Intute blog

I remember the 1st October 2004 vividly – it was the day I started work for Intute as the new Executive Director. On that first day, I was ushered into my office, presented with a shiny new laptop, introduced to the Mimas Manchester based staff, and bombarded with information. As the day ended I was totally bemused.

Soon after that I started my first of many tours of the UK, visiting the teams of staff at all the seven Intute partner institution universities. I met a group of talented and dedicated people and I heard different but equally compelling views of the right way forward, which planted the seeds of a pathway for change in my head. I believed we could do more, I believed in people’s capacity to innovate and I was convinced of the dedication of everyone to making the Internet a better place for students, researchers and academics.

From then until now, those people have confirmed that my first impressions were right. They have worked tirelessly, they’ve adapted, they’ve pulled together, and they’ve turned good ideas into great projects and new services. For all of this I would like to say a heartfelt thank you to all of them.

As we wind down our consortium, it makes me terribly sad to think that we will no longer all be working together after today. I hope that our respective expertise, our ability to adapt, and our focus on user needs will lead us all on to make continued but different contributions to supporting intelligent use of the Internet.

Staff at the last Intute Staff Conference

Thank you to all Intute staff, contributors and partner institutions.
Caroline Williams, Executive Director of Intute.

Here are the latest social science research publications.
As listed by the LSE Library

International organisations
Media
Education
Social policy
Economics

Here is the list as selected by the LSE Library

You can view our main listing at http://lselibraryresearch.blogspot.com/2010/07/government.html

Police Service Strength England and Wales: 31 March 2010 Home Office statistics.

Liberating the NHS: Report of the arms-length bodies review Department of Health

Drug Misuse Declared: Findings from the 2009-10 British crime survey England and Wales Home Office statistics.

Citizenship Survey: April 2009 to March 2010 – England These statistics include data covering a range of issues including community cohesion, empowerment, values, racial and religious prejudice and discrimination, volunteering and charitable giving.

Public Attitudes Towards Mobility Scooters: January and March 2010 Department for Transport

Evaluation of the Mortgage Rescue Scheme and Homeowners Mortgage Support: Interim report Communities and Local Government research.

Early Experiences of Implementing Personal Health Budgets Department of Health.

Jobcentre Plus Annual Report 2009-10

Financing PFI projects in the credit crisis and the Treasury’s response National Audit Office HC: 287, 2010-2011

Political Reform Draft Structural Reform Plan. This is a draft plan on political reform. It sets out a timescale for delivering reform in the areas of parliamentary democracy and political reform, devolution, decentralisation, accountability and localism and civil liberties.

Report on the Administration of the 2010 UK General Election Electoral Commission.

Health and Safety Executive Annual Report and Accounts 2009-10

Sustaining value for money in the police service Audit Commission

Cafcass’s response to increased demand for its services The Children and Family Court Advisory and Support Service in the aftermath of the Baby Peter crisis. HC: 289, 2010-2011

Department for Business, Innovation and Skills: Draft structural reform plan.

Anti-Social Behaviour Order Statistics: England and Wales 2008

Office of Fair Trading: Annual report and resource accounts 2009-10

Preparing for Pension Reform: The information needs of small and micro employers at auto-enrolment department for Work and Pensions.

Winter resilience Interim report

Local government pensions in England Audit Commission information paper.

Review of Bus Profitability in England Department for Transport

The National Flood Emergency Framework for England- Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs

DfE: Permanent and Fixed Period Exclusions from Schools in England 2008-09

Engineering, Social Justice, and Peace Conference will run from 4th to 6th August in London from August 4th to 6th 2010 in collaboration with the Higher Education Academy Engineering Subject Centre and Engineers Against Poverty.
Topics to be covered include critical thinking, sustainability and the contexts of technology.

This will be my final post here. As I’m sure you’ll have seen, Intute funding has been cut and only a few of the staff will remain for its final year.
I’ve very much enjoyed the twelve years I’ve spent doing this job both with Intute Engineering and with EEVL before that, and I’d like to thank you all for your interest over the years and for reading this blog.

In the fourth of our series of posts looking back at the work of Intute we wanted to focus on some of the valuable collaborative work that has taken place between the service and the wider education community, dating back well over a decade.

In addition to the seven universities that formed the Intute consortium, our most immediate partnerships were with over one hundred organisations and individuals who have worked on the Internet Resource Catalogue and those who are authors of the Virtual Training Suite tutorials.  These people have provided an invaluable pool of subject knowledge and expertise for the service, which the HE/FE community in general have been able to benefit from, and build upon.

In terms of wider partnerships we have also been privileged to work with a number of prestigious bodies such as the Wellcome Trust, the British Library, the Royal Geographical Society, the Royal College of Nursing, the Royal Society of Chemistry and many of the Higher Education Academy Subject Centres through the AIRDIP Project and other initiatives.

Over the years, Intute has been involved with a range of projects, harnessing Intute staff expertise and technology, as well as using our database as a test-bed for new services and methods.  Some of the more technically oriented projects were described in the previous post of this series.  Other projects that called on subject and content expertise included:

• Organic.Edunet for agriculture (an EU-wide programme)
• Providing metadata services for JORUM and some of the Higher Education Academy Subject Centres.
• IJDDIP (Intute/JISC Digitisation Dissemination Project, which aimed to generate awareness of the new JISC digitisation projects amongst the relevant sections of the UK academic research community.

Throughout its history, Intute partners have worked together to offer real benefits to the library and information community.  We have developed machine-to-machine interfaces and worked closely with institutions to embed services and features into learning and teaching materials via the Intute Integration Project.  University libraries such as Leeds used the MyIntute personalisation interface, newsfeeds and search widgets to build online lists of resources across a range of academic subjects.  By 2009, 67% of UK universities had widely integrated Intute content into their library Web pages, VLEs or federated search systems.

There are too many projects and partnerships to list here individually, but our recent user survey provided us with some feedback about the impact of the loss of Intute staff on innovation and development projects.  Here are some of the responses we received:

“Intute staff have been a valuable source of technical, quality and content expertise that would otherwise have cost huge amounts in consultancy fees.”

“Our involvement in such projects has to be assessed and justified against ever increasing pressure to maintain core activities. We value the knowledge, expertise and experience that Intute staff offer, which we can’t hope to replicate in house.”

Intute staff are incredibly important to sustaining and improving collaboration and increasing momentum with small institutions or single research specialists and gathering it together into a sustainable whole.”

The number of partnerships and content specialists working across the service has provided some interesting challenges in terms of communications and implementing change in such as large service but it was also a good example of a service “by the community, for the community”.  We would like to thank all our partner organisations and especially the individuals within these organisations (past and present) for all of their support and hard work and wish them well in their future endeavours.

European e-Justice portal
The European Internet portal e-Justice, was launched this week as an electronic one-stop-shop for access to justice throughout the EU. It is intended to help citizens and practitioners in locating information about European law and law of individual member states. It includes links to the main EU primary law databases: EUR-Lex, Summaries of EU Legislation, PreLex, JURIFAST, JURE, and Caselex. Links to e N-Lex database, which enables access to the national legislation of many EU and information on national judicial systems Information on obtaining legal aid and going to court for members of the public, information for businesses on insolvency procedures, business registers in Europe and the individual EU member states.

UK Sound Map
The SoundMap is a project of the British Library and the Noise Futures Network. It is working to create a sound map of the UK using mobile technology. The beta pilot version covers pilot survey is based on the Sheffield metropolitan area. It covers Sheffield, Rotherham, Doncaster, Barnsley, Chesterfield, Eckington, Worksop, Killamarsh, Dronfield and Bolsover. Members of the public can contribute typical sounds, noise recordings from their locality. Users may browse the map and listen to the sounds. These aim to create a social history of the natural and built environment of the area. Those already available include football matches, wildlife.

Cibera
Cibera was launched in 2003 as a joint project among the Ibero-American Institute (Berlin), the German Institute for Global and Area Studies – Institute of Latin American Studies (Hamburg) and the Bremen State and University Library. It sponsored by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) and part of the interdisciplinary German Science Portal vascoda. Its aim is to provide indexes to articles and links to key web resources covering German research on German research on Latin America, Spain and Portugal. It cross search searches library catalogue holdings from the partners, Bibliography of Hispanistic Research in Germany, Austria and Switzerland , and tables of contents of a number of key titles.

RestoretheGulf.gov
Is an official federal portal of the US government providing information on the Deepwater BP oil spill response and recovery. It includes press releases, statistics and reports about the response. Also available are maps, photographs, data and information about local rescue efforts. A good complement to http://www.geoplatform.gov/gulfresponse/ which has more detailed geomaps.

Novia Scotia historic newspapers online
A joint project of Beaton Institute, Cape Breton University and Nova Scotia Archives & Records Management, provides free access to the full text of about 15 local newspapers covering the 18th-20th Century. These are rich sources of social, political and economic history of Canadian regions. Titles include Nova Scotia Chronicle and Weekly Advertiser (Halifax), 1769-1770, The Cape Breton News (Sydney), 1850-1854

National Library of Scotland Flickr
The NLS now has its own Flickr account where you can get free access to images, photographs and prints from the collection.

Key historic highlights are:

• Last letter of Mary Queen of Scots
• Order for the massacre of Glencoe
• First World War images

These are from the papers of Field Marshal (Earl) Haig (1861-1928), and include battlefield scenes. They are official military photographer images and also include examples of military propaganda.

Atlas of Historical County Boundaries – USA.
Item updated by Newberry Library, Dr William M. Scholl Center for American History and Culture. A useful reference source for information and maps of the history of state boundaries in the USA. Click on the map for chronologies, references for further reading and zip GIS files for downloading.

Our changing lives
A useful website supported by the Economic and Social Research Council, Wellcome Institute and the Medical Research Council. It describes itself as offering a gateway to finding s from latest research on how British lives are shaped and are changing in the 21st century. How they are affected by health, wealth, employment. It provides links to the major websites of longitudinal studies, birth cohort studies undertaken from the 1940s until the present day. The descriptions are offered in a style which is accessible to the public and undergraduate’s links are provided to the original survey home pages where many examples of data can be directly downloaded.

Zeitgeist
Is a prototype to highlight the most shared BBC WebPages on Twitter,
It has been developed by BBC research and development. The system combines a custom built ingest chain using Twitter’s public APIs to search for tweets containing a BBC URL. It is possible to view trends for the last 24 hours and 7 days. The links are ranked by a tweet count (including retweets) for the chosen time period. Each entry details the page title, category, media type, short description and when it was first tweeted.

14-18 Images of the Great War (Immagini della Grande Guerra)

is a digital library made of historical photographs digitized from different library collections in Italy. They include the Central Museum of the Risorgimento in Rome. Fondo guerra BUA – Biblioteca Universitaria AlessandrinaFondo guerra BSMC – Biblioteca di Storia Moderna e Contemporanea in addition to the photographs the site also has a selection of digital images of Italian first World War Trench newspapers offering insight into the Italian soldiers experiences. All information is offered in Italian only. Copyright notices are on the website.

Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI)

The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and Oxford University have launched a new index to measure poverty levels which they said give a “multidimensional” picture of people living in hardship, and could help target development resources more effectively. The new measure, the Multidimensional Poverty Index, or MPI, was developed and applied by the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative (OPHI) with UNDP support. It will be featured in the forthcoming 20th anniversary edition of the UNDP Human Development Report to be released in October 2010, and replaces the Human Poverty Index, which had been included in these reports since 1997. It is possible to view examples of the methodology and case studies

Here is the latest weekly round up from the LSE Library

Big Society: Speech by David Cameron

National Survey of Investment in Adult Mental Health Services 2009-10

Home Office Statistical Bulletin 12/10: Crime in England and Wales 2009-10 – Findings from the British Crime Survey and police recorded crime

What Does the Distribution of Wealth Tell Us About Future Retirement Resources? Department for Work and Pensions research.

Private Fostering Arrangements in England: Year ending 31 March 2010 statistics.

Conviction Histories of Offenders Ministry of Justice statistics.

Rough Sleeping England: Total street count 2010

Department for Culture, Media and Sport : Structural Reform Plan

Response to the House of Commons Health Committee report
The use of overseas doctors in providing out–of–hours services:
Fifth Report of Session 2009–10 cm7904

London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games Quarterly Report July 2010

Independent Supplementary Review of Regional Development Agencies National Audit Office.

Progress with VFM (Value for Money programme) savings and lessons for cost reduction programmes HC: 291, 2010-2011

Modelling and Forecasting UK Mortgage Arrears and Possessions: Report communities and local government research.

Supporting Young People: An evaluation of recent reforms to youth support services in 11 local areas Office for Standards in Education, Children’s Services and Skills

Valuing the Police: Policing in an age of austerity Ministry of Justice

Sustaining Value for Money in the Police Service Audit Commission.

Public Confidence in the Criminal Justice System Ministry of Justice.

European Social Fund Cohort Study: Wave one Dept for Work and Pensions

Evaluation of Gender Equality and Equal Opportunities within the European Social Fund Department for Work and Pensions

Commission for Rural Communities: Annual report and accounts 2009-10

Court Experiences of Adults with Mental Health Conditions or Learning Disabilities Ministry of Justice.

Domestic Abuse Programmes: A process study In prison and probation services.

Strategic Financial Management of the Defence Budget National Audit Office. HC: 290, 2010-2011

Estimated Costs to Society of Crime on Public Transport in England 2006-07 Dept of Transport

Passengers’ Perceptions of Personal Security on Public Transport: Qualitative research report

High Speed Rail Access to Heathrow: A report by Lord Mawhinney

Community Care Grant HC: 286, 2010-2011

Here is the latest round up from the LSE Library
International organisations
Economics
Social policy
Development studies
Higher education
Media

Russia to kick off construction of a new spaceport (BBC)
‘The future cosmodrome will be built near the town of Uglegorsk in the Far Eastern Amur region, close to the border with China.
It is planned to be mostly used for civilian launches and should be operational by 2015.’

see also:
Build a spacestation
Spaceport (Wikipedia)

Since its public launch in 2006, Intute has become a hotbed of technical innovation. The distributed team have achieved many notable new developments, including groundbreaking forays into virtual worlds, thorough exploration and integration of Web 2.0 tools, and the use of powerful technologies in new and exciting ways.

As the RDN hubs integrated into the Intute service, a range of additional services was developed and enhanced. The former MyHumbul personalisation service was given a facelift and re-released as MyIntute, a powerful tool enabling registered users to save their searches, receive alerts, and – more recently – add their own non-Intute bookmarks to create their own reading lists and exportable sets of learning and teaching materials. The World Guide, formerly part of the GEsource geography gateway, was also extended; this brought together a wealth of freely-available satellite imagery, data sheets, country profiles and maps from organisations such as NASA, the CIA, the US Government and elsewhere, and provided dynamic search interfaces and new ways of mining the data. An interactive world map and country comparison tools were developed, and the service was enhanced in 2009 with the use of Google Maps to provide interactive city exploration tools.

Integration of other Google services has also taken place. Various Google Custom Search Engine databases were created, firstly to provide an e-journal searching service, and latterly to provide a replacement for the old “harvested” database of Web content. Intute has also made use of Google Analytics, while the technical team have also explored a number of other extensions of the Google API which were never made public.

Intute expanded into virtual worlds in 2007, with the inclusion of Intute search terminals in Linden Labs’ Second Life (SL), a feature which has provided us with thousands of visitors and searches ever since. Technical team member Chris Stephens has pioneered many developments in SL, and has become an expert in the field, while various other members of the team have also dabbled in SL; the very first Intute staff conference featured two presentations developed in the virtual world.

As “Web 2.0″ became an increasingly ubiquitous term, developments at Intute proceeded apace. The prolific team had developed interactive commenting, rating and cataloguing tools with “Web 2.0″ type functionality years before their public release in some cases, while Intute became increasingly populated with additional features designed to provide the user with a more interactive experience. Examples of this included the Virtual Training Suite quizzes and basket functions, an aggregated jobs and news service, conference news and alerting, and a tool enabling the cataloguers to cross-search multiple thesauri and keyword databases in a simple and intuitive manner.

A suite of integration tools was also provided for the user community. Some of these – such as Intute Include and its pared down “Lite” version were provided by the former RDN and re-engineered for Intute – while others were developed in response to the needs of the users. Blog, Facebook and Twitter services were established to address communication needs, while the technical team also began to develop applications using the Facebook API; unfortunately the funding cuts meant that these were never released.

Following the hugely-popular launch of the Internet Detective tutorial, we moved swiftly to create a version specifically for mobile phones – the Mobile Internet Detective was completed last year, and the skills learned have since been applied to other developing services at Mimas in Manchester. As mobile technologies continue to develop and become increasingly accessible, it’s good to know that we have developed the experience to create and provide such tools for the community.

The Value for money in automatic Metadata generation (ViM) project also spent 18 months looking at a range of software packages to do just that: one of Intute’s strongest selling points has always been its collection of high quality descriptions written by subject specialists, and so it proved highly interesting to investigate the use of tools to supplant this. We explored the use of the the Autonomy IDOL software in a unique manner by integrating it into our cataloguing system and configuring it to provide automated descriptions, keywords, subject headings and suggested categories; the iVia Data Fountains software was also installed and used to catalogue a range of electronic theses, while we also created our own in-house automatic metadata creation tool, which works in a similar fashion to UKOLN’s DC-dot Dublin Core metadata extraction tool.

Intute at its core has always remained a simple, accessible service which satisfies the needs of its users; sometimes the use of new technologies can be done “just for the sake of it”, and we have always listened to our users’ requirements and implemented only those features we have felt to be of direct benefit. The members of the Intute technical team have been involved in a wide range of service developments since 2006, and have explored a staggering range of new technologies; whilst only a fraction of these have evolved into live service enhancements, the experience garnered has been of immense value, and has been a source of pride and satisfaction to all of us.