On 20th April 2007 the British Computer Society London Office in Covent Garden was base for the 2007 ‘Intellectual Property Rights in E-Learning Workshop/Conference’. The conference was organised by the School of Computing Science at Middlesex University.

David Donald was asked to present at this event by Dr Carlisle George who had seen David present before and thought that he was a more than suitable candidate for the event. Dr Carlisle was previously a barrister and is now a senior lecturer at the School of Computing Science at Middlesex University.

The one day conference brought together several researchers from Middlesex University and other experts in Intellectual Property Rights to speak on IPR related to e-learning.

David spoke about the work done on the Spoken Word and the ‘Obstacles to Accessing the Multimedia Heritage’ that the Spoken Word holds. He spoke widely about the project’s approach to the rights and permissions it holds in partnership with the BBC and various other intellectual property issues including the Spoken Word user license agreement.

David felt that his presentation went very well. He has already received positive feedback form the conference organisers and has been asked to present at future events.

Photo Courtesy of: Markhillarry

Spoken Word has recently acquired its’ 1000th user! This honour was bestowed upon the 23 year old Tracy Walker who is currently in her first year at Glasgow Caledonian University studying Occupational Therapy. In recognition of this event Ewan MacPhee of Spoken Word presented the 23 year old with an i-Pod shuffle in her chosen colour of blue. The above photo shows Ewan and Tracy outside the Saltire Centre. Tracy was thrilled with her prize.

On Friday 13th April after five hours travelling by train David, Iain and Graeme of Spoken Word arrived in Hull for the first meeting of the REMAP project.

The REMAP project is based at the University of Hull and its’ aim is to ‘investigate the use of a digital repository to support the embedding of records management and digital preservation within the context of a UK Higher Education institution’.

REMAP is a follow on from the RepoMMan Project which stands for the Repository Metadata and Management project. Repoman aimed to develop a tool that would interact with a Fedora based repository system.

The project has been funded by JISC under the latest JISC capital programme. The capital programme is additional funding from JISC of £81 million over three years to enhance the network infrastructure (SuperJANET 5), to digitise key resources for the academic community, and to support the development of e-learning; e-infrastructure; virtual research environments; users and innovation; and repositories and preservation.

The REMAP project is being led by ESIG (e-Services Integration Group) at the University of Hull. ESIG are also a part of our recently started EDINA led VSM portal project.

Although tired form the long journey David, Iain and Graeme definitely found Hull to have been a rewarding experience.

Photo Courtesy of: Helen K.

David, Iain and Ewan attended a half day conference at St. Andrews University run by SHERPA as part of their series of UK roadshows that have also called at such places as the University of Liverpool and the University of Durham.

SHERPA aims to investigate ‘issues in the future of scholarly communication’ and is currently developing open-access institutional repositories in a number of research universities to ‘facilitate the rapid and efficient worldwide dissemination of research’.

The day started for the three of us at the Powmill Milk Bar where we ate lunch while listening to David’s funny anecdotes about his numerous adventures.

Half an hour after Powmill we arrived just in time for the beginning of the conference. The first presentation was by Gareth Johnson who spoke generally about Open Access including its current and future use and the various barriers it currently experiences.

The next presentation was carried out by representatives from St. Andrews University. They spoke about their internal experiences of Open Access and the successes and opposition that they had faced and continue to face. The speakers outlined an interesting anecdote which involved one academic saying that open access repositories only existed ‘to give librarians some work to do’.

The final presentation was by Jane H. Smith who spoke about the RoMEO and Juliet services. RoMEO is a useful repository of journal publishers’ listings that is run with support form JISC and the Wellcome Trust. Juliet is a ‘complement to the RoMEO service provided by SHERPA for authors and repository administrators, which lists summaries of publishers’ copyright transfer agreements as they relate to archiving’.

The day was of most interest as it illustrated the view points on Open Access of those from a range of academic areas. The conference also almost acted as a reassurance that the barriers to Open Access are common throughout all institutions.

Ewan MacPhee has written a journal article about the ‘Talking Hospitality Podcasts’ that have recently been released on the Spoken Word website. The article has been published in ‘The Hospitality Review’, a quarterly journal published by the Threshold Press for academic and industry hospitality purposes. Within the article Ewan ‘explores the potential of the podcast for hospitality education’ and ‘previews’ the Talking Hospitality mini-project. Unfortunately only select articles from the journal are available online but it is possible to get a hold of the article by e-mailing: editors@threshold-press.co.uk for information on back issues or contacting Spoken Word directly in order to see a copy of the article.

On 13th March 2007 David and Iain of the Spoken Word joined David Jordan from the BBC’s ‘Future Media and Technology’ department at the JISC Conference 2007 in Birmingham.

The JISC conference provided an excellent opportunity to showcase the Spoken Word’s work alongside the other projects involved in the digital libraries in the classroom programme including DialogPlus (University of Southampton and Penn State University), DART (London School of Economics) and DIDET (University of Strathclyde and Stanford University).

All those inviolved in the digital libraries in the classroom programme shared a stand, answered questions and handed out leaflets to others present at the conference.

The conference also provided the backdrop for a 15 minute JISC funded film promoting the work of the digital libraries in the classroom programmes that includes David and Iain of Spoken Word, Alan Hutton, Douglas Chalmers, various Caledonian University students and the Saltire Centre…by popular demand the film will appear on the Spoken Word site shortly!

The conference was also useful for meeting with people that the project had previously collaborated with. Notably David met with Chris Awre from the University of Hull who, like ourselves, is currently part of the Fedora users group. Recently we have started a new collaboration with the University of Hull in the form of the JISC REMAP project.

However the most notable meeting took place with Tom Loosemore who is project director of BBC 2.0 at JISC. He has played a key role in the BBC’s New Media strategy over the past few years and so the meeting was of great interest. The meeting took place after Tom had presented to the conference about the 15 web development principles that the BBC are currently using as a structure to develop their web services and reach out to even more users. A brief outline of his presentation can be found by clicking here. In the coming months we hope to visit the BBC to talk to staff in the Future Media and Technology department and carry out a presentation about the work of the Spoken Word project.

Photo Courtesy of: ClickCLickElectric

David Donald has been invited to share his expertise with Northwestern graduate students at the Medill School of Journalism, Sciences Po in Paris.

Sciences Po is an undergraduate and graduate education doctoral school and research centre in Paris with a library and documentation and publishing services.

David will talk with the students about various new media issues including blogging, audio, video, and interactive web applications for journalism. He will concentrate on teaching students how to use blog applications for the first time and outline the digital audio and video work done on the Spoken Word project which will be extremely useful for journalists interested in furthering their knowledge of web based broadcasting.

Photo(c): Courtesy of ‘That Ambitious Girl’

On 5^th March 2007 the Spoken Word’s Principal Investigator David Donald will travel to Brussels where he will attend a high level workshop based around the agenda of driving forward the establishment of a European e-Infrastructure for e-Science digital repositories along with other ‘professionals’ in the area of digital repositories.

The conference will revolve around various discussions of the following issues:

• What the major issues are behind the interoperability and widening of access to digital repositories across Europe.
• What are the tools that need to be encouraged in order to move infrastructures, techniques for metadata assignment, and storage management technologies forward?
• What are the key technological limitations inhibiting the growth of repositories?
• How can we reduce the domain-specific knowledge required to access and use these repositories in order to open them up to wider research?
• How can a sustainable technical framework be realised, preserved and maintained across Europe that will ensure continuing accessibility to repositories?
• How can European-level policy initiatives encourage growth and the overcoming of technological barriers?

The findings from the workshop discussions will be used in various EU-funded initiatives concerning repositories.

A conference attendee has set up this del.icio.us page with tags linking to content discussed and presented at the Open Repositories Conference in Texas. There is a particularly interesting tag leading to an article by Paul Miller, ‘The Technology Evangelist’, on library 2.0. The del.icio.us page can be found by clicking here.

The 3rd International Conference on Open Repositories takes place in Southampton between the 1st - 4th April 2008. The Conference will be hosted by the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton, which has a long history of research into the technological aspects of open repositories. The conference will provide focused workshops and tutorials and will also use general conference sessions as a platform to debate and bring together all the issues raised over the four days.