A number of partners have been working through and with us here  at Mimas  on a  JISC funded  Collection Management project, which is part of the broader Resource Discovery Taskforce activity

Since we have all been working on this slightly under the radar, and recognising the need to share more about this project and what’s going on, we’re planning series of blog posts to update the community on the progress and lessons learned through the partnetship.  The following update is from Julia Chruszcz, who is project managing this piece of work:

Just two months into the JISC funded Copac Collection Management Project the progress has been significant. At a meeting of the project partners on the 6^th May each of the representatives from the White Rose Consortium (WRC) universities (Leeds, York and Sheffield) articulated the potential significance of this tool on their decision making processes around monograph retention and disposal and collection development. This included notions of collaborative collection development and how such a Collection Management Tool could facilitate regional and national approaches, each influencing local decisions for libraries.

The WRC has undertaken the early testing of the web-based tool in an approach that the project has adopted to inform development and iteratively assess the tool.  The idea is to build up a full specification over the life of the project of what will be required to take such a tool forward to introduce into library workflows. The next stage, between now and the beginning of July will be to further develop the batch and web technical interfaces based upon the WRC feedback and for this development to undergo further critical testing. The project is due to provide an interim report at the end of June with full report to the JISC at the end July.

The enthusiasm from all the project partners, JISC, Mimas, RLUK and WRC, stems from the realisation that we have the potential to produce a tool that will make a real difference to helping libraries make informed decisions particularly at a time of financial constraint, and assist in furthering the possibility of a national monographs collection, protecting access for researchers at the same time as facilitating local decisions that will save money and resource longer term. And all this by intelligent re-use and application of an existing extensive database, a resource invested in by RLUK and the JISC over many years, the Copac database.

If this is something you are interested in we’d really like to hear your view point and perspective.

We’re pleased to announce that JISC has funded us to work on the SALT (Surfacing the Academic Long Tail) Project, which we’re undertaking with the University of Manchester, John Rylands University Library.

Over the next six months the SALT project will building a recommender prototype for Copac and the JRUL OPAC interface, which will be tested by the communities of users of those services.  Following on from the invaluable work undertaken at the University of Huddersfield, we’ll be working with ten years+ of aggregated and anonymised circulation data amassed by JRUL.  Our approach will be to develop an API onto that data, which in turn we’ll use to develop the recommender functionality in both services.   Obviously, we’re indebted to the previous knowledge acquired by a similar project at the University of Huddersfield and the SALT project will work closely with colleagues at Huddersfield (Dave Pattern and Graham Stone) to see what happens when we apply this concept in the research library and national library service contexts.

Our overall aim is that by working collaboratively with other institutions and Research Libraries UK, the SALT project will advance our knowledge and understanding of how best to support research in the 21st century. Libraries are a rich source of valuable information, but sometimes the sheer volume of materials they hold can be overwhelming even to the most experienced researcher — and we know that researchers’ expectation on how to discover content is shifting in an increasingly personalised digital world. We know that library users — particularly those researching niche or specialist subjects — are often seeking content based on a recommendation from a contemporary, a peer, colleagues or academic tutors. The SALT Project aims to provide libraries with the ability to provide users with that information. Similar to Amazons, ‘customers who bought this item also bought….’ the recommenders on this system will appear on a local library catalogue and on Copac and will be based on circulation data which has been gathered over the past 10 years at The University of Manchester’s internationally renowned research library.

How effective will this model prove to be for users — particularly humanities researchers users?

Here’s what we want to find out:

• Will researchers in the field of humanities benefit from receiving book recommendations, and if so, in what ways?
• Will the users go beyond the reading list and be exposed to rare and niche collections — will new paths of discovery be opened up?
• Will collections in the library, previously undervalued and underused find a new appreciative audience — will the Long Tail be exposed and exploited for research?
• Will researchers see new links in their studies, possibly in other disciplines?

We also want to consider if there are other  potential beneficiaries.  By highlighting rarer collections, valuing niche items and bringing to the surface less popular but nevertheless worthy materials, libraries will have the leverage they need to ensure the preservation of these rich materials. Can such data or services assist in decision-making around collections management? We will be consulting with Leeds University Library and the White Rose Consortium, as well as UKRR in this area.

(And finally, as part of our sustainability planning, we want to look at how scalable this approach might be for developing a shared aggregation service of circulation data for UK University Libraries.  We’re working with potential data contributors such as Cambridge University Library,  University of Sussex Library, and the M25 consortium as well as RLUK to trial and provide feedback on the project outputs, with specific attention to the sustainability of an API service as a national shared service for HE/FE that supports academic excellence and drives institutional efficiencies.

Copac’s original remit was to be the merged union catalogue of the holdings of the RLUK (then CURL) libraries. This was expanded in 2006 to include libraries added through the Copac Challenge Fund (http://www.rluk.ac.uk/node/59), which aimed to ‘facilitat[e] the discovery of the widest possible range of research materials’. The specific Challenge Fund activity has ended, but we are still committed to helping to expose rare and under-used materials, and are accepting informal applications from libraries wishing to be included in Copac. We ask applicants for some information about their collections, and ensure that they meet some basic technical criteria.

Our main focus is on supporting UK education and research, and we prioritise collections with large amounts of rare, scarce, and under-exposed material. We accept applications from all types of library, not just academic and research, and we will take specific collections from a library – eg while a public library’s lending collections may not fit in with Copac’s remit, they may have special collections that do.

Our Steering Committee is meeting in September, and they’ll be discussing strategies and priorities to ensure that Copac’s growth remains mission-focussed and sustainable. Much as we as a team would be delighted to add every library, that simply isn’t feasible in the short-term for a variety of reasons. Our steering committee will help us to prioritise our inclusions over the next two years. Longer-term, we’re going to develop a new strategy for Copac, and our future approach to content development will be high on the agenda.

Until then, we’re looking at ‘quick wins’ for helping users access more content held across the UK. For instance, the ‘your local library’ tool. We’ve been working with academic libraries whose collections are not on Copac to cross-search their collections through z39.50. When a user of the library signs in to Copac, they get the opportunity to search their institution’s records alongside Copac.

If you’re interested in learning more, please email copac@manchester.ac.uk. We’d be pleased to hear from you.

In the morning, we were asked to interrogate what has been characterised as the three ‘realms’ of the Library Domain: Corporation, Channels, and Clients. (For more explanation of this model, see the TILE project report on the Library Domain Model). My groups were responsible for picking apart the ‘Channel’ realm definition:

The Channel: a means of delivering knowledge assets to Clients, not necessarily restricted to the holdings or the client base of any particular Corporation, Channels within this model range from local OPACs to national JISC services and ‘webscale’ services such as Amazon and Google Scholar. Operators of channel services will typically require corporate processes (e.g. a library managing its collection, an online book store managing its stock). However, there may be an increasing tendency towards separation, channels relying on the corporate services of others and vice versa (e.g. a library exposing its records to channels such as Google or Liblime, a bookshop outsourcing some of its channel services to the Amazon marketplace).

In subsequent discussion, we came up with the following key points:

• This definition of ‘channel’ was too library-centric. We need to working on ‘decentring’ our perspective in this regard.

• We will see an increasing uncoupling of channels from content. We won’t be pointing users to content/data but rather data/content will be pushed to users via a plethora of alternative channels

• Users will increasingly expect this type of content delivery. Some of these channels we can predict (VLEs, Google, etc) and others we cannot. We need to learn to live with that uncertainty (for now, at least).

• There will be an increasing number of ‘mashed’ channels – a recombining of data from different channels into new bespoke/2.0 interfaces.

• The lines between the realms are already blurring, with users becoming corporations and channels….etc., etc.

• We need more fundamental rethinking of the OPAC as the primary delivery channel for library data. It is simply one channel, serving specific use-cases and business process within the library domain.

• Control. This was a big one. In this environment libraries increasingly devolve control of the channels via which their ‘clients’ use to access the data. What are the risks and opportunities to be explored around this decreasing level of control? What related business cases already exist, and what new business models need to evolve?

• How are our current ‘traditional’ channels actually being used? How many times are librarians re-inventing the wheel when it comes to creating the channels of e-resource or subject specialist resource pages? We need to understand this in broad scale.

• Do we understand the ways in which the channels libraries currently control and create might add value in expected and unexpected ways? There was a general sense that we know very little in this regard.

There’s a lot more to say about the day’s proceedings, but the above points give a pretty good glimpse into the general tenor of the day. I’m now interested to see what use JISC intends to make of these outputs. The ‘what next?’ question now hangs rather heavily.

The major aim for this work is to improve the Copac user experience.  In the short term this will mean improving the quality of the search results.  More broadly, this will mean providing more options for personalising and reusing Copac records.

We’re going to be undertaking the work in two phase.  We’re calling Phase 1 the ‘iCue Project’ (stands for ‘Improving the Copac User Experience’).  This work will be focused on  investigating and proposing pragmatic solutions that improve the Copac infrastructure and end-user experience, and we’re going to be partnering with Mark Van Harmelen of Personal Learning Environments Ltd (PLE) in this work (Mark is also involved in the JISC TILE project, so we believe there’s a lot of fruitful overlap there, especially around leveraging the potential of circulation data a la Huddersfield).  The second phase is really about doing the work — re-engineering Copac in line with the specifications defined in the iCue Project.

We see this work tackling three key areas for Copac:

(i) Interface revision: We’ll be redesigning Copac’s user interface, focusing on areas of usability and navigability of search results. We are aware that the sheer size of our database and our current system means that searches can return large, unstructured result sets that do not facilitate users finding what they need.  Addressing this is a major priority.  We’ll be building on the CERLIM usability report we recently commissioned (more on that in another post) and also drawing on the expertise of OPAC 2.0 specialists such as Dave Pattern.  We’ll also be working consistently with users (librarian users and researcher users) to monitor and assess how we’re doing.

(ii) Database Restructuring: A more usable user interface is going to critically rely on a suitable restructuring of Copac’s database. Particularly, we are centrally interested in FRBR (Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records) as a starting point for a new database structure. We anticipate that whatever we learn as we undertake this piece of work will be of interest to the broader community, and plan to disseminate this knowledge, and update the community via this blog.

(iii)  De-duplication: The restructuring implies further de-duplication of Copac’s contents, and so we’re also developing a de-duplication algorithm.  Ideally we would like to see the FRBR levels of work, expression, manifestation and (deduplicated) item being supported, or a pragmatic version of the same.

The end user benefits:
1. Searches are faster and more effective (Copac database is more responsive and robust; users are presented with a more dramatically de-duplicated results view)
2.  Search-related tasks are easier to perform (i.e. the flexibility of this system will support the narrowing/broadening of searches, faceted searching, personalising/sharing content)
3.  Access to more collections (Copac database is able to hold more content and continue to grow)

So there we have it.  It’s going to be quite a year for the Copac team.  If you have any questions, comments or suggestions you’d like us to take on board, do leave a comment here or email us.  (Not that this will be the only time we ask!) We can also be chatted to via twitter @Copac.

I was invited to present a ‘Sector Perspective’ on the issue, and specifically the ‘Pain Points’ identifed around ‘Creating Context’ and ‘Enabling Contribution.’ The TiLE project suggests a lofty vision where, with the sufficient amount of context data about a user (derived from goldmines such as attention data pools and profile data stored within VLEs, library service databases, institional profiles — you know, simple enough;-) services could become much more Amazon-like.  OPACs could suggest to users, ‘First Year History Students who used this textbook, also highly rated this textbook…’ and such. The OPAC is thus transformed from relic of the past, to a dynamic online space enabling robust ‘architectures of participation.’

This view is very appealing, and certainly at Copac we’re doing our part to really interrogate how we can support *effective* adaptive personalisation. Nonetheless, as a former researcher and teacher, I’ve always had my doubts as to whether the Library catalogue per se, is the right ‘place’ for this type of activity.

We might be able to ‘enable contribution’ technically, but will it make a difference? An area that perhaps most urgently needs attention is research on the social component and drivers for contributing user-generated content.  As the TiLE project has identified, the ‘goldmine’ here to galvanise such usage is ‘context’ or usage data. But is it enough, especially in the context of specialised research?

As an example of the potential ‘cultural issues’ that might emerge, the TiLE project suggests the case of the questionably nefarious tag ‘wkd bk m8’ which is submitted as a tag for a record. They ask, “Is this a low-quality contribution, or does it signal something useful to other users, particularly to users who are similar to the contributor?”

I’d tend to agree the latter, but would also say that this is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to rhetorical context. For example, consider the user-generated content that might arise around contentious works around the ‘State of Israel.’ The fact that Wikipedia has multiple differing and ‘sparring’ entries around this is a good indicator of the complexity that emerges. I would say that this is incredibly rich complexity, but on a practical level potentially very difficult for users to negotiate. Which UGC derived ‘context’ is relevant for differing users? Will our user model be granular or precise enough to adjust accordingly?

One of the challenges of accommodating a system-wide model is the tackling of semantic context. Right now, for instance, Mimas and EDINA have been tasked to come up with a demonstrator for a tag recommender that could be implemented across JISC services. This seems like a relatively simple proposition, but as soon as we start thinking about semantic context, we are immediately confronted with the question of which concept models or ontologies do we draw from?

Semantic harvesting and text mining projects such as the Intute Repository Search have pinpointed the challenge of ‘ontological drift’ between disciplines and levels. As we move into this new terrain of Library 2.0 this drift will likely become all the more evident.

Is the OPAC too generic to facilitate the type of semantic precision to enable meaningful contribution? I have a hunch it is, as did other participants when we broke out into discussion sessions.

But perhaps the goldmine of context data, that ‘user DNA,’ will provide us with new ways to tackle the challenge, and there was also a general sense that we needed to forge forward on this issue — try things out and experiment with attention data.  A service that gathers that aggregates both user-generated and attention/context data would be of tremendous benefit, and Copac (and other like services) can potentially move to a model where adaptive personalisation is supported.  Indeed, Copac as a system-wide service has a great potential as an aggregator in this regard.

There is risk involved around these issues, but there are some potential ‘quick wins’ that are of clear immediate benefit. Another speaker on Friday was Dave Pattern, who within a few minutes of ‘beaming to us live via video from Huddersfield’ had released the University of Huddersfield’s book usage data (check it out).

This is one goldmine we’re only too happy to dig into, and we’re looking forward to collaborating with Dave in the next year to find ways to exploit and further his work in a National context.  We want to implement recommender functions in Copac, but also (more importantly) working at Mimas to develop a system for the store and share of usage data from multiple UK libraries (any early volunteers?!)  The idea is that this data can also be reused to improve services on a local level.   We’re just at the proposal stage in this whole process, but we feel very motivated, and the energy of the TiLE project workshop has only motivated us more.

This afternoon we had an interesting chat with Dave Pattern from the University of Huddersfield (he of Opac 2.0 and ‘users who borrowed this also borrowed…’ fame).  We’re hoping to collaborate with Dave to see how his important work can be taken forward on a national level.  Dave is about to release the Huddersfield circulation data (anonymised and aggregated) to the community and he’s hoping it will trigger some debate and ideas for developments.   This certainly is a real opportunity for people in our field.  On our end, we’d like to figure out how we could develop a similar feature for Copac, but also look at how to bring more libraries into the mix — contributing more data so those ‘recommendations’ are more effective.

Dave and I both sit on the TILE reference group, and there has been some important work going on in that project about the potential ‘goldmine’ of attention data we’re all sitting on at institutions and data centres.  TILE recommendations suggest the development of an attention-data store service.  Frankly, the sheer scale of this type of all encompassing undertaking gives me headpsin, but a service for the storage and open share of circulation data less so.  In fact, JISC has also recently tasked Mimas and EDINA to propose work around ‘Personalised Search and Recommendation Engines,’ so there’s real scope to think carefully about what such a service might look like.

Goldmine indeed — I’m speaking (from my ‘sector perspective’) at the TILE meeting next week.  The focus of the meeting is to look at how we can improve services for learners by aggregating and using learning behaviour data.  For our part, I am keen to see where this work with circulation and attention data can take us, and I’m looking forward to putting some thoughts together on this score for the meeting.

The key practical aim of the meeting was to share the personalisation aspects of D2D project work, and also to discuss the recommendations of the two DPIE reports. The D2D work includes some development of personalisation components for Copac, components we are referring to cautiously as ‘lightweight’ for now. One way in which we plan to ‘personalise’ the service for users is by offering a ‘My Local Library’ cross-search, achieved (we hope — we’re very much in early phases here) via a combination of authentication and IP recognition used to identify users’ geographical location, and then a cross-search of local institutional library holdings data via Z39.50 targets.

In addition, by next the middle of next year, Copac users will be able to save marked lists of records and export them into other 2.0 environments via an atom feed (I’ll let Ashley write the more technical post on that development). Further down the line (i.e. beyond the next six months) we are interested in providing tools for users to annotate, bookmark and tag these records, but we also want to make sure that any such developments are not made in isolation and are ‘Copac’-centric — there’s a lot to explore here, obviously.

In and of themselves, these developments are not especially complex — the latter is an example of personalisation via ‘customisation’ (to use JISC definitions) where users explicitly customise content according to their own preferences. What I am especially interested in, however, is how saved lists (‘My Bibliography?’) could be used to potentially support adaptive personalisation (this is what Max Hammond, co-author of the DPIE 2 report wryly referred to at the meeting as ‘spooky’).

Dave Pattern’s experiment with using circulation data to ‘recommend’ items to University of Huddersfield library users is well known, and I hope the first step towards some potentially very interesting UK developments. On this end, we’re interested in knowing if there is anything similar to be gleaned from saved personal lists — ‘users with this item in their saved lists also have…’ (or something along those lines). This terrain is very much untested, and one of the critical issues, of course, is uptake. Amazon’s recommender function is effective due to the sheer number of users (effective *some* of the time, that is — we all have ‘off-base’ Amazon recommendations stories to tell, I admit). And this is just one small example of how adaptive personalisation of a service like Copac (or other JISC IE services) might work — there are also opportunities around capturing attention data, for instance.

The DPIE 2 report urges extreme caution in this regard. It raises some very pointed questions about how JISC and its services should approach adaptive personalisation. Too often, the authors warn, ‘personalisation’ is established as a specific goal, with the assumption that ‘personalisation’ is intrinsically valuable. In this context, change is technology rather than user driven, which is fine for experimental and demonstrator work, but high-risk for established services with a strong likelihood for failure. They question how helpful definitions of Personalisation put forth by JISC are in carrying forward a development agenda (Customisation; Adaptive Personalisation based on Data held elsewhere (APOD); Adaptive Personalisation based on User Activity (APUA). This definition “provides a mix of concepts from data capture to functionality, rather than setting out the logical link between a source of data about a user, a model of that user, and an approach to providing the user with a personal service” (17). Also missing is a robust benefits mapping process — “there is little analysis of the benefits of personalisation, beyond an assertion that it improves the user experience” (20). The report concludes:

Complex developments of “personalisation services” and similar should not be a current
priority for JISC. It seems unlikely that an external personalisation service will be able to
generate a user model which is detailed enough to be of genuine use in personalising
content; user preferences are probably not broadly applicable beyond the specific resource
for which they are set, and user behaviour is difficult to understand without deep
understanding of the resource being used. Attempting to develop user models which are
sufficiently generic to be of use to several services, but sufficiently detailed to facilitate useful
functionality is likely to be a challenging undertaking, with a high risk of failure. (26)

These are somewhat sobering thoughts, especially in a climate of personalisation and 2.0 fervour, but overall the report is useful in considering how to tread the next steps in development activity. Key for us is this issue of the user model — can we (Copac? SUNCAT? JISC?) develop one that is likely to be of use to several services? My hunch right now is ‘no.’ We know very little concrete about researchers’ behaviour and how they might benefit from such tools (interestingly, both DPIE 2 reports focused on benefits for undergraduate students, when most of the services in question are largely used by researchers). About humanities researchers, we know even less (much of the interesting work around online ‘Collaboratories’ centres on the STEM disciplines). Apparently JISC is about to commission some investigative work with researcher-users, and here at Mimas a team is about to undertake some focus group work with humanities researchers to determine how personalisation tools for services like Copac, Intute and the Archives Hub could (or could not) deliver specific benefits to their work. I’m sure this research will prove very useful.

We’re urged to ‘proceed with caution,’ but we proceed nonetheless. At Copac we’re taking a long hard look at what a personalised service might look like, and accepted that some risk-taking is likely forecast for the future. I’m very interested to know other’s opinions on a possible recommender function for Copac — at what level could such a tool prove useful, and when might it possibly be obstructive? Personally, I have used the ‘People who have bought also bought’ feature in Amazon quite extensively as a useful search tool. I am less likely to take up the direct recommendations that Amazon pitches at me through my ‘personalised’ Amazon home page, however. (This comes, in part, from making purchases for a six year old boy. If only I could toggle between ‘mummy’ and ‘professional’ profiles…. now there’s a radical thought).

Bored with the same old books? Not now Chetham's catalogue is going into Copac...

We’re not sure what this fellow is reading, but we agree that the remedy is surely to be found in Copac Thanks to the inclusion of libraries like Chetham’s (the oldest public library in the English-speaking world, no less) our users are going to be able to discover some fascinating and rare materials, many of them unique to the UK. The Challenge Fund has aided us in bringing in catalogues from fifteen such libraries (the Tate Gallery, Lambeth Palace, Kew Royal Botanical Gardens, to name but a few).

This is a long tail made up of not a few long titles. We particularly like this one from Chetham:

Felix Folio: the hawkers and street dealers of the north of England manufacturing districts; including quack doctors, cheap Johns, book-sellers by hand, bookstall-keepers, watch-sellers, needle-dodgers, “land sharks,” alias “turnpike sailors,” alias “duffers,” nut-sellers, bird-sellers, wild-fowl dealers, “dollopers,” flying stationers, street ballad sellers, cheese hawkers, cum multis aliis. Being some account of their dealings, dodgings, and doings, by Felix Folio [pseud. of John Page]

(and you can even buy a facsimile)

p.s. anyone know what a ‘dolloper’ is ?