Digital Life Beyond The Institution

Digital Life Beyond the Institution
Brian Kelly
UK Web Focus
Being smart with technology;
creating something from nothing:
Continuing your professional life when
your institutional IT infrastructure no
longer exists!
Email: ukwebfocus@gmail.com
Twitter: @briankelly
Slides available under a Creative Commons
CC-BY licence

• You’ve been working in your institution for several years
or
• You are a librarian and you provide support for your users
What happens when:
• You (or your users) leave your host institution but wish to
continue your professional activities
• You (or your users) no longer have access to:
 IT applications which were licenced to the institution
 Digital content which required institutional access rights
 IT training and user support
Context
How do you survive digital life beyond the host institution?

• Worked at UKOLN, University of Bath from
Oct 1996 - July 2013
• Made redundant following JISC cessation of
core-funding for UKOLN
My challenges:
• How do I continue to function as an independent
consultant?
• How do I ensure that resources I have created can
continue to be used and developed?
• What do I do when I don’t know what to do or when
things go wrong?
About Me
How can I continue to build and grow my digital identity
and manage my digital tools and services?

What is the role of
librarians in
supporting users
who may find
themselves in this
predicament?
About You

•WHEN STAFF AND RESEARCHERS
LEAVE THEIR HOST INSTITUTION
5
Digital Life Beyond the Institution

What happens when:
• “The axeman cometh” and staff are made
redundant or take early retirement?
• They wish to continue to exploit their professional
interests as:
 A consultant
 An itinerant researcher
 A means of developing their CV
 A ‘citizen scientist’
 ….
“The axeman cometh”
Who has responsibilities for ensuring staff and researchers
are able to respond appropriately to such ‘life events’?

What’s Your Policy When Staff Leave?
See http://www.bath.ac.uk/bucs/news/news_0013.html

•POLICY AT BATH UNIVERSITY
Detailed policies
8
• Staff leave
• Staff have a new job in the Uni
• Staff are dismissed
• Staff die
University gives very brief details when:
But is leaving the institution really an unusual event?

“By 2015, there will be more Briton over 65 than under 15.
We cannot afford to discard their expertise.”
“Studies show that on average each of us will have seven
careers, two of which are yet to exist.”
Stella Creasy, Labour MP for Walthamstow
In New Statesman, 20-26 Sept 2013
Changing Work Environment

We are seeing how moves to openness can provide
benefits for life-long learners:
• Open source software: avoids licence costs which
enable software to be used outside the institution
• Open content: avoids licensing restrictions so
content can be used and modified
• Open access: avoids licensing restrictions so
research papers can continue to be accessed
Responding to the Changes
User support and education – the missing component?
An opportunity for librarians?!

Following announcement of forthcoming cessation of funding need
to ensure:
• Minimal loss of digital content
• Minimal loss of professional networks
• Continued access to use and modify social media services
• Identify and implement strategies for ongoing digital presence
My Move to The Cloud:
A Case Study
Note that since I didn’t intent to die in my job, such plans
should have been in place in any case!

The Institutional Repository
Opus, the University of Bath
institutional repository,
provides a secure, reliable
& maintained repository for
my research papers,
project reports, etc.

• Opus policy seeks to ensure
long-term persistency of
content.
Persistency of Records
• When people leave will they
still have their contributions
listed?
• Or their usage statistics?
Opus repository continues to provide content,
ownership details and usage statistics 

Informal feedback:
• "Records disappear when someone leaves because that's entirely
appropriate."
• "Staff leaving the university have a different relationship to the
organisation. By rights we should shut off ALL accounts the day the
relationship with the organisation ends."
Institutional context:
• “this is obviously down to institutional management of people records”
Where does your policy fit in the spectrum?
• We’re focussing on the REF and our CRIS
(Current Research Information System)
• We are loyal to former employees
Persistency of Records

• Ensure that a record of
your work (e.g. your
publications) is
available beyond the
institution (e.g. on
LinkedIn)
Manage Your Own Records

• Ensure that your (open
access) publications are
hosted in an environment
you can maintain when
you leave the institution.
• For example:
• ResearchGate
Manage Your Own Content
Papers hosted initially in local open
access repository

• Ensure that your (open
access) publications are
hosted in an environment
you can maintain when
you leave the institution.
• For example:
• ResearchGate
• Academia.edu
• …
Manage Your Own Content
No permission to upload book
chapter, so metadata-only
records
Full-text of open access paper available

Ensure that if
you have a
blog it isn’t
trapped in the
institution (and
potentially
deleted when
you leave).
Some options:
• Create a
blog in the
Cloud initially
• Migrate your
blog to the
Cloud
Manage Your Own Ideas
Blog at ukwebfocus.wordpress.com was
continued with no need to migrate content

Have you got your drive
SkyDrive, Google Drive
or Dropbox accounts?
Use Cloud Sharing Services
Case study
Since 2012 I’ve used SkyDrive for
collaborative peer-reviewed papers:
• File in one place (avoids multiple
master copies problem).
• Can be viewed (and updated) on
mobile devices
• Can use MS Word in the Cloud

A spectrum of ownership:
• Your CV and list of
publications
• Your publications
themselves
• Your blog content
• Your domain name
• Your own server
Manage Your Own Domain

Netskills
course
Learning More
Case study: During Netskills course the
one.com hosting company mentioned.
The ukoln-diaspora.org.uk domain was
registered and Web site created for £10
fee in 10 minutes during course.

Take control of your
research identity!
ORCID:
• Open Researcher
and Contributor ID
• Non-proprietary
alphanumeric code
to uniquely identify
scientific / academic
authors
• Managed by ORCID
Inc. an open &
independent registry
Manage Your Research Identifier
My ORCID: 0000-0001-5875-8744

After 17 years of
email use I had:
• Large number of
messages
• Large number of
contacts
• Personal &
professional uses
Know How To Migrate Your Email
I needed to know how to:
• Set up new email accounts (Gmail) & re-subscribe to lists of interest
• Migrate old email messages, sender details, etc.
• Associate social media services with new email accounts
• Rationalise use of email

Change your email address
to ensure you aren’t locked
out of Cloud services!
Email For Authentication
Claim your papers in
Google Scholar while your
institutional email is valid –
otherwise you might not
be able to claim them!

Importance of developing one’s
professional networks – a valuable source of
advice and support:
Twitter: Quick queries, discussion and links
to resources
Blogs: More in-depth contextual
information and responses
Getting Help – When the IT Help Desk
Has Gone

The Role of Librarians
What is the role of librarians in ensuring
staff and researchers and other
members of staff can exploit their
potential when they leave their host
institution?
Traditionally:
• Many IT services were provided by the
institution
• Librarians (and IT staff) provided advice &
support on use of such services
• Non-hosted services were banned (access to Second
Life) or deprecated (“the content isn’t secure”, “the
service isn’t reliable”, “they’ll claim ownership of your
content”, “students won’t want us in their space” … )

A New Role of Librarians
In the past:
• The IT infrastructure was
mainly hosted in the
institution
• The IT support infrastructure
focussed primarily on
institutional services, with
some appreciation of(and
warnings about) Cloud
services
My
University
Slideshare
Google

A New Role of Librarians
In the future:
• The IT infrastructure no
longer revolves around the
institution
• The IT infrastructure will
focus on the services
chosen by the individual
(with warning about the
transient nature of
institutional services)
My
PLE / PRE
My current university
My first university

New approaches can help librarians to ensure that the departure of
researchers can stimulate the economy:
• Support the migration of intellectual assets so that they can
continue to be used
• Ensure that training to do so is embedded in institution
Stimulating The Economy

Advice for
graduates
provided
by Careers
Service

SCONUL
No digital
literacies for
staff &
researchers?

Shouldn’t life-long skills to
manage digital content
be address in Research
Concordance?
Research Concordance

Professional ethics: copyright is broken, so why am I enforcing it? (proposed by @lawsonstu)
Copyright law is broken. By criminalising citizens and creators in order to protect the profits of
corporations, it harms the people that it should be empowering. Therefore I see it as an ethical
imperative to break and/or subvert it; civil disobedience is a necessary part of a functioning
democracy.
It is part of my job in a library to uphold and enforce copyright law.
Professional ethics are in conflict here: on the one hand, I have a duty to my employer and society to
act in accordance with the law; on the other hand, when that law is wrong, it is unethical to force
people to comply with it.
How can this be resolved? I'm not sure that the professional ethics espoused by our current
professional organisation, CILIP, are enough to negotiate dilemmas like this. What does this mean? Do
we need a new, more agile ethical approach that can deal with contemporary information ethics?
And if so, can we find this within existing professional frameworks or do we need a new professional
body?
The Radical Librarian
Session proposal for the Radical Library Camp, Bradford, 28 Sept 2013

Digital life is now primarily in the Cloud, so why am I ignoring this? (proposed by @briankelly)
We seek to prepare our students with life-long learning skills for working in a digital
environment after they graduate.
But members of staff and researchers are only given training in institutionally-approved &
support technologies. We fail to provide training and support for staff for their digital life
beyond the institution.
And yet everyone will leave the institution (unless they die in the job!)
Professional practices and institutions are in conflict here: on the one hand, I have a duty to
my employer to support the needs of the institution; on the other hand, my profession, and
the higher education sector, believes in the value of life-long learning.
How can this be resolved? I'm not sure that the digital literacies summary espoused SCONUL
and promoted by Jisc, are sufficient, as this focusses only on teaching of digital literacies. Do
we need a new, more agile approach that can deal with contemporary need for digital life
beyond the institution? And if so, can we find this within existing professional frameworks or
do we need to do this for ourselves?
The Radical Librarian
Manifesto proposal for the ILI 2013, London, 28 Sept 2013

Photo from http://www.flickr.com/photos/selco/5347009607/
Where Do You Stand?
Today we’re learning
about the risks of using
Web 2.0 services

Photo from http://www.flickr.com/photos/alatechsourceblog/101011114//
Where Do You Stand?
Today I’ve explained why
you need to migrate to
Web 2.0 services

To conclude:
• There will be an increase in the numbers of staff and
researchers who will need to manage digital content
and services when they leave their host institution.
• Current institutional and national plans do not seem
to address such needs.
• An opportunity for innovative approaches from early
adopters?
Conclusions

Digital Life Beyond The Institution

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Digital Life Beyond The Institution