Features and Issues document, after day 1 discussion (day 2 minor edit)

Imagining an integrated future:
Library content, library services and the campus Course Management System
A CIC conference, February 23-24, 2004

Features and Issues – An Ongoing Discussion

Revision 2-23-2004: After day one discussion
Revision 3-26-2004: Post-conference, pre-posting

General observations from day one discussion
• The issues set forth are not uniform in scope; some are multi-part, others more simple. We must normalize these somehow as we move towards writing a report or otherwise disclosing the results of our work at this meeting.
• We have not yet established any way to capture the temporal: which issues can or should be addressed immediately, which must be addressed over a period of time, which have some mixture of a short- and long-term nature.
• We should strive, in analyzing all issues, to identify the “low hanging fruit;” projects that can be attacked and completed in a relatively short time period. Things we can and should do now. Cliff’s suggestions are quite helpful here (importing/linking content, policy issues).


Features
Possible library features to be integrated in the course management system:
Resources
1) Academic integrity guide
2) Bibliographic management tools
3) Citation guide
4) Copyright guide
5) Creating Course Web sites guide
6) E-books
7) Evaluating websites guide
8) Federated, or broadcast, search of subscription databases and ejournals
9) Faculty materials
10) Library catalog
11) Plagiarism guide
12) Research/search strategies guide
13) Scanning/media digitization guides
14) Subject guides and prepared subject searches
Services
1) Information literacy instruction online (training)
2) Course learning guides
3) Course packs
4) Course reading lists
5) E-Reserves for text and media, both library-owned and faculty-owned
6) Help desk/online help
7) Institutional repositories
8) Interlibrary loan and document delivery
9) Instructional support centers
10) Learning object management
11) Live and asynchronous online reference
12) Rights clearinghouse

Issues
Some of the issues that may face implementers working to integrate any of the features, above:
Technical and implementation issues
1) Authentication and single sign-on
2) Gathering and maintaining individual preferences
3) Technical platforms, compatibility and extensibility, middleware, APIs
4) Are open source solutions available, viable?
5) Do standards exist?
6) Metadata and controlled vocabulary: appropriate level and type of description for materials and scope of description; appropriate and supportable vocabularies
7) Is training necessary and is it accessible?
8) Outreach and publicity: reaching potential users of new services and resources
9) Lowering the barrier to initiating requests; designing accessible and visible new features
10) Implications for long-term archiving and preservation

Organizational issues
1) Library’s and IT’s involvement in evaluating and implementing campus information systems (CMS, digital asset management, online catalogs, etc.)
2) The Library’s and IT’s role in management of learning objects and locally generated, sharable course material.
3) Who are the stakeholders? Do they speak the same “language” and understand each other’s terminology, priorities, and goals?
4) Navigating trust between the Library and IT organizations
5) How do Library and IT staff work together to support this integrated offering?
6) Balance between faculty autonomy and aggregation of course material
7) Balance between customized service and quick, easy access to high quality library resources (broad and deep penetration)
8) Content rights management, including digital rights management: for a single course, for course reuse, for packing and porting courses. Compliance with U.S. Copyright law, TEACH Act.
9) Avoiding duplicate purchases: evaluating CMS content packages in light of library subscriptions
10) Does an environment exist where experimentation and failure are possible?
11) Does a collaborative effort between Library and IT overtly align with direction from the executive leadership of the institution?

Additional issues introduced through Day 1 discussion
1) Policy issues: legal (privacy, copyright, etc.) and cultural
2) Who are the other campus partners, in addition to the Library and IT? Faculty and students ought to be included in future planning for the CMS. How do we include early adopter-faculty and other faculty? What about the special role of graduate students?
3) What new or reallocated resources will the new offerings require: staff, time, money, etc?
4) Striking a balance between seamless publication and resource branding (in the interests of provenance, link resolution, access to appropriate help and support, etc.)
5) Usability and simplicity of use. What usability studies are we performing? Can these efforts be distributed? Can results be shared?
6) Who should have access to certain features of these integrated systems? What information (including statistics and tracking data) should be retained and who should have the rights to access it?
7) How does the institution encourage faculty to participate and adopt these systems and technologies? What reward structure is there?
8) Learner-centered systems and the centrality of the student role; eportfolios and assessing student growth and achievement above and beyond any one course.
9) Where is the pedagogy? What are the teaching philosophies? What role is there for the library in pedagogy?
10) Institutional partners (IT, Library, faculty, others) must have a chance to clarify language, express their needs, their goals, and their priorities before setting to work on collaborative projects.
11) How do we make a case for our collaboration to the highest-level administration?
12) Training and support: what impact will integrated systems and services have? How will staff gain new skills? Who will train and support the users and the staff? How will we provide help within the CMS?
13) Content accessibility: range of issues from ADA to format longevity.
14) Rights transparency. It must be easy to declare and easy to understand the rights surrounding any object or group of objects.
15) With an explosion of portals, how do we avoid portal creep? How to collaborate instead of compete on campus portal projects?
16) How can we make learning objects discoverable, and whose issue is this discovery? Are we sharing perspectives? Are there selection criteria? Description best practices?
17) If course management systems aren’t designed to retain course content over the long term, will we and where will we archive this material? Beyond the courses, what content should be retained long-term?
18) Integrating tools, systems, and staff in support of faculty course development. Understanding the differences in Library/IT culture. Do we change at the same rate? How quickly is technology adopted?
19) Just-in-time training and service provision, desire for self-service, disinclination to approach the library and the library staff.
20) What does it mean to achieve integration? What are the broad integration goals? Appearance of seamlessness, less clicking, fewest stops, a single environment. Do we wish to be organizationally integrated? Functionally integrated?
21) How do we define success? How will we know when we are successful? What statistics will we gather, have we gathered to demonstrate success or lack of.
22) Are we duplicating efforts between the organizations? Do we know what our counterparts are doing? Do we understand their jobs, their skillsets?
23) How can libraries collaborate with faculty on information literacy? How adequately have we estimated students’ information literacy?
24) Risk tolerance: how do we tolerate failure? Is it possible to innovate when working on an enterprise level?

Glossary terms
Academic technology
Accessible
API
Archival
Authentication
Authorization
Cataloging
CMS
Content object
Content rights management
Crosswalks (metadata)
Digital asset management system
Digital Library Technologist
Digital rights management
Dublin Core
Ereserves
Federated search
IMS
Institutional repository
Instructional technology
IT
JSTOR
Learning object
Life cycle of learning objects
Link resolvers
LMS
Mappings (metadata)
MARC
Metadata
Middleware
NetID
OCLC
OKI
OpenURL
Pathfinder
Pedagogy
Persistence/persistency
Portal
Provenance
Publishing system
SCORM
Secure computing
SFX
Stewardship
Subject guides
Systems Librarian
Textbook
Textbook

Straw Vote (values clarification exercise)
Use in conjunction with Organizational (Org) and Technical (Tech) issues, above.

Issue Number LT Library Other Total
Org-8 25 28 5 58
Org-5 22 33 1 56
Tech-1 20 31 4 55
Tech-6 21 27 1 49
Tech-10 17 22 6 45
Org-2 16 26 2 44 ^ More than 1/2 the votes^
Org-1 12 24 2 38
Org-7 7 28 1 36
Org-3 11 23 1 35
Tech-3 19 13 0 32
Org-9 7 22 1 30
Tech-4 18 10 0 28
Org-11 8 17 1 26
Org-10 4 13 0 17
Org-6 9 5 1 15
Org-4 7 6 0 13
Voters 32 47 4 83

Conference day 1 summary notes, C. Stewart

facilitators

-termporal issues were not addressed
-imbalance in scope of issues
-should we have broad issues or specific issues? we should have a mix
-we should have as a goal to identify a project
-identify things that people can do right away
-concerns about what we actually want out of this meeting? would have been better to allow people to express their needs, then from that build a list of issues.
-shorter-term, reachable goals, what is the low-hanging fruit.
-Cliff's suggestions: linking (easy import of content), policy issues. Cliff's talk really had an impact on the groups.

new issues
-privacy issues
-policy issues: legal and cultural
-more than just IT and library collaborating
-dedication of resources, both time and money
-branding at the library or university level; where are issues coming from
-simplicity of use: how easy is it to use
-security and privacy issues: access to interactions and transactions.
-faculty and their involvement: importance in their role in adopting learning management systems, and an institutional reward structure to affect change
-students as the emerging consumer of the instruction content
-what is the pedagogical component, what about teaching philosophy
-clarifying language, priorities, goals
-how do we make a case to the highest level administration to make a case for this collaboration.
-branding, training, intermarriage
-accessibility to various formats
-what records will be kept and for how long? archiving, access, etc.
-learning objects and retaining information about who can use them so that it's immediately apparent what the rights situation is. Transparencecny
-portal creep: everyone is coming out with their own portal, who will have the top level
-technical issue: roles for librarians access (also a policy issu)
-lack of communication and trust relationship: at the institution, but also on a broader scale. No understanding of goals and needs of the various units.
-open source
-how to make learning objects discoverable; is this a library issue? Are we sharing perspectives about this? What kinds of selection criteria.
-research needs; getting faculty involved with providing students with what they're demanding. should we be building resource management tools.
-Content preservation; what should be preserved and what is ephemeral: course management systems aren't designed to be long-term. Long-term storage should be accomplished in a content management issue.
-Copyright as an area of concern
-Training issue and staff training, skills building; training and support
-Alignment of leadership: how resources are distributed, incl. staff.
-What would the changes to the library management systems and course management system have to be with regard to training?
-What are you training on? What is your documentation like?
-Policy issues: legal and cultural policy. Legal: FERPA, TEACH, etc. Cultural: specifying that these things happen with these triggers, etc.


NEGATIVE SPACE
-archiving
-experimentation
-open source

1. Archiving and preservation
2. Legal policy: copyright and privacy, FERPA, HIPAA, TEACH
3. Technical access: authentication and authorization (roles within the organization)
4. Metadata: where does it sit, where does it travel? who is creating, who is receiving?
5. Who are the stakeholders? Who is missing in this discussion? Who decides who sits at the table? How to align with leadership?
6. How should the Library,IT staff work together to support this integrated offering?
7. Training and support
8. Avoiding duplicate content purchasing
9. APIs and interoperability; open source.

Conference day 1 summary notes, J. Duncan

Items for glossary

Learning Objects

Learning Management Systems

Course Management Systems

DAMS

AT - Academic Technology
IT - Used both to describe Instructional Technology and Information Technology
Digital Library Technologist
Systems Librarian/Technologist

netID

Authentication



Thoughts I heard multiple times:
Need for clarified roles among IT/AT and Library positions dealing with
similar "stuff"

Need for improved understanding in the IT community about what
constitutes "library resources."

This is an opportunity to stimulate discussion between records management
people and librarians.

An e-portfolio that follows you through life is "lifelong learning realized."
Heard this from Cliff Lynch and others. Introduces a host of issues related to
archiving, establishing security and "trust," portability...

Need to add to issues: "roles" in CMS and level of access. Example: librarians
with access to CMS courses. IT support individuals with access to be able to
provide support or assistance without compromising student information.

Conference day 1, unidentified table D

First ten minutes? After introductions and discussions of our expectations, we looked at the list and asked, “What’s left off and why?”

* Web-based tutorials. Why not integrate with Libraries or CMS or both?

* Compliance with TEACH Act? Sure, but why not Patriot Act, too. Where does privacy/FERPA law end?

* Faculty willingness to include librarians as partners.

* Solid economic analysis of the cost of providing metadata.

* We touched briefly on the complications posed by libraries’ licensing requirements of some databases.

* How do you avoid “portal creep”? Is it your CMS? Your library?

General Discussion

Discussion that the sixteen options weren’t equally weighty. Some were yes/no – others have lots of subtopics embedded. One cluster of the 16 deals with organizational structures, another with the kind of problem that will be solved.

* Who will design and implement a metadata training program for faculty/staff who need to apply metadata?

1. Organizationally, who else should be at the “enterprise discussion table”? Possible voices are the AV Services group, the public broadcasting group, the registrar, the archivist? From a user perspective (e.g., faculty or student), our organizational boundaries either are murky or confusing. Indeed, more services will always generate a demand for more and smarter user support services and broader training programs. (Faculty will say: “we don’t want training, we want support when we need it. Somebody needs to answer that phone!”)

2. We didn’t share a common understanding of “learning objects.” We used the example of how many PPT’s are at each university and how we could find out whether any of them might have one or more slides relevant to a faculty member. Does WebCT Vista adequately provide metadata tags?

3. We do not have a clear sense of the economics and scale of applying metadata in an enterprise system. What does it cost a faculty member to produce a PPT slide (depends on the slide – some are lavishly funded by research $$$). But currently we have no way to share at a granular level.

4. Current staffing cuts have forced changes to the contents of librarians’ jobs. Other issues deal with licensing issues (e.g., a database is restricted to students at a particular campus, which affects distance students).

5. As new services are envisioned, how do we get input from faculty BEYOND the early adopters? Sure, there are faculty senate committees – but at what level and in what way is input gathered? Even more critical, how do we get input from Graduate Students on both library and CMS issues? They are very big and important users of both systems.

6. Risk tolerance: how do we tolerate failure? On central infrastructure systems, failure cannot be tolerated. Period. Can you really innovate – or spur innovation – when you’re working on an enterprise scale? Small innovations are easy – scale is always hard. (E.g., Blackboard extensions.)

7. How can the libraries collaborate with faculty on information literacy? How adequately have we estimated students’ information literacy? (Students do not come to university with a mature sense of finding and evaluating information; nor are they very well informed about copyright.)

8. We have said very little about the role and importance of instant messaging among students, both for community-building and for collaboration. Should we have chat rooms for Library communication? Should this be part of the Libraries’ systems, the CMS, or both?

9. We said very little about #8 (content rights management, including digital rights management; compliance with law and policy; TEACH Act).

Conference day 1, table 7

Anything that the core group has missed?

Under technical and implementation training and support should be added.

**Why is the training left out? how does the integration change training -
documentation and training materials would have to be change?

**Also need to consider support

Library and IT need to interact on training. Dspace at WI, IT and
libraries collaborating in creating training.

Different types, needs and audiences of training - what do we mean by
training?

Find out what people want from integration - what they found was that it
would be nice to merge the documentation and make it part of the CMS.
Volker working on a course for teaching faculty and students what they
need to know about both library and CMS.

Change in culture - how to redesign the online materials to reflect what
students are actually looking for - largest number of hits are e-reserves.

What about workflow? who will do what?
Does anyone's campus have IT and libraries under the same department? Yes,
several. Iowa, MSU.

Perhaps we should discuss the idea of creating more monolithic systems or
breaking the systems down into modular components where possible so that
faculty can assemble what they want

Question about Organizational issues number 4 - navigating trust -
discussion about lack of trust or perhaps trust is not the right word -
turf problem between two units - problems with understanding each other
and communication.

Are the librarians happy with the level of integration at their
institutions?
no - but it's not IT, it is more issues with faculty

Content rights management (8) important - whether doing it commercially or
whether it comes from professor - need to figure it out first. They are
using Dspace at Ohio. Biggest battle is convincing faculty to let other
people use things. Some faculty don't want to share. Until we convince
faculty to buy into content rights management


Some fundamental problems:
1. Thinking about re-using content - faculty don't necessarily think about
that - not necessarily thinking of making that content available to
others. Although Universities are tending to begin to assume ownership of
content created.

2. Parts of the course might be the container that has subparts that are
not authorized for access, etc.

Are we also talking about very disparate systems? Like Dspace is a
learning repository - how do you train faculty where to put what? what
things go in Vista, for example, and what things go in Dspace? Need to
have the ability to define different levels of authentication.

The best policies are not tied to a specific tool, concerned about letting
the technology drive the policy - that is not good.

Policy within institutions? or policies of various institutions coming in
conflict with each other?

Point (8) has huge implications for all the other points. IT and
librarians need to have a shared vision. Currently they have different
agendas and some lack of understanding.

In the content management area one can make shared modules and bring them
into a course - the course is the temporary view of the objects - the
preservation of content happens on the course mgmt side

IT sometimes acting as a go-between between faculty and library - faculty
want students to have a reading list and a search function, IT asks
library to provide those things? At some places the library is not asked
to be involved at all, or they have to deal with requests coming at them.
The library is not asked to be involved in the planning process, just in
providing functionality piecemeal. Library and IT need to work together to
manage the chaos of change.

Users want something different from the library and it comes to libraries
through the back door. Somehow IT and librarians are missing what faculty
need?

Potential for vision at multiple levels - there are lots of different
visions. Vision plays differently within the context of the institution.
Need vision at many levels of the institutions. Faculty have a lot of
autonomy in a lot of institutions - they are used to being autonomous.
Difficult to build consensus with the different individuals. Some faculty
yell louder than others. Further, research institutions are not
necessarily focused on teaching.

Faculty are a bigger issue than library and IT. We basically have no
control over those issues.

Budget is becoming a driving force. Departments are trying to sell courses
to students. Teaching begins to become a money-making endeavor

There is logic that even people who are being pushy, can sell the good of
the institution. Hard sell for faculty.

People come to CMS to do administrative tasks like managing grades,
posting syllabus, sending email to class. The faculty created-stuff seems
to be the focus of what library want to preserve, but is that really worth
preserving?

The content should not necessarily be within the course - it should live
elsewhere.

What do students want? Do they want continued access to their course
materials. Students are driving faculty to put things online. Students
want to be able to see everything online in one place. A lot of the
materials posted online students print out.

Running pilots on annotating online content. students using tablet PCs
(windows journal?) so students can annotate content - downloaded the
content then could highlight it, make notes in margin, etc - then could do
searches in their annotated version of the
Does anyone understand (11) under organizational issues:

Molly sees it as meaning having a vision at the institutions - is there a
clear sense of where we are going with e-learning? are the decisions and
the commitments made at the highest level? is there any direction at other
colleges? (heads shaking "no" around the table)

E-learning has been a grassroots movement at most institutions - gets to
the point where it requires institutional support and policy making - it
needs to be supported and directed at the highest level.

Not all institutions make the same commitment to e-learning - the
competitive drive do do e-learning is not there at all institutions -
different in institutional vision depending on what their goals are -
research institution vs.

Broad range of things one can do with e-learning, and until the
institution makes the decision about how e-learning fits in the larger
scheme, there is no clear message. Some schools not seeing the
institutional vision.

Sometimes the colleges themselves determine how e-learning fits.
Particularly in the professional and graduate programs. Makes sense that
the determination of where e-learning fits happen at the collegiate level.

Colleges and universities that are more homogenous have an easier time
making institutional decisions. If you dig down into each department, it
is a microcosm of the greater institution.

We talked quite a bit about point (3) - stakeholders.

There is interested in Authentication - single signon. IT was not sharing
the technology to set up single sign-on so the library had to develop
their own authentication.

Shibboleth - how do we authenticate people from off campus when we are
giving them

We have a lot of monolithic systems that have different authentication
processes. Might be easier to get one big monolith so don't have to worry
about syncing all the passwords - some institutions have dictated that
they will have single signon and do not support people buying software
that does not support it. Need a secure password, single sign-on needs to
be hosted on secure servers. Students are often not careful with their
login - they'll get logged in and then walk away.

Who is driving single access? At what level is something too much? We used
to ask students to go to different floors to get different books.

Single sign-on is driven from all sides - IT wants it as much as the
users. IT goal to reduce the number of passwords. Single sign-on not
necessarily the term they use. Iowa calls it simple signon.

Some campuses are further along in the discussion about whether they want
all the systems to talk together and be integrated - reduce the clicks,
seamlessness, transparent to the user. Also reduces calls to support to
reset multiple passwords.

Schools have been audited - per auditors, they are now required to change
the secure password every 90, 60, or 30 days. Some schools have an e-mail
address where you can get confirmation sent, and other.


New question - do institutions populate courses with library links? or let
faculty add their own links? some are populating CMS course sites with
links to the e-reserves and reading lists for those courses.

Some are using Xythos network file management system

A big concern is what if the aggregator drops the article or pulls the
journal? Some schools buy full rights to protect themselves from this
problem - they buy archive rights.

Conference day 1 discussion, table 8


IMPORTANT EXISTING ISSUES:

-Training and staffing, particularly on the Library side. IT side has done some reallocation but has also had to ask for more staff. Perhaps this is an issue in 5.

-Metadata

-Standards

-Copyright policy

-Outreach and publicity

-Open source

-Duplicating purchased content: are they going directly to faculty? XanEDU, etc. Some charge the students directly.

NEW ISSUES
-Import and export tools and components, including intelligent content linking.

-What does integration mean? Seamlessness between systems.

-Balance between seamless/transparent publishing and branding/identification/provenance of resources.

-Add FACULTY to the list of Library/IT in any mention of partnerships.

-Are institutions REALLY going to archive courses over the long term?

LIST OF TERMS
-Subject guides
-Portal
-JSTOR
-EReserves (as a service vs. as a piece of technology)
-SFX
-OpenURL
-Metadata
-IMS
-Dublin Core
-Crosswalks/mappings
-Subject specialist
-processing
-SCORM: sharable content object reference model (Advanced Distributed Learning)
-API's
-OKI: Open Knowledge Initiative
-MARC