Ægir is a new set of contributed modules for Drupal that aims to solve the problem of managing a large number of Drupal sites. It does this by providing you with a simple Drupal based hosting front end for your entire network of sites. To deploy a new site you simply have to create a new Site node. To backup or upgrade sites, you simply manage your site nodes as you would any other node.

We’ve been successfully running multiple sites on a single development installation for several months.  Presently we only have a single site in production, but will likely be ramping up soon to roll out one or two others. Aegir should certainly help distribute administration of those sites.

Context sounds like another useful module. We currently use Panels module in Drupal 5 which has a very nice, yet somewhat limited, built-in context feature. I have a hate-love with Panels and would like to avoid using it in cases when I only need context without the accompanying box model.

Spaces module appears to go hand-in-hand with Context.

Spaces allows features (a blog, calendar, casetracker, shoutbox, gallery, etc.) to be enabled and customized in different configurations in different spaces…. Spaces features are essentially context definitions with some additional metadata. Once exported to code, spaces features can be bundled with exported views, implementations of the space settings class, and other niceties to create packaged, ready-to-go features.

Not exactly sure what that all means yet. It’s still in alpha for Drupal 6 only at this point.

FeedAPI is another developmentseed module we have been using. FeedAPI has been very handy for aggregating news from the likes of MedlinePlus, CDC, and others, and then turning those news items into nodes.  Nicely done.

Finally, the eXtensible Catalog Drupal Toolkit is not a developmentseed project, but one I’m anxiously awaiting any release of. Mlen-Too Wesley, one of the developers, gave a lightning talk in February at Drupal4LibCamp. There’s also a screencast. The XC Project just announced release of their OAI and NCIP Toolkits so hopefully the wait won’t be terribly long.

This edition of E2 almost makes me wish we’d moved to Portland 10 years ago when we were considering it.  What’s most inspiring is that the city commissioners, mayor, and other spearheaders interviewed don’t just talk about emissions and traffic, but about reviving the city while also drawing boundaries to preserve farmland and forests.

I get the same stir of inspiration from Tom and Christine Sine.

Is any of this possible in our midwestern sprawl-addicted stateline-divided city?

Having been a frequent reader of Deepak Singh’s business|bytes|genes|molecules blog over the last year, I was interested to see him hired by Amazon as business development manager of Amazon Web Services.  On December 04, 2008, Deepak posted to the AWS blog the announcement of Public Data Sets on AWS.  PDS on AWS is a data sharing experiment that takes advantage of Amazon’s in-the-cloud storage and computing services.

Just two weeks after Deepak’s post, Clint Boulton at eWeek confirmed that Google had axed its own Research Datasets project along with other projects of questionable value to Google’s bottom line.  While sharing data across the web, publicly or not, will surely become more common among researchers, milking copious amounts of ad revenue from that sharing is less likely.

The storage and computation of large datasets appears to be more in line with the AWS business model and perhaps Amazon has the lead on scalable architecture to support cloud computing.   Even if large numbers of researchers and research projects store and crunch their data on the web, that in itself won’t score big in the social web scene.  Programmers, analysts, and machines are more likely to be interfacing directly with the data than are the research investigators themselves.

It’s yet to be seen what Microsoft’s strategy for data storage might be in the recently released Azure platform, but they obviously have eyes on the educational and research markets.  Products like live@edu and SharePoint are increasing Microsoft’s reach into the academic computing world.

The Microsoft Research group quietly released a beta version it’s own repository software, running on .NET and SQL Server of course, but this isn’t just a reformulation of Dspace using Microsoft ingredients:

“The platform focuses on the management of research assets-such as people, papers, lectures, workflows, data, and tags-as well as the semantic relationships between them.”

Sounds like they’re paying attention.  And they’re beginning to appeal in ecumenical fashion to the larger research community by offering things like OfficeSWORD and taking part in discussions about open research repositories.

What is most interesting from the perspectives of the library and the university’s research office is how these services will redefine our notion of the “institutional repository”.  On one hand, many IT services such as web hosting and email have been commoditized to the point that institutions, especially smaller publicly-funded campuses, are unable to resist the cost savings and agility that come from hosted services like live@edu.  Why not commit fully to the .NET architecture and have your institutional repository software and data hosted on Azure as well?

On the other hand, why not take advantage of AWS’ flexibility and scalability for storing data or running our repository application?

Regardless of the platform(s) we choose, our notion of “institutional repository” is going to be stretched as we want to aggregate data and services from multiple platforms.  How will our Dspace service reflect our data stored in AWS?  The building blocks are already in place to support more complex relationships between our repositories, services, and data.  The time has finally come to put them to work.

…the popular search engines perform full text searches of unstructured text but enterprise content is much more structured than content in the Internet at large, it often contains fielded data in databases, and it is often hierarchically organized. Federated search vendors that want to sell into the enterprise need to consider this important difference.

True. However, Google isn’t new to enterprise search and they’re quick to point out that the algorithms they use for web content aren’t the same as for the GSA. Nevertheless, I am curious to know if it’s Google or MuseGlobal doing the relevancy math.

Sol also makes an interesting prediction about the impact the product will have on the market:

For better or worse, I think this offering will get many potential customers to view federated search as a commodity. Thus, it will force the high-end federated search vendors to work even harder than they do now to differentiate themselves from their low-end competitors. I can see it now: prospective customers will start using Google as a reference for product comparisons and will expect vendors to provide cheap and simple solutions.

My information, including an article at Information Today, says the AAC will run, in most cases, at least $50,000 plus over two years. That’s in addition to the cost of the Google appliance. I’m not sure which competitors or price tags Sol considers low-end in the federated search space. I wouldn’t consider this low-end. In my experience, such a price point might actually hit a sweet spot where only a couple of vendors exist now, especially for organizations that have already invested in Google search.

OpenCollection

collections management and online access application for museums, archives and digital collections.

Sophie

software for writing and reading rich media documents in a networked environment.

SEASR/NEMA

rich media analytics for humanists and artists.

Policy Archive, policyarchive.org

DSpace repository using the Manakin XMLUI. A comprehensive digital library of public policy research.

IMS Learning Tools Interoperability (LTI) v2.0

guidelines for the interaction of tools with learning/course management systems. This is really about decoupling functionality from any single LMS. It would create a more pluggable model, enabling faculty or students to be application producers and Learning Management Systems and other applications to be consumers.

Fluid Project

collaborative project for developing and distributing a library of sharable customizable user interfaces designed to improve the user experience of web applications. Fluid is not only developing component libraries, but is also churning out research, education, and outreach about how to design user experiences.

VIVO at Cornell

discover who at Cornell is working on a particular research topic; what they’ve taught or published recently; where facilities might be and what online tools are available to expedite research. Powered by RDF and Semantic Web technologies.

I’ve had the privilege of hanging out with Mark Diggory a bit as well as other  DSpace cohorts and some of the Fedora guys.  The comaradie between the Fedora and DSpace folks is encouraging. It’s a relief to know that I’m not the only one that admires Fedora’s content model and wonders why DSpace should try to reinvent that with it’s “2.0″ vision versus adopting Fedora as a storage and web services layer and benefiting from a shared developer base.  As one of the Fedora stakeholders put it, we could really turn the heat up on Microsoft by taking advantage of the best of both platforms.

Community Source and Open Source software development is thriving in the academic space.  Collaborate or die!

I’ll be posting my notes from JA-SIG 2008 over the next couple of days.  They’ll be raw, probably incoherent and fraught with errors, but there you are.

Recently, a Medlib-er asked for examples of how medical librarians were using Microsoft Sharepoint. The majority of respondants said they had created sites or pages for their library in Sharepoint, duplicating the usual stuff found on library web sites: ILL forms, links to the public catalog, and other sites – essentially reconstructing the library’s public web site in the Intranet, or even just linking to it.

I don’t mean to disparage the efforts of my cohort. Hospital and corporate librarians tend to be lone rangers with little time, resources, and permission to push the envelope. At least they did something. I’m convinced, though, that we can do better than that.

At the academic medical campus where I work, we’ve had a (non-Sharepoint) staff and student portal for some time. The library has worked closely with developers to incorporate some library services into the portal. From my brief experience, though, University staff only pay attention to the portal every two weeks when it’s time to print their timesheets. Students visit maybe a little more frequently to check their campus accounts. Ultimately, though, there’s no reason for anyone to visit the portal in order to get work done.

Sharepoint, as collaboration space, I hope will be different. My goal is to insert library services into the flow of work and study. Not in a “hey, look at us” or “eat your spinach” kind of way, but invisibly and naturally. I’ve spent a little time envisioning how we might accomplish that. I hope to spend a lot more time over the next year.
Here are my early thoughts:
Identify the stages and flow of research, work, and study on campus that might take place in Sharepoint.
Find areas where there’s been an observable, neglected need and suggest how the library might help, eg. metadata, text analysis, categorization, training.
Build small, modular web parts, connectors, and widgets that faculty, staff, and students can include in their own spaces.
Don’t make people come to the Library’s Sharepoint site to do something.
Don’t waste time recreating the Library’s web site in Sharepoint.
Don’t just link to the web site.
Share openly.
I got some serendipitous affirmation and inspiration today while following up on a medical student’s request. Upon entering med school, our medical students receive digital versions of recommended textbooks. This student wanted to know, reasonably enough, if there was an add-on for incorporating Stedman’s Medical Dictionary (which he already owned in digital copy) into Microsoft Word or, even better, OneNote – a popular tablet pc notetaking application among our students [1].

While searching for available options, I ran across a presentation by Carl Nolan, head of the medical research services project involving Microsoft and NHS.  Here’s an excerpt from an article by Microsoft:

Microsoft has invested £40 million in the Common User Interface programme – a series of projects to help the NHS get the most out of its IT investment. One of these projects has been looking for ways to build medical research services into the software that NHS staff already use every day.

These are exactly the kinds of services I would like to see us implement at KUMC. I hope they’re sharing.

Note: What I ultimately found was that for $100 you can buy the Stedman’s Medical Spellchecker which adds a custom dictionary to MS Office apps. But that’s only spellchecking. What if I want to look up the definition of a new term? Ideally, I’d want the spellchecking dictionary feature wrapped into a single service-package with the full dictionary available in the Research Services Task Pane. Instead, both Microsoft and LWW make seem to make that impossible.

The annual Horizon Report describes the continuing work of the NMC’s Horizon Project, a research-oriented effort that seeks to identify and describe emerging technologies likely to have a large impact on teaching, learning, or creative expression within higher education….

The core of the report describes six areas of emerging technology that will impact higher education within three adoption horizons over the next one to five years. To identify these areas, the project draws on an ongoing conversation among knowledgeable persons in the fields of business, industry, and education; on published resources, current research and practice; and on the expertise of the NMC and ELI communities….

Learn more about the Horizon Project and contribute to future editions at http://horizon.nmc.org/wiki/Main_Page.  NMC is a community of hundreds of leading universities, colleges, museums, and research centers exploring the use of media and emerging technologies in higher education.