This is the second area that TILE is focusing on. Mark van Harmelen presented on this, but I didn’t manage to capture it all. Essentially he considered User Activities

• Discovering
  • searching via terms and tags (personalisation or not)
  • browsing, as a result of recommending (via human and computer choices)
• Collecting – bookmarking
• Consuming – read/use
• Enhancing – adding comments, dialogues and tags
• Creating content, repurposing, remixing
• Publishing – explicitly making visible
• Curating – by, possibly in quest different ways by users and library/information professionals
• Collaborating – for learning, teaching and research

And some of the associated problems

• Control and cultural imperatives
• User base FE, HE, post formal ed, LL
• Trust and data quality (are the reviews ‘worthwhile’, could you allow updates to catalogue records? etc.)
• Data longevity
• Task support and workflow
• Technical implementation problems
• Cost (particularly search engine cost)
• Hand-off in the context of national data security

Some really interesting discussion around data and control – how we should approach this.

Definite agreement we need to open up data and ‘give up’ control, but not complete agreement on a lot of other things (should we be aiming for aggregation or distribution of data? should there be a ‘UK HE’ search engine?). Lots of debate, that I hope someone else captured better than I have here (I was too busy actually debating to type!)

TILE is brainstorming ways in which context can be derived:

• My Studies – Modules from VLE or VRE
• My ID
• My Activity – LMS/VLE/etc. Click streams
• My Feedback – bookmarks, reviews, ratings
• My Parameters – e.g. Location, status (and also the idea that you could want to ‘override’ by changing some of the parameters – to get access to 2nd year reading lists when you are in the 1st year etc.)
• My Interests

They also identified a couple that they are considering outside the initial scope

• My Networks – e.g. Facebook
• My Publications – Citation indexes etc.

Difficult to capture all the discussion but some points:

• Context varies – your ‘facebook’ context could be very different to your ‘academic’ context
• Context can feedback not just to the individual, but be used to drive information back to tutors (for example information about what students on their course are reading etc.)

Clearly there are privacy issues, but we can accept that context in the main can be derived from data aggregation – without dealing with individuals specific activity (except perhaps someones own personal usage data?)

We looked at a diagram suggesting a SUM for the aggregation of data that could be used to drive context across an institution – but I have to admit I didn’t quite get it – possibly I want to work at a level of detail that the SUM doesn’t go to?

It occurred to me as we discussed the issues, that we talked mainly about institutions not about users in terms of providing context. I need to think about this, but shouldn’t we be thinking about data portability, and how users carry their context with them? I need to think about this more.

The next presentation is on the e-Framework – a brief introduction to what it is etc.

What is in the e-Framework?

At it’s core, it is documentation:

• Service Oriented Knowledge Base
  • It’s documentation to help others
  • Describes services (based on open standards) and how to use them
  • Describes use of multiple services together
  • Describes best practices in use of services

It’s supported by an International Community covering the UK, Australia, New Zealand and the Netherlands – with a mixture of communities in each country, although there seems to be an ‘education’ focus (worth noting that this is clearly not a library specific thing)

Within the framework services are split into:

• Service Genre
• Service Expression

The Service Genre describes what type of service you are talking about (e.g. ‘search’) but doesn’t say anything about how it is achieved (i.e. intended to be technology neutral) (based on ‘behaviours’)

The Service Expression is about how the service is achieved – e.g. SRU/SRW, Z39.50 etc.

Standards and Service Implementations maybe linked to from the e-framework, but aren’t part of the framework themselves.

The idea is that the ‘genre’ would tell you ‘what can be done’

Building on this, you can start to build ‘Service Usage Model’ or SUM.

• An ‘abstract SUM’ can be created from business processes supported by Genres and Data Sources.
• An ‘implementation SUM’ can be created from Business Process supported by Expressions and Data Sources.

The abstract SUM would describe the situation in general terms – e.g. ‘you would need a search service’, the implementation SUM would say ‘using SRU/SRW’.

SUMs are where several genres or expressions are used together.

There were some discussions about the e-framework model, and how it worked, and how useful it would be.

I have to admit that I see the reason for it in terms of development – but I’m not completely convinced that it will work in practice, because I’m sceptical about it actually being used by developers in institutions.

Richard Wallis from Talis raised the issue that this highly structured approach seemed at odds with the ‘constant beta’ and agile development.

This afternoon I’m at a meeting of ‘TILE’ (‘Towards Implementation of Library 2.0 and the E-framework’). This is a JISC and SCONUL funded project, that follows on from the JISC/SCONUL sponsored report on Library Systems published earlier this year.

We are starting with an introduction from Ken Chad, one of the consultants on the project. Ken is showing some examples of how ‘web 2.0’ type technologies are coming into the library world – e.g. LibraryThing, the work by David Patten at the University of Huddersfield, California State University. Ken noting that soon after Amazon came out an article was published saying ‘should we do this in libraries’ – i.e. functions like recommendations etc., and we are only starting to see this happen 10 years later – why does it take so long?

Ken mentions MESUR project – collecting usage data (spans 100,00 serials etc.)

So, the two ‘pain points’ that TILE are focusing on are

• ‘Deriving Context’ – in HE we have good contextual information such as the course of study for a student
• ‘Enabling Contribution’ – the value of recommendations etc.

Following this there was some discussion on these two areas, and if there were other areas that the project ought to look at. The overall feeling was these were the correct areas to look at, but a couple of other areas were raised that the project ought to consider:

• The ‘back office’ side of library systems and there integration (with each other – e.g. metadata; and with institutional systems – e.g. Finance)
• The relationship between library systems and repositories, perhaps especially library workflows (e.g. acquisition)

It was also acknowledged that the project couldn’t hope to cover everything, and it was appropriate to focus on a few key areas.

The TILE project would like examples of ‘prototypes’ or ‘exemplars’ of ‘library 2.0’ type services – things like Amazon, LibraryThing etc. – especially examples around the two main points identified above. If you have examples, post a comment here and I’ll pass them on…