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.

Project Evaluation

We just finished our Project Evaluation report. The project's summative evaluation took place on the 19th of February and was directed by Neil Beagrie from Charles Beagrie Ltd. As part of this evaluation Neil ran an online survey with a sample of our interviewees and testers. The results were very positive. We chose people who knew about BRII and who had at least seen a demo or tested the Blue Pages. The reason for this was that we needed respondents who understood the basic concepts of BRII’s entity registry and RAD (Research Activity Data) and and were able to assess the potential benefits that sharing and re-using RAD could have for the University.

For the purpose of the survey we asked respondents to have a look at the working version of the Blue Pages. As this tool is still under development we have limited access only from Oxford networks. However I also compiled a series of screenshots for respondents who were not on campus. You can see the status of the Blue Pages six weeks ago.



and these are the results of the survey (click on + to zoom in):

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.

The BRII Project Use Cases Report is ready

The BRII Project Use Cases report is ready and available in PDF format from here. The Use Cases report contains four short, business-style use cases illustrating the uses and benefits of the BRII project outputs.

Any comments about the report are welcome. (Click on comments below or email me.)

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.

Institutional Innovation Projects Trade Fair

I have been working on the products I will offer in the Projects Traid Fair, part of the JISC Institutional Innovation Exchange event. I have designed a couple of posters to explain my three products. These will be:

• The Vocabulary site storing the new vocabularies created by BRII providing formal descriptions of concepts, terms and relationships within the "research" knowledge domain (funder information, people profiles, research data).
• Experiences and lessons learned from the User Testing of the Blue Pages. I have related some of these experiences in previous posts. I have also written a paper which will hopefully be published at the end of this month in Ariadne. In this paper I describe our approach to user testing, the reasons for choosing that approach and the lessons we have learned from it.
• The Oxford Blue Pages... or at least the concept of the Blue Pages, displaying aggregated Research Activity Data as research objects and the connections between them.

The JISC have asked us to make projects products directly related to your final report and outputs.

I will also have to buy products from other projects attending the event. I asked our JISC contact if we had to buy products which could be used only in our current JISC projects. He said there was not problem with making purchases with related activities. So I can buy products which can be useful in other activities in our office or perhaps other departments in the University.