JISClms Programme Meeting 7-8 September 2010, Glasgow University

Before attending

I was reluctant to attend the meeting, because it seemed to be too much: two full days for two of us, when the project itself lasts only six months and doesn't employ either of us involved in it full time. And we don't really fit into the groups suggested for discussion. John, being a busy local councillor, was unable to attend, but even so it seemed like a lot of time, particularly as Glasgow is not a convenient place to go from Cambridge where I am based, and as it clashed with the time I usually take my holidays. And I hate conferences, anyway. Like training sessions, they don't usually offer much beyond poorly organised presentations and certainly are no substitute for the material available on the Internet. So perhaps I attended determined to feel that it wasn't worth the effort.

I don't object to Glasgow as a venue, particularly. Having worked in Northern Ireland, I know that those who are involved in JISC projects from those parts of the UK distant from London face frequent and distant travel: in eighteen months based in Coleraine, I flew to England nine times. So it does seem only fair that occasional meetings should redress the balance somewhat by being held outside London and the south east of England. Even with decent bandwidth, JANET and Skype videoconferencing are no substitute for an actual meeting, either; but perhaps the future should be about virtual conferences, either using video or in virtual worlds such as Second Life.

Day 1

Each project was asked to provide a single powerpoint, as the basis for a three minute presentation as could be made to senior management. It was useful to see these, though I could have picked up more by looking at the project websites/blogs. (But I might not have done so if I hadn't been forced to sit through them!) It was a pity I couldn't get the WIFI to work - my netbook is short of space, so I hadn't installed Java, needed to run the applet which allows authentication to the Glasgow University guest network. Why wasn't there any support for Eduroam at the meeting, which would seeem a much better proposition for most of the delegates to this particular conference than Glasgow's conference guest network? (The answer, it appears, is that Glasgow isn't an eduroam site.) It looked as though there was some lively chat on twitter, which I will need to look at later.

There was some interest in the locator, mainly questions about how we are handling the location discovery side (which is detailed here). We also came into a small amount of criticism, for apparently setting up requirements because they seemed interesting to us as developers rather than because they came from genuine user need. I suspect this is prompted by this blog post, about choosing to use latitude and longitude to identify a location; in our defence, we had to choose some sort of co-ordinate system, which could be independent between different maps on which the same location might be found; for this purpose, lat/long serves almost as well as any other (though it does suffer from the complication that latitude goes upwards on a map, while the y co-ordinate of a spot on a graphic increases downwards from the top). It was this choice which makes it possible for us to add in new features without any significant development cost, such as allowing the display of the map to link to Google map centred at the same location.

It was also useful to renew acquaintances with several of the other participants, including some who have previously worked with us on projects, such as Dan Sheppard (from Caret in Cambridge and the FAR Project) and Owen Stephens (now a consultant, but formerly at RHUL and the ShibboLEAP Project).

The main event of the morning was the keynote, devliered by Lynn Silipigni Connaway from OCLC. This was interesting in its analysis of a lot of work over the last few years looking into how users regard libraries, coming to the conclusion that things are going to change and that academic libraries cannot wait until the current teenagers, with their familiarity with online tools going far beyond that of previous students, arrive before planning for this change. This was based on Lynn's report available online, which I would urge those interested in the future of UK academic libraries to read.

The catering for lunch was not wonderful, though of course the expectation was that most people were staying in the hotel and would have hot meals there. But it was perhaps a bit of a confirmation of the stereotype that Scotland is the home of unhealthy eating to have a choice of cakes and no fruit as a sweet, which is certainly unusual for this type of catering.

During the afternoon, we split into three groups, user experience, electronic resource management and open source. The locator project doesn't neatly fit into any of these categories, so I joined the open source discussion, as the one most interesting to me personally. The focus here was on the possibility of UK HE institutions adopting open source LMS systems, something which, by the end of the afternoon, I felt seemed likely but only on a small scale (mainly because of lacking functionality in existing OSS candidates, in addition to the usual fears about large scale OSS software, such as support, risk and sustainability). since the UK community has some distinct requirements, and there is not yet a significant UK community around OSS LMS systems, such issues are unlikely to go away any time soon. My impression at the end of the day - though I had to leave early - was that the outlook for open source LMS in the UK is pretty pessimistic.

The highlight of the day occurred on the trip back to the cottage near Penrith in which I was staying, as a kestrel stooped on the dual carriageway and landed about four feet away from me on the verge as I passed. Unfortunately, this trumps LMS and open source for me!

Day 2

A different venue (downstairs in the same building), but still no access to the WIFI.

The morning session was about turning what was thought yesterday about OSS LMS into an event for later in the year. The tone seemed rather more optimistic, as the focus was on how to get the messages of some of the advantages of OSS which are applicable to LMS (as on the white board in the morning): competition is good, there is an ability to show rather than say, and that in the current climate, we need cost saving options. Added to this, the discussion identified the need for flexibility - libraries are starting to want to add community developed widgets and use open interfaces for delivery of information to wherever it is wanted - VLEs, Facebook, mobile apps, etc.

By the end of the discussion, the remit of the event under discussion had moved away from a discussion of OSS to interoperability and flexibility of this sort: the event will have the tag (better than a title nowadays!) LibOpenEdge. It will be two days in January, one day for technicians, to look at some of the tools (OSS LMS, VUFind, etc) and then discuss the problems they have encountered (and the flip side, success stories) of trying to integrate data from diverse systems including the library. the style of the event would be mashedlib. This would be followed by a day aimed at senior managers, which will present the interoperability message, including the bad and good things noted on the first day. Vendors will be invited, and should hope not to be embarrassed!

Lunch was followed by a series of surgeries. The purpose of these was to help refine the three minute project pitches from the first day into something which could really be used to explain the importance of a project to senior management. This was actually quite helpful, with critical questions from experienced experts to elicit more benefits oriented pitches: less about what the project does, more about what the project does for you. The pitches are then supposed to become a  blog post, so I won't repeat it here. The meeting then finished early, leaving me with an hour and a half to fill before the train I had booked a seat on left. So I hung around and continued to talk to people for a while, before finally catching the subway to Glasgow Central.

Overall

I ended up enjoying the conference more than I expected to beforehand. Our project is perhaps an outlier in the programme, rather different from the others: it is more about development than integration, and this was why it was hard to fit into the groups on the afternoon of the first day and the morning of the second. The best parts of it were the opportunities to talk to people, and to establish some community ideas about issues such as the role of OSS in library IT.

Did I take away anything that would really help with the project? No, I don't really think so; our concerns are a little too different from most of the other projects. Were the discussions interesting? Yes, but they could have just as easily have taken place online, as far as I am concerned. Whether the discussions would have happened online is another matter; the event provided the impetus needed for them to take place. To me, this impetus was more than was needed, a big effort for something which I would have done with less effort. But that is largely just my preference for online tools over meetings.

On the other hand, the conference was about community building, and it pretty much succeeded in this. So JISC should count it a success.