MDLA Spring Conference 2012

I attended the Maryland Distance Learning Association (MDLA) Eleventh Annual Spring Conference on March 1^st. This conference was broad in scope. The attendees were mainly educational institutions with a heavy concentration in online learning. The workshops focused on trends in the delivery of content; standards, design and technology applications for course development; and andragogy.

Presenters were from many backgrounds such as education (professors, researchers) instructional design, and business (publishing & technology).

The keynote speaker was Hall Davidson, Director of Global Learning Initiatives: Discovery Education. He is the author of Not Your Father’s eBook: New Kinds of Learning Tools for New Kinds of Learning. Hall spoke about the importance and trend in ebooks being interactive so that the reader can manipulate content and engage in and contribute to their own learning. He provided us with an example of what he meant by creating an interactive ebook, using augmented reality. The user was able to select the characters they wanted to use to tell their story as well as select the environment where the story was to take place. There a website with free resources that can be used to create these interactive ebooks. Hall selected participants from the audience to create their own ebooks, selecting characters, creating the audio with their own voices and choosing a topic by selecting scenery representative of the environment they preferred. It was truly interactive learning. Most of the resources were compatible to the iPad, e.g. Zooburst, Word Lens (questvisual), Voice Net and Virtual Eternity.

This method of teaching and learning gives new life to simulations and can really enhance areas like the sciences.

I attended a variety of workshops:

Teaching the Military Learners in 2012: Addressing the Real Issues focused on teaching instructors sensitivity training. The concentration was on the military population, which can be a high percentage of online learners because of the accessibility from anywhere. The attention was placed on the stressful lives that military men and women experience. Knowing what they go through in this environment and understanding their way of life and being sensitive to their needs allows them to be a more successful student and an instructor much more effective in teaching. UMUC has a faculty development training program that they highly encourage new faculty to take. I could see this type of training being effective for most institutions because of culturally diverse populations.

Building Student Success and Retention Through Open Educational Learning Tools: The Bridging to Success Project focused on a research pilot of online courses using tutorials created in math and study skills to increase student success rate in the online environment. The funding to create these Open Educational Resources is a part of the Next Generation Grants. The courses create a learning community for students online in an effort to encourage peer to peer learning and help students transition to college, successfully. Assessments are built into the program both pre and post learning. The B2S (Build to Success Projects) are being offered to colleges with an interest in piloting activities for retention and persistence (http://b2s.aacc.edu).

New Accreditation Guidelines for Distance Education: What are you Doing to Prepare and Comply? focused on revised guidelines for institutions with online programs. The guidelines are more prescriptive and detailed in what is expected. The document was developed by the Council of Regional Accreditation Commissions and is endorsed by U.S. Accrediting bodies (e.g.MSCHE). If you have online courses and are developing programs online, knowledge of this document is critical. Here is a link to the document: http://www.msche.org/publications/Guidelines-for-the-Evaluation-of-Distance-Education-Programs.pdf

I attended a Roundtable session facilitated by the Quality Matters organization. This organization has created a method of determining quality assurance in online/blended courses. “Quality Matters (QM) is a faculty-centered, peer review process that is designed to certify the quality of online and blended courses.”

The roundtable was an effort to determine how the organization can conduct research in collaboration with institutions to establish the impact on student outcomes as a result of this process. Many suggestions were made on what could be measured like student satisfaction, instructional growth (instructor/faculty); organizational impact, etc. There were also conversations about what incentives could be offered to institutions to gather and share their data.

Anita Norton

University of Virginia Digitization Services Unit

On January 28, 2012, Liz Mengel, Brian Kehoe, and David Reynolds visited the Digitization Services Unit (DSU) of the University of Virginia Libraries to learn about their workflow, staffing, and equipment. UVa was identified as an "exemplary digital library program" in the course of our research while writing the Digitization Strategic Plan for the Sheridan Libraries. Bradley Daigle and his staff at UVa spent all morning showing us their layout and sharing lessons learned. This meeting provided invaluable direction to our own plan. Following are some of the highlights of their program.

Workflow

• Most digitization work flows from faculty or student requests to use digital images in their teaching and research.
• Requests are initiated via an online form. Special Collections receives the request and begins tracking it in an online tracking system.
• A routing slip containing lots of information about the request is generated. This slip, which contains a QR code, tracks effort through the various phases of digitization. It also enables a very orderly workflow for their many student employees
• Special Collections assesses physical condition and routes to Preservation if work is needed.
• DSU then takes the item, digitizes it, and performs post-scan operations such as crop and rotate.
• DSU averages 3-5 requests per day; could do more with multiple shifts
• Digital images are delivered to patron via FTP server automatically. Public domain images are imported into the libraries digital repository.
• Tracking system is open source and available on GetHub

Collections

• They rely mostly on “patron-driven collection building”. Patron requests guide which items are scanned, but these are then brought into broad collections like “text collections” or “archival collections”
• Scan the whole book or folder whenever possible. This helps build collections.

Intellectual Property

• There are three levels of access granted to digitized items: world, consortium only, UVa only
• Developing a “due diligence” checklist for public service people. They should be the ones who decide whether or not something can be made available, not the Digitization Unit.
• JPEGS for items that are under copyright are watermarked along the border with a copyright warning statement
• IP problem areas include donor specifications and unpublished materials such as letters
• Bradley is working on a lightweight checklist that will help public service folks determine when a an item can be made available for “world access”

Modern Lanugage Association

At the 2012 MLA annual convention in Seattle, the "peripheral" discourses of libraries, digital humanities and media studies were strikingly central--a very new development, in my experience.

* Before the convention, I attended a digital humanities workshop. The most useful part of the workshop was a roundtable on peer review; we discussed the changing conditions for peer review not just in digital journals but websites where various scholarly projects are aggregated. How do you address the temporal dimension of projects where the content, the links and the interface will degrade over time?

* A very interesting early session was on Google Books and other mass digitization projects. There is profound concern among literature faculty that the poor quality of Google Books metadata obscures differences between editions, and that library collections decisions (de-accessioning) based on the availability of digitized copies of books may not take into account the important differences between copies, even for industrial-era printed material. A related issue came up in the session on "Old books, new tools": print-on-demand publishers get a lot of metadata wrong, and are publishing facsimiles of single copies as "editions."

* The new discussion group on libraries and literary studies hosted two sessions; I attended the one on libraries and learned journals, and was very pleased by the quality of the presentations, the discussion, and the interaction between faculty and librarians.

* There were a variety of digital poster sessions, a format new to the MLA. (Welcome to the 21st century, MLA!) I saw several of these; two sessions on digital pedagogy were packed beyond capacity. There was also an ongoing exhibition of e-literature projects, including some projects from the 1980s presented on the original Mac Classic.

In addition to the digital humanities workshop and regular MLA sessions, I spent time in several intensive planning meetings for the digital journal for which I serve as an editor, http://archivejournal.net/, putting into practice some of the issues that were being raised at the conference... serendipitous!

7th International Data Curation Conference

Last week I attended the 7th International Data Curation Conference (IDCC, twitter #idcc11, http://www.dcc.ac.uk/events/idcc11) in Bristol, UK.   The theme of this year's meeting was "Public? Private? Personal? navigating the open data landscape".

In addition to a large number of very stimulating presentations and discussions throughout, the meeting was bracketed by two interesting keynotes.

The opening keynote was delivered by Ewan McIntosh of NoTosh (http://www.notosh.com/).  He talked about moving away from the often dry messages of research, research data, and the data management that supports reuse and toward stories that demonstrate impact of the research and data.  He talked about the work that his company has done with some  young students to develop TED-like talks (http://bit.ly/uzXeLD).  Some of the lessons learned from this activity, he feels, are more broadly applicable to improving data reuse: 1. tell a story 2. create curiosity 3. create wonder 4. solve pain 5. create reasons to trade data.

The closing keynote was given by Natasa Milic-Frayling of Microsoft Research Cambridge (MSRC). Natasa talked about the Microsoft team's interaction with a working research team. The big lessons from their work relate to the disconnect between how clean and precise we would like the data management processes to be and how messy they are in real life.  The lab team's pragmatism is not typically mirrored by those of us who work in the realm of data management.  A couple of examples:

• Though the researchers used electronic notebooks and many steps in their process were captured therein, only more informal summaries of these processes fed into next steps in the data provenance chain.
• New technologies were brought to bear on the research team's workflow.  These technologies were not perfectly aligned with the needs of the project and there were some compromises made to achieve workable integrations.  These compromises made it difficult to accurately track and verify the origins of some information that became part of later data products.

Presence in the researcher's lab was the only way for the MSRC team to detect these issues.  Understanding the lessons of this work will inform the way we engage with researchers in our own institutions.

As I mentioned previously, the conference had many excellent presentations.  Links to presentation slides and other resources, where available, have been added to the online conference program.

Maryland E-Books Summit

by Sue Vazakas

Kristin Bernet, Sharon Morris, and I attended this event in Columbia, MD, on November 29-30, 2011.

Pre-Summit: Publishing 101 and Libraries 2015

This 1/2-day event was intended to give some background about how the publishing industry works and what's going on right now in their world.

(1) Steve Potash, Overdrive
(2) Nora Rawlinson, Publisher, Earlyword: the Publisher/Librarian Connection
(3) Josh Marwell, Director of Sales, HarperCollins
*
(1) Overdrive provides e-books mostly to public libraries and is getting bigger and bigger. For example, if you go to the Baltimore County Libraries site, find an e-book, and click on the "download" link, you'll be taken to the Maryland's Digital e-Library Consortium, "powered by Overdrive." Maryland's site had a growth of 300% over the past 1.5 years.

Interesting fact: Overdrive is adding more and more publishers to its service, and just signed O'Reilly, whose stuff will be DRM-free (as opposed to its stuff on Safari, which we have).

Another of their initiatives: adding a "buy it now" link on their site. Whichever library's portal you go through to get to that link will receive a % of your TOTAL purchase, even if it's not books! NYPL and Philadelphia Free Library are piloting this.

(2) Rawlinson discussed "The Big 6" publishers, which is actually more than 6: Random House, Simon and Schuster, Penguin, HarperCollins, Scholastic, Hachette, Harlequin, Wiley, Holtzbrink (formerly MacMillan). Each has its intrigues; e.g., HarperCollins' "after 26 checkouts, library must buy it again," and Penguin's November pull-out of all new e-books from all public libraries, strangely citing "security concerns" even though Overdrive has DRM.

Another recent newsworthy event was Amazon's Jeff Bezos pricing the bestsellsers instead of the publishers. But Apple suggested another model: the publisher sets the price and the seller can discount them, which Amazon did. The Kindle Fire loses $3 per sale, but probably doing this so that it will sell more e-books. Amazon, the elephant in the room, also has several of its own imprints now.

(3) The HarperCollins speaker, when asked about the 26-checkout policy, said "it's always under review."

He believes that publishers add value by doing these things very well: developing talent, creating products (enhanced e-books and apps as well as print books), maintaining high quality of e-books, helping with e-book discovery, and marketing them, among other things.

They will be putting Espresso print-on-demand machines in some bookstores for their backlist trade publications.

As of now, 71% of their business comes from physical bookstores.

****************
The full-day meeting had about 300 attendees, evenly divided among academics, schools, and public libraries.

(1) Sue Polanka -- eBooks in Libraries: Big Dreams Meet Reality
(2) Robert Miller -- A Digital Library: Too Little, Too Late, or Just in Time
(3) Mary Minow -- eBooks: Buying vs. Licensing
(4) Joseph Sanchez -- The eRoad Less Travelled: Getting Control, Staying Relevant
(5) Eli Neiburger -- Libraries and eBooks in this Century: What to Do Now, What to Do Later

Here are just brief highlights:

Sue Polanka -- Her blog is No Shelf Required. She gave an overview of e-book business models and pros/cons. Recommended Eric Hellman's Glue Jar blog. She has an article in the Nov/Dec 2011 issue of American Libraries about buying e-books.

She discussed other developments, including:

--- The 3M Cloud Library: You pay $10K for the platform, and it even includes a "discovery station" (shown on the site) that shows you book covers, allows searching and browsing, and then lets you download the e-book onto your USB!
--- Freading: Short-term loans for $.50-$2 each, nothing owned, no fees, you buy the same content again as many times as you want to read it. Interesting but needs *lots* more content.
--- Consumer subscription services: These include Amazon Prime, Baen, 24Symbols (Spain), Afictionado (UK). Easy to use and cheaper than buying
Robert Miller -- Internet Archive

--- JHU should join!
--- They collect discarded books and even pay for shipping!
--- FREE e-books. They've had 10 million downloads per month on 2 million classic e-books!
--- robert@archive.org; 415-640-1092 (San Francisco)

Their system respects copyright laws because it's one user at a time. Duplicate books are not a problem, but they suggest choosing local items that are harder to find. His presentation blew everyone away.

Mary Minow -- She's a lawyer and Executive Editor of Stanford's Copyright and Fair Use site. She discussed "first sale," the Hathi lawsuit, DRM and DMCA, and the lack of accessibility of almost all e-devices.

Joseph Sanchez --- Fascinating fellow. Instructor designer at a college in Colorado; blog is thebookmyfriend. He gave an overview of the current "information ecology," including points such as

--- We're in the era of "non-expertise" (i.e., crowd-sourcing). Amazon and Apple aren't run by MBA's, just techies. They're both operating at a loss and don't care.
--- Overdrive doesn't manage its own DRM; Adobe Content Server does.
--- CIPA is Colorado Independent Publishers' Association. Sanchez's friend Jamie LaRue (whom Kristin and I heard at last month's NISO e-book conference) *bought* an Adobe CS system for $10K, then asked CIPA for their files so that their *own* consortium could be set up.
--- Patrons don't care about owning; they just want access.

Eli Neiburger --- This fellow was the lightning rod; one of this year's LJ "movers and shakers." He spoke very fast and was funny.

His scenario is that libraries *and* publishers are dead in their current forms. He showed a four-square chart, with combinations of "publishers thrive," "publishers die," "closed," and "open," and then described the different combinations.

The "open/publishers die" combination included "free," "no DRM," "no publisher deals because no publishers," and "libraries collect and store." For this combination, then, libraries need to have the infrastructure to collect and store, which we currently don't. We should store the content OF the community, rather than pay for commercial content FOR the community; e.g., school yearbooks (JHU technical reports), and material that doesn't exist anywhere else.

Other points:

--- Library economics work when each use gets *cheaper*, NOT stays the same
--- The price of $9.99 for an e-book is insane. If they were $.99, the authors would get about five times more money
--- Or, offer them free with something else. Example: in June 2011, 65% of the biggest money-making games were FREE to play.
--- Libraries must provide unique experiences, that you can't get anywhere else. Take half the collection money and spend it on events!
--- The Ann Arbor libraries started a site called Old News, which includes Ann Arbor newspapers that died and were digitized and put up for free, for *their* community and everyone else.
--- They also held "Scanning Day," on which people could bring a box of stuff and get it scanned while they waited. The library got great pictures never seen before.

Bottom line: Libraries must be prepared to pick up the pieces when the publishers (like ice houses and tgravel agents) are gone. The 21st century library must bring *its* community to the world.

Please let me know if you have questions.

Digital Library Federation Forum 2011

I attended the Digital Library Federation Forum in Baltimore, October 31-November 2, 2011. You can take a look at the program at the DLF website. A couple of themes that showed up multiple times were data curation, digital humanities, and project management. I will report on the latter here.

Agile Methodolgy (Naomi Dushay and Tom Cramer, Stanford University)

The Stanford library has moved to Agile methodology for their software development over the past few years. Their presentation reported on their implementation of Blacklight using Agile. They are committed to testing their software at every turn, but it is difficult to do with many developers. Their solution is to use the Hudson software to keep track of how much of the code has been tested. If you get a bug report, you can see what hasn't been tested and start from there. Posting test coverage can work well as a "shame factor". You don't want to be the one to make the software fail.

Another problem that was identified in the development process is "too many meetings." Developers need blocks of time to code. To help give developers more free blocks of time, Stanford has instituted "developer happy hours" in which no meetings are scheduled. It has greatly helped morale. They also have monthly "dead weeks" in which all standing meetings are cancelled.

A final problem that they are addressing is competing priorities for developers' time. To help combat this, the project managers group meets monthly for iteration planning. Agile is difficult to do in a multi-project shop. Stanford has capped each developer at 2 projects per month. The iteration planning meeting produces a road map for the month--anyone can look at all the projects and see where there are dependencies. Jira is used for weekly sprints and its versioning feature helps a lot.

The Project One-Pager (Tito Sierra, MIT)

Digital projects fail for many reasons including:

• goals of the project are unclear
• there is disagreement about the goals of the project
• the requirements are unrealistic or ambiguous
• the project is inadequately staffed
• there is a lack of consensus about project goals
• the proposed schedule is unrealistic
• the scope is poorly managed or unconstrained
• project doesn't make sense on further inspection

Good planning and communication will improve resource allocation, schedule estimation and managing scope. Tito has developed a tool that helps with planning and communication. It is known as the "Project One-Pager", and it enables a shared understanding of the project before it begins. The Project One-Pager comprises six elements that are agreed to by all principles in the project. The elements are:

1. Project title--a unique name to be used in all communication
2. Objective statement--a concise high level summary of what the project intends to accomplish
3. Requirements--a list of outcomes that must be achieved before the project is considered complete
4. Out of scope--a list of outcomes that the project explicitly WILL NOT address
5. Team--proposed core team roster with roles
6. Schedule--a list of high-level milestones with proposed dates

The project manager drafts the initial version and then the team starts the iteration process. When all agree that each element is clearly defined, everyone signs off. Just to make sure there is no misunderstanding, they also have the dean or an appropriate dean sign off. This leads to a clearly defined scope that will not creep out of control.

The benefits of this tool are that it is simple and accessible by all, it creates useful documentation for use externally, and it can reveal fundamental problems at the start when costs are low. It is not used for managing the project throughout its life cycle, but it does offer a good starting point.