Survive or Thrive 2010

‘Survive or Thrive’ is an opportunity for experts across the higher education and public sectors to reflect on the changes brought about by the web and digital technologies and on how these apply to the sharing and re-use of content for research and learning. Our key question is how can we better meet the needs of users. Significant changes in the way in which information is created, distributed and used have evolved over the past decade. These offer new ways to provide content, as shown [...]

“We’re really not ready for the tsunami of digital content that’s coming down the line.” Bill Thompson, BBC Technological innovation often takes the form of overlapping and richly interconnected waves of change; some rapid and disruptive, others subtly gradual and yet no less transformative. In Higher Education, as elsewhere, promising innovations must be dissected and evaluated in the context of existing constraints and the requirements of learning, teaching and research. Operationa [...]

In considering the interactions between institutions and content, it can be difficult to separate the diverse roles fulfilled by the various actors. A university, for example, generates content, consumes content, and may well also contribute and channel content. The desire of university-as-consumer to access content in an affordable manner must be juxtaposed with the desire of university-as-contributor to extract maximum value from its own contribution. A model developed by the JISC-funded TILE [...]

The UK Higher Education sector benefits from access to a veritable wealth of content, freely generated by various stakeholders within the sector and beyond, or procured on its behalf by the efforts of individual institutions and agencies such as JISC and the British Library. In areas from learning resources to scholarly publishing, traditional models are being challenged by growing enthusiasm for more ‘open’ and rapid approaches to creation and distribution. The realities of shrinking bud [...]

“People will go around you to get your content... unless you help them.” Mike Ellis, Eduserv In the past decade, the Web has come to dominate much of Higher Education’s interaction with electronic data and information, from the interfaces of the library catalogue or Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) through to web-based interaction with distant scientific instruments. More recently, the combination of trends (AJAX, the falling costs of storage and bandwidth, commodity availability of [...]

Through observing trends within Higher Education and beyond, it is possible to step back from the specific technologies and approaches being deployed in order to identify broader - and more sustained - themes. In the context of this event, six themes present themselves as being particularly germane. These are introduced individually below, but might briefly be characterised as follows: ●    Theme 1 - The increasing adoption of ‘open’ approaches to the creation, sharing and consumpti [...]

“If you rely solely upon the market, you will get a solution shaped by the needs of the market.” Bill Thompson, BBC As individuals spend more of their time online by choice, leveraging tools inside and outside the academic sector, it becomes evermore important to recognise Higher Education’s place within a broader landscape of approaches, norms, standards and systems. There is value in stepping back from the detail of running individual services, to consider the wider implications o [...]

As is the nature of real services and applied technologies, especially in a networked world, our six conference themes are themselves interwoven. Each theme is defined and discussed in more detail on the subsequent pages. [table id=2 /] Strong Connection | Possible Connection The current and emerging application domains identified under each theme also form an interesting pattern: [table id=3 /] Current domain | Emerging domain

Early interest in Open Access to the published output of scholarship has been subsumed within broader social, economic, political and technological drives toward transparency and unencumbered re-use of content (and raw data) in a growing range of application areas. Technology, licensing frameworks, and business models are becoming increasingly capable, although work remains to be done in fully integrating today’s enthusiasm for openness with legacy business practices reliant upon perpetuating [...]

Web companies such as Amazon, Google and Facebook have begun to illustrate the implications of working at scale, monetizing effectively free online offerings by mining the aggregate of millions of transactions in order to derive new value. New models, based upon open source software, massively redundant commodity hardware and highly automated workflows alter the underlying economics and give rise to a new class of services that would previously have proved unsustainable. The opportunity ha [...]

Accurate and timely access to the fine grain of ‘atomic’ data, text, audio and images is highly desirable in a range of research disciplines, to government (notably in security) and potentially to media consumers. Advances in software and processing capabilities, linked to retrieval feedback mechanisms are transforming possibilities in to feasible realities. Text Mining is about the discovery of new information, by automatic extraction from different resources and linking it together to f [...]

The ability of the web to connect human beings on any topic has generated widespread recognition and expectation of web-mediated contribution, recommendation and collaboration. User contribution embraces a wide range of content generation devices – enhancement (co-creation, reuse), research data (citizen science), metadata (tagging), commentary (annotation, review), explicit recommendation (rating, lists) and discussion (network forums). Domestic and academic consumers alike are interested [...]

Every day, our interactions with processes and organizations generate a wealth of data - Battelle’s 'database of intentions’, the so-called 'data exhaust' created as a byproduct of many online processes. This ‘Business Intelligence’ may be under utilized by some originators, but is potentially of high value to those with the interest and capacity to collect, synthesize and analyze at scale. Amazon and a new generation of web retailers and monetized online services have built their bus [...]

“The Real-Time Web is a paradigm based on pushing information to users as soon as it's available - instead of requiring that they or their software check a source periodically for updates. It's being implemented in social networking, search, news and elsewhere - making those experiences more like Instant Messaging and facilitating unpredictable innovations. Early benefits include increased user engagement (‘flow’) and decreased server loads, but these are early days. Real-time information [...]

Consideration of our six theses suggests that the interface of technology, services and scholarly artefacts is a maelstrom, the eye of the perfect storm. No objective is fixed, no direction is linear  – we are forever ‘beta’. Within this landscape, we are committed to leveraging scholarly assets to ensure the future of the academy and the health of the wider knowledge economy. We therefore offer four frameworks or models designed to assist delegates in reflecting on the relative import [...]

Particular technology applications are likely to differ in fit according to discipline and level. From the perspective of each discipline and its practitioners (as opposed to the technologists), the initial broad criteria determining fit will be ‘relevance’ (does it assist scholarship?), ‘readiness’ (are practitioners ready to use it?) and ‘reward’ (will there be a return for the practitioner investment?) - though there will be others. The following broad scholarly discipline area [...]

The acid test for any investment in innovation is whether it is hitting the ‘sweet spot’ – which may be expressed in a particular requirement or more broadly in terms of efficiency, economy or effectiveness.  In the network economy and the uncertain world of emerging technologies, it is especially important and yet particularly difficult to identify that sweet spot. Both the drive for innovation and the challenges to be answered are intensified in a time of austerity. For any given inn [...]

Whenever we consider new models or new technologies for content and information management, and especially when assessing their likely fit and impact in a particular domain (e.g. a whole library, a particular collection or a research group), it is useful to have models that facilitate a first pass assessment, focusing on the core challenges ahead of piloting or implementing any given technology or service approach. We suggest those core challenges relate to scale, granularity, semantic consisten [...]

Behind new service prospects lurk the realities of costs and risks, linked to changing views of process ownership, location and associated dependencies. The assets involved in scholarship demand both origination and curatorial roles, played by creators, libraries, archives, museums and data centres within and without the HE sector. This model therefore addresses the question of ownership, of ‘Who does and should do what?’ - the ‘Leave it to Google’ (or ANO) challenge. It is designed t [...]