Reflections on 10 years of the Institutional Web

Reflections on 10 years of the Institutional Web Institutional Web Management Workshop 2006, Bath

About the talk…

reflections on 10 years…

social

political

technical

legal

cultural

err… business modal

all the ‘als’ I could think of…

but above all – personal and anecdotal

and somewhat ad hoc

but ending with reflections on where we are now

not really clear (even to me!) why I’m giving this talk

About me…

background in computing services at University of Bath

culminating (ha!) in being first ‘webmaster’

moved to UKOLN in 1996

digital library projects, libraries, cultural heritage

advising JISC and the wider community about standards (e.g. for the JISC Information Environment)

remained member of various Web-related committees at Bath until recently

now at the Eduserv Foundation

been a member of the web-support and website-info-mgt JISCMail lists for most of that time

ran the Web noticeboard at Bath for 10 years or so

10 years after…

a lot changes in 10 years…

… but not everything!

some of us have got older

look back at some history…

… not with the intention of dwelling on it

but because there might be things we can learn from it and it’s a useful reminder of where we were when other things happened

and there were early hints at the promise of the Web for learning and research that we are still working towards!

“ Change is inevitable… except from the University of Bath’s vending machines.” John Kirremuir circa 1995 circa 2005

A webmaster’s timeline

1969 – first ARPANET link established, 1977 – first demonstration of TCP/IP

1984 - Novelist William Gibson coins the term ‘cyberspace’

mid-80’s – term ‘Internet’ coined

1990 – HTTP invented

1993 - NCSA graphical browser launched

1994 – 1 st WWW Conference, AGOCG “ Running A WWW Service” published; web-support Mailbase list created

1995 – Search Engine Watch founded

1996 – Brian Kelly joins UKOLN as UK Web Focus

1997 – 1 st IWMW (as “ Running An Institutional Web Service”)

1998 – Earliest records of web-support and website-info-mgt lists

1998 – first mention of ‘accessibility’ on website-info-mgmt list

1999 - Webtechs becomes porn site, RSS invented (2001), term ‘Blog’ coined (2002)

2000 - UniServity – first mention on website-info-mgmt list

2001 - Google University Search – first mention on website-info-mgmt list

1999 - 2000-03 – RSS invented again… and again… (and finally Atom)

2004-05 – ’Ajax’ and ‘Web 2.0’ terms coined

"The Internet? Is that thing still around?” Homer Simpson "Oh, so they have internet on computers now!” Homer Simpson what year did we first see URLs on the sides of busses and planes?

The age of the institutional webmaster (*)

(*) insert your favourite job title here

seen the growth of a new ‘profession’ over last 10 years

but one still without an common job title or easily defined job description or role

e.g. strategic vs. operational

e.g. variability of positioning within institution

happened against a rapidly evolving backdrop

note demise of ‘webmaster’ term (non-PC)

Andrew Cox’s (Sheffield) paper

“ young … hybrid and marginal”, “I’m responsible for stuff”

“ I do not do any web page creation in any shape or form”

not one of “the odd people in the corner” (i.e. the techies!)

With the benefit of hindsight… "If I had to live my life all over again, I'd do it all exactly the same - only I wouldn't read Beowulf.“ attributed to Woody Allen

ac.uk Web servers July 1993 -- busby.leeds.ac.uk cbl.leeds.ac.uk chem.leeds.ac.uk cpt1.dur.ac.uk genie.lut.ac.uk gps.leeds.ac.uk ukoln.bath.ac.uk web.cs.city.ac.uk www.cranfield.ac.uk www.rl.ac.uk agora.scs.leeds.ac.uk csirisb.leeds.ac.uk gopher.cs.nott.ac.uk ib.rl.ac.uk tltpa.leeds.ac.uk unixfe.rl.ac.uk

The land before Web…

yes, there was such a time…

… though of course, today’s new student’s will not really have known it

coloured books

Bristol CWIS software

gopher

numbered lists as user interface!

home grown (open, but UK-specific) solutions

"Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.” Douglas Adams (1952 - 2001)

Case study - Web notice board

1997 – 5 or 6 notices per day

2005 – ~100 notices per day

everything manually approved

no serious legal issues ever

generally open policy – except for very obviously illegal or offensive stuff

few cases of abuse

few rejections (ticket re-sales, cigarettes, uni accommodation issues…)

most hit pages on site

Simple architecture

original…

Web form submission area

email to maintainer

manual email forward to Perl script

transform to HTML and email to Web server

dump into notice area and rebuild main list (both as HTML)

now…

Web form submission area – content stored as XML file

email loop back to submitter to validate email address

email/Web-based confirmation to Perl script to move XML file from pending area to final location

build full listing, category listings, RSS channel, HTML view of notice dynamically using PHP and Perl

New policy enforcement mechanism

essentially based on trust…

… trust built from experience of manually moderated system

no proactive vetting

clear sanctions against abuse (blacklisting, and usual Computing Service AUP abuse mechanisms)

immediate (reactive) response to complaints

A general trend?

from flat HTML files, pretty much static content

to XML, managed content, with dynamic interface

higher quality (X)HTML – largely driven by desire to make content more accessible

better integration with institutional branding

general recognition that end-user need varies widely

in particular that it is better to move the content to the end-user rather than try to pull end-user into content via the Web user-interface

therefore, use of RSS for lists

allowing choice of user interface technology

static pages -> portal -> Web 2.0

The other trend

pressure for control of content

perfectly reasonable from perspective of senior management

totally at odds with web ‘culture’

fear of ‘publishing’ something that damages University brand

desire to moderate

concern about data protection issues, concern about IPR issues

though interesting, most concerns about content were raised by other members of the institution, not by central management

sense that this has eased with rise of blogging, etc. ?

Using external services

Webtechs story

external web stats services

UniServity and the ‘risk’ of outsourcing the whole site

school’s sector this is exactly what tends to happen

library community very early adopters of ‘service’ approach

standardised search interface in the form of Z39.50

invented before anyone had a usable client on desktop 

also much too complicated

Web 2.0 gives us much lighter-weight interfaces to work with – e.g. A9 OpenSearch

Guidelines for webmaster – circa 95

presentation by Brian at a meeting in Loughborough

Research Application

Details of experimental apparatus used at CERN are available on WWW.

Information about ALICE (A Large Ion Collider Experiment) available on WWW.

http://www.cern.ch/

Libraries

A backup copy of the Library catalogue at Leeds University is held in a BRS system.

A CGI program (C) accesses the BRS database. The output is converted to HTML and displayed by the browser.

This technique can be used for teaching & learning applications.

http://www.leeds.ac.uk/library/cats/backup.html

CWIS

Many universities have developed Campus Wide Information Systems (CWIS) based on WWW.

http://www.brad.ac.uk/bradinfo/bradinfo.html

Distributed Teaching

It is possible to dissect a virtual frog on WWW.

http://george.lbl.gov/ITG.hm.pg.docs/dissect/

Student Learning

Second year undergraduates in the Fine Art department, University of Leeds write multimedia essays, which will act as a resource for the next year’s second year students.

http://www.leeds.ac.uk/fine_art.html

Visualisation

A Chemistry MIME type has been proposed by Henry Rzepa (Imperial) and others. It can be used as a visualisation aid.

Platform independence

Application independence

Potential for distributed teaching & learning

http://chem.leeds.ac.uk/novel.html

Control Systems

A robotic telescope is available at Bradford University.

Authorised users can submit a request or operate the telescope in real time.

Mark Cox’s paper Robotic Telescopes - An Interactive Exhibit On WWW was presented at the Mosaic & WWW conference.

http://www.eia.brad.ac.uk/

Conferences

About 200 papers from the Mosaic and The Web conference were available on WWW before the conference started.

Undergraduate students can now attend virtual conferences .

http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/SDG/IT94/Proceedings/

Collaborative Systems

At WWW 94 Tim Berners-Lee asked for groupware facilities for WWW.

A week later WIT (WWW Interactive Talk) was announced.

For further examples, see the URL

http://union.ncsa.uiuc.edu/HyperNews/get/www/ collaboration.html

http://www.w3.org/wit

Follett and all that…

1993 - Joint Funding Council’s Libraries Review Group published the Follett Report

directly led to JISC funding the eLib Programme

range of projects broadly in the area of libraries and information provision generally

huge influence (IMHO) on JISC development strategy since then

Most important, there needs to be a sea-change in the way institutions plan …d provide for the information needs of those working within them. The view of the learning, and research … is no longer adequate. Information is now available …gh many different media, and in all manner of locations. Depending on history, …ography and the resources available, more or less of this material may be …le in the "library", but it is no longer possible for any single "library" alone to contain it all. The emphasis is shifting towards information and information …ccess. This has profound and far reaching implications, and all institutions … act to ensure that they are in a position to deal with these to best advantage. http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/services/papers/follett/report/ch1.html

1990 – HTTP invented

1993 - NCSA graphical browser launched

1994 – 1 st WWW Conference, AGOCG “ Running A WWW Service” published

JISC strategy

to enable UK education and research to keep their activities world-class through the innovative use of ICT

to provide advice to institutions enabling them to make economic, efficient and legally compliant use of ICT

to help the sector provide a positive, personalised user experience

to develop mutually advantageous partnerships with organisations in the UK and abroad

to advise, inform and implement the strategies of government, funding councils and research councils

JISC activities

JISC initiatives and issues

Access Protocols Shibboleth Evolution

Institutional Repositories

Digital Preservation and Curation

e-Learning Support

Open Access Publishing

E-Frameworks

Text Mining and Search Engines

Open Access

making research output available on the Web for free

self archiving (of peer-reviewed, published papers)

open-access publishing (author pays model)

institutional repositories seen as key part of the supporting infrastructure

2000 - UniServity – first mention on website-info-mgmt list

2001 - Google University Search – first mention on website-info-mgmt list

1999 - 2000-03 – RSS invented again… and again… (and finally Atom)

2004-05 – ’Ajax’ and ‘Web 2.0’ terms coined

1991 – arXiv launched

2001 - Budapest Open Access Initiative

2001 - OAI Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) published

2001-2003 - Harnad, Stevan (2001/2003) For Whom the Gate Tolls? http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/resolution.htm

2004 – Google Scholar launched

isn’t it just putting research papers on the Web? Not really!

structured access using metadata (to support citation analysis, author search, etc.)

explicit and open licensing to encourage re-use

management of resources (IPR)

linkages between papers and research data

preservation of scholarly record

E-Framework

e-Framework for Education and Research

an international attempt to “ produce an evolving and sustainable, open standards based, service oriented technical framework to support the education and research communities ”

on the basis that SOA provides flexibility, (cost and other) efficiencies in long term and avoid vendor lock-in

collaboration between JISC (UK), DEST (Australia) and New Zealand (with intention to widen participation gradually – e.g. SURF?)

(from a UK perspective) builds on JISC’s E-Learning Framework (ELF) and the JISC Information Environment

http://www.e-framework.org/

e-Framework background

E-Learning Framework

a service-oriented approach to building e-learning systems

unbundling of monolithic learning management systems into functional components (services)

based on open standards where possible

relatively formal – but still significant issues with how best to do that

recognition that this work would have wider applicability (e.g. to research domain)… hence, becoming the e-Framework

JISC Information Environment

a national approach to information resource discovery provision (discovery to delivery – d2d)

based on open standards (OAI, RSS, SRU, OpenURL, etc.)

The JISC development agenda – in context

essentially a ‘digital library’ agenda

much of it flowing fairly directly from Follett

could argue that some of the stuff talked about on web-support is digital libraries

but… strikes me that there has been relatively little talk on the web-support list about e-learning or e-research

odd isn’t it – these are key to the mission of universities but they aren’t talked about much on the web-support and website-info-mgmt lists?

Take ‘search’ for example

lots of talk on web-support over the years about search – generic good ol’ search

home grown solutions, ht://Dig, use of embedded external services like Google, use of Google Appliance

solving a general requirement for searching a set of Web pages

not specifically solving a requirement for e-learning and e-research?

little discussion about other approaches to finding stuff

‘ library’ approaches, collaborative tools, folksonomies, ontologies, etc.

Or take ‘content management’ …

again, lots of discussion about this over the years

lots of talk about ‘content management systems’

very generic

essentially about managing and delivering Web pages

little discussion about management of learning objects or management of research publications or management of research data

this seems a shame… there seems to be a lot that both sides could learn about the other

policy and process

technical solutions and standards

What special about e-researning?

the requirement for persistence

the need to manage the scholarly record – i.e. research publications

similar requirement for management of learning objects though timescales less

requirement to manage data – potentially huge amounts of data over relatively long timescales

impact on

data formats

management of content

identifiers

managing knowledge about people

What’s special about e-researning?

need to support changes in learning – i.e. pedagogy

from delivery to facilitation

group learning and collaboration

DfES agenda for personalised learning, e-portfolios, etc.

handling of IPR

increasingly mobile and technology aware learner base

sharing and re-use of learning objects

within and between institutions

desire to tag and annotate other people’s work

e.g. MIT OpenCourseWare, JORUM, del.icio.us, Connotea, etc.

and so on

The ‘m’ word

m = metadata

… and the semantic Web

in 1998 Brian and I jointly ran a workshop session on metadata at the 2 nd IWMW in Newcastle

what we failed to do (IMHO) was identify the functional requirements we were trying to meet

we started from Dublin Core and worked backwards (“we have DC, therefore it must be useful to us”)

not unique in this – I think one could make the same kind of arguments about LOM

Google showed us (the library community?) where we were going wrong, but …

But…

… not completely wrong

even Google Scholar still fails us in the context of searching for scholarly publications

inability to do citation analysis properly (because of mis-match between HTTP links vs. ‘old fashioned’ text citations (and more recent OpenURL citations)

inability to undertake ‘author’-type searches

inability to spot duplicates, where multiple copies exist on the Web

particularly where different copies have different formats (PDF vs. HTML vs. …)

inability to track through versions of documents (draft -> preprint -> postprint, etc.)

eresearning and the instutional webmaster

JISC perspective

emphasis on management of objects (scholarly papers, learning objects, complex objects and packaging, metadata, preservation)

relatively formal approaches to service description

etc. etc.

real-world perspective

emphasis on management of web pages

blogs and RSS

simplicity (by and large)

‘ darwinian’ approach – those services and standards that work, survive – those that don’t die

the wider environment

RSS and Atom

blogging

access to and use of online facilities outside the institution

Google and Google Scholar, Amazon

social systems – Flickr, del.ic.ious, Connotea, MySpace, MyFace, YouTube, etc.

microformats

growth of Web 2.0 mindset

all pulling the end-user away from institutional solutions

not clear how we use or embed these things in our services

Conclusions

firstly, that it would be good to see more engagement by the IWMW community in the issues being raised in the e-learning and e-research areas of JISC activity – notably the e-Framework and Open Access/Repositories

secondly, that a small amount of effort should be put into ensuring that we don’t lose our digital record of what the IMWM community has done over the last 10 years

JISC Institutions wider environment

Postscript…