Category: Social Media

A Landscape Study of Shared Infrastructure Services in the Australian Academic Sector

JISC has released A Landscape Study of Shared Infrastructure Services in the Australian Academic Sector.

Here's an excerpt:

In parallel with these investments, it has become evident that users in the higher education and academic sectors in Australia are choosing to use main stream Web 2.0 technologies in their daily work activities. However there is limited knowledge about who is using which Web 2.0 technologies and for what purposes. Moreover there is little information about why specific tools and services are chosen when institutional or nationally-funded services are available. JISC recently funded a study in the UK to investigate the adoption of Web 2.0 services by the higher education and academic sectors. The aim of this report is to survey the situation in Australia and hence enable comparisons with the UK. This survey therefore focuses on the current and active users of Web 2.0 tools and services in Australian Higher Education institutions and aims to identify what they are using and why.

Although the UK leads Australia in the development of collaborative eResearch services, the results of the survey indicate that the adoption of Web 2.0 technologies in the higher education sector in Australia is not significantly dissimilar to the situation in the UK. Users prefer to use Web-based services that are already adopted by the wider community and that are free, robust, simple to sign on to, and easy to install and use. Examples include: FaceBook, YouTube, Skype and Twitter. Although the most active use of Web 2.0 has been by early adopters (people who are not afraid to try out new tools, experiment with them and promote them to colleagues and peers), this situation is changing as more Web 2.0 technologies are becoming broadly adopted by mainstream users. Because Australia has not had the same level of investment in cyberinfrastructure and lags behind the UK in the development of services, it has been able to take advantage of services developed in the UK and USA (e.g., RoMEO, Shibboleth) – as well as the recent explosion of free, open source Web 2.0 technologies. In some ways, this delayed investment has been an advantage because there is not an established pool of services that is being superseded by commercial and open source Web 2.0 technologies.

See also the related report: Shared Infrastructure Services Landscape Study: A Survey of the Use of Web 2.0 Tools and Services in the UK HE Sector.

NIH Awards $12.2 Million Grant for VIVOweb, Social Networking Software for Scientists

The National Institutes of Health have awarded the University of Florida a $12.2 million grant to develop VIVOweb. The Cornell University Library and Indiana University are grant partners.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

By fostering alliances, it is hoped that biomedical research and discovery will move faster. The project will rest on VIVO, a technology developed at Cornell since 2003. It built a comprehensive network of scientists that identified existing projects and initiated new cooperation.

"Before VIVO, the Cornell librarians heard a lot of frustration from faculty members who couldn't find collaborators from different disciplines across campus,” Medha Devare, Cornell librarian for bioinformatics and life sciences. "The idea of VIVO was to transcend administrative divisions and create a single point of access for scholarly interaction. Now that VIVO is expanding across institutions, the biomedical community will be able to benefit from that bird's eye perspective of their research."

Money for the new grant, awarded through NIH's National Center for Research Resources, originated from American Recovery and Reinvestment Act funding. This has already opened eight positions at Cornell and more jobs at the other partners.

Cornell will spearhead the development of the multi-institutional functionality of the VIVO technology; the University of Florida will focus on developing technology for keeping each site's data current; and Indiana University Bloomington will develop social networking tools to enable researchers to find others with similar interests. Four other institutions — Scripps Research Institute, Juniper, Fla.; Ponce School of Medicine, Ponce, P.R.; Washington University of St. Louis; and the Weill Cornell Medical College, New York City—will serve as implementation sites.

Jon Corson-Rikert, head of Information Technology Services at Cornell's Mann Library, initially developed VIVO in 2003. As researchers and administrators embraced the newly created network, a team of programmers, designers and librarians expanded the project to all other disciplines at Cornell.

Other universities began to explore the open-source, free software. VIVO has been adopted for local networks at other universities and institutions in the United States, Australia and China. This new project will follow VIVO's original model and build a multi-institutional platform for the biomedical community.

The Cornell effort to develop VIVOweb will be led by Dean Krafft, the Library's chief technology strategist, Corson-Rikert and Devare. VIVOweb's open Semantic Web/Linked Data approach will empower researchers to extend their research communities—not just via prior knowledge or serendipity, but through recommendation or suggestion networks based on common traits described in the VIVOweb researcher profiles.

"Smithsonian Team Flickr: A Library, Archives, and Museums Collaboration in Web 2.0 Space"

Martin Kalfatovic et al. have self-archived "Smithsonian Team Flickr: A Library, Archives, and Museums Collaboration in Web 2.0 Space" in Smithsonian Research Online.

Here's an excerpt:

The Flickr Commons was created as a forum for institutions to share their rich photographic collections with the emerging Web 2.0 audience of Flickr. The Smithsonian Institution was the fourth member of the Commons. The Smithsonian effort was a direct collaborative effort of the libraries, archives, museums, and information technology staff that generated new pathways for collaboration between these units. As the world's largest museum complex, these Smithsonian units serve as a microcosm for collaboration in the information age. The Flickr Commons project provided insights into how the knowledge, skills, and abilities of libraries, archives, and museums (LAM) can converge in the Web 2.0 environment to provide collection access to new, and in some cases, unknown of audiences. Simultaneously, by putting "LAM" content into an environment that allows for direct interaction by these audiences, the knowledge of the content for holding institutions is enriched. By exposing Smithsonian content within the Flickr environment, the Institution is learning what content is desired by the Web 2.0 world, how to bring crowd-sourcing into professionally curated collections, and how to bring diverse institutional skills together in a collaborative project.

JISC Releases Web2practice Web 2.0 Guides

JISC has released a series of Web2practice Web 2.0 guides.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

How-to guides on web 2.0 technologies are now available from JISC Netskills for lecturers and researchers which complement five short animations about getting started.

Anyone interested in social media, RSS, collaborative writing, podcasting and microblogging can download the Web2practice guides in both video and PDF format from the website. . . .

Video creator Steve Boneham, JISC Netskills consultant trainer, said: “While we’ve aimed the tools at the UK higher and further education audiences, the internet and Twitter knows no national boundaries—we’re really pleased that people from so far afield are taking such an interest.”

He continued: "I'm particularly pleased that people have started embedding the materials as well as this is just what we wanted to encourage people to do—the materials are completely free for people to use, copy, adapt, comment on and above all, share."

Personal Engagement with Repositories through Social Networking Applications: Final Report

JISC has released the Personal Engagement with Repositories through Social Networking Applications: Final Report.

Here's an excerpt from the project Web site that describes the project:

The Institutional Repository has become the established technology deployed at universities and other institutions to enable scholars to self-archive their research outputs; the PERSoNA team will be embedding social networking tools which allow chat, tagging and bookmarking (amongst other things) within the repository, and encouraging users to comment on their use of our repository and make recommendations amongst each other leading to the onward discovery of further resources.

EPrints + Web 2.0: SNEEP 0.3.2 Released

SNEEP 0.3.2 has been released. (See the project page for more information on the Social Networking Extensions for EPrints.)

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

SNEEP is a set of EPrints plugins that provide "Web 2.0-ish" features such as the ability for users to annotate eprint abstracts with shared Comments or personal Notes, and to categorise them with Tags.

SNEEP 0.3.2 adds out-of-the-box support for version 3.1.2.1 of EPrints, but the main change is that, for the first time, SNEEP is now distributed with an automagic install script. Where previous releases required a rather lengthy manual process, in the majority of cases installation should now be quick and painless.

Creative Commons License Facebook App

Fred Benenson has released a Creative Commons License Facebook application.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

Last weekend I spent Saturday morning writing the Creative Commons License Application for Facebook. The premise is simple: installing the application allows Facebook users choose and place a CC license badge on their profile page indicating which license they want their content to be available under. Alongside the badge is text that explains what content (Photos, Videos and Status & Profile text are currently available as options) is licensed.

This surrounding text also contains RDFa, though this is of limited utility to search engines since Facebook profiles are not yet publicly indexed.

Higher Education in a Web 2.0 World

JISC has released Higher Education in a Web 2.0 World.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

Web 2.0, the Social Web, has had a profound effect on behaviours, particularly those of young people whose medium and metier it is. They inhabit it with ease and it has led them to a strong sense of communities of interest linked in their own web spaces, and to a disposition to share and participate. It has also led them to impatience—a preference for quick answers—and to a casual approach to evaluating information and attributing it and also to copyright and legal constraints.

The world they encounter in higher education has been constructed on a wholly different set of norms. Characterised broadly, it is hierarchical, substantially introvert, guarded, careful, precise and measured. The two worlds are currently co-existing, with present-day students effectively occupying a position on the cusp of change. They aren’t demanding different approaches; rather they are making such adaptations as are necessary for the time it takes to gain their qualifications. Effectively, they are managing a disjuncture, and the situation is feeding the natural inertia of any established system. It is, however, unlikely to be sustainable in the long term. The next generation is unlikely to be so accommodating and some rapprochement will be necessary if higher education is to continue to provide a learning experience that is recognised as stimulating, challenging and relevant.

The impetus for change will come from students themselves as the behaviours and approaches apparent now become more deeply embedded in subsequent cohorts of entrants and the most positive of them—the experimentation, networking and collaboration, for example—are encouraged and reinforced through a school system seeking, in a reformed curriculum, to place greater emphasis on such dispositions. It will also come from policy imperatives in relation to skills development, specifically development of employability skills. These are backed by employer demands and include a range of ‘soft skills’ such as networking, teamwork, collaboration and self-direction, which are among those fostered by students’ engagement with Social Web technologies.

Higher education has a key role in helping students refine, extend and articulate the diverse range of skills they have developed through their experience of Web 2.0 technologies. It not only can, but should, fulfil this role, and it should do so through a partnership with students to develop approaches to learning and teaching. This does not necessarily mean wholesale incorporation of ICT into teaching and learning. Rather it means adapting to and capitalising on evolving and intensifying behaviours that are being shaped by the experience of the newest technologies. In practice it means building on and steering the positive aspects of those behaviours such as experimentation, collaboration and teamwork, while addressing the negatives such as a casual and insufficiently critical attitude to information. The means to these ends should be the best tools for the job, whatever they may be. The role of institutions of higher education is to enable informed choice in the matter of those tools, and to support them and their effective deployment.

Birmingham City University Offers M.A. in Social Media

Birmingham City University is offering an M.A. in Social Media.

Here's an excerpt from the program description:

This MA programme will explore the techniques of social media, consider the development and direction of social media as a creative industry, and will contribute new research and knowledge to the field. . . .

The research-based nature of this MA draws upon the expertise of the Interactive Cultures research unit based in the Birmingham School of Media (http://interactivecultures.org/). Our established and innovative work with music and radio industries, policy, cultural entrepreneurship as well as the practices of social media will inform class work and the directions of individual scholarship.

Teaching takes place in small groups. There will be a mixture of lectures, seminars, research workshops, presentations and field-trips. In exploring and innovating in research in social media you will work with other students and engage with professional practitioners, interacting and disseminating ideas through websites, blogs, Twitter and other social media as well as at networking events.

The taught postgraduate phase of the course will comprise modules that explore social media from a cultural studies perspective and explore political economy, social enterprise and social media organisations. The Masters component entails a substantial piece of independent study and the origin of either a social media production project of an original piece of research in the form of a 15000-word dissertation.

Digital Collections/Exhibitions Software: Omeka 1.0 Alpha Released

Omeka 1.0 alpha has been released.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

This version of Omeka includes:

  • New helper functions and updates current helper function;
  • Enhancements and fixes bugs throughout the admin panel;
  • An autocompleter to the tags field for items;
  • Filtering for the users list in the admin;
  • An upgrade notification to admin dashboard if you're version of Omeka is older than the latest stable release.
  • A "Remember Me" checkbox to the login.
  • A global view page and helpers for file metadata, which will allow you to edit file metadata and display it in public themes.

Now Available: Scriblio 2.7, CMS/OPAC WordPress Plugin

Scriblio 2.7 has been released.

Here's an excerpt from "Scriblio 2.7 Released":

Scriblio is an open source WordPress plugin that adds the ability to search, browse, and create structured data to the popular blog/content management platform. And WordPress adds great ease of use, permalinks, comments/trackbacks/pingbacks, and other social and web-centric features to that structured data. But that’s not news. The news is that Scriblio now has an internal data model that supports much more sophisticated uses. . . Whereas previous versions of Scriblio were mostly just display and social interaction interfaces to data that’s created or managed elsewhere, this new version supports soup to nuts creation and management of collections.

Wikipedia May Screen Changes to Popular Pages Prior to Publication

In "Wikipedia Bolts Its Open Door," Giles Hattersley reports that Jimmy Wales will propose that changes to popular Wiki pages (e.g., biographies of living persons) be screened by "core users" prior to publication on the site.

Wales is quoted as saying:

One of the great misconceptions about us is this idea that Wikipedia is anti-elitist. That’s just wrong. We are actually extremely snobby . . . . These core users really manage and enforce our standards. If it weren’t for them Wikipedia would be chock full of rubbish.

Podcast: "The Law and Policy of Web 2.0: Much Old, Some New, Lots Borrowed, So Don’t Be Blue"

EDUCAUSE has released a podcast of a presentation by Beth Cate, Associate General Counsel for Indiana University System, called "The Law and Policy of Web 2.0: Much Old, Some New, Lots Borrowed, So Don’t Be Blue."

Here's an excerpt from the abstract:

Social networking sites and other Web 2.0 technologies offer rich tools for creation, collaboration, and community building. As such they have generated great excitement among faculty, staff, and students as they explore incorporating these technologies into their teaching and learning. Some of the most compelling features of these technologies—how quickly and easily materials can be shared and repurposed, how large and fluid Internet communities tend to be, how many cheap third-party services are available—are the same ones that raise questions about whether and how law and policy affect how we use these technologies in support of learning.

In this session, Beth Cate reviews and answers questions commonly asked by faculty, staff, and university attorneys. She also talks about why, although technologies are continually evolving, the relevant legal and policy principles are generally quite familiar and not scary. She highlights a few new wrinkles and some unknowns and offers practical strategies for maintaining good communications with your campus counsel as you and your institution navigate these promising new technologies and look ahead to Web 3.0.

Pew Internet & American Life Project Releases "Adults and Social Network Websites"

The Pew Internet & American Life Project has released "Adults and Social Network Websites."

Here's an excerpt:

The share of adult internet users who have a profile on an online social network site has more than quadrupled in the past four years—from 8% in 2005 to 35% now, according to the Pew Internet & American Life Project’s December 2008 tracking survey.

While media coverage and policy attention focus heavily on how children and young adults use social network sites, adults still make up the bulk of the users of these websites. Adults make up a larger portion of the US population than teens, which is why the 35% number represents a larger number of users than the 65% of online teens who also use online social networks.

Still, younger online adults are much more likely than their older counterparts to use social networks, with 75% of adults 18-24 using these networks, compared to just 7% of adults 65 and older. At its core, use of online social networks is still a phenomenon of the young.

LibWorld—Library Blogs Worldwide

Christian Hauschke, Nadine Ullmann, and Sarah Lohre have edited a book about the global blogging efforts of librarians, LibWorld—Library Blogs Worldwide. It is available in print form and as a free PDF download.

Here's the abstract:

On April, 23rd 2007 a series of postings started on Infobib.de, where guest authors from all over the world introduced the library and library related blogs of their own country. This book is a collection of 30 revised LibWorld articles, accompanied by a foreword by Walt Crawford. Included are articles about the blogosphere of: Argentina, Australia, Austria, Belarus, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Greece, Hungary, Iran, Italy, Japan, Latvia, Malawi, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Peru, Puerto Rico, Russia, Singapore, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Trinidad & Tobago, USA.

Digital New Zealand's Coming Home Memory Maker: Users Remix Media to Create Digital Videos

Digital New Zealand has released its Coming Home Memory Maker, which allows users to remix historic digital media.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

The Memory Maker is an interactive online video remix tool, that lets people mix historical film footage, digitised photographs and objects, and music/audio clips into a 60 second video that can then be saved, shared, and embedded on other sites.

Digital Collections/Exhibitions Software: Omeka 0.10b Released

The Center for History and New Media at George Mason University has released Omeka 0.10b.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

Omeka 0.10b incorporates many of the changes you asked for: an unqualified Dublin Core metadata schema and fully extensible element sets to accommodate interoperability with digital repository software and collections management systems; elegant reworkings of our theme API and plugin API to make add-on development more intuitive and more powerful; a new, even more user friendly look for the administrative interface; and a new and improved Exhibit Builder. While the changes are extensive and represent a next-to-last step forward toward a 1.0 release in early 2009, existing users of Omeka should have little trouble switching to 0.10b. New users should have even less trouble getting started. Meanwhile, visitors to Omeka.org will find a new look, a more intuitive information architecture, easily browsable themes and plugins directories, improved documentation and user support, and new ways to get involved in the Omeka community.

"Defrosting the Digital Library: Bibliographic Tools for the Next Generation Web"

Duncan Hull, Steve R. Pettifer, and Douglas B. Kel have published "Defrosting the Digital Library: Bibliographic Tools for the Next Generation Web" in PLoS Computational Biology.

Here's the abstract:

Many scientists now manage the bulk of their bibliographic information electronically, thereby organizing their publications and citation material from digital libraries. However, a library has been described as 'thought in cold storage,' and unfortunately many digital libraries can be cold, impersonal, isolated, and inaccessible places. In this Review, we discuss the current chilly state of digital libraries for the computational biologist, including PubMed, IEEE Xplore, the ACM digital library, ISI Web of Knowledge, Scopus, Citeseer, arXiv, DBLP, and Google Scholar. We illustrate the current process of using these libraries with a typical workflow, and highlight problems with managing data and metadata using URIs. We then examine a range of new applications such as Zotero, Mendeley, Mekentosj Papers, MyNCBI, CiteULike, Connotea, and HubMed that exploit the Web to make these digital libraries more personal, sociable, integrated, and accessible places. We conclude with how these applications may begin to help achieve a digital defrost, and discuss some of the issues that will help or hinder this in terms of making libraries on the Web warmer places in the future, becoming resources that are considerably more useful to both humans and machines.

Digital Collections/Exhibitions Software: Omeka Package from OKAPI Released

The Open Knowledge and the Public Interest has created an Omeka package that "bundles together their custom theme, plugin modifications and additions to the 0.9.2 version."

Here's an excerpt from the Omeka announcement:

The Okapi theme enables Omeka users without expert web design skills to create polished multimedia exhibits and collections. The home page features a cinematic 980×500 pixel main image and up to four featured exhibits. Exhibit pages include new layouts for articles, themed collections and embedded multimedia. The bundled Multimedia Links plugin enables embedding of HTML code, flash video (flv), and many other formats supported by the included JWplayer. The theme displays accessible Flash-based typography and is W3C CSS and XHTML compliant.

The ECAR Study of Undergraduate Students and Information Technology, 2008 Published

EDUCAUSE has published The ECAR Study of Undergraduate Students and Information Technology, 2008.

Here's an excerpt:

This 2008 ECAR research study is a longitudinal extension of the 2004, 2005, 2006, and 2007 ECAR studies of students and information technology. The study is based on quantitative data from a spring 2008 survey of 27,317 freshmen and seniors at 90 four-year institutions and eight two-year institutions; student focus groups that included input from 75 students at four institutions; and analysis of qualitative data from 5,877 written responses to open-ended questions. In addition to studying student ownership, experience, behaviors, preferences, and skills with respect to information technologies, the 2008 study also includes a special focus on student participation in social networking sites.

Omeka 0.10 Alpha Released

The Center for History and New Media at George Mason University has released Omeka 0.10 Alpha. Omeka is used to provide access to digital collections and exhibitions (see the About page).

Here's an excerpt from the announcement:

In this version we’ve updated to a powerful new data model based on an unqualified Dubin Core standard. We’ve also improved the theme and plugin APIs to work with that data model and make it easier for plugin and theme creators to work with Omeka.

History 2.0: The History Engine Relaunches

Noted digital historian Edward L. Ayers, whose The Valley of the Shadow project has been very influential, became the President of the University of Richmond last July, and now the innovative History Engine project has moved with him from the Virginia Center for Digital History at the University of Virginia to Richmond's Digital Scholarship Lab.

Here's an excerpt from the "What is the History Engine?" page:

The History Engine project aims to enhance historical education and research for teachers, students, and scholars alike. The Engine allows undergraduate professors to introduce a more collaborative and creative approach to history into their classrooms, while maintaining rigorous academic standards. The core of the HE project is student-written episodes—individual snippets of daily life throughout American history from the broadest national event to the simplest local occurrence. Students construct these episodes from one or more primary sources found in university and local archives, using historical context gleaned from secondary sources to round out their analysis. Students then post their entries in our cumulative database, giving their classmates and fellow participants around the country the opportunity to read and engage with their work.

Read more about it at "The Little Engine That Can."

Kete 1.1 Released

Kete 1.1 has been released. Kete is a Ruby on Rails application. Source code can be obtained from the Downloads page.

Here'e an excerpt from the 9/1/08 ITSIG announcement:

Kete combines features from Knowledge and Content Management Systems as well as collaboration tools such as wikis, blogs, tags, and online forums to make it easy to add and relate content on a Kete site.

A more complete description can be found on Katipo’s Web site (Katipo provides fee-based support for Kete).

The Kete 1.1 Features and Bug Fixes page lists new features in this version.