The Jorum Development Plan (February - April 2012)
Posted by Laura Shaw on 2nd February 2012
This is an update to the Jorum Development Plan (Oct 2011 - Jan 2012).
Jorum is currently a JISC Service in Development. The Jorum management team is in the process of developing a Business Case in support of Jorum formally becoming part of JISC’s Services Portfolio. For this we need a clear remit and evidence of demand. We will ensure we update the community with any developments, but do not expect to be in a position to do so until June/July 2012. This blog post summarises the community and technical activities we’ll be carrying out over the next three months.
1. Community Activities
1.1 Licensing
We are pleased to announce that we have worked with previous Jorum contributors to re-licence almost 70% of those resources that were in Jorum without a Creative Commons licence. In this next period we are looking into adding additional types of open licences (e.g. the GNU General Public Licence) as options for contributors, available for all methods of deposit, to ensure Jorum is not restricting the open content we can accept. More details are available below in the Technical Activities section.
1.2 Subject and Institutional Pilots
We have been working with a small number of HE and FE institutions and subject communities to better understand the potential for Jorum to provide new, more targeted routes into content, and community-appropriate support for ongoing work and development. We are initially asking two questions: “What would www.jorum.ac.uk/
1.3 Getting Your Content into Jorum
We’re continuing to expand and improve the options available for depositing content into Jorum. Further details can be found under Technical Activities. Over the next four months we will be focusing on working within the community to ensure that existing OER resources are brought into Jorum using these options. If you would like us to work with you to provide access to your OERs please contact us at support@jorum.ac.uk.
1. 4 Working with R&D Projects
As well as continuing to support OER3 projects such as ALTO UK, Jorum has worked with several institutions and communities to support their bids to the JISC OER Rapid Innovation funding call. If these are successful, we’ll have some good opportunities from mid-March onwards to help develop Jorum to meet some current community requirements. We’re also working closely with the JLeRN Experiment project, based at Mimas, which is exploring technical solutions for gathering, sharing and using ‘paradata’, or data about the usage and educational contexts of resources.
1. 5 Improvements to the User Experience
Based on user feedback, we will soon be releasing a new, clearer, easier to understand resource page. We are also working on improving discoverability of resources in Jorum. And most importantly, we are developing an entirely new “front end” interface for Jorum from scratch, built with the existing Jorum as the engine underneath. This will enable us to be really creative and responsive to what users need, including providing exciting, friendly ways to browse the collection and view resources. For more details see the Technical Activities section below.
1.6 Jorum as a Good Open Development Citizen
We want to make sure we’re contributing appropriately to the open source development communities we are part of, and that we are taking advantage of all the benefits going open source can offer. With this in mind we’ve engaged the services of OSS Watch to support us in understanding our options and developing our priorities. And we’ve launched our first ever Dev8D Jorum Developer Challenge, with prizes for developers who come up with applications that demonstrate useful, innovative, original use of the Read API.
1.7 The Jorum Steering Gorup
Our re-formed Jorum Steering Group, representing influential stakeholders and aligned with all areas of our designated community, will meet for the second time in February 2012. A list of all members, and the minutes of the first meeting, is available on the Jorum website. The Steering Group’s role in 2011/2012 is to assist Jorum in developing a strong business case for moving into service and to advocate the use of Jorum in their communities.
2. What’s Next in the Community?
Whilst technical work will focus on improvements to the user experience, we’ll also be engaging with current and potential content contributors to develop new bulk deposit mechanisms. If you would like us to work with you to provide access to your OERs please contact us at support@jorum.ac.uk.
When we have scoped changes to the user experience we’ll be contacting volunteers on the user group to ensure the changes are beneficial and do respond to the feedback that we have gathered.
Using the new bulk upload tools we’ll be working with those of you in the community who already have repositories, making more resources discoverable through Jorum. This will mean that Jorum will also give you access to resources held in other repositories. If you’d like your repository, or a repository you use to be discoverable through Jorum please contact us.
We’ll continue to tell stories via our blog and Twitter feed about Jorum usage and successes. We’ve found that our social media communication channels do increase Jorum usage and that Featured Resources get more views and downloads, so we will be continuing this work. If you have a resource in Jorum you’d like us to feature why not Tweet us @JorumTeam.
Finally we aim to release the Jorum Dashboard to the community so you can access statistics, more details under technical activities.
3. Technical Activities
Our most significant technical activity for the next four months will be starting development of Jorum’s new user interface. Alongside this front end work, we have been busy making improvements to the existing Jorum service; at the time of writing we expect these to have passed our staging tests and to be deployed in early February 2012.
3. 1 Rolling Out Shortly:
Improving the Existing User Interface - We have made and tested some user interface improvements to the existing Jorum UI. The resource page has been given a makeover, and the package download mechanism has been vastly improved. The left hand side menu has been simplified slightly on all pages, and we have replaced one pointless icon with a more appropriate Creative Commons icon.
3. 2 Ongoing this Quarter:
New User Interface - The new Jorum interface will target the features and improvements requested by the community in the feedback obtained from user engagement, including significantly improving the functionality of resource discovery. Implementation of the DSpace Read API has been completed and will be used to separate the development of a new user interface for Jorum from the core DSpace code. It’s also worth noting that work is planned by the DSpace development community to address the problem of close ties between the native DSpace user interface and the infrastructure.
OAI-PMH Ingest from Other Repositories - Using OAI-PMH for bulk ingest overcomes most of Jorum’s previous reliance on a Jorum-specific non-standard RSS ingest feed format, and moves Jorum to being able to ingest using the standard repository harvest feed format. Some work is required to ensure that when an external resource is harvested the licence conditions on that resource are respected. To accomplish this the harvested feeds will be inspected to check the licence statement against the supported Jorum licences for a match, and the harvested licence will be applied; if there is no match then the resource will not be able to be harvested. We anticipate that this ingest mechanism will enable import from many repositories of interest, e.g. JISC OER3 projects. Subject to further consideration of policy, this will also allow us to use Jorum as a one-stop search hub for material in carefully selected repositories, from which we then regularly ingest. Further investigations will be required to allow the harvesting of resources that do not use Jorum’s supported licences (currently Creative Commons). We aim to ensure that other open licence models (not just the CC variants) can be accommodated if there is found to be a need within the community.
Other Bulk Deposit Mechanisms - Supporting the growth of content is one of the larger themes of Jorum’s development effort. Currently the development plan does not mandate a particular technology for single and bulk resource upload. SWORD, OAI-PMH and the use of the DSpace Write API are being explored (see the point above re implementation of OAI-PMH ingest from other repositories).
So, on our list for investigation alongside OAI-PMH, as resource allows, is testing SWORD 1.3 as a deposit interface; it is already available in the Jorum build of DSpace. We are looking at it with respect to EasyDeposit for individual resource deposit; a modification of EasyDeposit for bulk upload; and as a possible deposit mechanism for the new front end.
It is likely that SWORD will eventually be the preferred mechanism for upload; with OAI-PMH being used to harvest from selected OER repositories. The use of the DSpace Write API remains an option but would require testing and some potential development to be used as an upload technology.
A Development Project in Progress: Jorum Statistics Dashboard - Requests from contributors for statistics on use of their OERs is the most frequent Jorum Helpdesk enquiry. It’s also clear from broader requirements gathering that usage data in general is something that users want, both to see which resources might be useful, and to promote their own resources. We’ve been developing a Dashboard that will eventually be made available to Jorum’s users; at present the Jorum Steering Group is helping us refine requirements. We’ll also be using the work we’re doing on what statistics are needed and in what format to eventually support access to them on resource and collection pages in the new Jorum front end.
Upgrading our DSpace Version - Until recently, limited resource has precluded spending time on upgrading the core DSpace 1.5.2 instance. However, the appointment of Ben Ryan as our new Jorum Technical Coordinator (Service) has given us some additional flexibility. Ben is now investigating what is involved in an upgrade. If an upgrade is made, then the extra facilities that become available to the front end would help us in various ways (e.g. easy-to-implement faceted search, and moving to SWORD 2.0 for upload). However, development of the new front end does not depend on an upgrade.
4. What’s Next Technically?
Agile methods are increasingly being adopted in planning the work of Jorum. The new front end is being developed using Kanban methodology, and agile planning methods are being used to support broader technical and non-technical work within Jorum.
Agile planning is dynamic and responsive to changing requirements. However, we anticipate that the technical focus over the next few months will include:
The new front end, where the broad flow of development is: resource pages; hierarchical browse; linked-metadata browsing; search; user accounts; resource deposit by a contributor; bulk ingest; collection pages.
Continued tailoring of the Dashboard to support new views of the statistical data held in Jorum about resource usage, with a focus on providing an “end point” for the new front end to interrogate, retrieve, structure and display usage statistics targeted at the resource owners, users and institutions.
Continued infrastructure improvements to the production environment, including failover of the application servers and automatic restart of failed applications servers to limit downtime to a minimum.
Work completed on the REST API and the new front end has separated the resource discovery from the core DSpace code, removing one barrier to the upgrade of Jorum to a later version of DSpace. Further work to remove the reliance on the modified DSpace codebase that Jorum uses will allow the upgrade to a later version and enable the use of the improved functionality such as curation; improved statistics gathering and display; batch metadata editing; configurable submission workflow; and the Discovery browse interface.
Autonomy IDOL has been used within Mimas to support rich resource discovery and has been used in a limited way to “index” Jorum content. Investigation will focus on the ability to aggregate, summarise and process metadata, content and contextual information held within Jorum to aid resource discovery by uncovering relationships between information in the Jorum system.