BRII at the SCONUL Conference

Yesterday I attended the "Organisational Leadership in a Time of Change" SCONUL Conference at Leeds Queens Hotel. Although I could not stay for the whole event (I stayed only 1 of 3 days) I enjoyed it. I attended a few presentations and presented our BRII poster.

I would like to thank Prof John Lancaster who welcomed me and who kindly helped me to move the BRII poster to a more visible place :)

Sorry for the poor quality pictures, dark place and shaky hands.

Blue Pages video clip

As the project will end soon (31st of March) I wanted to show you what we have done so far with the Blue Pages. We will not stop working though. We will continue working on harvesting more data and user engagement. Anusha and Mat have been working tirelessly on the Blue Pages and although there is still a lot of work to be done on it I think it is at a stage where I can show you a short demo. This is a work in progress video and we are using a few sets of harvested data. The video below lasts 3:14 minutes and has no audio.



Open wmv version on a separate window.

BRII Presentation

On Friday 5th of March I attended a book launch at the University of Hull - Business School. The book is titled "Supporting research students" by Dr Barbara Allan.

"The importance of supporting the needs of research students has recently risen higher up the academic agenda around the world. Numbers of postgraduate students have expanded, and the traditional PhD has now been joined by a new range of doctoral qualifications including professional doctorates. These developments have led to a more diverse student body which now includes senior professional practitioners. This shift has been accompanied by a recognition that universities must encourage library and information staff to make their critical contribution to students' research skill. This timely book offers guidance to enable them to support the specialist needs of these students."

The event was launched by Biddy Fisher, President of the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals and Emeritus Professor Patsy Cullen, Board Member of the Museum, Libraries and Archives Council.


During the event Dr Allan presented her current project called the Graduate Virtual Research Environment, an online environment inviting Phd students and research staff in the Business School to share and learn from each others experiences. Then Dr Chris Thomson ran a demo of the environment. He writes a blog here.

After their presentation I gave a short talk about BRII. I talked about the entity registry trying not to use too technical language ;) and about how Research Activity Data (RAD) can be used in the Blue Pages, to design websites, in ORA, etc. I made emphasis on how RAD can complement research students' learning by providing overviews of what experts are doing in their fields of research. Here you have my presentation.

Uncovering User Perceptions of Research Activity Data

I recently wrote a paper about the user testing of the Oxford Blue Pages. It has been published in Ariadne in their January 2010 issue. Here you have a link to the article in Ariadne www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue62/loureiroKoechlin The title is Uncovering User Perceptions of Research Activity Data. I chose that title to emphasise the aspect of the user testing which we think helped us the most to engage and understand our users. Beside improving software usability the user tests provided us with data which confirmed and complemented the findings of the Stakeholder Analysis. In this article I discuss the concepts of Usability, Perceived Ease of Use and Perceived Usefulness and provide some examples from feedback.

I have also deposited a copy of the article in the Oxford University Research Archive ORA here http://ora.ouls.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid%3A1d61ea76-1a6a-4595-a011-52a8303c549b
You can also find the ORA record (with the full text) for the BRII Stakeholder Analysis here http://ora.ouls.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid%3A1df69991-cd37-445b-a4c7-3573ce80c36e


Note: I have added a section titled "BRII Papers, Reports and Presentations" in the right column of this blog (scroll down a bit.) It contains links to relevant outcomes produced by BRIIl.

BRII's Products - JISC Trade Fair

These are posters I designed for the Institutional Innovation Projects Trade Fair. The posters explain our three products: a vocab site, an approach to user testing and the Blue Pages.

Click on pictures to get larger versions

We have many more products of course but these are the ones I thought could be more attractive to other projects. In addition to the above, we have produced an object registry containing aggregated research activity data which is actually the core of the project, we are designing processes of data harvesting, we have written a stakeholder analysis which studies the requirements and uses for research activity data at the University of Oxford, we organised a JISC assembly on stakeholder buy-in, etc.

JISC MEAoT Assembly

Yesterday I attended a JISC assembly organised by the Modular e-Administration of Teaching MEAoT Project run by CARET - Cambridge University. The aim of the event was to explore ways in which stakeholders and other parties can be encouraged to adopt tools developed in JISC projects. Below you can see my presentation:



The second slide briefly explains the nature of BRII and the Entity Registry we are creating. The registry is a container of Research Activity Data and it is these data which has been semantizised that we are trying to sell around the University. BRII is doing this at two levels. First, being the registry an abstract concept, users find it difficult to understand. Therefore BRII needs to provide tangible examples that use its data. Slide 3 shows this as level 1: providing practical examples of data use, one of which is the Blue Pages. However, as the Blue Pages is a new piece of software BRII needs to find ways to promote it across its user base. Through user tests (level2 ) on the Blue Pages we make sure it fits the needs of our potential users, but at the same time we sell the idea of Research Activity Data being available in our registry for another users.

There were other presentations of course. The MEAoT people have written a summary about the event in their blog:

The Centre for Applied Research in Educational Technologies (CARET) in Cambridge University hosted a JISC assembly for the Modular e-Administration of Teaching (MEAoT) project on Thursday, 10 December 2009.

The list of participants included:

Richard Prager, MEAoT project PI, Cambridge University Engineering Department (CUED)
Laura James, CARET
Anne Clarke, MEAoT project, CARET and CUED
Guy Chisholm, MEAoT project, CARET
Avi Naim, MEAoT project, CARET
Cecilia Loureiro-Koechlin, JISC BRII project, Oxford University
Bridget Taylor, DAISY project, Oxford University
Jenny Mackness, JISC liaison for MEAoT
Rachel Tuley, Teaching Administrator, CUED
Jen Pollard, Computer Officer, Cambridge University English Department
Carmen Neagoe, Teaching Administrator, Cambridge University Judge Business School
Helen Marshall, Teaching Administrator, Cambridge University Physics Department
David Goode, Computer Officer, Cambridge University, Department of Divinity

The programme was designed to make the meeting a pleasant event. It started with a historical overview of the project (by Prof. Prager). This was immediately followed by lunch at a nearby restaurant, which helped break the ice and make everybody more comfortable.

Read more here: http://modular-e-admin.blogspot.com/2009/12/modular-e-administration-of-teaching.html

BRII Inside O.R.

This week I got a copy of the Inside O.R. magazine - November issue with a short article about BRII. I wrote this article after the OR51 conference (Operational Research) where I presented a paper called Making Sense of Research Activity Information in the Information Systems stream.




Thanks to Rajan Anketell, Inside O.R. editor.

Click here to download whole issue.

Making Sense of Research Activity Information

This week I attended the Operational Research OR51 conference at the University of Warwick. This is a big conference for the OR people. A very exciting event. I gave a presentation in the Information Systems stream, having previously submitted an abstract. We started conference activities on Tuesday morning, but there was dinner and a wine tasting welcome event on Monday evening. :)

The information systems stream was opened by Nick Davey, IBM Delivery leader with a presentation on Client Relationships.

I followed then. My presentation was titled: Making Sense of Research Activity Information. I talked about the findings of the BRII Stakeholder analysis: needs we need to account for and benefits that a tool like the Research Information Infrastructure RII can bring to researchers, administrators, strategists and disseminators. I was a bit ambitious and in the few last seconds of my presentation I suggested and idea for analysing in depth different stakeholders profiles in different contexts (creation and use of research activity data) by using the Model of Enactment of Technologies-in-practice by Orlikowski (i). This is a useful tool, a practice lens as she calls it, to look at the use of technology and the (social) structures that influence its use. These structures are not necessarily inscribed or embeded in the technology by designers but surround users in their daily activities. See the presentation and abstract below.




Note: the last slide is just an example of how agents and contexts can be modeled by using the model of enactment of technologies-in-practice. By separating the issues in each of the boxes (interpretative scheme, norms and facilities) we can understand better why technologies are used the way they are used. Understanding all these issues within the context of the University of Oxford would help us to design tools that use information about research activities in the ways our users find most relevant and useful.

Abstract

Oxford University is a research-intensive institution. Research is carried out individually or in groups; within one subject field or in cross disciplinary collaborations. It also crosses organisational boundaries to other universities in the UK and abroad. Research expertise, resources and outcomes vary from discipline to discipline. Information about research activities is published in websites using independent systems belonging to academic units, research centres, institutes, projects and individual researchers. These systems and information have been designed to fulfil the individual needs of each area or research activity and accounting for outside needs is beyond their aims. Seen all together they look like fragmented, dispersed systems resembling Oxford’s federated, complex structure. From such heterogeneous sources of information it is very difficult to obtain a clear picture of research done in the University.

Research activity information needs to be visible and easy to access to increase the research impact of the institution, and to boost collaboration and funding. Efforts are being made to create a research information infrastructure to collect research activity data from around the University, to classify and connect those sources and to make them available in a consistent and organised way. This paper explores the perspectives and issues related to the use of research activity information and the systems through which this information can be made visible and kept updated in an accurate and consistent way. The paper is focused on a stakeholder analysis done on a sample of Oxford academic and administrative units involved in research and related activities.

Anyway, conference was good, saw many interesting presentations. We also went on a Shakespeare tour around Stratford upon avon :)



(i) Orlikowski developed her model of enactment of technologies-in-practice based on Giddens' ideas of structuration.

• Orlikowski, W. J., (2000), 'Using Technology and Constituting Structures: A practice Lens for Studying Technology in Organizations', Organisation Science, 11, no.4: 404-428
• Giddens, A., (1984), The Constitution of Society, Cambridge, Polity Press.

JISC SSBR Newsletter

The JISC Institutional Innovation programme has released a new issue of their Support, Synthesis and Benefits Realisation (SSBR) Newsletter. (Issue Six - 1 September 2009.) We are happy to see that we are featured on the front page, or is it the first paragraph? :)

Activity slowed a little over the past few weeks? Looking at the significant progress made by many projects, it appears not. BRII have completed their Stakeholder Analysis report and there are a several assemblies in the pipeline for projects to swap ideas and share resources. In this newsletter, you will also find news of free training, workshops and tools which you may find useful along with key conference and seminar dates.

You can access the SSBR Newsletter from:
http://newsletter.inin.jisc-ssbr.net/2009/09/01/issue-six-1-september-2009/

There is a short article about us titled BRII Stakeholder Analysis Report:

Recently Cecilia Loureiro-Koechlin from the BRII project announced that they had reached a project milestone by completing their Stakeholder Analysis report.

Click on the following link to read the complete article: http://newsletter.inin.jisc-ssbr.net/2009/08/31/briireport/

JISC upcoming event

Soon I will be attending the Lifelong Learning and Workforce Engagement Support, Synthesis and Benefits Realisation Event Organised by JISC Institutional Innovation programme. (Yep, that is a long name.) The event will take place on the 23rd and 24th of April at the Macdonald hotel in Manchester. You can find the programme here.

The BRII project belongs to the Institutional Innovation Round 2. It is required that all projects belonging to that group design and display a poster. I will post a draft here as soon as i come up with something.