profiles and repositories elsewhere

There's a terrific thread getting going on the JISC Repositories mailing list, where people are describing the repository use in their institutions. It has also diverged into discussion of how profiles and repositories interact. As well as local efforts, there is mention of some major players:

• Vivo - a "research-focussed discovery tool" from Cornell, which lets you browse or search for information about Cornell faculty and staff
• Catalyst - "brings together the intellectual force, technologies, and clinical expertise of Harvard University and its affiliates and partners to reduce the burden of human illness"
• BibApp - a "Campus Research Gateway and Expert Finder"
• OpenScholar -a "a paradigm shift in how the personal academic and research web sites are created and maintained"

I don't think our project would yet lay claim to any of these exotic descriptions, but it's great to know that other work is going on in this area - it's an exciting space!

Summary of Initial Research

There is no single standard in the presentation or content of University profiles, just as departmental websites differ widely in their design and layout so there is no common practice in representing staff. We did however find some universal basic categories of information which are used on all profiles.

It’s interesting that the take up of profiles is high but there are still people who have nothing but a name and perhaps the name of their college listed on their profile. This leads us to wonder about the level of concern among staff about putting their contact details and information about themselves online. We didn’t find any evidence to suggest that there is a bias towards age, gender or seniority in the completion or non-completion of profiles. Further research with staff members through interviews and a survey will hopefully uncover the reasons why some feel less inclined to provide details on their departmental websites.

Throughout the course of our research we kept asking questions about how users were writing and updating their profiles. In the next stage of our research we will look at how departmental profiles are managed and who are they are managed by. We’d also like to learn more about the attitudes of staff towards their University profiles and whether they feel satisfied with how their profiles represent them to the wider world.

A more detailed analysis of of initial research can be found here

Templates vs. Free Pages

We’ve finished our initial research on the current status of University profiles. Issues of templates and standardisation versus a free hand in creating one’s own web page have raised some interesting questions. Templates - as you would expect produce a standardised and uniform look which has the stamp of authority, but which often fall short in terms of interesting and personal content. Web pages where users are free to communicate what they value feel more friendly and open. These pages invite dialogue and present academics as people with passions and interests that a list of publications can’t communicate.

There is an underlying problem though, templates offer a way onto the web for those who don’t have the technical expertise to write their own html. It’s no surprise that most departments using the ‘free page’ system are science and technology focused.

So what’s the answer for more engaging and professional profiles? I think it's probably a synthesis of the accessibility and professionalism of templates but with the freedom offered by free pages (how we achieve this is another matter). We need to allow and encourage people to post more often, with more options for personalisation and the space to write more creatively. One idea might be to replace the titles of boxes on templates with questions. So instead of a box called ‘research interests’ we would write ‘describe your research interests and your current work’ or even ‘ Imagine that you’ve met a new person at a conference - they’re not familiar with your area of work, how would you describe it?’ Titles on text boxes encourage users to write lists of keywords separated by commas. This provides a useful string of metadata but it tells us nothing of that person's motivation, their journey through their work or their passion for their subject.

Profiles need to be easy to use and quick to update to encourage academics to use them, but the more fundamental problem is in making people care about their digital identity - why would they care about their online profile? Who is the profile for anyway? These are questions that we hope to address through surveys and more in-depth interviews with academic staff. Esther Dingley, co-founder of Graduate Junction and current Arcadia fellow at the UL has a really great post on her blog about the importance of legitimising the time spent on creating and maintaining digital identities.

challenges of understanding social network data

A great article from danah boyd, about the challenges when computer scientists meet social scientists in the study of networks and relationships, based on large data sets.

Welcome

Welcome to the JISC ConnectedWorks blog. To introduce the project, here is the original abstract:


We will build a scholarly networking platform into our institutional VRE to support
researchers sharing their profiles and connecting with others, to enhance the research lifecycle and to drive collaborations. We will integrate publication sharing, enabling academics to upload a paper, have it deposited in the institutional repository, and text mine it to develop and extend the author’s connections via co-author relationships and also research topics. The publication will also automatically be shared on the researcher’s public profile. We will work with the institutional bibliometrics provider, Symplectic, the repository (DSpace at the University Library) and also a user-centric design practice to ensure a fully integrated, and researcher-focussed system. This will be fully sustainable within the University of Cambridge due to its support for REF activities and will be shared with the wider community through fully open source software release (most likely within Sakai3) and sharing of our experiences and models.