Focusing initially on Performing Arts students, a cognitive interview was devised comprising of three tasks designed to capture participant search behaviour whilst engaged in research activity.

Screen capture software was used to record the on-screen activity of the participants performing research (a task) with the tools of their choice, and an accompanying audio stream was recorded to provide a running commentary of the participant’s train of thought during the exercise.
Performing Arts students love to talk

Each task was allocated ten minutes – producing three 10 minute video files for each participant, for which there were a total of four participants. In addition to screen capture, a questionnaire was given to each participant with questions related to how they would perform the research for the given tasks (no use of computer). The reason being that there may be differences between thinking about a task and actually performing a task; and so, we asked two participants to begin with the questionnaire followed by the computer-based task, and the other two participants beginning with the computer-based task and filling out the questionnaire afterward.

The questionnaire also asks participants to comment on the tools used, and to provide discussion on the effectiveness of the toolsets and any issues encountered, and additional functionality they would like to have.

The three tasks below were written to resemble pseudo Performing Arts coursework assignments that incite the use of expected tools i.e. OPAC and Internet search engines.

Task 1

You have been tasked with the production of a stage play based on silent movie The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, for which the only sound allowed to be used is the noise associated with cars (engines, car horns, indicators, reversing sonar, wipers, screeching tires, crash noises etc.).

Task 2

Examine the literature on Performance Arts Attendance with a view to analysing trends of socio economic characteristics that influence attendance at performing arts events. What, if any, are the factors and barriers to audience retention?

Task 3

Headlining current affairs, and being of concern with schools and child development agencies for many years now, children’s ‘behaviour’ has devolved in working and middle class families. Write a play that captures the essence of these ‘concerning’ times from one or more of the following perspectives: the school, the parent, the child. In addition, the play must be written in the style of Gilbert and Sullivan that veils the story behind an alternative setting (The Mikado).

Analysis of this data has shown that the main toolsets used are: OPAC, Google, Google Scholar, and International bibliography of theatre and dance with full text (a commercial database). There were variations of keywords used in the search criteria and not all with success.  Two reasons may account for this: spelling mistakes and poor choice of keyword. In general, only the top six results were scrutinised for relevant information; further results being ignored. This possibly due to the time constraint imposed on the task, or perhaps from the belief that additional results would not yield desired results.

Participants followed an expected pattern – launch Google, enter keyword, find the top hits (usually Wikipedia), get some background information, and then refine search (ejournals, articles and books); this involved using Google Scholar, OPAC and the commercial database. For video and sound samples, participants used YouTube and a Sound-byte specific website. No search was performed on OPAC for film and sound. NB. Europa Film Treasures is accessible from OPAC, but the search facility is limiting and does not provide an option to search by film title? Film and Sound returns a broken link. Google was deemed to be very supportive for searching information with its automated text search feature and recommendation function, and of course being simple and intuitive to use.  Some search terms were clunky at returning desired results, for instance things such as ‘theories’ and ‘criticisms’ of a play, ‘previous’ productions, ‘presently running’ productions.

Improvements were identified as follows:

To assist with searching: automated text/suggested words; highlighted key words; a side panel for storing returned searches that can then be used again later or discarded – including an identifier to indicate their source e.g. Google, OPAC etc..
A way of displaying inter-library loans, and relevant information relating to the search, with an indicator for which articles are actually available. The related information could be things such as where a play is presently showing, ticket office number, or past versions of the performance company, links to video… basically something that provides extra context relevant to the search.
Once a search has been performed – a method for jumping directly to the text that appears in the initial search return. For instance, when searching Google a list of results is returned which provide a sample of the text from within that web source; but when you access that link it is not easy to see where that text appears within the page.

So what next?

We’ve got more users to observe, and we’ll need to see how they conduct their use of the university toolsets and understand their particular requirements. These participants will include academic staff and library cataloguers.

Acknowledgements

For participating in this phase of the CLOCK project, we would like thank the following Performing Art students: Gemma Smart, Charlotte Haythorne, Marc Brock, and Kirsty Barnes.

• Andrew Beeken has been exploring the Cambridge COMET data via its SPARQL endpoints and has already blogged about the process of using SPARQL to “build kind of a ‘Hello World’ of open data querying”. He’s now looking at the recently-released Harvard open bib data and comparing the speed, the use of matching namespaces, and the use of JSON vs RDF/XML.
• This work is leading up to unified search and presentation of records from several sources (Cambridge/COMET, Harvard, Lincoln/Jerome, OpenLibrary, etc.). Andrew and Trevor Jones are collaborating on drawing up a high-level architecture for CLOCK, and a strategy for expressing Linked Data, which will be shared with the rest of the project team (and publicly) for discussion.
• To support this, Alex Bilbie in ICT services at Lincoln is helping to get the original Jerome application up and running on the CLOCK server (jerome.library.lincoln.ac.uk), where it can be used as a stable platform for developing and RDF-ifying Lincoln’s own bib data.
• Trevor Jones and Ed Chamberlain will work together on developing the work with users (in parallel, at the University of Lincoln and the University of Cambridge) to clarify their requirements for bibliographic data:

• For cataloguers, based around a rethink of copy cataloguing workflows, we will try to tease out requirements from talking to cataloguers (and associated subject librarians) asking to be ‘positively disrupted’: what do they need to do? What is missing from their data?
• For researchers, we will build on some initial user walkthrough analysis done by Trevor and Andrew in Lincoln, with performing arts students in LPAC (the Lincoln Performing Arts Centre). What are the research questions that users are trying to answer? How does bib data help them answer those questions? What’s missing? Ed and Trevor will agree on a set of questions and tasks;
• These requirements will be used to feed the remainingcycles of platform development for CLOCK.

A quick and dirty app to perform a basic search on an endpoint

At its core, CLOCK is a project to link open bibliographic datasets. That’s the philosophy behind it. Where things start to get really exciting  is what we could build with this data. I’m not going to stand up and say the concept of linked open data is new; it’s not. But we’ve certainly got some interesting ideas of where we could take it from the point of view of bibliographic data…

Paul Stanthorp has already written a post discussing the three target tiers for these applications.

So, an update! Things have sprinted forward with CLOCK this week and, as well as some interesting theoretical study which my cohort Trevor Jones will shortly be blogging about, we’ve started looking at both potential high level applications (so that we’ve got something to strive for) and started building some basic search apps (so that we’ve got something real to play with).

The first app we’ve cobbled together is kind of a “Hello World” of open data querying. Using the Cambridge Uni endpoint, we’ve hacked together a really simple app which takes user input in the form of a publication title, author and the number of records to limit the search to. The app takes this criteria, cobbles together a SPARQL query and, using the sparqllib php library, we fire that query at the endpoint and display the results. Publication titles then link back to the URI from Cambridge. We’ve wrapped the Skeleton HTML boilerplate round this for pretties.

While this might seem pretty trivial to some, it’s a good starting point for where we want to go with CLOCK which is, ultimately, delivering “consumer level” applications that run on simple user input rather than relying on users being au fait with complex query languages.

Where next? Well, we want to expand on this basic app and introduce:

• Multiple data sources
• Local data caching
• Better handling of search criteria
• Autocompletion
• Highlighting of search terms
• User accounts (possible cross login from existing uni accounts) which will instruct the default library searched
• Favourites and saved searches

This proof of concept development also sits alongside the theoretical work we’re doing.

We’re beginning to make some progress towards a framework for development in the CLOCK project. Project developers Trevor Jones and Andrew Beeken, with the support of the other developers in LNCD, now have the following at their fingertips:

This blog post is a comment upon the formal project implementation plan, and gives some more detail about how the CLOCK project intends to meet its project aims.

In February, 2012, the project team (EC, CL, PS, OS) met at Peterborough Regional College (roughly equidistant between Lincoln and Cambridge!) to discuss the implementation plan and our CLOCK ‘first steps’. We made copious notes using an interactive whiteboard. Here’s what we agreed for CLOCK…

Most of the day’s discussion was spent attempting to define more clearly the users/audience for CLOCK, narrowing down the field of study a bit as we went along, and looking for potential ways to engage those audiences in the research. We agreed that our users consist of:

1. Cataloguers and library managers looking to innovate their resource description workflows as well as contribute to the corpus of Open Bib Data, through improving/correcting/augmenting existing records as well as submitting new records, “adding to the story” by allowing libraries to incorporate data elements outside the boundaries of traditional resource description.

We spent a while discussing how the project might approach the problem of proposing new ”…minimal workflows for cataloguing around individual, disaggregated RDF elements” (taken from the project plan). We’ve also since discussed this back at Lincoln with staff in the Library and LNCD – I’ll shortly be blogging some diagrams which illustrate several different possible approaches to cataloguing workflow, as part of the ‘Users and use cases’ thread. We’ll also ve speaking to cataloguers at Lincoln and at Cambridge to try and get a clearer picture of the ‘pinch points’ in existing cataloguing, where applications using OBD might make a difference to their work.

Key quotes:

“Matching / negotiating of the best available Open bib data through common identifiers; the importance of a social/reputational aspect in identifying authoritative data; [use of] associated social/reputational metadata making explicit the provenance, history, and ‘pagerank’ measurements of each data element. [The phrase 'a narrative verdict on the catalogue record' was used…]“

2. Researchers (qualified as “the ‘serious’ and tech-savvy researcher“), who may be keen to incorporate Open Bib Data in user tools (e.g. citation/reference management software). We agreed to concentrate within the CLOCK project on a specific discipline—that of Drama/Performing Arts—because of the interesting challenges posed by the description of performance resources in existing bibliographic data. (“Almost anything you’d want to know about a play isn’t recorded in the MARC record!”). We identified a number of potentially useful resources and sources of data, including:

• The play’s the thing
• TheatreDB
• Resources in institutional repositories
• Theatricalia
• Dutch Culture Link
• Wikipedia/DBpedia

We agreed that we’ll set up a series of interviews/structured tasks for researchers in performing arts at Cambridge and Lincoln; also for subject librarians in the discipline (as a proxy to the researchers themselves). CLOCK will look at how well existing catalogue data describes performance and related resources (perhaps by sampling MARC records at both instititutions), and how external sources of ‘non-library’ data might complement and enhance those records.

3. Developers attached to academic libraries, who are looking to build applications exploiting available Open Bib Data, and techniques for interrogating and exploiting that data. The engagement with this audience is probably more at a strategic level than the first two – what are the technology choices and the decisions around the design of APIs and data endpoints – can we make a case study on developing using OBD?

We also discussed CLOCK’s overlap with other projects (in particular the Open Biblio 2 and the Open Education Metadata UK project). This work will be picked up by Ed Chamberlain, who is a common factor in all three projects!

“The project team believe that an important aspect of this innovation will be serious consideration given to the development of an awesome, national, open scholarly catalogue knowledgebase for the UK (“data.ac.uk/library” or “library.data.ac.uk”).”

Members of the CLOCK project team have since signed up to the new DATA-AC-UK mailing list and we will use the project as an opportunity to propose first steps in publishing national bibliographic data to data.ac.uk. This will be the topic of a future blog post.

“CLOCK will explore options for updating and maintaining the shared platform on data.lincoln.ac.uk as an eventual service”

University of Lincoln developer Alex Bilbie has blogged about the future of 5★ open data publishing at Lincoln: “As part of the Jerome project, we cracked open the university library’s digital catalogues and stored the data in a sane format (i.e. not MARC). Now through the CLOCK project the data will be semantically marked-up and compatible with other institutions bibliographic data“. This will also be the topic of a future blog post.

The CLOCK project is harnessing the success of these two complementary initiatives and investigating new approaches to data creation and discovery in the library domain. In particular, CLOCK will investigate, propose, and develop new, web-based bibliographic tools which will make it easier for different users—cataloguers in academic libraries, and the “serious”, tech-savvy researcher—to find Open Bibliographic Data and incorporate that data into systems and workflows.

This is the CLOCK project implementation plan:

Aims, Objectives and Final Output(s) of the project

The CLOCK project’s overall aim is to challenge assumptions and drive innovation in libraries’ interaction with bibliographic data. The project team believe that an important aspect of this innovation will be serious consideration given to the development of an awesome, national, open scholarly catalogue knowledgebase for the UK (“data.ac.uk/library” or “library.data.ac.uk”).

As a medium-term step towards this goal, CLOCK will explore options for updating and maintaining the shared platform on data.lincoln.ac.uk as an eventual service. Longer term maintenance of the Cambridge open data service will also be investigated.

The investigation will take an experimental approach, building upon the RDF encoded structured metadata released through the COMET project as a readily accessible resource for enrichment of data within the Jerome software environment. At this preliminary stage, four steps in record enrichment have been identified:

1. Matching / negotiating of the best available Open bib data through common identifiers;
2. The importance of a social/reputational aspect in identifying authoritative data;
3. A process of harvesting a returned record (parts of a record) to be re-used;
4. Enrichment, repair and cleansing of data in the knowledgebase (positive feedback loop).

By exploring aggregation, ‘data cleansing’ and enrichment through readily available open sources, it hope to highlight new distributed approaches to metadata production–cataloguing, storage and delivery, including minimal workflows for cataloguing around individual, disaggregarted RDF elements. The project will explore ways to do this using automated techniques built around open reusable metadata.

Whilst the two million records published under the COMET project will act as a starting point for this process, the participants aim to utilize other sources, including images, table of contents data and related supplementary resources (geo-data, author biographies, etc). Through this, there will be an additional social aspect of the project, to identify and document other authoritative open data sources to consume and to report back on successes and failures.

Alongside a focus on enrichment through open data, the project will recognise that a ‘pure open’ information environment is still far from the norm. It will also investigate methods in which open data can be consumed by semi-open and commercial resource discovery services and how such services may themselves benefit from open approaches to data publishing.

Final Project Products

Primary outputs:

1. An enhanced Open Bibliographic Dataset containing records sourced from Jerome, COMET, and other open data sources, permissively licensed, delivered over fast API in a range of formats (e.g. MARC, RDF, JSON) as both whole records and disaggregated, Linked data: along with associated social/reputational metadata making explicit the provenance, history, and ‘pagerank’ measurements of each data element. All data and APIs produced will be published on data.lincoln.ac.uk and access will be maintained by the University of Lincoln on that platform for at least the next 3 years;
2. A repository of Open Source software for gathering, manipulating and publishing such data plus public documentation for the APIs, clarifying in particular the utility of the ‘data cleansing’ and the social/reputational metadata in distributed cataloguing environments;
3. A proposal for the continuation of the work of CLOCK toward the specific aim of establishing a distributed open scholarly catalogue knowledgebase for the UK (“data.ac.uk/library” or “library.data.ac.uk”).

Secondary outputs:

1. User documentation: a formal clearly-documented user requirements analysis and evidence of user engagement (e.g. user ‘stories’);
2. Contextual documentation: a published literature review;
3. Technical documentation: an examination of relevant standards and processes for manipulating Open Bib Data, particularly via API, and a comparison-cum-synthesis of the parallel approaches to open data publishing taken by COMET and Jerome;
4. Contributions toward the JISC Open Bibliographic Data guide, initially in the form of commentable public plans for implementation of the shared Lincoln-Cambridge datastore. These will be reviewed at regular intervals and will eventually build into guidance for other academic libraries on releasing data openly. An experimental focus will allow mistakes and development ‘wrong turns’ to be shared with a wider community;
5. We will disseminate our work during and beyond the duration of the project. Progress will be communicated by regular blogging throughout the life of the project. Project members are active within the UK HE development and library communities. Through blogs, social networks and talks at events they will continue to act as champions for open data publishing, furthering the aims and objectives of the Discovery programme. In particular, we will showcase our work at relevant JISC workshops, and will produce public project documents according to the JISC branding guidelines, targeting specific and relevant audiences.

Wider Benefits to Sector & Achievements for Host Institution

Jerome provided a modern API-centric approach to open data services and discovery using NoSQL database technologies and Open Source search. COMET published over two million records under a Public Domain Data License, many of them available for query via an RDF-store/SPARQL endpoint. Tools and techniques to achieve this have also been release under a permissive software license.

The CLOCK project aims to scope and develop powerful and usable API-based web services which will make it easy to locate available Open Bibliographic Data for a given bibliographic work, These services will be aimed predominantly to meet the needs of:

1. developers attached to academic libraries looking to build applications exploiting available Open Bibliographic Data, and techniques for interrogating and exploiting that data;
2. cataloguers and library managers looking to innovate their resource description workflows as well as contribute to the corpus of Open Bib Data;
3. the ‘serious’ and tech-savvy researcher, who may be keen to incorporate Open Bib Data in tools aimed at the user (discovery, citation/reference management software, repositories).

In addition:

1. Students and staff at the University of Lincoln will benefit from a substantial increase in the size and ‘weight’ of Jerome/data.lincoln.ac.uk (“Quantity has its own quality”); from a refinement of the discovery interface; and from engagement with RDF/linked data;
2. Cambridge University Library will benefit from aspects of the Jerome architecture (e.g. the use of schemaless databases and aggregated search indices), the practical re-use of its own data (N.B. through this consumption of its own output, important lessons on RDF utility can be learned and shared. This methodology has already pworked for CUL with its public facing API project), and from the ‘proving’ of existing approaches through agile distributed development sprints;
3. To wider HE, the project will demonstrate the value of such data (and the development method) to universities and the wider community, enabling future developments. CLOCK is an opportunity to demonstrate ‘real world’ open web services for libraries, including [i] APIs to enhance existing free or commercial Discovery environments, [ii] the making-accessible of emerging sources of open metadata (the BL table of contents; the outputs from the Open Bibliography 2 project), (iii) a distributed ‘data cleansing’ model (articulated at the COMET-Jerome hack day in August 2011), a new more open approach to cataloguing–resource description, (iv) time and money savings for academic libraries through exploitation of the bibliographic commons and tools for engaging with it.
4. Both institutions share a firm strategic commitment to open data publishing. It is the ambition of the project participants that any future major developments in national level resource discovery learn and benefit from the experiences gained in this project. JISC, Discovery, and the community at large will benefit from demonstrations of the above ‘real world’ discovery-enhancement tools (above), from a robust public discussion of the parallel technologies for storing and manipulating bib data – RDF store vs. schemaless approaches.

Risk Analysis and Success Plan

1. The principal risk to the success of the project would be an inability to appoint a suitable person to the position of developer in time for the start of the project. The recruitment process for this post began in February and was completed in March 2012.
2. A related risk is that the other members of the project team (Paul Stainthorp; Ed Chamberlain) are involved in other JISC-funded projects. The project manager (PS) will take care to ensure that—while the work of the various projects may complement CLOCK—there is clear distinction between the goals and outputs of the various projects. Weekly–fortnightly iteration meetings for the CLOCK project will help to ensure this, and Lincoln has established the LNCD group to co-ordinate the work of its overlapping commitments.
3. As always, there is a risk that key staff may be absent through illness. We will mitigate against this through close collaboration via the web-based development tools, weekly–fortnightly iteration meetings, and periodic reviews of the project.

Risk Analysis (*overall risk = likelihood × severity):

If the CLOCK project is a success, we anticipate it will have the following long-term effects (ETA up to one year after the end of the project):

• Developers unconnected with Lincoln or Cambridge will exploit the APIs to build or enhance new open (and semi-open) bibliographic discovery services.
• Academic libraries will incorporate Open Bib Data elements from CLOCK in their cataloguing–resource description workflows.
• Serious researchers will use Open Bib Data elements from CLOCK in personal citation/reference management software.
• A new social/reputational model of reputation in distributed cataloguing will have gained some traction in academic libraries.
• Significant steps will have been taken toward a national, distributed open scholarly catalogue knowledgebase for the UK (“data.ac.uk/library” or “library.data.ac.uk”).

IPR

We have no objection to JISC making any part of this proposal available should the contents be requested under the Freedom of Information Act, or if we are successful in our bid for funding that our project proposal is made available on JISC’s website.

1. Any additional bibliographic data or metadata created as a result of this project will be released under an open license that permits unrestricted re-use. Wherever possible, the Open Data Commons PDDL or CC0 will be used.
2. All software outputs will be released under an appropriate Open Source licence (we will seek further advice from OSSWatch on the most appropriate licence).
3. All documentation and blog posts will be released under the Creative Commons attribution share-alike licence, CC-BY-SA.

Project Team Relationships and End User Engagement

We intend to use the CLOCK blog (http://clock.blogs.lincoln.ac.uk/) to provide regular updates on the status of the project, and to provide links to working services and data. In addition to the JISC Discovery events, the developer community will be engaged through the growing data.ac.uk community and mailing list, and library staff through events such as a Mashed Library unconference planned for early July, with a cataloguing / open data theme.

The CLOCK project team will consist of:

Paul Stainthorp is Electronic Resources Librarian at the University of Lincoln. Here he will act as project manager and (jointly with Ed Chamberlain) researcher. Paul has several years’ experience of working with open metadata systems (repositories, journal article knowledgebases); he successfully project-managed the Jerome project. Here he will manage the project overall, produce reports and documentation for JISC, as well as leading the lit. review and user engagement workpackages.

Ed Chamberlain is Systems Development Librarian at Cambridge University Library. Ed will act as lead researcher / internal technical consultant and provide additional project guidance. He brings extensive experience of project management, library systems implementation, metadata publishing and open licensing. In addition to managing the COMET project, he was responsible for releasing and documenting Cambridge’s existing APIs to library services. As lead researcher for CLOCK, he will be primarily responsible for the technical standards & methods workpackages, and for guiding the work of the developer.

Chris Leach is Systems Librarian at the University of Lincoln. With more than 30 years experience in a range of technical library roles, Chris’s focus in CLOCK will be to support the analysis of existing and emerging library data standards, and to support the work of the developer.

Owen Stephens is a library consultant, and for this project will provide consultancy and advice to put the work into a national context, relating CLOCK to the wider movement toward open data and the work of the JISC Discovery initiative. Owen has a technical background in libraries with experience of service delivery and strategic planning. He has been responsible for a number of innovative projects at both institutional and national levels.

Andrew Beeken and Trevor Jones have been appointed (March 2012) as developers on CLOCK. They will act as lead programmer on the project, making use of iterative development tools as described above. They will also participate in the user requirements analysis and the review of existing data standards.

Ian Snowley, the University Librarian at the University of Lincoln, will act as project sponsor and director.

Projected Timeline, Workplan & Overall Project Methodology

The University of Lincoln has an established and rapidly-maturing agile, iterative, distributed approach to web development, supported by tools including Codeigniter, Github, Google Groups, Pivotal Tracker and WordPress – this methodology has serviced previous JISC-funded projects well and will again be employed here. Tools used will be exclusively web-based, allowing staff from Lincoln, Cambridge, JISC and elsewhere to participate.

The project will end 31 July 2011. Because of the iterative approach to development, there will be continual gathering, analysis and documentation of user/technical requirements throughout the project. Results will be disseminated via a project blog, community events, the Discovery newsletter, etc., and via more formal channels (e.g. journal articles in scholarly and trade publications for libraries) where appropriate.

High-level plan of workpackages:

Budget

We propose that the follow-on funding sought will be used to cover the time of the team members at Lincoln and Cambridge, and to fund part of the new post of web developer. In total, 45% of the funding sought will go on staff (incurred appointments and institutional staff allocations): this is appropriate for a project where a high level of expertise must be applied. Apart from on-costs and travel/expenses, the other significant expense is that of the consultancy work which is necessary to ensure a wider application and scope for the CLOCK project than was the case in Jerome or COMET, both being more rooted to their respective institutions.

Breakdown of the budget:

Projects Web Developer, 0.6 FTE 18.63%
Recruitment 0.68%
Equipment 3.02%
Travel 1.51%
Consultancy 4.98%
Directly Incurred Total 28.81%

Directly Allocated Staff* 22.99%
Estates (Lincoln) 6.04%
Estates (Cambridge) 1.03%
Directly Allocated Total 30.06%

Indirect Costs (Lincoln) 33.1%
Indirect Costs (Cambridge) 8.03%
Indirect Costs Total 41.13%

Total Project Cost £ 66,329.20 (100.0%)
Amount Requested from JISC £ 49,879.56 (75.2%)
Institutional Contributions £ 16,449.64 (24.8%)

1. Just as we did for Jerome, we’ll be using the CLOCK project blog for all reporting to JISC (as well as for blog posts about the work of the project itself):
• List of required blog post headings here
2. We also need to produce a Project Plan, based broadly on our original proposal:
• Required headings for the Project Plan here
3. (As project manager) I’ll also be emailing Andy once a month with a quick update on progress;
4. There are nine other projects in the Discovery phase two programme, plus CLOCK:
• List of projects here
• There’s also a mailing list for the programme
5. The next programme meeting will take place ^w/_c 16 April 2012, in Birmingham:
• List of programme meetings here
6. As in phase one, consultants will be preparing case studies on the various projects (CLOCK included) for the benefit of the wider Discovery programme.

Related: we’re planning to hold our first project team meeting on 14 February 2012. To spread the burden of travel equally, we’re going to hold it in a location convenient for Lincoln, Cambridge and the West Midlands…

In a nutshell:

• The University of Lincoln, working in consortium with Cambridge University Library and Owen Stephens Consulting, has been awarded £49,877 by JISC to investigate ways of driving innovation in libraries’ interactions with Open Bibliographic Data, through a project we’re calling CLOCK (Cambridge-Lincoln Open Catalogue Knowledgebase).
• These new developer posts will include a significant amount of working with library data-exchange formats, web standards, and Linked Data, including contributing to the development of a sector-wide data.ac.uk service.
• The role requires extensive knowledge of the web and its attendant technologies and the software development and analytical skills to put this knowledge to good effect. The postholder should have demonstrable experience as both a producer and consumer of RESTful web services.
• You can apply online via the University’s jobs website

• Closing date is 2 February 2012
• Salary: grade 6 (from £25,251 pro rata)
• There are two part time posts available (0.4FTE each – i.e. approx. 2 days a week)
• Posts are fixed term until 31 July 2012
• Based at our lovely Brayford Pool Campus in Lincoln city centre

This is an opportunity to work alongside a range of interesting people from the University Library in Lincoln, from Cambridge University Library, and from the national Discovery programme, as well as a growing ‘cross-project’ pool of developers in LNCD, our agile open-source ninja webdev hothouse. “If we were to summarise our technologies and interests I guess they would be #agile, #opensource, #opendata #LAMP, #php, #codeigniter, #mongoDB, #OAuth, #APIs, #HTML5, #CSS3, #github and moving towards #RDF and #LinkedData. Just seeing these hashtags listed together should cause your heart to beat with excitement “

If you have any questions about the role please get in touch!

The title says it all, really. The University of Lincoln, working in consortium with Cambridge University Library and Owen Stephens Consulting, has been awarded £49,877 by JISC to investigate ways of driving innovation in libraries’ interactions with Open Bibliographic Data, through a project we’re calling CLOCK (Cambridge-Lincoln Open Catalogue Knowledgebase).

CLOCK is a continuation of and elaboration upon the work of two recent JISC Discovery projects—Jerome at the University of Lincoln and COMET at the University of Cambridge—via a programme of development work shared between the two institutions, and with library consultant Owen Stephens. JISC were impressed enough with the work of both projects, and sufficiently interested in the potential for collaboration, that they encouraged our joint bid for follow-up funding.

Between now and the end of July, 2012, the CLOCK project will provide us with a framework to:

…[1] exploit through real-world applications the significant amount of data released openly by Cambridge University Library; [2] apply the Jerome database architecture, iterative development methodology, and API framework to a bibliographic dataset an order of magnitude greater than the University of Lincoln’s; and [3] to build and enable a new set of tools and demonstrator services which will enable the future development of public Open Bib Data web applications of practical utility to libraries and end-users.

You can read the full bid document, here.

I’m very much looking forward to working with Ed Chamberlain, Systems Librarian in the University Library at the University of Cambridge, along with Owen Stephens, veteran of a number of campaigns to open up access to library data, and Chris Leach (Systems Librarian) and Ian Snowley (University Librarian) from the University of Lincoln. Thanks are due to all of them for their help in writing the successful bid; to the Research & Enterprise Development office at Lincoln for their invaluable assistance in putting together the project budget; and to the LNCD group at the University of Lincoln for providing the kind of supportive development platform that makes these kind of projects possible.

Finally, a big thank you to Andy McGregor and the JISC Digital Infrastructure: Information and library infrastructure: Resource discovery programme, for this opportunity to further explore the blossoming environment of open bibliographic data/open discovery in libraries. If you haven’t done so already, you might like to take a look at the following websites:

• Discovery: a metadata ecology for UK education and research
• Open Bibliographic Data Guide
• data.lib.cam.ac.uk (beta)
• data.lincoln.ac.uk
• JISC-funded Open Bibliography 2 (Ed Chamberlain is also involved in this project)
• LNCD projects
• JISC resource discovery programme

As with all our projects, we’ll be blogging it comprehensively (so stand by for a steady stream of awful clock-related puns used as blog post titles). Although there’s little to see there yet, the CLOCK project blog is at: http://clock.blogs.lincoln.ac.uk/ – along with its own RSS feed . Watch that space!