OR2013 Website Launched!

As we approach publishing a final post of highlights from Open Repositories 2012 and move this website towards being an archive of this year’s event we wanted to let you know how you can begin connecting with next year’s conference.

Open Repositories 2013 will be taking place on Prince Edward Island (PEI), Canada and you may recall that in the very warm welcome the team gave at OR2012 they promised to have their website live very soon… Well the OR2013 website is now live! Bookmark it now: http://or2013.net/

On the website already you’ll find some introductory information on the Island and highlights of what you’ll be able to enjoy during your conference stay. An OR2013 Crowdvine has also been set up so do go and sign up.

OR2013 have also launched their Twitter account: you can find them as @openrepos2013 and they are using the hashtag #OR2013 to get the conversation around next year’s conference started.

So, over the next few months you can not only look forward to some updates from the OR2012 team but you can also look forward to hearing much more about OR2013 from the Prince Edward Island team and start planning your ideas, papers, etc.

 

 

 

 

Another Round of Highlights

It has now been a month since we gathered in Edinburgh for Open Repositories 2012 and we are delighted to report that there has been plenty of new content and reflection about the conference appearing since then.

Well over 90 blog posts and reports on the conference are now out there – you have been absolutely brilliant over the last few weeks sharing your reports, reflections and thoughts on how to take forward the fantastic ideas shared by speakers, posters, fellow delegates. We are sure there are more posts to come (since it has taken us a while to update this blog and we’re sure we’re not the only ones still thinking about talks, ideas, discussions had) so do let us know as you add any reports or write ups of your own. For now here are a few more highlights we wanted to share while everything is still fairly fresh – look at the bottom of this post for links to a more thorough collection of posts.

Firstly we have noticed lots of you sharing links to your slides on SlideShare. We will be making sure all of the programme content, slides and videos are connected up here on the website but for now we are making sure we gather these links to your shared presentations. For instance Todd Grappone and Sharon Farb at UCLA have shared their slides on the broadcast news archival work. This ambitious project is one to keep an eye out for, especially when it opens to the public in the future.

Research data has featured prominently in many of your write ups as it was a major theme of this year’s Open Repositories:

Leyla Williams blogged up a summary on the conference for the Center For Digital Research and Scholarship, with particular attention paid to research data and public access to hives of content.

Meanwhile Leslie Johnston of the Library of Congress gave a talk on big data, and also wrote up a great post on the significance of data in a repository setting where publications were once the center focus.

Tyrannosaurus and Shark in National Museum

Some people say open access policy has no teeth… (‘OR2012 012′ by wr_or2012, 22-07-12)

In addition to delegates and attendees who have been sharing their experiences some of our workshop facilitators have been sharing rich reflections on their workshops. For example Angus Whyte of the Digital Curation Centre further developed the idea of research data in repositories, and wrote up the conference workshop on the subject

Most of you will have seen some of the Developer Challenge Show & Tell sessions and we are delighted that the DevCSI team have shared their videos of OR2012 and they are a great collection of Developer Challenge presentations and short interview recordings, like this clip of Peter Sefton, chair of the judges:

Click here to view the embedded video.

We are also starting to see some really interesting posts about how OR2012 ideas and talks can be operationalised. For instance Simon Hodson of JISC has posted a whole series of excellent OR2012 write ups and reflections at the JISC Managing Research Data blog.

And we have also started to see publications based on the conference appearing.  Steph Taylor has written about OR2012 for Ariadne (Issue 69) as an example to frame her advice from getting the most from a conference – it’s a super article and should prove handy for planning your trip to OR2013 on Prince Edward Island. OR2012 has also featured very prominently in the latest issue of Digital Repository Federation Monthly, which includes 10 Japanese attendees’ reports of the conference – huge thanks to @nish_ku for bringing this to our attention.

The Digital Repository Federation article is far from the only non-English write up we’ve had – so far we have spotted write ups of the conference in German, Finnish, Polish, more posts in Japanese and this fantastic series of images of the conference dinner from the Czech KlíštÄ›cí Å¡uplátko photo blog. We know our language skills can’t match up to the incredible diversity of languages spoken by OR2012 delegates so we would really you to let us know if we’ve missed any of the write ups, reports, or reflections shared, particularly if they have been shared in another language.

As we have shared a number of write ups that draw on major conference themes it seems appropriate to close this post with the video of Peter Burnhill of EDINA delivering the closing session this year and wrapping everything up. It’s worth re-watching and, like all of the OR2012 videos, you can watch, share and comment on this on YouTube:

Click here to view the embedded video.

And finally….

We have several OR2012 conference bags left to give away. These are the perfect size for a laptop and papers which makes them fantastic for meetings but they are also great for looking stylish and well-travelled around the office or for transporting your craft kit to coffee shops and meet ups. We will be posting these remaining bags out with a few bonus edible Scottish treats so make sure you comment here or tweet with #or2012bags quickly to make sure you secure one of our last three remaining bags!

Where to find even more highlights…

  • Images can be found on Flickr, Highlights are gathered on our Pinterest board.
  • We have several gatherings of useful links which you can find on Delicious: write ups (blog posts, reports, etc.) of OR2012, useful resources shared in presentations and via Twitter, and OR2012 presentations.
  • Videos are on YouTube.
  • We have gathered tweets with Storify for browsing and exploring (please note this archive is updated once a week).
  • If you want to analyse or browse the text of all tweets you can access the full spreadsheet containing thousands of #OR2012 tweets on Google Docs. Please ignore colour codings – these are being used to remove unwanted content (tweets intended for other hashtags) and to ensure we capture all links to useful resources shared.

A quietly amplified summer

You may be wondering what I’ve been up to for the last few months as things have been rather quiet here on the blog. I thought it was time to post something brief on recent activities ahead of a longer post to come soon…

June saw the Digimap GeoForum in York and I was in full social media amplification mode liveblogging, tweeting and shooting a timelapse of the event. Read through the whole event here on the Digimap blog.

Click here to view the embedded video.

My book chapter on “Support for users within an educational or e-learning context” in the volume ”User Studies for Digital Library Development” (Editors Milena Dobreva, Andy O’Dwyer and Pierluigi Feliciati) was also published in late June. Click through to the Facet site or on Amazon to secure your copy!

There was a brief excursion to London for one of the Guardian Seminars on Social Media from Jennifer Begg – I would recommend these particularly to those who have been using social media for a while but are not yet tackling it strategically.  Jennifer even managed to introduce me to an excellent web app that I’d never heard of: Bufferapp is a fantastic webapp and Chrome plugin that enables you to queue up tweets in advance – a more reliable alternative to FutureTweets or a cheaper and more user-friendly alternative to HootSuite. In exchange I shared my adoration of If This Then That (which has recently added some really useful new channels and options around sharing “recipes” for tasks) which inspired a blogpost from Jennifer that’s well worth a read if you want to get started with IFTTT.

And so to July…

This month I have mainly been preparing, with help from my fantastic student Zack, for the Open Repositories 2012 Conference. This is an international event and this year it attracted over 460 delegates from 34 countries. I was part of the Host Organising Committee and led the amplification of the event via videoing sessions, liveblogging, tweets, photography, managing a Flickr group and a conference CrowdVine presence, use of tools like Pinterest etc. It was a fantastic experience of social media amplification at huge scale – we had over 4000 tweets to the conference hashtag during the event for instance – and I’m just now working out what to analyse further, write up, reflect upon, etc. Look out for a fuller blogpost soon. In the meantime you can explore the Open Repositories 2012 website to find all of the content created thus far.

And now? Well in addition to all the day to day EDINA social media stuff I am preparing my module on Social Media for the forthcoming MSc in Science Communication and Public Engagement – there are still spaces left so do take a look at the website and consider applying for what will be a fantastic masters programme!

And finally… I have also been completing my MSc in eLearning Dissertation on CPD in Collaborative Social Media Spaces. Once submitted I will share a copy here as many of you were kind enough to complete my research questionnaire some months back.

 

 

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Highlights (so far)

OR2012 has wrapped up, tweets are now just slowly fluttering in, and blog posts are popping up like new database entries in springtime. We wanted to gather together a sampling of the best stuff we’ve come across since last week and put it all in plain sight. We know you guys eat broken links and buried content for breakfast, but we figured this could be your pre-meal cup of coffee. …or something. Anyway, here’s what we’ve got.

Keita Bando was active throughout the conference. Here's a shot taken at the drinks and poster session. Click through to see the rest of Keita's lovely photos

Natasha Simons was one of our volunteer bloggers, and she did a fantastic job of it. Mixing summary, analysis, and flair into each post makes each and every one a pleasure to read. Here’s one on arriving in Edinburgh and hearing about the ‘Building a National Network’ workshop, one on conference day 2 (and haggis balls), and one with a sporran full of identifiers chat.

Rob Hilliker immortalized some of the software archiving workshop whiteboard notes for us. Linked to his Twitter post, which leads to a few more pictures and his epic stream of OR2012 tweets

Nick Sheppard, another of our volunteer bloggers, wrote up his reflections of the first two days of the conference on the train ride home. He was keen to write it, and you should be keen to read it. Trust us.

Owen Stephens put together some notes and commentary on repository services, and especially on ResourceSync for folks that are into that sort of thing.

We’re also pleased that discussing the Anthologizr project inspired an Edinburgh University MSc student to focus on that work for his e-Learning dissertation.

An amazing bit of #OR2012 activity analytics by Martin Hawkseye using Carrot2. Click through for full details on how it was made.

The JISC MRD folks took superb notes about the session on institutional perspectives in research data management and infrastructure.

Brian Kelly weighed in on Cameron Neylon’s opening plenary and the significance of connectedness, with particular focus on social media platforms. His site is always worth a browse, so keep tabs on it. View the plenary below.

The DevCSI developer challenge was quite a lively segment of the conference, no matter which side of the mic you were on. Stuart Lewis drummed up excitement about the collaboration between developers and managers that the challenge aimed for this year, and the result was more than we could hope for. The number of submissions was higher than ever. Check out the competition show and tell and read about the winners.

A mockup of Clang! It was the runner-up project in the DevCSI developer challenge. Click through for a post about the idea

That’s what we’ve gathered so far, but it isn’t enough to do you all justice. That’s why we want you to comment, write in, tweet, and photograph everything you think we missed. We need slide decks, papers, pictures, and everything else. Speakers, if you haven’t passed on slides to session chairs, don’t be shy. And everybody else, drop us a line. We’ll be sure to include whatever you’ve got.

"Coder we can believe in." Click through for Adam Field's first tweet of the image

All this work isn’t just for the website. Everything we gather up will be going into a repository of open repository conference content. What can we say, we’re pretty single-minded when it comes to keeping it all open access for you lot. Get sending, and we’ll share more soon.

What to expect from OR2012 over the next few weeks

As the conference draws to a close we wanted to thank all of you that came along or followed the event online, and we wantnd to fill you in on what would be happening around the conference after the in-person part of Open Repositories 2012.

In the next few weeks we will be going through the over 4000 tweets and the fantastic photos, blog posts, presentations, conference materials and commentary that you have been producing throughout the conference and we’ll be summarising all that right here, linking to your blogs and reports, and highlighting where you can access all of the official conference content.

Here are eight ways to keep in touch:

  1. Fill in our survey – tell us what you liked, what we could have done better… we value all of your feedback on the event whether you were here in person or via reading our blogs, tweets, seeing videos etc: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/OR_2012
  2. Stick with us on Twitter – we will continue sharing blog posts, updates, and conference-related new via the #or2012 tag and the @OpenRepos2012 account. And you should start following the new @ORConference Twitter account which will keep you in touch with Open Repositories throughout the year! Remember to reply, comment, retweet!
  3. Blog with us – we did our best to liveblog from the parallel strands but we would love to hear what you thought of these and other sessions – did you go to or run a fantastic workshop? Was there something increadibly useful from the user group you’d like to see shared more widely? We would love your contributions to the blog or to hear about where you’ve been writing up the event – just drop us an email or leave a comment here!
  4. Keep an eye on the OR2012 YouTube channel – you will find over 40 videos of the parallel sessions (excluding P1A unfortunately, our AV team have been unable to correct a corrupt file of that recording) there already and Pecha Kucha sessions will be appearing over the next few weeks.
  5. Share your pictures – if you haven’t already joined our Flickr group please do get in touch – we’d love to see more of your pictures of the event!
  6. Pin with us! – We have begun the process of gathering our favourite images and videos from OR2012 on Pinterest. We would love to add your highlights, your favourite parts of the event so do let us know what you’d like to see appear!
  7. Connect on CrowdVine! Now that you’ve had a chance to meet and chat it’s a great time to use the OR2012 CrowdVine to stay in touch, make further connection, discuss your thoughts on the event. For instance there’s already a great thread on “highlights and things you’ll take home“.
  8. And finally… Look out for emails about Open Repositories 2013. If you’ve let us know your email address via the feedback form we’ll be in touch. You can also join the Open Repositories Google Group and stay in touch that way. Or you can simply drop us a note to or2012@ed.ac.uk and we’ll make sure we add you to our list for staying in touch.

We really enjoyed Open Repositories 2012 and really hope you did too!

Closing Session by Peter Burnhill

Today we are liveblogging from the OR2012 conference at George Square Lecture Theatre (GSLT), George Square, part of the University of Edinburgh. Find out more by looking at the full program.

If you are following the event online please add your comment to this post or use the #or2012 hashtag.

This is a liveblog so there may be typos, spelling issues and errors. Please do let us know if you spot a correction and we will be happy to update the post.

Kevin: I am delighted to introduce my colleague Peter Burnhill, Director of EDINA and Head of the Edinburgh University Data Library, who will be giving the conference summing up.
Peter: When I was asked to do this I realised I was doing the Clifford Lynch slot here! So… I am going to show you a Wordle. Our theme for this years conference was Local In for Global Out… I’m not sure if we did that but here is the summing up of all of the tweets from the event. Happily we see Data, open, repositories and challange are all prominent here. But Data is the big arrival. Data is now mainstream. If we look back on previous events we’ve heard about services around repositories… we got a bit obsessed with research articles, in the UK because of the REF, but data is important and great to see it being prominent. And we see jiscmrd here so Simon will be pleased he did come on his crutches [he has broken his leg].
I have to confess that I haven’t been part of the organising committee but my colleagues have. We had over 460 register from over 40 different nations so do all go to PEI. Edinburgh is a beautiful city but when you got here is was rather damp but it’s nicer now – go see those things. Edinburgh is a bit of a repository itself – we have David Hume, Peter Higgs and Harry Potter to boast – and that fits with local in for global out as I’m sure you’ve heard of two of them. And I’ve like to than John Howard, chair of the OR Steering Committe and our Host Organising Committee
Our opening keynote Cameron Neylon talked about repositories beyond academic walls and the idea of using them for turning good research outputs into good research outcomes. We are motivated to make sure we have secure access to content… as part of a more general rumbling with workshops before the formal start there was this notion of disruption. Not only the Digital Economy but also a sense of not being passive about that. We need to take command of the scholarly communication area that is our job – that cry to action from Cameron and we should heed that.
And there was talk of citation… LinkedIn, Academia.edu etc. is all about linking back to research to data. And that means having reliable identifiers. And trust is a key part of that. Publishers have trust, if repositories are to step up to that trust level you have to be sure that when you access that repository you get what it says it is. As a researcher you don’t use data without knowing what it is and where it came from. The respoitory world needs to think about that notion of assurance, not quality assurance exactly. And also that object may be interrogatable to say what it is and really help you reproduce that object.
Preservation and Provenance is also crucial,
Disaster recovery is also important.. When you fail, and you will, you need to know how you cope, really interesting to see this picked up in a number of sessions too.
I won’t  summarise everything but there were some themes…
We are beginning to deal with the idea on registries and how those can be leveaged for linking resources and identifiers. I don’t think solutions were found exactly but the conversations were very valuable.And we need to think about connectivity, as flagged by Cameron. And these places l,e twitter and Facebook… WE don’t own them but we need to be I them, to make sure that citations come back to us from here.And finally, we have been running a thing called repository fringe for the last four years, and then we won the big One. But we had a little trepidation as There afe a lot lf hou! And we had an uncondference strand. Ad i can say that UoE intends to do repository fringe in 2013.

We hope you enjoyed that unconference strand – an addition to complement the open repositories, not to take away from it but to add an extra flavour. We hope that the PEI folk will keep a bit f that flavour at OR and we will be running the fringe a wee bit later in the year, nearer the edinburgh fringe.

As I finish up I wanted to mention an organisation in IASSIST, librarians used to be about the demand side of services but things have shifted over time. We would encourage that those of us here lik up to groups like IASSIST (and we will suggest the same to them) and we can finds way to connect up, to commune together at PEI and to kshare experience. And so finally I think this is about the notion of connectivity. We have the technology, we have the opportunity to connect up more to our colleagues!

And with that I shall finish up!

Begin with an apology….

We seem to have the builders in. We have a small event coming up… The biggest festival in the world… Bt we didn’t realise that the builders would move in about the same week as you….what you haven’t seen yet is out 60x40ft upside down purple cow… If you are here a bit longer you may see it! We hope you enjoyed your time nonetheless

It’s a worrying thing hosting a conference like this… Lke hosting a party you worry if anyone will show up. But the feedback seems to have been good and and I have many thank yous. Firstly to all of those who reviewed papers. To our sponsors. To the staff here – catering, edinburgh first,nthe tech staff. Bt particularly to my colleagues on the local Host Orgnaising Committee: Stuart Macdonald, William Nixon, james toon,  andrew bevan – most persuasive committee member getting our sponsors on board, saly Macgregor, nicola osborne who has led our social media activity, and to Florance Kennedy, who has been using her experience of wrangling 1000 developers at FLOc a few years ago.

The Measure of success for any event like this is about the quality of conversation, of collaboration, of idea sharing, and that seems to have worked well and we’ve really enjoyed having you here. The conference doesn’t end now of course but changes shape.. And so we move onto the user groups!