Squatting in the Library? Visitors and Residents at UKSG

The most tweeted soundbite from Andy Powell's opening presentation for day two of UKSG was 'content should be of the web, not on the web'. This nicely sums up several of the comments and observations of plenary speakers over the first two days. People, we need to be nicer to our content and help it grow to reach its real potential. Content, I'm sorry, you are going to have to work much harder! It was interesting to note that Cliff Lynch was making very similar points to Andy on the other side of the pond, at CNI2011. The well known work 'The Machine is Us/ing Us' demonstrates this well.

Andy drew on a now seminal piece of work on 'Visitors and Residents' by Dave White of Oxford University. This describes how we interact with the online environments - with Residents spending a significant portion of their time online, building a known profile / identity and contributing to the process of creation online. Visitors are more likely to use the web as a tool, dipping in and out to find specific resources or answer specific questions. Both groups are equally valid, but we need to be able to cater for both. To date, digital libraries have tended to focus purely on the Visitor.

So what does this mean to those offering services using an online medium? The changing focus on Residents helps us to move from a controlling "this is you and this is what you are allowed to do' attitude to one where the user has more control - ''this is me and what I have done". Andy posits that social interaction is what creates content, and queries whether the approach of institutional repositories in working in this context. Few researchers see value in depositing or providing metadata, which has let to a culture of mandates - they very controlling approach that does not support the user.

One of the ways we can think about making some simple but significant changes for our content and services is to exploit the potential of URIs (of this type, not this type). URIs support the notion of 'of the web' not 'on the web'. Instead of saying where something is, they say WHAT something is. This moves us closer to the concept of intelligent, linked data and helps provide a platform for the type of social activity that is building content.

Andy notes that the environment and culture for openness does not simply appear over night but that companies are beginning to exploit the benefits of linked data - the 'Facebook Like' button for example relies on linked data to achieve its aims, and that little button is appearing everywhere!

The takeaway from the talk? Probably a call for both libraries and publishers to think more about how their services are supporting Residents and not just Visitors to provide a truly effective service in an online environment.

How blogs can drive scientific progress

Adam Bly opens by thanking the Tweeters for keeping him in touch with the conference. Adam, you see, is in New York. We're in Edinburgh. Virtual speakers: a first for UKSG.

Distributing, managing, sharing, visualising data
Adam will speak around the issue of how we can ensure that we are constantly updating and refining our first principles and our technologies in a landscape that is constantly evolving. He illustrates changes in science by showing a picture of the large hadron collider. "It's a reminder of how science has become increasingly global, with dozens of countries (even those in current geopolitical conflict) coming together to collaborate." These huge, global, multidisciplinary collaborations require new approaches to distributing and managing data. Scientists must not only produce, but find new approaches to sharing and visualising, data.

"Open science is what will drive the most profound and robust advancements in the future, and will ensure that science has the greatest potential to affect society for the better."

Adam says we have a social responsibility to make research as available as possible to the world - to scientists, and researchers, across borders - and ensure that the technology that does this doesn't impede progress. (It's nice to hear someone make this argument about the core data, not the finished article - I think the former is much more valuable to progressing research, and doesn't devalue what publishers add.) The challenge is not whether open science is good or bad, but how it becomes scaleable, sustainable and simple to adopt. We need purpose-built software and environments for researchers, so that this extraordinarily valuable community is not spending its time on IT but is instead discovering the next great cure.

Starting over on scientific communications
We need to bed four first principles into this reboot of the system:

• Digital core - we've been moving online for years, and will continue to do so. But if the core isn't fundamentally digital, then we just end up hacking solutions around the edge, and can't create the kind of intelligence that a truly digital core for research promises.
• Free flow of information - economic growth is tied to the abundance of scientific information, and we're on track to increasingly free flow.
• Standards and interoperability - to ensure that as projects progress they can be tied together, so individual scientists are not navigating through disconnected and redundant applications, but bringing disparate pieces together.
• Knowledge from information - using tools like data visualisation to see realtime changes and extract knowledge.
  

ResearchBlogging
Adam uses the example of the ResearchBlogging platform, which enables scientists to communicate with each other and the public, using the simple, open blog as a medium. Scientists can easily tag posts so that they can be syndicated to appropriate outlets. It helps ensure that they are contributing to the scholarly record, and that their work and dialogue are being seen more widely than hitherto (journal clubs etc). He shows an example of a ResearchBlogging feed in the PLoS One site - conversations relating to published papers being immediately syndicated back to the source.

Value of blogs in tracking, funding and planning science research
Some researchers in the Netherlands have done the first bibliometric / webometric study of blogging in science, and have used ResearchBlogging as the subject. They found that blogs are more immediate than traditional academic discourse, and are more contextually relevant than academic literature. They focus on the implications of science. This kind of study enables us to understand where discussions around the web are focussed, to better understand the movements of science and direct policy-making and funding.