Present: Annie Bélanger, Allan Bell, Betty Graf, Jennifer Haas, Mark Haslett (Chair), Michele Laing, Sharon Lamont, Susan Mavor, Alex McCulloch, Richard Pinnell, Susan Routliffe, Debbie Tytko, Carolyn Vincent (Recorder)
Regrets: Mary Stanley
Guests: Samantha Gibbon, Ted Harms, Sandra Keys, Wish Leonard, Doug Morton
1. Campus IT Review
Allan lead the discussion of the document of Library responses to questions sent from the Campus IT Review committee. Allan indicated that Library Systems has a great relationship with IST that could be used as a model for the campus.
The Systems Help Desk was a major point of discussion by the Library Managers. It is important to determine where there are redundancies with the IST Help Desk and what the level of service for the Systems Help Desk is.
Allan will be meeting with IT on Wednesday, January 21, 2009 and Library Managers were encouraged to submit any comments or questions to Allan before this meeting.
Action: Managers will forward any comments or questions to Allan prior to his meeting on January 21, 2009.
2. Scholars Portal (SP) Highlights
Library staff who participated in Scholar’s Portal meetings in Toronto in December were invited to attend this special Manager’s Meeting to provide reports on their meeting highlights. For the interest of all Library staff, their notes are included in the minutes.
Ted Harms
Of note was the “RACER tips & tricks” open discussion to glean how other departments handle their ILL requests and a session, led by Ashley Thompson from Laurentian, detailing the experiences of extending ILL privileges to reciprocal borrowers, which occurred between University of Ottawa and Laurentian. This could be of interest for UW’s co-op students but the recommended minimum residency of 6 months in that particular city could be a barrier. Unfortunately, logistical and policy issues will probably make it very difficult to fully satisfy all institutions’ concerns.Samantha Gibbon
Initiatives being worked on by OCLC:
• Working on an alternate method of communication between RACER and WCRS; moving away from the ISO protocol – too restrictive. The impact is time saving at UW ILL.• Addition of Policy Directory in WCRS which would allow for a borrower to verify if the lender can/will lend material. The impact of this is time saving at UW ILL and no back and forth communication is required.
System update information:
• Mars update (rolling out RACER 4.0) in early 2009. NCIP will be included in a limited fashion in the update (it has been rolled out in some areas of the US). Completely new staff view look with customizable interface features ad hoc user alerts and customized work queues.Distance Education Discussion Group:
• A wide variety of institutions are represented in the group. Some offering little to no Library Services to DE students, others offering full library services. UW seems to be the one in the group that has the most comprehensive and integrated services.Wish Leonard
The highlight of the day was the discussion on E-journals that was moderated by Mary Lehane of York University. It was very lively and some surprising comments were made from ‘no Interlibrary loans from electronic resources’ to the whimsical ‘sometimes.’ Mary noted TUG’s creation of an Interlibrary Loan Inclusions List and asked Wish to elaborate on that. As a result some people followed up with him later, and he provided them with the link to our interface.Interestingly, another participant was encouraging attendees to ignore the licensing contract with vendors and just go ahead and fill requests. Wish made note to the audience that it was his understanding that licensing contracts trumped copyright legislation.
It was decided that a group be formed to produce standardized text that should be included in licensing contracts to cover filling interlibrary requests from electronic resources. Members of this group are: Mary Lehane (York), Susan Stone (Toronto), Ian Gordon (Brock) and Wish Leonard (Waterloo).
This brief would be submitted to Faye Abrams with the intent that it be taken to OCUL Directors for consideration/approval.
Sandra Keys
Report of OCUL Data Group (DINO) Meeting, December 10-11, 2008, Ryerson University:• A full report will be forthcoming which will cover the various agenda items of the DINO meeting.
Health Data Strategy:
Since the inception of DINO a few years ago, the acquisition of health data has been on the table. With the success of <odesi>, its infrastructure, and the interest in potentially obtaining trusted digital repository status, this discussion has taken an exciting turn. Whilst they were preparing to have a discussion at DINO which would result in a strategy to pursue the acquisition of health data, Paula Hurtubise and Kathy Scardaletto were talking separately to other Ontario government departments about the very same thing! Since discussions were at an early stage, Paula could only share the very beginnings.There is significant interest from the government side, but also various issues which would need to be dealt with, including confidentiality. It was decided that a small sub-group of DINO members would be tasked to work with Paula on this initiative, of which Sandra is one.
Richard Pinnell
OCUL Map Group met at Ryerson on Dec 11, 2008.There was a full agenda with topics such as an update on the Ontario Geospatial Data Exchange and the status of the data products available to us through that program and a discussion on the results of an ESRI software licensing survey Most of the time was spent talking about the work of the Map Group’s Geospatial Data Access Group including a review of their funding proposal document entitled Geospatial Data Portal: Search, Discovery and Delivery.
This lengthy document which went through several drafts presents a case for a “centralized geospatial data server or portal intended to provide for search, discovery and delivery of geospatial datasets common to participating OCUL institutions.” The document was submitted in December to Leslie Weir, the OCUL Director responsible at the time for coordinating the OCUL Map Group and she in turn took it to OCUL Executive. During the month of December the proposal was revised to include a health informatics component and was recast in the format of a business case. Early in January this business case was sent to OCUL Directors for their information and just as significantly, it was sent on January 7 to OntarioBuys, a program within the Ontario Ministry of Finance, the same program which provided significant funding for the ODESI project.
OntarioBuys had expressed interest in several of OCUL’s ScholarsPortal 2020 projects including Supporting the Research Process. OCUL decided to develop a business case for a proposal entitled: Expanding Ontario’s Research Cyberinfrastructure: Building Scholars Portal 2020.
The total project budget for this three year project is $1,265,000. OCUL is seeking funding support from OntarioBuys but will in addition contribute some matching funding. Budget items include: technology infrastructure (software, hardware, bandwidth, storage), staff (three full time positions and internship support), and staff support costs. Three full time positions are: Project Manager, GIS/Data Analyst/Programmer and Senior Level IT Coordinator for Server Support.
The project is staged with two phases over three years.
Phase 1: Acquire technology (hardware and software, etc); do performance testing of this technology; begin to acquire health data collections; begin data markup (DDI standard for markup) and data loading. This is the RFI/RFP stage for server, interface, and software. Testing of the geospatial portal will be by a subset of the OCUL Map/DINO group. There will also be testing by and communication with the research community.Phase 2 (year 2): Extend portal usage to all OCUL members. GIS portal capability will be limited to simple geoprocessing such as clipping. Health data collections will continue to grow. There will also be testing by and communication with research community.
Phase 2 (year 3): Develop an online mapping tool (more than clip and ship). Training workshops for OCUL staff in the use of metadata for geospatial datasets and metadata for health informatics that contains GIS variables.
The big thing is the online mapping tool that enables users to manipulate, visualize and analyze data online without requiring desktop GIS software. Current awareness and browsable tools such as user generated tag clouds, most frequently requested data or most recently added data alerts, related items displays, and image tickers for serendipitous discovery, social web widgets and social web functionality.
1. Service related benefits:
• Advance research in Ontario by making geospatial data easily findable and accessible over the web; access to a broader set of geospatial and health informatics data for analysis.• Build stronger research data collections: implementation of a single, collaborative and effective data procurement process will substantially lessen workload for individual institutions.
• Develop model licenses for optimal access to geospatial and health data.
Geospatial portal will deliver data in an online environment with a common set of tools and services• More effective use of existing data collections and expenditures: project provides efficient and effective access to this information resulting in increased research productivity.
• Metadata.• Level playing field.
2. Cost related benefits:
• Staff savings: geoportal and health informatics service is developed by project staff at a cost of $876,000 over three years. Currently just one OCUL institution spends nearly $300,000 each year on staff for its exemplary data and geospatial services.
Sustainability following project completion, after year three.
1. 1 employee: GIS specialist/analyst
2. Maintenance budget: software, hardware updates; scalability for storageAnnie Belanger
Accessibility (Scholar’s Portal Day presentation by Jutta Treviranus):
Important new Ontario legislation came out the week of Scholar’s Portal Day:• Accessible Information and Communications Standard (Public review until Feb. 6 http://www.mcss.gov.on.ca/mcss/english/pillars/accessibilityOntario/accesson/business/information/
o An add on to Accessibility for Ontarian’s with Disabilities Act (http://www.mcss.gov.on.ca/mcss/english/pillars/accessibilityOntario)
o Impacts:
? Regulations for libraries, websites, educational institutions, publications, etc.
? Capacity to provide on request materials (instead of just in case) – timeliness, quality, availability
? Specific to individual
? Communications to and from patrons
? Applies to curriculum, content, services, etc.
• These regulations are the second part of the growing regulations to support the AODA. Last year, the Accessibility Standards for Customer Service were released. The deadline for compliance is January 2012.
• There is a third part of regulation that is expected to be released next year. Not clear
New ISO standards for Personalization of web interfaces – ISO 24751 and the new WCAG standards from W3C were also announced that week. WCAG 2.0 replaces WCAG 1.0 and may have significant impacts on how web content is developed. The WCAG guidelines are meant to help Web designers build sites that can be read and understood by people with disabilities as diverse as blindness, hearing impairments, physical impairments, and even cognitive disabilities like short-term memory impairment or seizure disorders.
Some web projects for accessibility that may be of interest (led by UofT):
• TransformABLE
• Fluid (fluidproject.org)<odesi>
<odesi> is a web-based data exploration, extraction and analysis tool. It provides researchers with unprecedented access to a significant number of datasets in a web-based data extraction system which will be delivered through the highly successful Scholars Portal model.The project is jointly funded by the Ontario Council of University Libraries (OCUL) and the BPS Supply Chain Secretariat, Ontario Ministry of Finance. <odesi> is based on the Data Documentation Initiative (DDI) social survey metadata standard and the Nesstar data system.
It is currently being hosted by Queen’s University. Jeff Moon, Queen’s Government Publication Librarian, is the lead.
<odesi> provides researchers the ability to search for survey questions (variables) across hundreds of datasets held in a growing number of collections. <odesi> supports basic tabulation and analysis online, and allows for the downloading of most datasets into statistical software for further analysis. <odesi> provides unprecedented access to extensive collections of polling and social survey data.
Key polling data collections include: Canadian Opinion Research Archive (CORA), Canadian Gallup, Ipsos Reid, and public-domain files such as the Canadian National Election Surveys and selected files from the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR). Statistics Canada's public-use survey data forms the core of <odesi>'s social survey data holdings. <odesi> is expanding its survey data to include other national and international data sources.All files can be exported to a variety of formats in parts or in full. This includes full exports into SSPS.
University researchers can deposit their data sets in this repository, even if they have already deposited them in their institutional repository. This development is of interest in view of the growing requirements by funding bodies for researchers to make their data accessible to all.
Doug Morton
Darin McBeath, Director of Disruptive Technology, Elsevier described XML2G0, a way of packaging ejournals and ebooks. There would be Repository 2.0 with an article repository and an image repository (images are problematic because retrieval is usually text-based from the caption). Users could retrieve zipped files of articles, or whole issues or entire journals so they could perform data-mining operations on the results (though he said nothing about what the legal team thought about such wholesale downloads!). He posed the questions should/could we let the user be the publisher? What external services would we incorporate when presenting an article?Matt Goldner, Director of End-user Services of OCLC noted that use of library web sites has been decreasing, that people are starting searches, especially subject searches, with Google, Yahoo & SM Live Search. Those services engaging users are opting for simplicity, self-service, immediate gratification, single source for single categories, rich interactivity. He expects that large projects will disappear because they take too long, we must produce services that are pluggable, mashable, hackable. He ended by modifying Darwin’s message that it is not survival of the strongest or the fittest but of those most able to adapt.
Crit Stuart of ARL told of the process of developing a learning space at Georgia Tech in which students were extensively surveyed, asked what would draw them back to the library. The new space was heavily promoted and is a beehive of activity.
Recordings of the live Adobe Connect sessions from the 2 OCUL days in December are now available on the SPOT wiki.
Resource Sharing Day:
http://spotdocs.scholarsportal.info/display/ILL/OCUL+Resource+Sharing+Day+2008+-+PresentationsScholars Portal Day:
http://spotdocs.scholarsportal.info/display/SPD/Links+to+PresentationsThe login and password to view the recordings is ocul.
Jennifer Haas
Understanding User Needs session:
Highlights from the User Consultation report were presented. This report was
prepared by the firm Usability Matters and based on work they were contracted
to do by OCUL to help the Scholars Portal team understand the research
process. The report is available online at:
http://spotdocs.scholarsportal.info/display/PSWG/User+Study.The purpose of this study was to learn more about the research process, the
tools and techniques used by researchers, and to get a sense of the
researchers' ideal information research process.Based on the findings of the user consultations, the following was recommended
in the report:• Raise awareness of existing tools
• Improve existing tools
• Improve the transition between tools
• Improve the implementation of "Get It"
• Position RACER at a point where users run out of other access options
Usability Matters continues to work with Scholars Portal staff and in the
current phase they will help develop and conduct usability testing for the e-
journals search interface. They will be working to set up remote testing that
will connect usability study participants with Scholars Portal staff involved
in developing the e-journals search interface. Approximately 12 students from
a variety of OCUL schools will be recruited to participate in interactive
testing every 2 weeks from mid January to the end of March.
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