Staffordshire University workshop on OER, metadata and repositories

Last week my colleague Jill Russell and I travelled to Stoke-on-Trent to run a workshop for the good folk at Staffordshire University on metadata and repositories. I had met one of their librarians, Sarah Hall, at another talk I gave at Staffordshire in April and she contacted me to see if I was interested in talking further about metadata, both as a user and as one sharing materials on the web.

The first half of the workshop focused on the importance of metadata in describing learning resources appropriately (we got the participants into small groups and asked them to come up with questions they would need to ask about a resource to find out if it would be useful for them - basically getting them to come up with the ideal metadata schema).

Jill (who is our institutional repository manager) then took them through our institutional repository, UBIRA (http://ubira.bham.ac.uk), highlighting metadata fields and how material on the repository is found by Google.

I got to bang on about how crucial rich metadata is in not only finding material but also in contextualising it for the user. It was really exciting (yes, exciting) to see the small groups come up with so many points that I also think are important to ideally include in metadata for learning resources:

• who is the intended audience
• are there any specific learning outcomes attached to the material
  
• how well does the material work for the intended audience
• how difficult/easy was it to create
• tracking of different versions
  

I also got to use my pistachio/Tesco analogy (see previous post)!

I know the day was all about facilitating discussions amongst another group but I found it to be really interesting and not a little inspiring. The participants were very vocal in a positive way and really engaged with each other and the topic.

I'm now looking forward to another possible talk on designing and sharing educational resources next year (I'll have to wait to see if the abstract is accepted first) but I have come up with yet another terrible analogy that I'm just itching to use...

Google Books and bad metadata

What was I saying earlier about the need for good metadata in order to open up free content? The Times Higher Tweeted today on the Google Books metadata fiasco and ensuing online discussion on linguist and Professor Geoffrey Nunberg's blog. At the end of August he blogged about the millions of metadata errors on Google Books. At first you almost think this is funny but then it dawns on you how much information Google holds and how much trust is invested in them by their billions of users.

One thing that's pointed out on Geoff's blog post is that a crucial thing to remember is that Google Books will likely be 'The Library' in the future. No-one else will repeat the scanning they've done, so we're stuck with Google Books as our one online source for digitised books. This means that they absolutely have to get this right and, more importantly, that they must alert their users to its ongoing limitations.

Frustration of different database platforms

I've just come back from co-running an information skills session for GP tutors. I've run this session, along with NHS librarian/trainer Elizabeth Saunders from Worcester Trust, a few times now. Each time we seem to spend longer explaining how the different Medline platforms work than the GPs do actually get to practice using the database. I would like someone to explain to me how it benefits our users (the GPs and eventually the medical students) to develop different versions of databases. I'm assuming that it's partly down to the requirements of different networks/systems within different institutions and partly down to the data on the database being licenced for use by more than one platform provider.

This reminded me of my recent post (below) about the design of databases and how this links to being able to find information. Today, I first demonstrated how to use the Ovid Medline platform via our eLibrary. There are several versions of Medline available this way, mostly different date ranges (just to confuse users further) but the searching interface is actually fairly intuitive and the searching functionality is very powerful. It's what I'll train the medical students on so it's useful for the GP tutors to see it in action.

Elizabeth then took over, demonstrated the NHS Evidence site (which I think is excellent for finding information) and then went on to demo the NHS version of Medline. This version looks very different to Ovid and kind of behaves differently too. It should be just as powerful and bring back the same results. However, this isn't always the case. Elizabeth and I did some testing last year and found that with some searches, sometimes, slightly different results came up.

There are several reasons why this is frustrating:

1. Having to demonstrate two versions of the same database is time consuming and confusing, especially when demonstrating just one database can be confusing enough.
2. If the same database (different platform) is bringing back even slightly different results then this kind of goes against the idea that you are undertaking a comprehensive literature search. If 'good enough' is okay, then fine, but users need to understand the limits of a database and if the limits are different for each version you will lose them pretty quickly.
3. It means that as a librarian I should be getting to know different versions before showing them to users and I don't want to have to do this. I want to get to know the best version and show my users this one.

So, how does this link to re-using learning material? Well, journal literature is learning material and if I can't demonstrate an easy(ish) way of finding relevant material to my users, then someone is doing something wrong, and it ain't me.

OER and linking up resources to users

Reading some Tweets yesterday from David Davies and others has made me want to write at a bit more length than 140 characters about opening up resources to users. David blogged about a post by Tony Hirst on opening up library resources to searchers.

This has made me think again about how we structure collections of information, whether it be books on physical shelves or electronic articles in a bibliographic database. So much of my job in teaching students and researchers how to find information is spent describing how databases/search engines/libraries/indexes etc. are put together. Librarians like me come up with clever analogies to help demystify databases and the necessary search strategies ("imagine you're arranging a dinner party, you have to go shopping, now we need to put together a shopping list" etc.). The reason we spend so long training students how to do this is that, in many cases, databases aren't built to help people find information, they are built as repositories.

Some databases are better than others, but I think we should glean something from the success of Google and Wikipedia about usability and how users instinctively look for stuff. I don't want to turn any of my students or researchers into librarians and it can be frustrating sometimes, having to go into great detail about MeSH searching and Boolean operators when all they want is to find the perfect article.

I think that we need to concentrate on pushing content out to users, to places where we know they will be looking. At Birmingham we've configured our e-resources so that if a student is on campus or off campus and signed in to our eLibrary, then any search they do on Google Scholar will display our e-journal holdings (along with all the open web results) with a branded link. This way users are guided back to the (very expensive) resources that they are entitled to.

I go back to my shopping analogy again. In my local Tesco there are three locations where I will find pistachio nuts: the baking aisle, the wholefoods aisle and the snack aisle (all with different prices but that's another matter). What Tesco's are doing is placing the product where they know shoppers will go, rather than forcing the shopper to behave in an unnatural way. This is what we must do with information. Don't try to turn every student into an expert searcher, place the information at their point of need.

This is why I think that really thoughtful metadata can be very helpful. It's all very well having a sophisticated taxonomy with technical medical terms but if your users don't think or search in that way, they'll never be linked up with what they need. Maybe this means more emphasis on user collaboration/consultation when building databases (without it going all Homer-Simpson-designs-a-car). Or maybe the semantic web will solve all of these problems!?

I think we need to ask ourselves what we really want our databases/repositories to be: carefully structured but inpenetrable warehouses or open, usable, welcoming goldmines.

SOLSTICE event: Creating and Sharing Digital Content

The SOLSTICE event (Edge Hill University, 16th July) was a really good day. The speakers comprised project managers from the JISC funded ReProduce programme of projects (http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/elearningcapital/reproduce) and one from the new OER programme of projects.

One of the keynote speakers was Tom Boyle, director of the RLO CETL. Tom demonstrated the GLOMaker2, a tool for creating online learning content. It looked really easy to use and the best thing is that is has a pedagogical framework underpinning every step of creation. This is especially exciting (yes, exciting!) as many of us are guilty of creating content based on what is available or possible technically rather than focussing on the pedagogy first and then using appropriate technology to create content. The new tool will be released on 21st August, for free, from the link above.

We will be testing out GLOMaker2 at Birmingham in a sort of ReJiG, part 2, where we will be demonstrating various bits of kit to support creation of learning content. We will be encouraging our librarians to use this software and evaluate in terms of use and re-purpose.

Anyway, back to SOLSTICE. The other talks were very good and highlighted many of the same problems that we found with BRUM and ReJiG and that I've pulled out in the post below (finding content, standards of content and metadata, copyright). There was a discussion session at the end of the day in which we all listed our 'must haves' for anyone looking at these issues. I'm hoping that an organisation/individual/project group will start to take these issues forward, especially in terms of IL RLOs (this is the idea for our IL RLO Share community of practice) so watch this space!

BTW - visiting Ormskirk meant a very welcome overnight stay in Liverpool and another quick peak at the Colour Chart exhibition at Tate Liverpool (that I'd visited a week before). Well worth a visit.