Digitisation at the British Library

News from the ELKS community website:

Bringing the world’s knowledge into the digital age

Introduction to the seminar:

The British Library is one of the great research libraries of the world, holding over 150 million items in all the common languages and formats of the world. The advent of the Internet and the ability to digitise large quantities of text and images and make them available over the Web has transformed ways of working in research and learning. For almost two decades, the British Library has undertaken a number of focused digitisation initiatives. More recently, we have entered the world of mass digitisation of newspapers and books. Using the experience gained from digitising 25 million pages of books and 4 million pages of newspapers dating from the early 17th century, the approach, challenges and lessons learnt will be presented. Strong partnerships with higher education institutions have ensured the resultant resources met pedagogical needs, the current approaches and possible future trends will be presented.

About the speaker – Mr Aly Conteh, Digitisation Programme Manager, British Library.

Aly Conteh is the Digitisation Programme Manager at the British Library, a post he took up in April 2003. He is responsible for the development and implementation of the policies, workflows and standards which govern digitisation of items from the Library’s vast collections. He has been involved in many digitisation projects at the British Library including projects to digitise 25 million pages of 19th Century books and 4 million pages of pre-1900 newspapers and hundreds of manuscript volumes. He serves on the Executive Board for the IMPACT project a large-scale integrating project funded by the European Commission as part of the Seventh Framework Programme (FP7). He is as a member of the European Commission’s Member States’ Expert Group on Digitisation and Digital Preservation.

Click here to watch the recording of the seminar: https://connect.le.ac.uk/p28002466/

Gabi Witthaus

Award-winning OTTERs

Yes that is indeed correct: you are reading the blog of the award-winning OTTER team. Admittedly the prize was a box of chocolates but it was a prize nonetheless. What exactly did we win this award for? Well for having the winning entry in the virtual poster competition that was run by JISC as part of the OER Interim Meeting on the 20th October. You can view all the other competitors alongside our winning entry here: http://www.slideshare.net/heather_jisc/oer-project-posters-201009-compress2-2229165

I’ll stop bragging about the award-winning OTTERs now and talk about the poster in more detail. We wanted something that would stand out and that would be memorable so we took a more humorous approach by choosing to include representations of ourselves in the poster. We’re each being asked a key question by a panic stricken lecturer struggling to juggle all her commitments alongside being asked to make their resources open. The questions are answered by the relevant OTTER expert who provides the detail required in a clear concise manner.

The poster also provides an opportunity to welcome the two newest OTTER members: myself and Richard Mobbs. We’re both working as Learning Technologists for the team. It’s also, with regret, a farewell to a former OTTER, Simon Kear, who is now our resident Zookeeper.

The OTTER team are always available to answer any questions you might have on OTTER and OERs, please feel free to contact us or leave a comment in the blog.

Emma Davies
Learning Technologist

OTTER dissemination seminar

Yesterday was an exciting day for the OTTER team as we held our first official dissemination event.

The audience from Leicester were accompanied by attendees from JISC and Jorum, and all listened to us give an introduction to the types of OERs we were aiming to produce, the technical considerations we had to take into account, a rousing run through of OER FAQs (thank you, Sahm), as well as an update on the copyright and IPR issues we have encountered/tackled to date.

PowerPoint slides from the presentations can be viewed here.

We were also honoured to have Tina Wilson from the Open University as our guest speaker. It was great to hear from someone at the institution who introduced the UK to OERs on a grand scale via OpenLearn.  She talked about a range of projects run by the OU, ending with their most recent – SCORE – which aims to provide support for other UK OER projects.

Integrated into the programme were two question-and-answer sessions, and the audience had clearly been listening as they came up with some tough questions for us all.

The feedback received so far has been good, and we hope to be able to deliver an update at our next dissemination event (date tbc – watch this space!).

Tania Rowlett

Copyright Officer

OTTER-SAIDE partnership

Today Ale and I had an online meeting with Jenny Glennie and Tessa Welch (Director and Programme Specialist respectively) of SAIDE, the South African Institute for Distance Education. The purpose was to explore the possibility of collaborating on the publication of an open educational resource, ‘Supporting Distance Learning’, produced by SAIDE, and making it available as an OTTER OER. We very quickly arrived at agreement on this goal, and spent the rest of the meeting discussing the details of licensing, branding, and actually ‘OTTER-ising’ the materials. The resource is currently on a temporary site and will soon be located on the OERAfrica repository.

The original book, published in 1998

I should perhaps state my personal interest in this particular OER. The website, ‘Supporting Distance Learners’, is the updated version of a book by the same name published by SAIDE in 1998, both of which I had a hand in writing. The earlier version, which was co-authored with Suzanne Smythe, was written before online education had taken off in South Africa, and was largely a manual for tutors on how to support their learners in a traditional ‘correspondence’ type of setting, with occasional face-to-face tutorials. The current, web-based version is a completely different beast, and is aimed at helping tutors get to grips with the online tools at their disposal to provide effective support for their learners.

This is not the first OTTER OER to have been produced by a Leicester staff member while under contract to another institution – for example, we have just received IPR clearance from the University of Southampton for the inclusion of a great resource on phonology and phonetics written by Pam Rogerson-Revell from the School of Education at Leicester. However, it is OTTER’s first international partnership.

The benefit to the University of Leicester is that this resource will complement several others in the OTTER collection that are aimed at educators working in an online environment. It will also increase our ability to share knowledge (both ways) with the educator community in developing countries, which is a major aspect of the OTTER vision.

The benefits to SAIDE are: a potentially increased target audience for the resource, as well as the opportunity for the materials to undergo a rigorous evaluation by the OTTER team – they will be checked for pedagogical quality, for IPR/copyright issues, and for any formatting glitches. (And considering that I’m not a disinterested party, this prospect is somewhat scary to me… Please go easy, Sahm, Tania and Simon!)

I’m delighted to have brought two of my favourite work families together in this partnership, and thoroughly looking forward to the SAIDE-OTTER collaboration.

Gabi Witthaus

OTTERs in BERLiN

Last week, we from the OTTER team made a working visit to the BERLiN project in Nottingham. The purpose of our visit was to explore with the BERLiN team issues of common interest and concern around OERs.

We also wanted to use the opportunity to learn more about the U-Now, Xpert, and Xertes platforms and discuss our role in the forthcoming Open Learning conference being planned by the BERLiN team for November 2009. Another focus of our meeting was FAQs on OERs.

The meeting was very fruitful and we came away with a sense of reassurance about our individual projects. Whilst there were many similarities of approach we also found some differences.

Key issues	OTTER	BERLiN
Subject disciplines	Nine subject disciplines across the University of Leicester	Small representation of OERs from all 32 Schools of the University
Credit weighting	Notional measurement of credit weighting	Use of “module framework” to measure credits
Transformation of materials	Use of the CORRE framework for gathering, enhancing and validating OERs	An ongoing conversation approach between the academics and the BERLiN team.
Validation of OERs	Internal validation of OERs with UoL partners, students followed by external validation with other educator and students outside of the university	Validation of OER through an editorial board made up of a PVC, Director of teaching and learning, head of Elearning and other academics
Copyright	Use of blanket CC license – Copy-distribute-share alike.	Use of blanket CC license for U-Now OERs and variable licenses for materials on Xpert
Academic engagement	Use of subject teams to sell and promote the OTTER project	Use of academic to academic contact and email communication. Also the VC is doing a podcast to endorse the OER programme.
Reward and recognition	Individual biographical information on all the OERs	Individual biographical information and also promotion of the social responsibility angle of OERs
External links	Links with SAIDE	Partnership with OER Africa

We plan to make other working visits to other UK OER programmes in the next coming weeks. Stay tuned for more OER lessons learnt.

Samuel Nikoi

CORRE: A framework for transforming teaching materials into OERS

We have been developing further the detailed CORRE framework, and thought it might be useful to post it in summary form for comments (click on the image for a larger version):

Samuel Nikoi

Increasing institutional web presence: the OER impact factor

Last month webometrics, which ranks world universities based on global performance and web visibility, was published. The ranking has been published twice each year since 2004 and covers over 17,000 higher educational institutions worldwide.

The ranking, which measures visibility of HE institution, has as one of its main objectives the motivation of institutions and scholars to have a web presence that accurately reflects their activities, especially those related to the processes of generating and communicating scientific knowledge.

The methodology used by webometrics for arriving at a web impact factor (WIF), and hence a rank, include

• link analysis (i.e. the number of external in-links)
• the number of pages of a website
• the number of documents from rich files in a web domain
• the number of publications collected through Google Scholar database.

Not too surprisingly, MIT came first in the world ranking and this has been directly linked to its huge OpencourseWare programme. UK universities that featured in the top 100 include Cambridge, Oxford, The Open University, Nottingham and Leeds, all of which have vibrant open educational resource (OER) programmes. The same reason, i.e. open access initiative, is reported to account for the improved performance in the league table of other European universities in Norway, Spain and Portugal.

Whilst the methodology for generating data for ranking the Universities can be queried, the fact cannot be ignored that institutional open access policy initiatives, aimed at promoting and increasing the volume and quality of electronic publications of an institution, is an important factor in web visibility and hence contributes to the perceived quality of education and academic prestige of that institution.

We are encouraged by such news to press on with OTTER. Hopefully, the University of Leicester, which currently is ranked 383, will improve its rating in future webometrics.

Samuel Nikoi

OER Evaluator

OERs save time for learning designers

This morning I spoke at the National Association of Distance Education and Open Learning in South Africa (NADEOSA) annual conference. In my presentation, I looked at the landscape for open and distance learning in the 21st century, with a particular focus on the issues for developing countries in terms of resources, connectivity, etc. (As if to drive home the point, the Skype connection between Leicester and Pretoria kept dropping!)

One of the ‘threads’ in the tapestry I described was Open Educational Resources, which I believe can enable educators to produce high quality teaching materials both cost-effectively and within reasonable time frames. The audience picked up on this point in the Q&A session:  the importance of critically reviewing OERs before using them was noted, and some concern was expressed about the time involved in finding suitable OERs and modifying them for the context in which you teach.

Tony Mays from SAIDE/UNISA then made a great point: he described two studies that had been carried out in different parts of Africa. These studies found that, whereas designing learning materials from scratch took an average of 100 hours per notional learning hour, sourcing and modifying OERs took only 40-60 hours. Still time-consuming, but a significant saving.

Does anyone know of other studies to this effect?

Gabi Witthaus

Links or files: further

Nick at Unicycle raises an interesting point about whether to upload to JorumOpen only links if the resources already exist online.

I remember this was also raised at the startup meeting in June.

Here at OTTER we’re going to upload both links and resources. One of our OER partners  at Leicester is the Virtual Genetics Education Centre in the Department of Genetics. VGEC already have a superb collection of OERs hosted by themselves.

OTTER will be taking a selection of these OERs and running them through Sahm’s workflow process. Some of them will change as a result. For example, OTTER will make some of the VGEC videos available as downloadable mp4 chunks to be viewed on an iPod/iPhone.   

As an example, watch the video on Using a micropipette. Being able to refer to this video, or parts of it, on a handheld device in the lab would seem to make it a very useful resource.

So we intend to upload both the VGEC link to the full video plus the various files we produce (which will also include the full video). Visitors to JorumOpen can decide which resource best fits their needs. (Of course, we’ll also replicate this on our Plone site.)

VGEC, who are already producing some excellent OERs, came on board for a number of reasons. However, two important ones were accessing JorumOpen and having other pairs of eyes run over the existing material.

It’s considerably more work to upload files as well as links, but the benefits to the user are considerable, especially in terms of untethering and re-purposing. 

It may not always be feasible and worthwhile for all OERs (i.e. a link may be the best option), but setting out with the idea of  providing both the files and the link  to JorumOpen seems the best starting point, and our experience thus far is bearing this out.

I’d be interested to hear what others think.

Simon

Learning Technologist

OTTER in August and September

I’ve just returned from a week’s leave, during which my fellow OTTERs have been as busy as usual.

Ale and I had a successful meeting this morning with the Department of Media  and Communication here at UoL to bring them on-board as additional OER partners. In fact, we’ve had to put a moratorium on further partner recruitment simply to allow us time to process (or OTTERise) the excellent materials we already have.

We’ve also had our first planning meeting for our internal dissemination event, scheduled for late September. Each of us will outline our individual roles to the delegates. We will also have a number of OERs in various formats and from a range of subjects to display.

We anticipate that this afternoon event will have two main functions: first, to explain the reasoning behind OERs and thereby (hopefully) allay the fears of academics who may, at present, be unconvinced; and second, to showcase the work of the OTTER project.

Further down the road, we’re hoping to meet up with our partner projects, perhaps by holding joint events, and certainly some of us will be taking up Steve’s offer to attend Nottingham’s OER conference later this year.  Apart from the other benefits, this would be an excellent opportunity to listen to representatives of OER Africa.

So plenty happening, as always. And looking forward to seeing everyone on the metadata 2nd Tuesday event today!

Simon Kear