UKSG Presentation November 2009
Posted by: Chrissie Turkington on: November 18, 2009
At the UKSG E-Resources for FE Seminar I gave a presentation looking at whether libraries and learning resource centres are providing learner centred environments.
My aim for the presentation was to get you all thinking. Over the last few months I’ve been talking to Librarians putting forward observations and reflections, on how libraries could respond to the evolving needs of learners and their learning styles, to prompt discussion and elicit feedback.
It’s been an interesting few months of changing ideas and perceptions resulting in the presentation below. Are we providing Learner Centred Environments? How can a library be “physical” as well as “virtual”? How can we exploit online platforms? How do Learning Styles influence library services?
The presentation showcases innovative ideas, new technology and useful websites, and provides some suggestions to challenge your thinking and influence your future planning.
Diving in at the Deep End – Platforms for effective e-resource management (Powerpoint)
Handout on Learning Styles (MS Word 2007)
Customising ebrary
Posted by: Chrissie Turkington on: November 16, 2009
Did you know that you can customise how the ebrary eBook library looks?
Top Bar
It is possible to customise the top bar of your ebrary site to show whatever you wish; provided that you ensure that all links open in a new window and that the new page is 42px high. This page can be hosted on your own college server and updated whenever you wish. Try creating a new page with your college logo, links to your other online resources and your college catalogue.
Homepage
The right half of the homepage can also be customised and hosted on your own college server thereby enabling regular updates as required. You can showcase your most popular eBooks or highlight all the set texts that are included in the collection.
A public example of a customised site is available at: http://site.ebrary.com/lib/csli/home.action
ebrary Reader InfoTools
The InfoTools menu within the eBrary reader can be customised as you wish to link to web sites of your choosing. This can include any site with persistent links such as Infotrac or your library catalogue. At present only the InfoTools menu within the ebrary reader can be changed, but ebrary are working on enabling this customisation with the InfoTools menu of the QuickView. See my previous post for details of how to get the ebrary reader working on your college network.
How do I start customising my college’s ebrary site?
You need to contact jisc-support@ebrary.com with details of how you would like to customise the site.
Further details
Full details of how to customise ebrary are on the ebrary site at:
http://www.ebrary.com/kb/librarian/basic_implement.jsp#site
Thanks to Hilary Richmond at Cheadle and Marple Sixth Form College for letting me assist with customising her college’s ebrary site to understand how this all works.
The ebrary Reader – technical issues
Posted by: Chrissie Turkington on: October 30, 2009
- In: eBooks
- 3 Comments
Now that colleagues are starting to use ebrary, it has come to light that to use the ebrary Reader (the one that includes speech), you may need to ask your technical team to set it up for you on the network. Here are all the details you need which have been provided direct from ebrary.
- We require the latest version of Java. Please make sure Java has been updated
- Please make sure cookies are enabled and that reader.ebrary.com is not blocked on ports 80 and 443. This has been a common problem with colleges that are using proxies/firewalls
- From the diagnostics we have been receiving, it seems that many users have not allowed for write access to their home directory. The Java reader does not require admin rights for installation but it creates personalized files for users in their home directory.
- Proxies that cache ebrary data can cause session errors because each individual who accesses needs unique session data. Ebrary servers are at 216.200.62.* . I recommend making sure that no content is cached from those IPs.
- If you are still having trouble, visit http://site.ebrary.com/validate and http://www.ebrary.com/kb/users/java_diag.jsp
If you still have problems using the ebrary Reader, please do get in touch.
links for 2009-10-22
Posted by: Chrissie Turkington on: October 23, 2009
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Inlcudes a report on the MIMAS Mobile Learning Conference in July 2009
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Creation of a 21st Century Learning Resource Centre at Blackpool and The Fylde College
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Here are 100 tips that can help you effectively use Twitter in your libraries.
Copyright and Digitising Content
Posted by: Chrissie Turkington on: October 21, 2009
Copyright. It seems like a minefield of potential problems and just when you think you have it all worked out, you find another potential issue. We get asked a lot about copyright of digital information and where to obtain information. Hopefully in this blog post I can give you some pointers for where to look for advice and the restrictions you should be aware of.
It is essential that any copying of content into a digital format, whether by scanning or retyping extracts, is licensed in some way. The CLA Licence for State FE Colleges does give some permissions for digitising UK works provided your college has an up-to-date CLA licence and is a member of the Association of Colleges (AoC) and that the content is only for the benefit of staff, students, and consultants of the licensee. (See the definition of Authorised Persons within the licence for further details). However there are some exclusions to this licence which can be found on the CLA website.
All content that has been digitised must be stored in a secure area that is only accessible to these Authorised Persons and there must be no links to this content from external or third party websites.
The licence restricts what can be digitised within any one course of study. The digitised form must be no more than:
- 5% of any published edition or
- one complete chapter of a book or
- one whole journal article or
- one short story or poem not exceeding 10 pages in length or
- the entire report of a single case
The college must hold one copy of the original material and the digital copy must be a verbatim copy of the original Licenced Material. In addition, the identity of the author and the title of the work from which it is extracted must be included.
This is all well and good, but where does it leave visually impaired learners? The CLA FE licence does permit copying of content for the sole personal use of visually impaired users - provided any digitisation is made in accordance with the Copyright and Visual Impairment Joint Industry guidelines. This is a specific entry to the licence only for learners with visual impairment – the definition of which is expanded in the guidelines.
The material being digitised must not be readily available in a suitable format and the college must retain the original licenced work.
Some of the standard CLA FE licence restrictions above remain in place:
- If this original work is lent, sold or given away, any digitised format of that work must be deleted or transferred with the original.
- The digitised work must not be made available on an intranet, newsgroups or on the internet and cannot be passed onto a third party.
- The digitised copy of the original work may not be amended other than as required to enable full access. This must be done with the permissions of the author or their representative.
The copyright of the material always remains with the copyright owner and some formats can be excluded from these permissions. It is always advisable to request the permissions from the copyright owner before digitising any text content. JISC TechDis provide a Publisher Lookup tool which gives details of how to contact each publisher and simplify the process.
JISC Legal has recently provided us with general guidance regarding digitising content for learners with disabilities.
Clearly where learners with disabilities are involved there is an obligation on the institution to provide them with accessible materials. Where the learner has a visual impairment then they are able to copy and adapt materials for their learning. Where those with other disabilities require copies to be made of learning materials this can be arranged by the institution. It is in this situation where it is important to have the appropriate permission from the publisher for the copying. The publishers involved may be happy to have their work copied in the way described but that should be clarified with the publisher preferably in writing.
It may be valuable for institutions to check what use can be made of materials licensed for learners and ensure that and new agreements to purchase learning materials provide for conversion to electronic means for learners that require it.
Do be aware that the CLA FE licence only permits the scanning of UK works.
Whew! Hope that helps. All links to useful information are below. Feel free to comment and add questions and I will endeavour to answer them or point you to where the answer may be.
The CLA FE licence:
http://www.cla.co.uk/assets/217/further_education_licence.pdf
The CLA FE webpage (including exclusions):
http://www.cla.co.uk/State_FE_colleges_EWandNI.php
Copyright and visual impairment – Joint Industry Guidelines:
http://www.publishers.org.uk/en/home/copyright/copyright_guidelines/
Publisher Lookup UK:
http://www.publisherlookup.org.uk/
Education post-16 and the DDA:
http://www.rnib.org.uk/livingwithsightloss/moneyandrights/knowingyourrights/
disabilitydiscriminationact/Pages/education_post_16.aspx
JISC Legal:
http://www.jisclegal.ac.uk
JISC TechDis:
http://www.techdis.ac.uk
Excellence Gateway Library Case Studies
Posted by: Chrissie Turkington on: October 14, 2009
In 2007/8 the RSCs were given funding for an Information Officers post whose role, for half of their time, is to seek and assist with authoring FE case studies for inclusion on the QIA Excellence Gateway. This work has resulted in a wealth of information being made available. Some of the library related case studies are below.
Loughborough College and West Nottinghamshire College: The search for single sign-on to electronic resources
Published: 2 April 2009
Following the withdrawal of JISC funding for ATHENS, the access and identity management system in July 2008, many FE colleges have been investigating alternative ways of accessing online resources. In this case study Loughborough College and West Nottinghamshire College have both successfully implemented Federated Access Management using Shibboleth technology to enable students to access various electronic resources by merely signing into their respective College networks.
http://www.excellencegateway.org.uk/page.aspx?o=194242
Tresham Institute: Integrating two library collections
Published: 27 October 2008
Tresham Institute is a further and higher education college with campuses in Corby, Kettering and Wellingborough in Northamptonshire, and The Rutland College in Oakham, with nearly 3,000 full-time and 13,000 part-time students. The College is in the process of a major redevelopment project, the first stage of which is a brand new £20 million campus in Kettering that opened to students in September 2007 and combines the provision that was previously offered at two sites in the town.
http://www.excellencegateway.org.uk/Programmes/page.aspx?o=166924
Queen Elizabeth Sixth Form College: Library system opens up new horizons
Published: 13 May 2009
Queen Elizabeth Sixth Form College uses its new library system in an innovative way, which has benefited the College tremendously. From managing the library’s catalogue to assigning student locker keys, the new system has had a huge impact on the management of resources and improvement of student access to information.
http://www.excellencegateway.org.uk/page.aspx?o=201973
Weymouth’s Learning Gateway improves behaviour
Published: 23 July 2008
Weymouth College set-up a “Learning Gateway” as part of a move towards creating a “learning” rather than a teaching environment. It involved setting up 180 workstations through which learners could access Moodle, both in timetabled sessions and on an open-access basis. The project has been so successful that, three years on, the College is looking at ways of developing it and putting it at the heart of a new build scheme.
http://www.excellencegateway.org.uk/article.aspx?o=162093
Stafford College: LRC uses self-assessment toolkit
Published: 16 March 2009
Stafford College undertook a free self-assessment of its learning resource centre using a toolkit developed by the Council for Learning Resources in Colleges (Colric) and the FE and HE group of Cilip (CoFHE). The tool provided a way of evaluating quality of service and served as a useful benchmarking exercise.
http://www.excellencegateway.org.uk/Programmes/page.aspx?o=192897
Harrogate College: RFID in the library
Published: 13 March 2009
RFID (radio frequency identification) systems are typically used in higher education libraries. This case study is an example of how RFID can work in a further education environment. RFID has many organisational advantages over using only a library management system, which can free staff time for a more personal library service.
http://www.excellencegateway.org.uk/page.aspx?o=192902
Priestley College: How do you successfully develop your new learning space? Ask your students, of course!
Published: 13 March 2009
When Priestley College began to plan the redevelopment of its learning resource centre, it continued the culture of student involvement that exists within the College by asking students to help plan and create the new development. This case study describes how the JISC infoKit on ‘Planning and Designing Technology-Rich Learning Spaces’ was used as the starting point for ideas and planning, and how the finished development was the recognisable result of students’ ideas and plans.
http://www.excellencegateway.org.uk/page.aspx?o=192957
Blackpool and The Fylde College: Rethinking spaces, rethinking staffing – new staff structure and roles for a technology-rich learning resource centre
Published: 13 November 2008
This case study focuses on how the staffing structure and roles have been redefined to meet the needs and challenges of ‘The Loop’, a new technology-rich library and learning resource centre at Blackpool and The Fylde College.
http://www.excellencegateway.org.uk/Programmes/page.aspx?o=168007
Northampton College: Embedding information skills into the curriculum
Published: 26 January 2009
Northampton College has offered structured Information Skills programme in selected courses of study that have seen the skill levels rise of those learners. For example, one review concluded that grades had risen by 5% on a module that relied solely on assessment by essay.
http://www.excellencegateway.org.uk/page.aspx?o=170609
Peterborough Regional College: Making information retrieval sessions “wicked”
Published: 29 June 2009
‘Library+’ staff at Peterborough Regional College have developed an innovative approach to help students get to grips with using the Dewey Decimal system. Inspired by staff development training using interactive whiteboards, they have designed an activity-based interactive pairs game which is fun, engaging and effective in helping students search for course-relevant resources in the library.
http://www.excellencegateway.org.uk/page.aspx?o=228547
Lambeth College: Subject Finder – supporting student research online
Published: 11 March 2009
Subject Finder was an original idea of Teum Teklehaimanot, a member of Lambeth’s Learning Resources team, when he was himself a student and considering options for a web design course project. The subsequent development of Subject Finder as an education-based web directory and search engine has also been driven by his personal interest and commitment to providing a student-friendly Internet search tool. It is now becoming an embedded tool within the College’s virtual learning environment to support Lambeth’s students across a variety of disciplines.
http://www.excellencegateway.org.uk/page.aspx?o=191739
Henley College Coventry: IT Project Area focuses on learners’ needs
Published: 6 July 2009
The IT Project Area (ITPA) is part of a converged learning resources centre (LRC) service offering study support and audio and visual services. The ITPA reflects the learners’ needs and is very curriculum-focused with services, including one-to-one IT support sessions and a comprehensive LRC induction programme.
Dreaming of Kindle?
Posted by: Chrissie Turkington on: October 12, 2009
- In: eBooks
- 2 Comments
If the Sunday Times is to be believed (ingear 11/10/09), Kindle may be the eBook reader of my dreams 
… but not yet 
Amazon is making it’s massively hyped eReader “Kindle” available to the UK from October 19 to very mixed reviews. Take a look at the comments on the Guardian website for example:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/oct/07/amazon-ebooks
This isn’t a UK release per se (we’ll have to wait longer for that), but Amazon.com making the Kindle available for export outside the US. Although they have made some changes (if you buy the right Kindle from the choice of three, the wireless will now connect to 3G networks outside the US using AT&T roaming), there is still quite a lot that’s American about it. The built in dictionary is “The New Oxford American Dictionary”, the Kindle Store prices all it’s books in dollars and the content available from the store is currently predominantly American but is starting to include more UK content with the inclusion of The Times, The Telegraph and the Daily Mail. Jeff Bezos, Amazon boss (as The Guardian puts it), has promised a UK version of Kindle in the future which will be available from Amazon UK accompanied by a UK Kindle store with prices in sterling.
Be careful – UK use of the current Kindle can be costly. The price on the screen is not necessarily the price that you pay. The Kindle itself will be more expensive than is stated due to customs duties and import taxes. It’s also possible that the Royal Mail will charge you administration costs. You can upload documents to the Kindle directly using USB, but if you want to email them to the Kindle there is a charge of “$.99 per megabyte”. In addition the books are more expensive to download in the UK with the inclusion of a download charge of $1.99 per item.
Personally all I want is an eReader that will show every format of electronic document I have (in the main MS Office and PDFs – I haven’t make the foray into purchasing an ePUB format book yet) whilst being really easy to use. It would “make my day” if the eReader would also go online and allow me to easily search the JISC eBook collections as well. EVEN BETTER (OK, I’m pushing it a bit here) would be a way of cataloguing all the books that I have access to – uploaded and online – into a fully searchable index. I can dream 
From the Sunday Times’ review, it looks like Kindle has the potential to fulfill my dreams and also provide for those dreams I never knew I had!! (An eReader that reads the eBook to you – how useful is that!), but this release is limited for UK users. The web browser doesn’t work in the UK (my dreams have now gone up in smoke) and neither does the ability to follow blogs. I think I have a little while to wait before the Kindle will make my dreams come true.
So, when is the official UK launch?…
The Janet Access Grid Support Centre
Posted by: Chrissie Turkington on: October 9, 2009
Yesterday some of the RSC NW team went to see the team based at the University of Manchester who make up the Janet Access Grid Support Centre (AGSC). I must admit that I went along not knowing an awful lot about it, but had a suspicion that a number of years ago I attended a meeting that was held in “The Grid” (sounds ominous). Following the meeting I was absolutely amazed by the potential for the technology.
The Access Grid (AG); according to the AGSC website (http://www.agsc.ja.net) is:
“… in simple terms is an advanced videoconferencing application that uses audio and video tools allowing people in different locations worldwide to meet in a virtual venue (virtual meeting room). In these virtual venues participants can see and speak to each other in realtime, use online chat and share applications simultaneously.”
There’s very little needed to get started in the AG and it can be quite cheap. Don’t get me wrong, I think that the AG would definitely be overkill for an awful lot of what could easily be done in a Web Conferencing tool such as Dimdim or Adobe Connect, but for a collaborative meeting I suspect you couldn’t get a better service – especially with the free 9-5 support provided by the AGSC team.
I’ve just had a look at free software that was shown to us yesterday called Evo http://evo.caltech.edu/evoGate/. It’s easy to install, free, and; just using a microphone and web cam; I easily went into one of the virtual venues on the grid. Didn’t cost me a bean There’s a beginners guide to setting it up on the AGSC website http://www.ja.net/services/video/agsc/services/evo.html There are other software packages available to get onto the Grid, but I thought I’d start here. The other free one is the Access Grid Toolkit.
I could really get into this for meetings and it’s a way of being green. It’s a real shame though at present that all attendees need to install software before accessing the grid so at present it restricts how we can use it. We always try wherever possible to use technology that doesn’t require installs to ensure that any restrictions to installing software do not impede anyone taking part.
If you would like to join me in the grid to see how it works, then drop me a line. I think the potential for meetings with this technology is huge and I would like to keep testing it for while to see what we can do. Maybe, at some point, we should try piloting it for a meeting with one of the library circles? What do others think?
links for 2009-09-11
Posted by: Chrissie Turkington on: September 12, 2009
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The Publisher Lookup UK website is a collaborative facility jointly organised by JISC TechDis and The Publishers Association. The purpose of the website is to enable educationalists working with disabled learners to get an electronic version of published texts from UK publishers as quickly as possible. The site gets about 5000 hits per month.
Nintendo 100 Classic Book Collection – Reading Lists
Posted by: Chrissie Turkington on: September 9, 2009
Following on from this morning’s blog, my FE Curriculum colleague Anita Holt has very kindly passed me the Word document below that lists all the books in the Nintendo DS 100 Classic Book Collection and has included whether they are on the recommended reading lists for the GCSE and/or A Level Curricula.
DS 100 Classic Book Collection GCSE and A Level Reading List
