I can’t get over how wonderful the Flipboard app for the iPad is. I have never really been able to get into the RSS scene as the applications for viewing news feeds have always been so dull and un-inspiring or un-intuitive. I also find the inbox style presentation of many RSS services overwhelming, and I often find myself trying to empty my box of unread items.

This app has truly re-inspired my consumption of online material, presenting all my social media, RSS feeds and followers all within a beautiful glossy magazine setting. The ambience of this app means that I now pay attention to links that are tweeted on my timeline, and I now find myself highlighting articles that I have enjoyed or plan to read later.

I am now convinced that all I have required since the explosion of social media is simply a consistent approach, one place to view my content. On top of this I now desire clever spacing, clear typography and simplistic ways of sharing content with others. I think it will be hard to prize me away from this app and my blueprint for content I’m sure will use this as a benchmark for years to come.

Better get my spanner out, dip into my CSS again!

I have often shown staff at work how to separate their personal and professional lives on Facebook, creating lists and encouraging the use of the small padlock when status publishing. Plus simply makes the assumption that you will want to keep some updates separate from others and therefore gives you plenty of simple options before you post.

The open/close nature of Plus essentially blends together the exclusivity of Facebook, alongside the openness of twitter, allowing you to make interact with close friends, but at the same time keeping someone you met at a conference once at arms length, but drawn in closer again with just the tap of a button!

The big influx of Twitter users to Plus has meant that all followers have rejoined in this space, the spammers unfortunately having more than 140 characters to share their thoughts. It would be great to steal the hash-tagging functionality from Twitter, allowing users to discuss topics with strangers in real time and opening the network further. 

I’m impressed overall. There are some failings though. Plus has tried to add some sort of RSS type reader for topics that interest you. I soon discovered a feed for soccer provided very little; the American who set up this feed was happy to mix American football and soccer all in one big mix. 

The programme is incredibly intuitive, allowing you to drag and drop fake images and videos directly onto the page. At the end of the process you can even export the whole project as HTML so you can show colleagues or clients how the site is likely to look.

Big thank you to Jesus, Will and Kate.

As no one else I knew (including my wife) was able to do the same I decided to devote this time to learning something new; wordpress theme design from scratch.

I had previously tried to alter existing templates, but these tend to be very bloated and complicated, taking ages just to strip back to the bare essentials.

After a good hour of searching I found this excellent tutorial, provided by Brian Wood on the Adobe Website. He provides a basic theme for you to begin with, which I ended up deleting all the way back to the bare PHP.

After around five hours of work I was able to launch the template this blog runs on. It turns out that WordPress is very good at aiding this creatvity; I was able to develop a custom menu through the dashboard of the admin space. I did however become very lazy with the sidebar, which are created by using three different out of the box text/html widgets.

My next job is to fix the 404 and archive pages, present my CV on the ‘About’ page, as well as add social media icons just below the menu bar on the right hand-side.

This was born out of frustration, as our version of Blackboard would not allow us the ‘tab’ feature that other University Libraries provide to give students access to Library content. Therefore I had to create a Blackboard course, before adding content and enrolling all staff/students at the University on it.

The guides were written in HTML/CSS, but have some Flash and Javascript to get the videos running. I was worried about hosting files within Blackboard that went beyond HTML as I thought the system might reject embedded scripts. However as you can see, there has been no problem at all and students have been very impressed with the support we have given them for their course.

My next job is to create a library full of videos, including induction videos for new students that are too hungover to attend our original sessions.

[View with PicLens]

Although the Head of our Library service thinks it would benefit my career to charter, there is no financial incentive for me to do so. My job does not require it, and many of the jobs that are available simply require experience and/or a postgraduate qualification in the area.

As I am now a growing number in a generation that have to pay £100+ to the student loan company each month, as well as a further £20 for Union membership, is it any wonder that there is no motivation to join?

However the hardest part is purely cultural; helping students to understand why you are moving to single sign-on, what it means for them, as well as confusion over what Athens is/was!

Below is a list of questions sent by Chris Spencer, Library Procurement & Systems Development Manager at Bournemouth University. I thought of blogging my replies in order to share our experiences at Bath Spa with other Librarians.

1)      I presume you needed to register an additional entity id with the Federation to allow testing of LA without compromising existing user experience with Athens MD? How is this done?

Whilst we were testing we registered our IDP as ‘Bath Spa University TEST’ with the UK Federation. We thought that by adding ‘TEST’ in capitals students would realise they were taking risks by attempting to authenticate with this through the WAYF.

You can opt to be invisible in the Federation WAYF in order to avoid confusion, but this would involve a lot of hard work during testing as URL’s would have to bypass the WAYF but still prompt authentication to your services.

Now that we are live we have two entries with the Federation: ‘Bath Spa University’ and ‘Bath Spa University ATHENS’.

2)      Has parallel running caused any confusion for the users who have stumbled across the LA authentication route.

Yes. Students still try to log into LA authenticated resources using their Athens credentials.

However the LA log-in page was customised from the outset so that project information and contact details were available in case users failed to log-in. Since September I have probably answered around two to three email enquries a day from students/staff who are confused.

3)      Has the move to LA necessitated much editing to your web pages and documentation?

Our users were regularly updated on the project via our webpages and blog.

Whilst we were testing I set-up a brand new section within the electronic services side of our website, constantly adding services to the list whilst we were testing. Wherever we could we would invite users to test our new method through these pages, inviting comments to me via email.

However Athens and IP authentication was still our default and supported method of authentication during testing, and was therefore still very much at the forefront of our website. We only wanted users to test LA access whilst browsing the site or by clicking a link in an email.

Users were invited to test our system whilst browsing our site

4)      Have you opted to use a single authentication protocol (ie shibboleth module) or are you going mixed economy (ip, athens,shibb)? Have you gone for WAYF or WAYFless links?

Our supported method is now LA and IP authentication. As a result we tend to provide two links seperately from our website, for on and off campus users.

Where I can I have generated WAYFLESS url’s. I have done this using the following methods:

• Asking the service providers for WAYFLESS url’s
• Visiting the Federation site to see if they have instructions for particular service providers
• Visiting the websites of Shibboleth run institutions, before copying and altering their links to fit
• Using a Firefox add-on called ‘HTTP Headers’, allowing me to trace WAYFLESS URL’s during the authentication process.  URL’s generated using this method however have to be constantly monitored as they are not stable or supported by the service providers.

5)      How much promotion have you done? Any communication channels particularly effective?

We communicated the project to our users wherever we could:

• Four testing requests were sent out to all staff/students during our BETA testing phase
• Two all staff/student emails sent to warn users of our MD/LA transition
• Two further emails once the transition happened
• One message sent out to all Athens users, via the admin console
• A large poster, with fire and explosions to advertise the removal of Athens MD use from April 5th 2010
• The same poster, published on our foyer ppt display
• All Refworks users were contacted, video tutorials produced for instruction
• A ‘MyAthens’ panel was set-up to communicate the same general information with those who don’t check their email!
• Our Library blog

As a result it is hard to work out which methods were most effective, there were so many!

However I did recieve a large volume of response once the all staff/student emails were sent out, and the Google analytics stats that I installed in the log-in page reflected busy periods of activity once the emails were sent.

6)      Any strategies for ensuring that those off-campus users who by-pass library pages and go direct to resources make the right authentication choice for logging in?

The discovery issue was the most difficult part of the project.

The all staff/student emails were important to attract these users to our site. By setting up a panel in MyAthens I also hope to capture some of these users also.

Now that we have made our transition, I found it also important to notify members of academic staff that their VLE links may need updating. Links from the VLE to EbscoHOST or DawsonERA for example contained specific codes, prompting Athens access.

7)      Any lessons learnt so far?

When contacting service providers from the beginning be careful when mentioning OpenAthens LA 2.0! I found this caused confusion, particularly as many only recognise Athens or Shibboleth authentication.

Therefore I found it more useful to say the following:

We wish to test our Shibboleth installation with you. Our details are: {insert here}

We are in the UK Federation metadata as {your chosen WAYF name}

Some providers may want to know what affiliated values you are passing, but otherwise setting up testing is that simple.

8)      How easy is it to add new resources through the LA admin tool?

The great thing about LA is that as long as you are passing the right attributes, you only have to pass on your details to service providers in order to ‘add new resources’.

I did have to create a new attribute for OCLC’s Geobase, as they required a particular entitlement string that was relevant to their service only.

The only slightly tricky part is setting up permission sets in the admin tool, as you need to make sure that you are not frivolously sending out  to Service Providers who do not require them. However as long as you send out the affiliated attribute by default LA will work with many SP’s from the word go.

9)      Is the usage stats tool operating?

No. Expected this summer I believe. Can’t wait.

10)   Your general thoughts on the whole process

In terms of setting up and testing LA the whole process is easy. It just runs.

The major difficulty was often centred around discovery. We quickly realised that students generally do not access our resources by visiting the Library website. Instead, students would often use OpenURL linking via Google Scholar, click on links from courses in the VLE or visit service providers directly. As a result we heavily promoted our website as the place to visit to discover our resources and this has worked to a certain extent.

However it won’t be until the launch of University portal before we can have the confidence that we are reaching our users. The will provide a central location where students can make tution and housing payments, access email, Blackboard, as well as accessing our electronic resources. This will involve linking LA with our own implentation of OpenAthens SP so that students only have to log-in once in order to access all of their campus services.

The other difficulty was that only senior department members can send out all staff/student emails. That meant that despite my contact details being published in the email in case of queries, users would always tend to reply to the sender. This meant that our Head Librarian would recieve copious amounts of emails from confused users, who would ask questions on any Library related topic. This meant that even the task forwarding them on took some time to complete.

If I was to do a similar project then I would organise emails to be sent via a ‘no reply’ type alias. If this is not possible then a rule should be set-up in Outlook to forward all emails with a particular subject heading to the correct person.

We have been running Eduserv’s LA 2.0 as our IDP for over six months now, taking us from the BETA product right through to the full release. The project did begin very slowly, mainly down to fact that we were all so new to the world of identity management, having used OpenAthens MD/IP authentication since the beginning of time.

I am impressed at how easy LA 2.0 has been to set-up and maintain. Our computing services department install all of the regular updates now, whilst I log-in to the admin console when needed to configure attributes and settings.  Our Active Directory did have to be cleaned up however, making sure that leavers are removed quickly and that LA can differenciate between staff/students/affiliates.

Once these issues were ironed out, OCLC’s GEOBASE was the only database which required LA to send out a specific affiliated attribute to be sent out, taking just minutes to set-up. Otherwise the default release of attributes was set-up at the very beginning and has not been touched since. The system just works.

For a full (colour coded) list of electronic resources that work with LA 2.0, visit here.

The main difficulties I did experience were with service providers, who were not aware of LA. I instead began to refer to our IDP as Shibboleth, to cut down the amount of confusion when providers referred to the fact that we already had Athens authentication set-up.

After registering our ‘Live’ install of LA with the Federation, the real hard work begins. We have chosen April 5th as the official changeover date when the Library removes all mention of Athens, instead forcing (where we can) students and staff to log-in via our new single sign-on service. This has involved regular all staff/student emails, blog updates, as well a published panel on the ‘MyAthens’ page warning of the changeover. There will also be some work during the summer to provide better ways in which students discover our resources.

It is seen that the change will have limited implications for our users, however Refworks users will have to migrate their data between accounts. In order to cope with this I have emailed all Refworks users, sending them directly to a video tutorial on our Library blog.

The success of our project has resulted in Eduserv basing a case study on us, and I have been invited to discuss our experiences at a series of Athens workshops throughout March.