I’ve recorded the video for Sprint 7, and have split this into three parts:

Part 1: Review of Research and Development (powerpoint)
Part 2: Demo of new features added in Sprint 7 (live)
Part 3: Student Discovery, and What’s next (powerpoint)

Enjoy!

Several people have asked me for more info on the semantic web. To be honest, the Wikipedia entry is a good place to start as it also links off to sites for all levels of technical knowledge. If there is enough interest out there, maybe we could arrange a short “Semantic Web 101″ webcast for focus group members - what do you think?

One thing I’d like to highlight now though is an article in Nodalities, Talis’ own semantic web magazine which “…bridges the divide between those building the Semantic Web and those interested in applying it to their business requirements”. Called “Open world thinking” (p.10), it’s written by Nadeem, who as some of you will know is part of the Project Zephyr team. The second half of the article is particularly interesting, as it highlights the importance of ontologies, something we discussed in the last sprint (oh, videos are coming!) in relation to institution heirarchies.

So, if you have 5mins, go and take a look - it even has a fancy pdf viewer which makes a “swish” noise when you turn the page. Could life get any better, eh?

As discussed in Sprint 7, we are planning to run several student focus groups to to explore some of our ideas around student discovery. Plymouth have already signed up - are you interested in hosting a similar event?

Although we’re still in the planning stages of how to organise an event, we would be looking at up to a dozen students (who we will pay!). Depending on the stage in development, the make-up of the students and what we would be doing, is liable to change.

If you feel this is something you could put together, drop me an email.

The Sprint demonstrated two milestones:

1) The successful import of Sheffields lists from TalisList to Zephyr
2) The implmentation of new “List of Lists” and “List” management screens

Additional functionality was also shown, namely “Tag bundles” and “Citation Preferencing”

Several items of feedback were provided by advisory customers, beyond general enthusiasm for the new changes:

- Place the count of resources within a section in the section heading
- Provide a user preference for a user viewing a list to determine if it is collapsed or expanded
- Provide a “generic” template (resource-type non specific): This could also be used for data conversion where the resource type couldn’t be determined - the list maintainer would then be allowed to move metadata from a generic template to a known resource type
- Provide a “generic” citation view, for lecturers who don’t want a specific citation style initially shown
- Provide a default sort of resources within sections (none, Title A-Z, Title Z-A), defined at list level but with option to over-ride at section level. Manually moving a resource into a section, it would automatically float to the correct sort point
- Provide “Last Edited By” alongside “Last Edited Date”

We are planning, for Sprint 7, to look into the following areas:

- VLE integration (Blackboard and WebCT)
- Prototyping the student experience
- Users and permissions (”who can do what”)
- Continued analysis into citation styles and supported resource-type set

Customers are encouraged to review the latest build at http://zephyr.stage.talis.com/.

I’ve been looking at “Status” and “Process State” on Talis List, and comparing to what we have in Zephyr.

Basically, Zephyr has the states of “Draft”, “Published” and “Archived” which sits at the LIST level. Looking at Talis List (and equating functionality), it also provides the facility to put both status and processing state on a SECTION, or on a RESOURCE.

I’m keen to get a sense of how important this is, or how frequently these are used, etc. Do you have published lists but with one section in draft? Do you want to have a single resource in draft - and why/when? Do you use the “processing state”, for example, to manage a simple approval workflow?

Cheers, Ian

I’m working on various detailed specifications following on from the requests people made a few months ago on what they’d like to see as the first citation styles supported. There were lots of votes for both “numeric” and “vancouver” - are these the same? Looking into this, it seems they are, but I want to confirm that before I throw away a load of docs. Can anyone help?

How we migrate articles is looking like it may be a “challenge”, primarily around identifying them as such, and setting the correct resource type (i.e. “Journal Article”) in Zephyr. My initial perusal seems to suggest a lot of options for how these can be added to your existing Talis List/s.

Could a representative from each institution summarise how you approach this currently. Are you linking to the journal in the OPAC, or on your A-Z list? Are you linking to your resolver? Or direct to the publisher or content aggregators site? How are you getting the metadata - manual entry, or some other way? Is there consistency?

There’s a lot of questions there, more to prompt your thinking than in anticipation of direct 1-to-1 answers. Respond however you want, and I’ll sift the results to try and draw conclusions…

As part of the data conversion, we need to determine how best to handle passive entries in your existing Talis List. Could you possibly summarise for me:

a) What ways you use passive entries across your lists (i.e. the purpose)?
b) Of these ways, what is the most prevalent use?
c) Suggest a couple of lists (e.g. module codes I can search on) which provide examples of this prevalent use?

Ideally, post your response on here, though I’ll happily take an email answer to ian.corns@talis.com.

We have encountered a lot of html mark-up in original Talis List data, mainly style (e.g. bold). At this point, we have made the decision to clean this out and not carry it across into Zephyr. To understand if this is a sustainable decision moving forward, can anyone tell me in what scenarios they have used markup? Is it in “notes”, pre-post text or when creating manual entries? Is there a case where this actually has some business value and you would be concerned that markup was not preserved?

Your comments on this are welcome!

I have just scheduled this for 14th March, 2008, at 13:30. It will last 1hr 30mins. The aim is, in effect, to show the implementation of many of the features that I demo’ed in the interim demo 3 weeks ago, which were just prototyped at the time. We hope to also be able to show the first Talis List conversion. See you then!