Transcript Institutional Web Management Workshop 2006, Bath Andy Powell, Eduserv Foundation [email protected] www.eduserv.org.uk/foundation June 2006 Reflections on 10 years of the Institutional Web.

Institutional Web Management Workshop 2006, Bath
Andy Powell, Eduserv Foundation
[email protected]
www.eduserv.org.uk/foundation
June 2006
Reflections on 10 years of the Institutional Web
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
Institutional Web Management Workshop 2006, Bath
June 2006
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-infomgt JISCMail lists for most of that time
• ran the Web noticeboard at Bath for 10 years or so
Institutional Web Management Workshop 2006, Bath
June 2006
10 years after…
circa 1995
• 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
circa 2005
• 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
“Change is inevitable…
• and there were early hints at the
promise of the Web for learning and
research that we are still working
towards!
Institutional Web Management Workshop 2006, Bath
except from the
University of Bath’s
vending machines.”
John Kirremuir
June 2006
A webmaster’s timeline
"The Internet? Is that thing still around?”
Homer Simpson
• 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 – 1st WWW Conference, AGOCG “Running A WWW Service” published;
web-support Mailbase list created
what
year
didhave
we
"Oh, so
they
• 1995 – Search Engine Watch founded
first see URLs on
• 1996 – Brian Kelly joins UKOLN as UK Web Focus
• 1997 – 1st IWMW (as “Running An Institutional Web Service”)
internet on
the
sides ofnow!”
busses
computers
andHomer
planes?
Simpson
• 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 2006,
‘Web
Institutional
Web Management
Workshop
Bath2.0’ terms coined
June 2006
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!)
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June 2006
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
Institutional Web Management Workshop 2006, Bath
June 2006
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
Institutional Web Management Workshop 2006, Bath
June 2006
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)
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June 2006
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
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June 2006
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
Institutional Web Management Workshop 2006, Bath
June 2006
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
Institutional Web Management Workshop 2006, Bath
June 2006
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
Institutional Web Management Workshop 2006, Bath
June 2006
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. ?
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June 2006
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
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June 2006
Guidelines for webmaster – circa 95
• presentation by Brian at a meeting in Loughborough
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Research Application
http://www.cern.ch/
Details of
experimental
apparatus used at
CERN are available
on WWW.
Information about
ALICE (A Large Ion
Collider Experiment)
available on WWW.
Copyright University of Leeds
17
Libraries
http://www.leeds.ac.uk/library/cats/backup.html
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.
Copyright University of Leeds
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CWIS
Many
universities
have developed
Campus Wide
Information
Systems
(CWIS) based
on WWW.
http://www.brad.ac.uk/bradinfo/bradinfo.html
Copyright University of Leeds
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Distributed Teaching
It is possible to dissect a
virtual frog on WWW.
http://george.lbl.gov/ITG.hm.pg.docs/dissect/
Copyright University of Leeds
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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.
Copyright University of Leeds
http://www.leeds.ac.uk/fine_art.html
21
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
Copyright University of Leeds
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Control Systems
http://www.eia.brad.ac.uk/
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.
Copyright University of Leeds
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Conferences
http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/SDG/IT94/Proceedings/
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.
Copyright University of Leeds
24
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
Copyright University of Leeds
http://www.w3.org/wit
25
Follett and all that…
• 1990 – HTTP invented
• 1993 - NCSA graphical browser launched
• 1994 – 1st WWW Conference, AGOCG
“Running A WWW Service” published
• 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.
June 2006
Institutionalhttp://www.ukoln.ac.uk/services/papers/follett/report/ch1.html
Web Management Workshop 2006, Bath
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
Institutional Web Management Workshop 2006, Bath
June 2006
JISC activities
Institutional Web Management Workshop 2006, Bath
June 2006
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
Institutional Web Management Workshop 2006, Bath
June 2006
• 2000 - UniServity – first mention on website-infomgmt list
Open Access
• 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
• 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
• 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/T
p/resolution.htm
• 2004 – Google Scholar launched
Institutional Web Management Workshop 2006, Bath
• 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
June 2006
E-Framework
http://www.e-framework.org/
• 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
Institutional Web Management Workshop 2006, Bath
June 2006
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 eFramework
• JISC Information Environment
– a national approach to information resource discovery
provision (discovery to delivery – d2d)
• based on open standards (OAI, RSS, SRU, OpenURL,
etc.)
June 2006
Institutional Web Management Workshop 2006, Bath
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 websupport 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?
Institutional Web Management Workshop 2006, Bath
June 2006
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.
Institutional Web Management Workshop 2006, Bath
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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
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June 2006
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
Institutional Web Management Workshop 2006, Bath
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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
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The ‘m’ word
• m = metadata
• …and the semantic Web
• in 1998 Brian and I jointly ran a workshop session on
metadata at the 2nd 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 …
Institutional Web Management Workshop 2006, Bath
June 2006
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 mismatch 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.)
Institutional Web Management Workshop 2006, Bath
June 2006
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
Institutional Web Management Workshop 2006, Bath
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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
Institutional Web Management Workshop 2006, Bath
June 2006
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
JISC
should be put into
ensuring that we
don’t lose our
digital record of what
the IMWM
Institutions
community has
done over the
last 10 years
Institutional Web Management Workshop 2006, Bath
wider
environment
June 2006
Postscript…
• the following slide was shown by Brian Kelly during the
2nd IWMW in Newcastle (1998)
• it caused some merriment among the assembled
audience (we were younger and more juvenile then)…
• …especially when Brian failed to recognise the typo it
contained and carried on giving his talk completely
ignorant of why everyone was laughing!
Institutional Web Management Workshop 2006, Bath
June 2006
Addressing
URLs (e.g. http://www.bristolpoly.ac.uk/depts/music/latest.html)
have limitations:
• Lack of long-term persistency
– Organisation changes name
– Department shat down / merged
– Directory structure reorganised
• Inability to support multiple versions of resources
(mirroring)
URNs (Uniform Resource Names):
• Proposed as solution
• Difficult to implement (no W3C activity in this area)
June 2006
Institutional Web Management Workshop 2006, Bath