ELAG 2014
Going digital in the closed stacks – Library logistics with a smart phone
Eva Dahlbäck and Theodor Tolstoy, Stockholm University Library
(see description of the talk)
Approx. 300 orders a day. Up until recently, orders would have been printed on paper. Orders from closed stacks, interlibrary loans and missing books. Before: digital -> paper -> digital (email sent to user to let them know item available).
The workflow is essentially the same, even if the orders come in differently and come out differently. So now a new digital workflow: All the orders are collected together in a list managed by the Viola programme, in which they are sorted. The librarian makes downloads the list, goes to the stacks and comes back with items. It's managed by a portable phone.
The list can be ordered by location. It is downloaded in the mobile phone. Each book has a separate entry and includes the shelfmark info. The librarians has also a small printer for slips. The phone scans the barcode and a slip is printed and goes in the book. Once a book has been scanned, it receives a green star (they can be various colours for various situations).
Benefits are fewer manual steps and a unique workflow. It's faster and easier to follow the order steps. It requires less people. Viola is also connected to the invoice-system (what does this imply?...). However collection is only twice a day...
A close collaboration between developpers and librarians was necessary. They worked with "user stories" to help in the collaborative work, to prioritise tasks and break them into smaller steps and to follow progress. The user stories included staff, such as the book fetcher (what does he/she need?) Intention is to release this as open source!
The technology used was ASP.NET MVC, the database is a SQL server (replaceable thanks to the ORM PetaPoco) and Android APP (Xmarin Monodroid). Most of these are open source.
Friday, 13 June 2014
Identifying and identifiers
ELAG 2014
Integrating ORCiD – A two way conversation
Tom Demeranville, software engineer specialising in digital identifiers and identities at the British Library
(see description of the talk)
ODIN (DataCite Interoperability Network) is concerned with linking authors with research output and is a 2-year project. It's also looking at datasets, grey literature, etc. What do we mean by identifying authors? The answer varies. One person can have lots of identifiers and profiles, including institutional profile, an ISNI, a ScopusID etc. or an ORCiD.
So the first distinction is between an identifier and a profile. We usually think of identifiers as unique ID but a profile can be much more. Another important point is that no one wants to type the same thing twice. Profiles can be automated or manual. Then there is the difference of identifiers as Institutions or Users, with conflicting notions of control but we all want disambiguation...
So what we need... One identifier and many profiles that solve different use cases.
ORCiD is meant to be a more open identifying system, managed for people with many different use cases. Relevant to publishers, unis, funders and libraries. It would help systems to talk to each other.
Ethos is e-Thesis Online Import. See demo at http://ethos-orcid.appspot.com
The ODIN project is working to integrate ORCiD and DataCite.
Integrating ORCiD – A two way conversation
Tom Demeranville, software engineer specialising in digital identifiers and identities at the British Library
(see description of the talk)
ODIN (DataCite Interoperability Network) is concerned with linking authors with research output and is a 2-year project. It's also looking at datasets, grey literature, etc. What do we mean by identifying authors? The answer varies. One person can have lots of identifiers and profiles, including institutional profile, an ISNI, a ScopusID etc. or an ORCiD.
So the first distinction is between an identifier and a profile. We usually think of identifiers as unique ID but a profile can be much more. Another important point is that no one wants to type the same thing twice. Profiles can be automated or manual. Then there is the difference of identifiers as Institutions or Users, with conflicting notions of control but we all want disambiguation...
So what we need... One identifier and many profiles that solve different use cases.
ORCiD is meant to be a more open identifying system, managed for people with many different use cases. Relevant to publishers, unis, funders and libraries. It would help systems to talk to each other.
Ethos is e-Thesis Online Import. See demo at http://ethos-orcid.appspot.com
The ODIN project is working to integrate ORCiD and DataCite.
The Mechanical Curator
ELAG 2014
The Surprising Adventures of the Mechanical Curator, and Other Tales
Ben O’Steen, technical leader of British Library Labs
(see description of the talk and the slides)
This project started last year, as an accident! Taking the stuff that's technically accessible... and making it accessible! Engaged with the researchers, formally and informally through yearly competitions. What they win is our time and effort! The unifying theme to (pretty much) all the requests is: Give us everything! But this is quite depressing: so librarians don't take part in research, they're only there to provide content? Another theme is to have tools to interpret the content, to be able to work on broad sweeps of content rather than one at a time.
The Sample Generator shows the chasm between the collection and the digitised material. Not only is the content not as much digitised but it is also not as accessible as it could be.
The challenge was that research didn't want to work with api's but access large amounts of data. Made an experiment: face detection on 19thC illustrations - it wasn't very successful. The depiction is usually "clean" and posed, males represented differently from females and therefore less often detected etc. But it gave the idea of the mechanical curator, who digs in the collection of digitised images and tries to find visually similar images, based on a calculated match. It has now been doing that for a couple of months (and tweets about it). An unguided way of discovering material.
Images published on Flickr, many views in 4 days. They are published as CC0 and there are already examples of creative re-uses, such as colouring-in for children, an artit's interpretation etc. But this doesn't bring money to the Library, which is always hard to justify. But this is encouraging creativity, it may not be research but it's not less imporatnt. An animation student used images to represent them in 3-D. Moments, by Joe Bell
So the impact is hard to measure. Accessible is great, can we make it more useful? A group of UCL big Data CS students will be given access to all the book data, cloud computing and will make an experiment for broader and more direct access to the collections.
The Surprising Adventures of the Mechanical Curator, and Other Tales
Ben O’Steen, technical leader of British Library Labs
(see description of the talk and the slides)
This project started last year, as an accident! Taking the stuff that's technically accessible... and making it accessible! Engaged with the researchers, formally and informally through yearly competitions. What they win is our time and effort! The unifying theme to (pretty much) all the requests is: Give us everything! But this is quite depressing: so librarians don't take part in research, they're only there to provide content? Another theme is to have tools to interpret the content, to be able to work on broad sweeps of content rather than one at a time.
The Sample Generator shows the chasm between the collection and the digitised material. Not only is the content not as much digitised but it is also not as accessible as it could be.
The challenge was that research didn't want to work with api's but access large amounts of data. Made an experiment: face detection on 19thC illustrations - it wasn't very successful. The depiction is usually "clean" and posed, males represented differently from females and therefore less often detected etc. But it gave the idea of the mechanical curator, who digs in the collection of digitised images and tries to find visually similar images, based on a calculated match. It has now been doing that for a couple of months (and tweets about it). An unguided way of discovering material.
Images published on Flickr, many views in 4 days. They are published as CC0 and there are already examples of creative re-uses, such as colouring-in for children, an artit's interpretation etc. But this doesn't bring money to the Library, which is always hard to justify. But this is encouraging creativity, it may not be research but it's not less imporatnt. An animation student used images to represent them in 3-D. Moments, by Joe Bell
So the impact is hard to measure. Accessible is great, can we make it more useful? A group of UCL big Data CS students will be given access to all the book data, cloud computing and will make an experiment for broader and more direct access to the collections.
Thursday, 12 June 2014
Data visualisation
ELAG 2014
Data visualization as a library service? Examples from Chalmers library
Stina Johansson, Librarian/bibliometrician at Chalmers Library, Sweden
(see description of the talk)
Father of Data? William Playfair (1759-1823), Scottish engineer and political economist. Developed first data charts. "The king at once undrestood the charts and was hihgly pleased. He said they spoke all languages..."
Graphics can make data much more "readable". A lot of communication is done through images. Chalmers Library uses a lot of visualisation to communicate about its data. E.g. topical analysis through keywords or citations networks or geospatial visualisations. E.g. Author co-citation analysis: a map representing the most cited authors, with links between them meaning various things, size or centrality of "dots" providing visual information.
Some of the visualisations are interactive - clicking brings to additional or linked info. Also visualisations of country level collaboration with environmental department data, for example.
See: http://chalmeriana.lib.chalmers.se/visuals/journal_citation/
Tools
Gephi: open source visualisation tool
Raw: open web app to create vector-based visualisations (from spreadsheets, potentially?) used on top of D.js.library (java) through a simple interface
VOSviewer: can use with a raw text file, easy to use
Data has to be clean and structured though! Be creative and play!
Data visualization as a library service? Examples from Chalmers library
Stina Johansson, Librarian/bibliometrician at Chalmers Library, Sweden
(see description of the talk)
Father of Data? William Playfair (1759-1823), Scottish engineer and political economist. Developed first data charts. "The king at once undrestood the charts and was hihgly pleased. He said they spoke all languages..."
Graphics can make data much more "readable". A lot of communication is done through images. Chalmers Library uses a lot of visualisation to communicate about its data. E.g. topical analysis through keywords or citations networks or geospatial visualisations. E.g. Author co-citation analysis: a map representing the most cited authors, with links between them meaning various things, size or centrality of "dots" providing visual information.
Some of the visualisations are interactive - clicking brings to additional or linked info. Also visualisations of country level collaboration with environmental department data, for example.
See: http://chalmeriana.lib.chalmers.se/visuals/journal_citation/
Tools
Gephi: open source visualisation tool
Raw: open web app to create vector-based visualisations (from spreadsheets, potentially?) used on top of D.js.library (java) through a simple interface
VOSviewer: can use with a raw text file, easy to use
Data has to be clean and structured though! Be creative and play!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)