Concierge: Personal Database Software for Managing Digital Research Resources

This article introduces a desktop application, named Concierge, for managing personal digital research resources. Using simple operations, it enables storage of various types of files and indexes them based on content descriptions. A key feature of the software is a high level of extensibility. By installing optional plug-ins, users can customize and extend the usability of the software based on their needs. In this paper, we also introduce a few optional plug-ins: literature management, electronic laboratory notebook, and XooNlps client plug-ins. XooNIps is a content management system developed to share digital research resources among neuroscience communities. It has been adopted as the standard database system in Japanese neuroinformatics projects. Concierge, therefore, offers comprehensive support from management of personal digital research resources to their sharing in open-access neuroinformatics databases such as XooNIps. This interaction between personal and open-access neuroinformatics databases is expected to enhance the dissemination of digital research resources. Concierge is developed as an open source project; Mac OS X and Windows XP versions have been released at the official site (http://concierge.sourceforge.jp)

Adaptive Digital Resource Modeling as Service Provider and Consumer

International audienceThe increase in the production of heterogeneous and multi-source digital data over last years raises several issues regarding their management and use. Hence, users can face some difficulties in selecting the adequate digital resources and combining them to reach their objectives in a given activity. In this paper, we focus on digital resources design and management in order to enhance their retrieval, interoperability, adaptation and collaboration within an adaptive system. In practical terms, our work consists in a new method for digital resource design and management capable of enhancing their usability. It relies on RESTful web service-based methodology and platform thinking approach. We have implemented our method in an interactive and adaptive PLE to assist researchers in using and managing their digital resources, called PRISE for PeRsonal Interactive research Smart Environment. We have also undertaken some experiments with PRISE platform in our laboratory. The result showed that modeling digital resources with RESTful and platform thinking concept enhances digital resource usability in terms of retrieving, interoperability, adaptation and collaboration

Investigating how South African humanities researchers engage with digital archives

OBJECTIVE: Despite technological developments in the Digital Humanities space, it is unclear that the facilities offered by digital archives support the needs of Humanities researchers in developing countries. The purpose of this thesis is to investigate how South African Humanities scholars use digital archives in their research as well as in teaching and other academic activities. METHODS: This thesis utilizes non-random convenience sampling. A feature determination study provided the sampling frame, defined the scope for the survey tool, and was used to uncover trends in digital archives development in South Africa. A self-administered online survey was conducted with Humanities researchers in South Africa to answer the research question. The thesis utilises basic descriptive statistics in its attempt to study and interpret the responses of participating researchers. RESULTS: 102 participants responded to the online survey. Despite many South African digital archives having the functionality to discover, browse and search collections, they are missing the features for collaboration, accessing and managing resources. Only 20% of the survey respondents are satisfied with South African digital archives' process of making content easy to find and accessible, whereas 48% of the respondents consider themselves users of complex digital resources, 44% have the knowledge and experience for using Digital Humanities tools and services, and more than 70% find technology to be useful for learning and teaching. CONCLUSIONS: The usage of archives and their functionalities vary widely. Users have stronger preferences for tools that support basic discovery and personal and collaborative research, but many consider existing support for basic features to be inadequate. In terms of advanced functionalities for managing digital resources, users are interested in these to varying levels, but the inadequate support means that these are still somewhat speculative

Using the Memory Lab: Values, Impacts, and Discourses

Personal digital archiving is how individuals accumulate, organize, store, and preserve digital possessions in their personal lives. New initiatives like the Memory Lab at the DC Public Library increasingly bring DIY digital conversion and preservation practices into public spaces. In order to study the values and impacts of such services and the discourses they activate, I interviewed 13 library staff and patrons about their experiences with personal digital archiving resources at DCPL. Interviewees emphasized values and impacts such as access to resources and the library's role in supporting digital literacy, as well as obstacles to participation including the difficulty of learning new skills and technologies. A critical discourse analysis of one interview reveals additional discourses at play: personal digital archiving at the public library can be valued as a resource for managing (having power over) change, a means of re-situating identity, and a vehicle for (re)imagining the future. This research contributes to our understanding of the narratives and attitudes that shape emerging personal digital archiving practices

“Why bother?” Learner perceptions of digital literacy skills development - learning design implications

Digital literacy skills are essential for today’s citizens. These skills are expected for everyday personal use, learning and effective performance at work. The UK’s Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education (HE) and employers therefore require graduates to be able to demonstrate these skills. However, the cost of UK university education is rising substantially and cash- and time-poor learners must decide what to prioritise. In this context they may favour subject-specific learning rather than skills development. How therefore can we engage learners in developing their digital literacy? The UK’s Open University is a distance learning institution. Its Faculty of Health & Social Care (FH&SC) has evolved different approaches for digital literacy skills development using technology-enhanced learning, based on skills resources that are either generic (usable by any FH&SC module) or are context-dependent and module-specific. Our Evaluating Approaches to Developing Digital Literacy Skills (EADDLS) project is exploring learner experiences of digital literacy skills development to identify their needs and preferences, to inform how we can optimise learning designs to better engage and support learners. Furthermore, since skills activities are widely required across different programmes, there is keen interest in the pedagogical and resourcing implications of using generic activities, as opposed to module-specific activities that are more challenging to share and maintain. We therefore also explore the influence of design features such as generic or module-specific contexts. We gathered data from online questionnaires (n=298) and interviews (n=18) involving learners from three modules. Focusing on the qualitative interview data, we explore what learners value and why, including links between attitude, motivation, and preferred learning designs. We identify reasons for certain findings from our quantitative data, e.g. a preference for integrated, module-specific activities over separate, generic activities and suggest a framework for managing activity complexity based on familiarity with the skill and the context

Creating an Intentional Web Presence: Strategies for Every Educational Technology Professional

Recently, educators are pushing for students, specifically graduates, to be digitally literate in order to successfully read, write, contribute, and ultimately compete in the global market place. Educational technology professionals, as a unique type of learning professional, need to be not only digitally literate to lead and assist teachers and students toward this goal, but also model the digital fluency expected of an educational technology leader. Part of this digital fluency involves effectively managing one’s web presence. In this article, we argue that educational technology professionals need to practice what they preach by attending to their own web presence. We share strategies for crafting the components of a vibrant and dynamic professional web presence, such as creating a personal website, engaging in social networking, contributing and sharing resources/artifacts, and attending to search engine optimization (SEO)

Workshop: Tagging, Bookmarking and Scholarly References: How Web 2.0 Technologies Benefit the Student, Scholar and Researcher

A primary challenge for any student, scholar or researcher is organizing and managing the massive amount of content readily available in today’s digital world. Several attempts have been made to provide solutions to this problem but many have fallen short of expectations. For example, many of the reference management software programs such as EndNote or RefWorks, as licensed products, are designed to support individual researchers in managing personal reference collections. On the other hand, the Web, and in particular Web 2.0, represents an approach to an evolving use of the Internet as a dynamic, participatory and collaborative medium for finding, organizing, managing, and sharing sources of information. This workshop introduces the use of user-defined tagging and social bookmarking within the context of an online freely available resource (CiteULike) for managing and sharing scholarly sources of information. These Web 2.0 technologies were introduced and implemented in an interdisciplinary NSF funded project focused on teaching students to effectively assess web site validity, engage in collaborative sharing and organization of scientific literature, and utilize technologies they were familiar with, social bookmarking and tagging, to research a scientific question and synthesize their findings. The benefits of sharing scholarly resources to facilitate collaborative work were demonstrated through this project

CRATE: A Simple Model for Self-Describing Web Resources

If not for the Internet Archive’s efforts to store periodic snapshots of the web, many sites would not have any preservation prospects at all. The barrier to entry is too high for everyday web sites, which may have skilled webmasters managing them, but which lack skilled archivists to preserve them. Digital preservation is not easy. One problem is the complexity of preservation models, which have specific meta-data and structural requirements. Another problem is the time and effort it takes to properly prepare digital resources for preservation in the chosen model. In this paper, we propose a simple preservation model called a CRATE, a complex-object consisting of undifferentiated metadata and the resource byte stream. We describe the CRATE complex object and compare it with other complex-object models. Our target is the everyday, personal, departmental, or community web site where a long-term preservation strategy does not yet exist

Generating collaborative systems for digital libraries: A model-driven approach

This is an open access article shared under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/). Copyright @ 2010 The Authors.The design and development of a digital library involves different stakeholders, such as: information architects, librarians, and domain experts, who need to agree on a common language to describe, discuss, and negotiate the services the library has to offer. To this end, high-level, language-neutral models have to be devised. Metamodeling techniques favor the definition of domainspecific visual languages through which stakeholders can share their views and directly manipulate representations of the domain entities. This paper describes CRADLE (Cooperative-Relational Approach to Digital Library Environments), a metamodel-based framework and visual language for the definition of notions and services related to the development of digital libraries. A collection of tools allows the automatic generation of several services, defined with the CRADLE visual language, and of the graphical user interfaces providing access to them for the final user. The effectiveness of the approach is illustrated by presenting digital libraries generated with CRADLE, while the CRADLE environment has been evaluated by using the cognitive dimensions framework