Portfolio Commons Project Final Report

University of the Arts London

Project Start Date: 26th March 2012

Project End Date: 28th September 2012

Length of Project: 6 Months

Name of Lead Institution: University of the Arts London

Name(s) of Project Partners(s)

• Jorum Service, MIMAS, University of Manchester

• Richard Jones (Cottage Labs)

Full Contact Details for Primary Contact:

Name: John Casey
Position: Project Manager
Email: j.casey@arts.ac.uk
Tel: 020 7514 8056
Address: 272 High Holborn, London, WC1V 7EY

Contents
About (In a nutshell)
In Plain-English (GrandFinale)
Project Plan
Outputs
Lessons Learnt
Impact

 About (In a nutshell)

In this project we aim to enable the users of the UAL e-portfolio system (based on Mahara) 
to be able to select content from their portfolio and deposit it directly into the UAL learning resource repository (based on EdShare) and Jorum. We will do this by using the SWORD protocol.

The key technical challenges the project presents will be integrating the use of SWORD into Mahara, and getting the target repositories to accept the content we deposit via SWORD. Ideally the content will also be discoverable in the repositories and viewable in a useful way to users.

We shall be working with

• Jorum Service, MIMAS, University of Manchester

• Richard Jones (Cottage Labs) – one of the original SWORD team

• EdShare/Eprints (ECS Partners Ltd)

Below is our use case diagram that provides a clear overview about the kind of interactions we are looking at:

Use Case Diagram

Benefits of this include:

• Making deposit in the repositories a lot less of a hassle for users

• Giving the users a list of ‘published’ items with URLs that they can reference in the future (to be implemented in a future version)

• Helping us learn more about SWORD and identifying other applications for its use (with WordPress and Drupal for instance) as well as thinking about other ways to link our various systems together

Typical User Journey/Walkthrough/Benefits/Issues

• The user wants to select and share some of their work with the world via a repository – they have to choose what to share and decide how much (can already do this in Mahara) – they could archive their whole portfolio but that is not the intention – we will need to have advice about the need to be selective and the benefits/reasons for sharing their work (to be OERs for others and to have web ref on their CV?)

• They have to select a repository and a licence (probably need a pop-up link or some such about each repos and the CC licence system – a recent addition to this would be the need to express a simple copyright statement.

• They hit a ‘deposit button’ and should see a progress bar and get an email confirmation with a link to the resource (email confirmation will be implemented in a future version)

• They should have access to a list of resources they have deposited with Titles, Descriptions etc. and web links to the item in a repo – would be really nice if the number of view/downloads was displayed next to each item (to be implemented in a future version)

• Need to think about versioning and overwriting options and whether that can be done in the scope of this project

In Plain-English (GrandFinale)

Students and staff at the UAL who use the e-Portfolio system (based on Mahara) will be able to select content from their personal portfolio collection attach Creative Commons licences to that content and then publish to the open web using 2 different repository systems as publishing platforms:

• Jorum (http://www.jorum.ac.uk/)

• Filestore (http://alto.arts.ac.uk/filestore/)

They will be able to do this without leaving their e-Portfolio. This means the content they publish in this manner will be retained in the long-term after they leave the UAL and their e-Portfolio system is closed. Such content will be available all over the world under the terms of the chosen Creative Commons licences and become part of their long-term online profile. Because the content has been deposited in institutional and national repository services users will be able to reference the content in the future in their CVs for professional purposes.

In the future other institutions who are using Mahara as their e-Portfolio system will also be able to implement similar services for their staff and students using our open source code.

Please see the 2 minute video screen-cast demonstrating the near-final version of the system in action from a users point of view. Video here

Project Plan

WP1 Startup Prepare detailed plan within 2 weeks / Arrange and brief staff / Project web site, Blog and Twitter. Finalise & sign consortium agreement / Initial team and user workshops / Establish code repository that is open to the community / Month 1

WP 2 Wider Community Engagement Contact OER programme and Rapid Innovation community organisations and projects (SWORD project, DEVCSI, Mahara Dev Community, ePortfolio communities) / attend meetings / respond to enquiries / Month 1- 6

WP 3 User Consultations and Prototyping Understanding current practice (UAL ‘Workflow’ Portfolio system, Jorum, EdShare)/ Explain Concepts / Discuss paper and wireframe prototypes and examples / Identify User needs / identify user requirements/ Identify technical problems for early attention Month 1 – 2

WP 4 Decision making and code prototypes Validate requirements and scenarios /

Develop functional specifications / develop needs hierarchy and evaluate / Target critical technical problems for early attention (small test code prototypes) / plan development activities Month 1 – 2

WP 4 Development Analysis and Design / Code Development / Iteration with test users / Testing / Release to users for testing / Final version Month 1 – 6

WP 5 General User Release and Support User Communications Plan / Training Materials and Help system / Acceptance testing and evaluation / final review of code Month 4 – 6

WP 6 Winding Up Final release of code under OSI licence with full user and developer documentation/ Project reports on website Month 6

Outputs

The main outputs from this project are as follows:

• SWORD deposit successfully implemented in a test instance of the UAL Filestore repository (based on the EdShare variant of Filestore)

• SWORD deposit successfully implemented in a test instance the Jorum repository (based on Dspace

• Mahara core code modified to enable sections of content for export using SWORD in package formats customized to meet the needs of the 2 target repositories

• Mahara code and developer notes are available under open licences at this code repository – in the new future

• Presentation about our work at the ALT-C 2012 conference which gathered a lot of interest – please see http://altc2012.alt.ac.uk/talks/28035

Important outcomes from this project are an improved understanding of the SWORD protocol and its possible applications and how to go about implementing such a service on different systems in the future. Especially important is the understanding that transactions via SWORD have to be implemented in a way that fits the target repository configuration and the server configuration.

Lessons Learnt

We now have a much better view of how the SWORD protocol works and how we may put it to use in the UAL. We understand that exports from a system like Mahara need to be customized (‘tuned’), in order to be correctly received and processed by the target repository.

We also now understand that the main variables affecting this process at the repository end of things are a) the way the host server is configured in terms of packages accepted, how package metadata is ingested, and how content is previewed, b) how SWORD has been implemented in the repository software.

Impact

This service is going to be implanted at the UAL and will enable staff and students to publish their work directly into Jorum and the UAL Filestore, lowering the threshold to repository deposit considerably. It will also enable the creation of OER content from student portfolios something that is particularly import for Art & Design subjects.

Our work is also of interest to researchers at the UAL who are interested in depositing their research outputs and data into the UAL research repository (UAL RO). As the JISC Kaptur project, which includes the UAL, is also investigating using SWORD with Eprints we are starting to coordinate our work with them.

Based on this experience we are going to investigate implementing a similar facility to enable users of WordPress at the UAL to select content for deposit in the same two target repositories.

Our work has gained interest from the repository community as a way of lowering the threshold to deposit, we presented about this at the ALT-C 2012 conference (please see http://altc2012.alt.ac.uk/talks/28035)

Our work is also of interest to the Mahara open-source community and there is the possibility that it may be incorporated into the code in the future.