Institutional innovation: synthesis of programme outcomes

Report of the work of the Projects funded by the JISC Institutional change/innovation Programme 2008-2010. Report produced by the Synthesis and Benefits Realisation Team linked to the Programme

Meeting users where they are: Delivering dynamic content and services through a campus portal

Campus portals are one of the most visible and frequently used online spaces for students, offering one-stop access to key services for learning and academic self-management. This case study reports how instruction librarians at the University of Vermont collaborated with portal developers in the registrar’s office to develop high-impact, point-of-need content for a dedicated “Library” page. This content was then created in LibGuides and published using the Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) for LibGuides boxes. Initial usage data and analytics show that traffic to the libraries’ portal page has been substantially and consistently higher than expected. The next phase for the project will be the creation of customized library content that is responsive to the student’s user profile

The evolving landscape of learning technology

This paper provides an overview of the current and emerging issues in learning technology research, concentrating on structural issues such as infrastructure, policy and organizational context. It updates the vision of technology outlined by Squires’ (1999) concept of peripatetic electronic teachers (PETs) where Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) provide an enabling medium to allow teachers to act as freelance agents in a virtual world and reflects to what extent this vision has been realized The paper begins with a survey of some of the key areas of ICT development and provides a contextualizing framework for the area in terms of external agendas and policy drivers. It then focuses upon learning technology developments which have occurred in the last five years in the UK and offers a number of alternative taxonomies to describe this. The paper concludes with a discussion of the issues which arise from this work

Organizing for Higher Performance: Case Studies of Organized Delivery Systems

Offers lessons learned from healthcare delivery systems promoting the attributes of an ideal model as defined by the Fund: information continuity, care coordination and transitions, system accountability, teamwork, continuous innovation, and easy access

A survey of UK university web management: staffing, systems and issues

Purpose: The purpose of the paper is to summarize the findings of a survey of UK universities about how their web site is managed and resourced, which technologies are in use and what are seen as the main issues and priorities. Methodology/approach: The paper is based on a web based questionnaire distributed in summer 2006, and which received 104 usable responses from 87 insitutions. Findings: The survey showed that some web teams were based in IT and some in external relations, yet in both cases the site typically served internal and external audiences. The role of web manager is partly management of resources, time and people, partly about marketing and liaison and partly also concerned with more technical aspects including interface design and HTML. But it is a diverse role with a wide spread of responsibilities. On the whole web teams were relatively small. Three quarters of responding institutions had a CMS, but specific systems in use were diverse. 60% had a portal. There was evidence of increasing use of blogs and wikis. The key driver for the web site is student recruitment, with instituitional reputation and information to stakeholders also being important. The biggest perceived weaknesses were maintaining consistency with devolved content creation and currency of content; lack of resourcing a key threat while comprehensiveness was a key strength. Current and wished for projects pointed again to the diversity of the sector. Research implications/limitations: The lack of comparative data and difficulties of interpreting responses to closed questions where respondents could have quite different status (partly reflecting divergent patterns of governance of the web across the sector) create issues with the reliability of the research. Practical implications: Data about resourcing of web management, technology in use etc at comparable institutions is invaluable for practitioners in their efforts to gain resource in their own context. Originality/value of paper: The paper adds more systematic, current data to our limited knowledge about how university web sites are managed

Social Policy Resources for Social Work: Grey Literature and the Internet

Accreditation standards for professional schools offering social work degrees mandate curriculum content that provides students with skills to analyze, formulate, and influence social policies. An important source of analytical thinking about social policy is the “grey” literature issued by public policy organizations, think tanks, university-based research institutions, professional organizations, etc., that is increasingly available via the Internet. This research surveys library social work subject pages for content and links related to the social policy grey literature. A coding scheme was developed that counted the number of paths to relevant grey literature from the libraries’ subject guides. The results of the study suggest that there is a great deal of variance across institutions in how much help they provide users. Libraries must do a better job guiding users to the policy organizations that produce reports, briefs, newsletters, etc., that are important to social policy problem solving and implementation

1st INCF Workshop on Sustainability of Neuroscience Databases

The goal of the workshop was to discuss issues related to the sustainability of neuroscience databases, identify problems and propose solutions, and formulate recommendations to the INCF. The report summarizes the discussions of invited participants from the neuroinformatics community as well as from other disciplines where sustainability issues have already been approached. The recommendations for the INCF involve rating, ranking, and supporting database sustainability

Health information quality of websites on periodontology

Aim: This study aimed to assess the quality of the information available on the Web on gum disease. Methods: The term ‘gum disease’ was searched in Google and in MedlinePlus. The first 200 websites were analysed by the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) criteria and the Health On the Net Foundation (HONCode) certification, instruments for assessing quality of health information. Data was analysed through the Mann-Whitney test or KruskalWallis test, followed by the Dunn’s test, using the GraphPad Prism Software version 6. Results: MedlinePlus presented a significantly higher JAMA score than Google. Google’s first ten results had a higher JAMA score than the remaining websites. Journalism and health portals are the most reliable affiliations, while commercial and dental practices had low JAMA scores. JAMA score was significantly higher in websites with the HONCode certification compared to the ones without it. Conclusion: There are current concerns regarding patients’ use of the Internet for accessing health information. However, the conclusion we can make is that Google seems to favour websites with high quality information, at least in terms of JAMA score or HONCode accreditation. The JAMA score of dental practices’ websites could be improved by providing basic information such as authorship and date