LEARN End of Project Conference

5 May saw the final Conference in the 2-year EU-funded LEARN project on research data management (RDM), which has been led by UCL. This attracted 128 registrations in Senate House from 21 countries, with 95 institutions represented.

The day opened with a keynote presentation by Professor Kurt Deketelaere (Secretary General of LERU, the League of European Research Universities). Kurt gave a challenging presentation on the need for universities to get serious about RDM. He noted the leadership role that Europe is playing in delivering RDM solutions. Further keynote addresses in the Programme from Spain and Finland amplified the theme from the point of view of research-intensive universities and infrastructure suppliers. Panel sessions with guest members answered questions from the audience on RDM and debated with each other the validity of current approaches and views.

After lunch, the Conference broke into 4 parallel Tutorials, for which UCL led 2. I gave a tutorial on how to use the 200-page LEARN Toolkit of 23 Best Practice Case Studies. June Hedges, Myriam Fellous-Sigrist and Daniel Van Strien also gave a tutorial on engaging early career researchers in RDM issues.

The final keynote was delivered by Dr Claudio Gutierrez of the University of Chile, illustrating with an apple and two books  that research data has become the new currency of the research environment.

The Conference marked the end of the LEARN project, which officially finishes at the close of the month. Twitter postings underline how valuable attenders found the event. CODATA and EUDAT have commended the Toolkit of Best Practice Case Studies. In one of the video podcasts from the day, a North American visitor commented that (as a result of his attendance) he felt Europe was more advanced than the USA in tackling RDM issues. This, and other podcasts, will be available on the LEARN website (along with videos of all the plenary sessions). The podcasts can currently be seen via Twitter and are discoverable under the hashtag #learnldn.

The LEARN partners have enjoyed working together so much over the last 2 years that we are already planning a LEARN II – this time focussed on the whole area of Open Science.

Paul Ayris

Pro-Vice-Provost

For the second year running, UCL Library Services has been shortlisted for the prestigious Times Higher Education Leadership and Management Awards, for demonstrating best practice during the 2015-16 academic year. In this year’s selection, two UCL Library Services projects have been shortlisted as examples of sector-leading excellence.

1. LEaders Activating Research Networks (LEARN)

The Outstanding Library Team award recognizes outstanding work in library and information-services departments. This year, it is the LEARN Project which is being recognised. Based at UCL in partnership with a number of European and other international partners, The purpose of LEARN is to take the LERU Roadmap for Research Data and to develop this in order to build a coordinated e-infrastructure across Europe and beyond.

LEARN will deliver:

• a model Research Data Management (RDM) policy;
• a Toolkit to support implementation, and;
• an Executive Briefing in five core languages so as to ensure wide outreach.

In order to share knowledge about Research Data Management, LEARN has run a series of Workshops over 2016/17. The Final Conference is due to take place in London on 5 May 2017.

2. UCL Press

The Outstanding Digital Innovation of the Year award recognises the innovative use of digital technology to improve any function at a university. As the UK’s first fully open access university press, UCL Press has been pioneering a new model of scholarly communications. As highlighted in its first Annual Report, with over 100,000 downloads in 191 countries since its launch, UCL Press is going from strength to strength.

The fact that UCL Library Services is recognized by being shortlisted in both categories reflects UCL’s place as a leader in OA advocacy in Europe for 10 years. UCL’s financial investment in the Press supports its Global Engagement strategy, bringing UCL outputs to users around the world, thus adding value to the institution’s research. UCL Press is developing consultancy and hosting services to allow other universities to follow the UCL Press publishing model, or to use UCL Press infrastructure for their OA publishing, branded as their own university press. UCL Press and LEARN demonstrate how, as London’s Global University, UCL is leading the UK in the Open Science arena by harnessing world-leading research and cutting-edge technology to create impact via Open Access publishing.

I will inform you of the outcome of the awards ceremony, which is due to be held on 22 June. To be shortlisted for a THELMAs is already a significant achievement. Congratulations to all involved in securing this recognition for our excellent work as a department.

A few weeks ago I attended the 12^th International Digital Curation Conference (http://www.dcc.ac.uk/events/idcc17) in Edinburgh along with my colleague Myriam, and members of UCL Research IT Services. The conference takes place annually with international attendees with interests in Digital Curation, Digital Preservation and Research Data Management. This year the theme of the conference was “Upstream, Downstream: embedding digital curation workflows for data science, scholarship and society”. The theme of Data Science is obviously a hot topic but I was pleased to see that sessions were nuanced about the limits to data science methodology and emphasised the importance of data being well managed and presented in order for it to provide useful insights. The attendees of the conference work in a broad range of different institutions, countries and disciplines which were useful for thinking about the different needs and services being offered to support Research Data Management.

In the interest of brevity, I won’t cover all of the sessions I attended. Some of the highlights of the conference included:

“Rich Information: Hides in Missing Data” – Maria Wolters

This session focused on issues associated with missing data. Maria Wolters argued that missing data can potentially be meaningful and useful for research when the reasons for missing data are known.  Examples focused on missing data in health research contexts. Sometimes missing data in this context could reveal problems with the study design or the way in which data was being collected. It could also reveal a change in the health of the patient which was meaningful and predictive of a particular outcome. From the perspective of Research Data Management, the talk highlighted the importance of good documentation around study design and principles. This is especially important for making data reusable for others who may not have the same background information on how information was collected and why some data may be missing.

Next-Generation Data Management Plans: Global, Machine-Actionable, FAIR – Stephanie Simms & Sarah Jones

Data Management Plans were a recurring theme of the conference. Helping researchers write Data Management Plans is a key area in which the Research Data Support Officers in the library work to support researchers. These plans are currently documents which with a bit of luck are updated during the project to reflect changes in data management needs. There is an increasing interest in using these Data Management Plans to interact with other systems and automate aspects of the data management process through ‘Machine-Actionable’ plans. Using ‘Machine-Actionable’ plans may allow for things like automatic storage allocation, initial metadata for the project to be shared across other systems and for researchers to receive more tailored guidance as they write their plans. These plans are being considered in the ongoing development of DMPOnline and online tool that helps researchers write their plans. Currently, we are working on introducing a customised version of DMPOnline for UCL. The potential for integrating DMPOnline with other services and systems within UCL offers presents an exciting opportunity.

Curriculum & Training strand 

The strand of the conference focusing on Research Data Management training was useful for helping develop further ideas about developing and building on the training we are offering in Research Data Management. Of particular interest was the session on researcher training on spreadsheet curation. Spreadsheets form a large part of research data outputs at UCL so developing practical training in best managing spreadsheets could be a useful area for the service to develop in the future.

The conference was a great opportunity to gain ideas through the presentation and workshops but also through discussion with other participants. Over the next year, I hope to turn some of the ideas gained from the conference into new or improved services for the researchers we support at UCL.

Many habitual users of the Stores Service have become discombobulated in recent months by erratic behaviour from the store request form. This has now been fixed. Read on to learn more…

For the most part, customers request items directly through Explore, but there are exceptions. If the item is an unbarcoded periodical, for example, or if the reader wishes to collect/view the item at a site other than the Science Library, they can enter all the salient details in the generic form. This is then processed via an email-based system. Similarly, external users yet to apply for membership can place speculative requests via the form.

As with Explore requests, these are fulfilled within one working weekday, the sacred KPA of our service.

Unfortunately the CAPTCHA anti-spam feature of the form had become glitchy, leaving Stores customers uncertain as to whether their requests were being accepted, and often flooding our inbox with multiple duplicate requests. Click, click, click, click, click…

The library web support team have now moved us over to Google’s own ‘reCAPTCHA’ system. You may have seen this on your web travels – a tick-box demanding you assert that you are ‘not a robot’. You might be a cat or a parsnip or something, but as long as you’re not a pernicious bot intent on crippling us with DNS DDoS attacks, we’re happy* to provide you with material from our vast off-site collection (~1.5 million items).

We’re confident the new system will end the spate of errors, but please pass on any feedback to the contrary from readers at your respective sites. Email me with details of when the problem occurred, with as much information as possible i.e. UCL or non-UCL computer, mobile device, browser, nature of error, etc.

*note to self: confirm Mat Reynolds is happy to give membership to root vegetables with the correct forms of ID.

Readings from Dante’s Divine Comedy in English and Italian

Mondays 6-7.30pm, The Warburg Institute, Woburn Square

(Admission free)

Is a passage from Dante’s Inferno just what you feel like after a day’s work on a Monday? Or have you always wanted to know what all the fuss was about? Today you can find out, for free, at 6pm at the Warburg Institute off Gordon Square/Woburn Square with an introduction to Dante’s life and works, followed by readings on subsequent Mondays.

The annual collaboration between UCL Special Collections, the UCL Italian Department, the Warburg Institute and the Italian Cultural Institute has proved popular enough to resume this year, with a slightly different selection of passages and the chance, later in the term, to view some of the treasures from UCL Special Collections’ outstanding early and rare editions of Dante.

If Mondays aren’t a good time for you, try the themed Dante sessions on alternate Tuesdays at the Italian Cultural Institute in Belgravia. The next is tomorrow, 7-8.30pm.

Passages will be read in both English and Italian and illustrated, together with talks from UCL’s Dante Professor, John Took, on what to look out for in the excerpts. You never know: you could feel inspired, as this former member of the audience was, to cook the entire poem in biscuit form:

Dante’s Divine Comedy in edible form, created by audience member Leon Conrad.

Photo copyright David Ward.

Two weeks ago I attended ‘research software management, sharing and sustainability’ at the British Library. The event organised by the Software Sustainability Institute (an organisation promoting best practices in research software development) and JISC and hosted by the British Library aimed to explore some of the challenges that researchers faced in developing, maintaining and sharing software they produce as part of their research. In my role as one of the Research Data Support officers one of my responsibilities involves helping foster best practices around research data management. This includes issues around data collection, organisation, storage and sharing – increasingly activities aided by the use of software. For many data collections, analysis and reuse is difficult, if not impossible, without access to the software that was used to generate, process or analyse the data.  As a result of this close relationship between data and software, it is important that research data management activities considers software alongside data.

The first session of the day was run by Neil Chue Hong of the Software Sustainability Institute. Neil’s talk framed the rest of the day with the title ‘is my research right? Surviving in a post-expert world’. Neil began by discussing research projects where software (or more specifically the way humans used software) has resulted in incorrect results being published. Many of these mistakes were later discovered by other researchers demonstrating the importance of making underlying data and code available for others to interrogate. Having introduced some of the problems Neil outlined some of the things that researchers can do to address these. Suggestions for best practices were presented in a paper, ‘Best Practices for Scientific Computing’  include using version control, unit testing your code and using a continuous integration service. A subsequent paper recognised that some of these best practices could be intimidating to researchers so a set of ‘Good Enough Practices in Scientific Computing’ was subsequently published.

Following Neil’s session there were a range of group discussions and exercises alongside sessions by Torsten Reimer, Angela Dappert and Rachael Kotarski covering institutional support, software preservation and crediting software. There are already a range of UCL services which support researchers in these areas. Research IT Services provide training, consulting on software development and a research software dashboard which helps researchers get credit for software they produce as part of their research by linking it to IRIS profiles and making it easier for others to cite this software.

“Citation needed” –  CC BY 2.0 image by ‘futureatlas.com’ on Flickr

Many of the sessions mentioned potential roles libraries could have in supporting software sharing and sustainability, these included hosting sessions on best software practices for researchers, incorporating considerations around software and code in open access and research data management services and working to shift practices and cultures of academic recognition (not a simple task!).  A simple step is to encourage students and academics to cite software used as part of their research. The Software Sustainability Institute offers guidance on citing software in academic papers. Currently researchers do not often receive the same level of academic recognition for software they write when compared to other academic outputs. Projects like Depsy are playing a part in trying to shift this lack of recognition by tracking contributions researchers have made to software, and the subsequent use of that code in other software or published outputs. Librarians can also support researchers by offering them support in making their own code citable.

Although there were no simple solutions to the issues raised during the sessions it was useful to share ideas with other people working in similar and different contexts and to begin to think about projects that would help address these issues. The Software Sustainability Institute host regular events and has a great range of resources which I would recommend if you are interested in these issues.

New to UCL survey

The results of the New To UCL Survey are now available. Overall, some 92% of new students agreed that they feel welcome and part of the UCL community, and 94% are satisfied with their overall arrival experience here. Our reputation and location are the top reasons why our students choose to study with us.

Two questions in the Survey relate particularly to the Library. The first, I have successfully been able to use one or more of the libraries within UCL, scored an impressive overall score of 96% – 97% for undergraduates, 96% for taught postgraduates (PGT) and 94% for postgraduate research students (PGR).

The second Library question was: I have successfully been able to access online library resources e.g. e-journals, e-books. Here the overall score was 89% – 84% for undergraduates, 92% for PGTs and 94% for PGRs.

These are fantastic results and everyone in the Library should feel congratulated on an outstanding performance, which is once again visible across the whole of UCL.

The survey was developed by the Office for the Vice-Provost (Education & Student Affairs) after wide consultation across UCL and is intended to replace the Arrival section of the Student Barometer. The fieldwork took place in November. Surveys were sent to just under 19,000 new students, both undergraduates and postgraduates, and 25% (4,600) took part.

Paul Ayris

Pro Vice-Provost and Director of Library Services

Last week, I was pleased to host a group of around 12 Assistant Directors from other SCONUL-based academic libraries for an afternoon seminar. The meeting was in Science Library room 417, and colleagues found their way to the room despite the major refurbishment works on the ground floor! Conversation ranged across a number of areas, and I have extracted some highlights below:

Academic liaison and library inductions

We discussed changes to how our academic support teams operate, and the changes in terms of points of contact for academic liaison. Southampton described how they make increased use of blended learning, with high-quality online content to provide the information needed at the point of need. This led to a discussion about the increasing need to generate high-quality online content (videos or interactive tutorials) and how we can manage this. I mentioned the excellent Skills in Seconds videos which we produced here at UCL, and how effective our Subject Liaison Librarians and Site Librarians are in terms of engaging with academics. We also discussed the role of inductions, how Library Assistants can and do support these, and the importance of ensuring that users understand how they can benefit from our range of services and expertise.

Student engagement

We talked about student engagement and involvement, particularly in the context of the Teaching Excellence Framework. I mentioned that UCL has a ChangeMakers scheme, which we are looking to use in the Library. Colleagues noted that the Bright Spark scheme at Westminster had been successful, with a panel comprising academic and support staff deciding on the winning ideas which are taken forward. Newcastle presented their eventmovement platform to crowdsource student ideas and get students involved in developing the ideas into plans, which the Library can then choose to take forward. We noted that managing student expectations with these initiatives can be challenging, and that there needs to be an element of staff moderation to select which ideas are feasible within operational constraints. At the Open University, they have a pool of 500 students who can be called on for feedback in groups of up to 200 (for UX/testing).

A colleague also recommended Mentimeter to make our presentations more interactive and engaging, following a demo earlier this week.

Communication and Marketing

We discussed the trend to increase comms and marketing activity within the Library. A number of library services are working up communication plans, including internal and external communications. Newcastle’s comms team is staffed by students, a model which illustrates how the university are striving to involve students in different ways.

Postgraduate study spaces

The new study area and seminar room in the Research Grid, UCL Science Library

We visited a number of spaces developed at UCL to support PG learning, which are open to PGR (research) and PGTs (taught). I mentioned UCL’s Connected Curriculum which we try to support in these spaces. We discussed how some of our services are integrating support for PG students with early career researchers. One of the features of most of these spaces is that they are aspirational, reflecting high expectations of our student communities.

The University of Birmingham Library, which opened in September

Research Data Management is an area of great interest. I shared some information on the EU-funded LEARN project on Research Data Management, in advance of our next meeting in summer 2017 in Birmingham’s new library.

Overall, the event was enjoyable and showed that we face similar challenges across the different institutions which were represented. It was helpful to hear from other institutions about the work they are doing which we can learn from, but also to recap the excellent work which happens within UCL Library Services in the areas we discussed, across the entire family of our libraries.

Croatian research theses in DART-Europe

DART-Europe is a research portal which indexes and provides access to research theses in Open Access from across Europe. Many universities now see Open Access as the default mode of collection building for PhD and other research theses, because of the large number of hits which such materials gain.

The DART-Europe portal has recently started the ingest of metadata for research theses from Croatian universities. The portal currently (4 December 2016) provides access to 259 full-text research theses from Croatia.

The National and University Library in Zagreb has posted about this development, facilitated by UCL Library Services, on its website and via social tools such as Facebook. Zagreb says: ‘The National and University Library in Zagreb (NSK) has set up a system for a regular contribution of data from the Croatian National Digital Dissertations Repository (Nacionalni repozitorij disertacija i znanstvenih magistarskih radova, DR) to DART-Europe, the central point of access to digital dissertations from Europe’s higher education institutions, thus enabling an increased visibility of the research of Croatian researchers.’

The DART-Europe portal, maintained and developed by UCL, currently provides access to 717,286 open access research theses from 601 Universities in 28 European countries. It is a fantastic achievement to have passed both the 700,000 mark for accessible research theses and 600 for the number of universities and their libraries involved in this pan-European service.

The Croatian theses can be seen in DART-Europe here. Congratulations to all UCL colleagues who have supported the continued growth of this portal.

Paul Ayris

Pro Vice-Provost and Director of UCL Library Services

On Monday 21st November 2016, a group of Library Services staff and supporters including UCL academics and Professional Services staff celebrated the formal opening of a new reading room which will allow wider access to UCL’s rare books, manuscripts and archive materials for research and public engagement, supporting UCL’s distinctive Connected Curriculum.

Dr Paul Ayris said a few words to mark the opening of the reading room, sited at the heart of UCL. Paul highlighted that the project had delivered a high-spec space which UCL could be proud of. The opening marks a new phase in the history of UCL Special Collections, which started largely as a set of collections donated by the widows of early professors at UCL. Developments are afoot to establish permanent new bases for the treasures held in Special Collections, with a collaborative venture in partnership with Senate House Library and members of the federal university, as well as expansion facilities in future phases of UCL East. Paul congratulated all those involved in establishing the new reading room, and the party toasted the future of UCL Special Collections.

As described in a recent tweet, the site where UCL Special Collections’ new reading room is located was once a playground for University College School pupils…

What’s in our Special Collections?

UCL’s collections of manuscripts, archives and rare books date back as far as the 4th century AD and cover a vast range of subject areas, notably: London, Social History, Latin America, Jewish Collections and the Orwell Archive – which is the most comprehensive body of source material for Orwell studies anywhere in the world.

• You can find printed booked and journals in Explore.
• Search archives and manuscripts at UCL Archives.
• Many items from the collections have been digitised and are available to view on our Digital Collections web pages.
• Named collections are listed in the alphabetical directory.

A selection of Special Collections treasures were on show at the event.

Did you know?

• Some of the earliest donations to the Library include the 4,000 books given by Jeremy Bentham in 1833.
• We recently discovered the manuscript of a poem by Byron inscribed into Samuel Rogers’ The Pleasures of Memory (London, 1810).
• The first major manuscript gift, a magnificent 13th-century illuminated Latin Bible, was presented by William Steere in 1859.
• Sonia Orwell, George Orwell’s widow, chose UCL Library Services to house the precious manuscripts and notebooks of the author of Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm.

The new reading room is located in the South Junction and is open weekdays from 09.00-17.00 with appointments to consult material between 10.00 and 16.00. The room can hold up to 8 readers at any one time.