UKOLN News » article published

Visualizing Research Data Records for their Better Management

Alex Ball — Tue, 12 Jun 2012 09:25:23 +0000

The Journal of Digital Information, Volume 13, Number 1 features several papers dealing with research data management, including one by Alex Ball of UKOLN and the Digital Curation Centre, and Mansur Darlington, Thomas Howard, Chris McMahon and Steve Culley of the IdMRC at the University of Bath. In “Visualizing Research Data Records for their Better Management”, they present a UML2-based method of recording associations between research data records, so that the provenance, context and relative importance of the various records may be better understood by anyone not immediately familiar with the research. This paper relates to work carried out by the JISC-funded ERIM Project.

Tweeting the London Riots

lisrw — Fri, 01 Jun 2012 10:00:14 +0000

Emma Tonkin, Technical Innovation Co-ordinator at the Innovation Support Centre, was recently interviewed by a journalist from Science and has attracted interest in her analysis of Twitter coverage of the 2011 London riots. A posting on the ISC blog is available.

UKOLN Working Featured in Times Higher Education

Brian Kelly — Thu, 31 May 2012 16:11:00 +0000

Work by UKOLN’s Innovation Support Centre in identifying patterns of institutional use of Facebook by Russell Group universities has been featured in the THE Scholarly Web column of the Times Higher Education (THE).

The article highlights the growth in Facebook ‘likes’ of official institutional Facebook pages for the universities, but warns of the dangers of reading too much into this metric if used in isolation. The original information was published in a blog post which asked “What Next, As Facebook Use in UK Universities Continues to Grow?“.

UKOLN Contributions to JISC Inform

Brian Kelly — Thu, 29 Mar 2012 12:32:53 +0000

The latest issue of the JISC Inform newsletter was published yesterday and contained two articles from UKOLN. One article provides advice on how institutions should respond to the ‘cookie’ legislation which comes into force on 26 May. A second article entitled Making the most of the open web, in which “three experts discuss how to use the social web to increase traffic to your work and make it more discoverable”, describes sound approaches to the use of blogs as an open practice.

Re-engineering Libraries for the Data Decade

lisrw — Tue, 13 Mar 2012 10:15:05 +0000

The International Journal of Digital Curation, published by the Digital Curation Centre and produced at UKOLN has just published Volume 7, No 1 (2012) which includes an article by Liz Lyon, DCC Associate Director. In her article The Informatics Transform: Re-engineering Libraries for the Data Decade, Liz explains how library staff may need to supplement their existing skills in the light of the changes in the way scientific research is being conducted. With the advent of data-intensive research and a plethora of Web technologies, the landscape in which HE libraries will operate in the current decade is bound to change also. Liz asks how will library services, and also LIS schools and curricula, adapt? She considers how the position of data informaticians will alter, provides a set of assertions on which enhancements in recruitment practice may be based, and offers a view of the new role of advocacy in scholarly communication practice that libraries may wish to adopt.

Predicting the Future

Brian Kelly — Mon, 12 Mar 2012 17:53:34 +0000

An article by Brian Kelly entitled Predicting the Future: Evidence-gathering and Interpretation to Inform Planning has been published in Panlibus Magazine (Issue 23, Spring 2012) in PDF format.

In his article, Brian, a member of the Innovation Support Centre based at UKOLN, University of Bath, describes approaches to gathering and interpreting evidence in order to inform planning processes. This work is being carried out as part of the JISC Observatory service which is being provided by UKOLN and the JISC CETIS service.

Further information about the JISC Observatory is available on the JISC Observatory Web site.

Staying Ahead: Technologies to Watch in the Next Five Years

Brian Kelly — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 08:25:18 +0000

The work of the JISC Observatory, provided by the ISC at UKOLN and JISC Cetis, has been featured in an article published in JISC Inform. The article describes how the JISC Observatory has pulled together the top issues that are on the horizon within the year, within two to three years and within four to five years. The areas include mobiles and cloud computing (which are important for institutions now); game-based learning, new scholarship, learning analytics and semantic applications (which are expected to be significant in two to three years) and augmented reality, collective intelligence, telepresence and Smart Objects (which are expected to be of importance in four to five years).

Openness Should ‘go deep’

Brian Kelly — Thu, 16 Jun 2011 10:44:41 +0000

In an article published in the magazine Research Information today, Brian Kelly has “challenged the higher-education community to go beyond open access to published research in the pursuit of openness”. The article argues that, in addition to encouraging open access to research publications, there is a need to provide open access to data about research publications provided in institutional repositories.