked well, so wanted to give it a try.

Some thoughts:

Using a different tense is a little weird. Normally we write in the past tense if reviewing an event, when blogging as it happens I found myself switching between current and past tense (the latter out of habit). This wasn’t helped with no internet access before coffee, so i was writing in to a text editor (not that you wanted to know, called Smultron) something I planned to paste in to a blog post in the future, which when posted will be talking about the past, but i wanted it to read as if it was live!
I looked up at one point while switching between wordpress and twitter and saw two laptop screens of people in front of me, one had twitter across the screen, the other had the wordpress composition window. Am I boring or with the in-crowd?!
Perhaps the biggest point was my difficulty in note taking. I wanted to write stuff that other people not there would find useful. However, my notes were largely rather basic, not meaty enough to say much, someone reading would get a general idea what the talk was about. It would give someone a feel of the outline of a talk, but not what the key points were, something which I think is a crucial difference.
As well as taking notes, I had various tabs open, including the excellent crowdvine conference site, twitter, bloglines, google blog search (searching to see what turned up for ‘or08’… oh look! me! god I’m so vain). At times the note taking, twittering (and learning about tags on twitter) and checking out crowdvine, I would occasionally look up and have no idea what the presenter is talking about (I’m a man, I have evolved to be an expert single tasker). Must try and ensure I’m not being distracted from the actual reason I’m there.
My notes were rough. Not helped by the fact that the lecture hall was very full (and it wasn’t one of those poncy MBA lecture theaters with big wide seats), so I was being careful of my elbows – which limits typing, and for me, using the shift key. Does the embarrassment of badly typed, ill thought, ungrammatical notes get trumped by their potential interest to others and timeliness?
Timeliness is an important point, I could have waited until the end of the day but wanted to get them out straight away.
After morning coffee I had the internet. I sat down with next to two people I had met before, while there were quite a few with their laptops open, they were not, and I felt a little self conscious. They were trying to listen to the talk, and here was this guy next to them mucking around on his laptop the whole time. Actually I don’t think they were bothered.
While talking about being self-conscious, does posting things as quickly as possible look like attention seeking and ego massaging? Never thought that about anyone else doing it so hopefully the answer is no (but then I love this sort of thing, so I wont).

So will I do it again. Yes, and I like having the web to hand while at these things. I think I need to improve my note taking, and perhaps take more time writing up points (and my thoughts) on the things of interest rather than writing lots of little snippets. I basically need to take notes anyway (whether notepad and pen, MS Word or a blog), and it does make it stick in my head better than just sitting there, so I may as well make my notes open to others. The timeliness (thats time – li – ness, not Time Lines!) is perhaps harder to argue, but I like the idea that things are hitting the web the moment they happen, so think I will continue it.

or08: session 2b: Sustainability Issues

Tue, 01 Apr 2008 14:22:21 +0000

[again unedited, unchecked, sorry for mistakes!]

Warewick Cathro
Assistant Direct General, National Library of Australia

[sorry didn’t take very good notes for Warwick’s good talk]

“towards the australian data commons” paper on the web for reference on Australian policy in this area.

various sites/projects:

arrow: aggregates IRs in Uni repositories, 90,000 records, expects to grow rapidly. not a ‘native search service’ intended to let others use the metadata.
future: evolve, support financially by ‘austrian national data service’ (like everything else in this talk). will use shibb and poss openid.

or08: session1 (part 2)

Tue, 01 Apr 2008 11:02:39 +0000

again unedited/checked:

I’m tagging with or08:

http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch?hl=en&q=or08&ie=UTF-8&scoring=d
http://technorati.com/search/or08?authority=a4&language=en
**
On the margins of scholarship**

Richard Davis, Uni London Computer Centre

flickr, good example of an online document repository

“flickr for eprints”
1 – the data i enter to be used by other applications
2 – rss feeds i can use elsewhere
3 – clickable keywords, leading to similar articles in other repositories.

linnean online

demo’d images in an eprints ir, allowed photos to be previewed on the same page, bookmarks, comments.

or08: session1 part1

Tue, 01 Apr 2008 10:39:45 +0000

again, unedited or checked. draft notes:

ian mulvany -nature (who produce connotea) – speaker.
david kane – Waterford Institute of Technology

openid

semantic web, very useful to get data from, but hard to do and very few do it.

contributing: plan text easy, semantic web hard
data mining: semantic web easy, plain text hard.

talked about how nature are working on intergrating social tools with connotea.

“we want to connect repositories with connotea”.

or08: Open Repositories 2008

Tue, 01 Apr 2008 10:27:40 +0000

I’m at Open Repositories 2008.

Got in to southampton central at 8:15am, for a 9 start, thought i had loads of time but wait for bus, journey, and wondering around campus only just got here for 9. so did just about everyone else, so not username and password allocated until coffee time :( [but now online, hence you seeing this!]

draft notes from the first session, unedited or checked.
peter murray-rust
repositories data