Project Plan Post 5 of 7: Project Team Relationships and End User Engagement

John Paschoud will manage the project and coordinate liaison with stakeholders (including end-users) and dissemination. John is also currently managing the JISC-funded Identity Management Toolkit Project. He has over ten years of experience in managing projects funded by JISC and other agencies, including the HeadLine Project.

Dr Simon McLeish will act as Software Developer for the project.

Simon has extensive experience of open source software development

and use of the technologies required by this project.

Staff from the LSE Library IT Support Team will assist in integration with existing LMS and location data. Staff from other sections of the LSE Library will assist in collating and checking new location data and layout maps of the Library building. Library helpdesk staff will assist with recruiting test end-users, and with directing users to the Locator service.

Project Plan Post 4 of 7: IPR (Creative Commons Use & Open Source Software License)

All material on this blog and other documentary outputs of the project are the property of the contributing authors and are licensed under this Creative Commons Licence except where otherwise noted.

Software outputs are licensed under the GNU General Public License version 3.

Outputs from the project will be  copyright 2010.

Project Plan Post 3 of 7: Risk Analysis and Success Plan

Risk	Probability (1-5)	Severity (1-5)	Score (P x S)	Action to Reduce/Manage Risk
Staffing: Loss of key project staff	2	3	6	Ensure technical implementation and design are well-documented so that alternative staff can take over.
Technical: Failure of hardware or supporting software	1	3	3	Use of operationally hosted/managed servers and replaceable virtual server hosting where possible; maintain good communication with staff managing servers.
Legal: IPR	1	1	1	No IPR difficulties are anticipated as the project is undertaking technical development based on code written and owned by the LSE Project Team and already covered by Creative Commons license.
Organisational: Difficulty in recruiting sufficient numbers to join test user panels	2	4	8	Local staff with existing relationships with potential user panel members are engaged with the project. Budget allows for some incentives for participation.
Organisational: User testing is held up by unpredicted delays in technical development	1	5	5	First stages of user testing are on concepts/language only. Subsequent stages are dependent only on implementation of HTML 'controls' - not fully functioning webservices.
Technical: tools fail to provide minimum required functionality	1	5	5	Development entirely in-house with no external dependencies; Development work will be organised to be as incremental as possible
Technical: tools developed prove impossible to integrate with other services	1	5	5	The design of the tools developed will use standards and mechanisms already proven to integrate with a wide variety of services

 

Project Plan Post 2 of 7: Wider Benefits to Sector & Achievements for Host Institution

Benefits for the University Sector

Most universities will have complex holdings in their libraries, and library users often find it hard to understand cataloguing systems. So there is a general need for software which can help to find hardcopy materials as well as electronic resources. Several libraries have set up their own locator systems, of varying degrees of sophistication and ease of use: examples include Brunel (which maps to the shelf location) and Cambridge (which maps to the room). Others do not do so; a informal random search of five university libraries picked up only these two having interactive maps at all. The JISC funded HeadLine project found that shelf mark locations were the second most common query at library help desks in 1998. In the absence of more recent data, this seems likely still to be true and so provide a driver for improved discovery tools for books and paper journals which this locator would fulfil.

The tool to be developed by this project should satisfy this need. It should be easy to install and manage, and should, through its simple RESTful interface, be easy to integrate into a range of other tools, including LMS and VLE software.

Benefits for the LSE

The LSE library already has a system in place for showing the location of books found through the library catalogue, originally developed as part of the JISC funded HeadLine project in the late 1990s. However, there are distinct benefits associated with a re-write:

• The code now very old and because of multiple iterations becoming difficult to maintain.
• The locator was designed to work with the LMS OPAC and would need to be revised if linking in directly with VLE or supplying location maps suitable to formats requiring less than a full PC display (widgets within social spaces as well as portable devices).
• It is tightly tied into specific LMS software and will have to be reworked if the system used at the LSE changes.
• It does not work for all items in the catalogue (e.g. books which share the same classmark but are shelved separately.
• The administrative interface is cryptic and very basic: it is maintained by IT staff rather than cataloguers despite the data itself being catalogue related.

Project Plan Post 1 of 7: Aims, Objectives and Final Output(s) of the project

Aims

The principal aim of the project is to produce software which is:

1. Functionally capable of returning a map graphic with the location of an object from a library catalogue marked on it (or appropriate error message) on query via a RESTful interface;
2. Conceptually capable of being re-used by other members of the HE community, not tied in any way to the specific complexities of the LSE's cataloguing and shelving;
3. Technically capable of being re-used by other members of the HE community: well documented, tested, and easy to set up and administer;
4. Using open standards and providing a (documented) RESTful interface to enable re-use in other contexts than a library catalogue;
5. Freely available as open source re-usable software.

Objectives

Satisfying the following objectives should make it possible to realise the above principal aim.

• To understand and meet user/administrator requirements from a locator service at the LSE.
• To understand and cater for the complexities of shelving and cataloguing at the LSE.
• To ensure sufficient flexibility to make the application usable outside the LSE.
• To produce documentation which is clear to potential deployers and administrators.

These objectives will inform the design, testing and packaging of the locator service, on the assumption that most of the complexities of any HE academic library's shelving can be modelled from that of the LSE. In one important aspect, this is not quite true, in that the LSE has a single library on a single campus, but when this limitation is taken into account in the data model design, it should result in one which is transferrable elsewhere in the UK. The model itself will be available for scrutiny, of course, and librarians from other institutions than the LSE will be specifically invited to comment.