Whither Legal Deposit for Online Publications?

One of the mini-projects I started out on, and have to still to write up (and, indeed, complete!) during my Arcadia Fellowship was the life of a book, describing the travels made and processes applied to a work from the moment it is received via the legal deposit process into the University Library, through cataloguing and shelving, to the point at which it makes it back on to the shelf after its first loan.

One thing that didn't really cross my mind at all was the way in which born digital and published online content might be subjected to the legal deposit process, nor how legal deposit libraries might secure the long term availability and preservation of those works.

Anyway, it seems as if the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) have been consulting on the subject, and now they've opened up the consultation to a potentially wider audience than might have originally been the case by republishing it, in commentable form, on the WriteToReply consultation platform: Proposal on the Collection and Preservation of UK Offline and Microform Publications and UK Online Publications

The consultation seeks opinions on several proposals relating to the legal deposit of Offline and Microform Publications as well as Online Publications.

Which is to say, DCMS have worked out what they want to do (the proposals) and now's your opportunity to comment on it. As well as formal institutional responses, I got the feeling from a meeting with DCMS a week or two ago that they were interested in seeing how things like WriteToReply might help encourage a wider range of contributions to might complement full institutional responses. It's also worth bearing in mind from the individual user comment feeds, it's possible to use WriteToReply to help draft a full response...

As well as the proposals mentioned above, the consultation document is soliciting feedback on several other related matters.

For example, an impact assessment for agencies likely to support the process is provided in Impact Assessments – Intervention and options, analysis and evidence, which reviews some of the legal constraints around harvesting, as well as the costs of maintaining a legal deposit service for online materials. Have they identified all the major risks, or are there practicalities that have escaped them?

Defining territoriality is a major consideration on which feedback is requested in Further Details on Territoriality. With intellectual property rights in such a mess, here's an opportunity to contribute your opinions to the process.

Finally, practical everyday considerations about the actual legal deposit process are raised in Further Details on Harvesting Process. At the end of the day, the techies are going to have to implement this stuff. Here's an opportunity for developers to raise any concerns in an informal way



[Disclaimer: I am co-founder of the WriteToReply platform]

Bloggers: queue here for bus passes

Interesting insight from the Pew Project into the way the media ecosystem is evolving.

Since 2006, blogging has dropped among teens and young adults while simultaneously rising among older adults. As the tools and technology embedded in social networking sites change, and use of the sites continues to grow, youth may be exchanging ‘macro-blogging’ for microblogging with status updates.

Blogging has declined in popularity among both teens and young adults since 2006. Blog commenting has also dropped among teens.

* 14% of online teens now say they blog, down from 28% of teen internet users in 2006.

* This decline is also reflected in the lower incidence of teen commenting on blogs within social networking websites; 52% of teen social network users report commenting on friends’ blogs, down from the 76% who did so in 2006.

* By comparison, the prevalence of blogging within the overall adult internet population has remained steady in recent years. Pew Internet surveys since 2005 have consistently found that roughly one in ten online adults maintain a personal online journal or blog.

While blogging among adults as a whole has remained steady, the prevalence of blogging within specific age groups has changed dramatically in recent years. Specifically, a sharp decline in blogging by young adults has been tempered by a corresponding increase in blogging among older adults.

Clueless on copyright

We complain that young students are casual or clueless about copyright. But it looks as though the Obama White House may be just as confused.

New uses for Google #56632

Thanks to Dave Briggs for spotting it.

Cambridge Libraries Widget Launched

Today sees the official launch of the Cambridge Libraries Widget:

http://www.lib.cam.ac.uk/toolbox/camlibwidget.html

Developed in partnership between the UL and CARET, the widget is a unified interface for Cambridge library users, drawing together search facilities, library profiles, loans and requests in one easy-to-manage application. It's live in CamTools (Cambridge's VLE), Facebook and iGoogle.

The Widget is very much a product of the Arcadia Programme. It draws on the ideas of centering services around the user and providing relevance in resources and functionality which have proved such strong themes. At it's heart is a cross-institutional collaboration - a very Arcadia idea!

You'll need to be registered with a Cambridge Library to try it out at the moment ... but we're planning to write up what we did and how we did it at some stage so others can benefit too.

Two weeks into the project... software, pedagogy and research

So, two weeks into my Arcadia research project, how are things going?

Building on Huw's work for the library widgets, I've begun creating the prototype exam paper widget. As so often with technology, the bits you expect will be hard are easy, and vice versa! Raven integration turned out to be instantly sorted by a combination of folder settings and ready-made code from the library widget, but getting to grips with JQuery is taking longer than I'd hoped.

Meanwhile, I've been researching the current workflow for the paper archiving of past exam papers - you can see a first draft here. The coloured boxes indicate potential moments at which digital archiving could take place. I've also been researching the range of forms and media in which exam papers exist - from audio files to data sheets. I've visited a number of libraries and librarians across the University, who have all been extremely helpful.

I've been conducting a small scale literature review, looking for any research into best practice in using past papers to support exam preparation. Unfortunately, this does not seem to have been well investigated in the past: however, Cambridge itself has carried out a number of small scale projects around this issue, and I'll be talking to the instigators of these in the future.

Over the next week, I'm planning to continue the process of gathering together current digitised exam papers, and labelling them according to appropriate University schemas. I'll begin research directly with students, finding out more about their needs when revising. It would be interesting to hold a small focus group with supervisors as well, in order to chat about their use of past papers. And of course, I'll continue developing the prototype software, aiming to get it up to the point where the information is working in a web page, though without a determined user interface.

Introducing myself - Harriet Truscott, the new Arcadia Fellow

To all the readers of the Arcadia Blog - greetings from the new Arcadia Fellow!

My name's Harriet Truscott, and I'm picking up the Arcadia baton from Huw Jones. By the end of my ten week fellowship, I'm planning to have a tool in use by students across the University. It'll be a race, so keep reading the blog to find out how it goes.

I'll be spending my time here investigating the potential impacts of digitising the storage of all past exam papers at the University. At the moment, college libraries are storing bound copies of all exam papers (6 fat volumes, taking up a lot of shelf space) for each year. It's been suggested that these could be effectively archived in D-Space, the University's digital repository. I'll be thinking about how students can use past papers to learn most effectively, and about the practical implications for digitising papers. I've already been impressed by the vast range of materials included in Cambridge exam papers, from audio files to Sibelius composition software files.

Over the past eight years, I've worked in a number of Faculties in the University, finally putting down my roots at CARET, the Centre for Applied Research in Educational Technology, where I'm Lead Researcher on the Coursetools project, looking at the way courses are designed and run at Cambridge.

I'm delighted to be taking up this Fellowship, and look forward to an illuminating 10 weeks. I'll certainly be learning a lot more about exam papers!