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By John Paschoud - May 2001
John Paschoud from the London School of Economics Library explains how the HeadLine 'Personal Information Environment' for academic library users will evolve into part of ANGEL's 'Guided Environment for Learning'.
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The HeadLine Project [1] was funded under the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) eLib Programme from January 1998, and concluded its' technical development phase in February 2001. An extension to the project is undertaking further user studies until July 2001.
HeadLine has produced a number of working software components (freely available on an Open Source basis to the higher education (HE) community), and also detailed studies of various aspects of the hybrid library, such as resources data-modelling [2] and user authentication and authorisation [3]. However, what has been widely perceived as 'the HeadLine model' of the hybrid library is the Personal Information Environment, or ‘PIE’. This article takes a first look (from a very first-hand point-of-view) at the ways in which this model could be broadened to encompass all the information needed by learners in higher and further education, and how the Authenticated Networked Guided Environment for Learning (ANGEL) Project [4] will address these objectives.
The HeadLine PIE is a Web-server-based portal, first proposed in detail in November 1999 [5] providing user-centred views of collections of library resources. Each individual PIE user can configure their own library collection, so that it contains all of the resources that they want to use, and none of those that are not relevant or useful. The PIE and the thinking and machinery behind it are more fully described elsewhere [6] but for the purposes of this article the screenshot below will illustrate one example of the interface and types of resource entry-points that it presents to an end-user.
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| Figure 1: PIE Screenshot |
HeadLine also explored the idea of 'multi-personal' resource collections, shared by several people with common interests. The most obvious candidate groups with common interest in the same resource collections are the groups of students on the same course, but once a mechanism to enable shared access to PIE pages had been implemented, the idea could simply be extended to any group, and any individual user could quite easily create and administer a new group.
Like many fixed-budget projects, HeadLine ran out of time and money before implementing fully all the ideas it had generated. These included features like integrated, themed, online 'chat' (within group PIE pages), and user controlled current awareness alerting facilities. As far as possible, the project team has tried to preserve these ideas for the use of future developers, and has included documented specifications for them, and appropriate 'hooks' in the completed PIE program code. A potential PIE developer could implement many of these features by selecting and adapting other suitable open source components from available libraries such as Comprehensive Perl Archive Network (CPAN) [7].
The HeadLine PIE is paralleled by similar developments undertaken by the HE library community worldwide [8] and also (at least in some features) by commercial products like OCLC’s WebExpress [9] MetaLib from Ex Libris [10] and Pica’s Picarta product [11]. This generic model for the presentation of personalised views of library resources has collectively come to be known as "my-library" (a term originally coined, I believe, by Eric Lease Morgan of North Carolina State University [12] ).
Soon after we had started constructing individualised views of information resources traditionally held in libraries, it didn’t take a colossal leap of our collective imagination to see the possibilities of extending these tools to encompass other personal information of use to typical users in HE, and to start visualising how "my-library" could be extended to become "my-university". In general, these other information resources fall into two main categories: administrative information (such as personal details and timetables), and pedagogic learning resources - both usually (and, unlike library resources) highly specific in both form and content to the individual university with which the individual user has the relationship of student, teacher or researcher.
As the The Distributed National Electronic Resource (DNER) [13] supersedes the eLib Programme [14] as the JISC funding vehicle for new developments in this field (for higher and further education in the UK), the focus has widened from just the library, to a more inclusive treatment of "learning resources".
For the benefit of those readers who have already been calling their library a "learning resource centre" (or something more esoteric) for some time, a good way to illustrate this distinction is to classify most 'traditional' library resources as open-ended information spaces, in which the user is not guided through any particular course of study other than the (possibly optional) sequential order imposed by the author, and learning materials as more constrained and directed information, guiding the end-user (possibly with the help of some courseware management tool, such as WebCT [15], BlackBoard [16], and many others) through one or more specific courses of study.
The trend, reflected by recent calls for research and development proposals, is for educational systems to become ever more integrated and seamless in operation. This entails sharing databases and metadata systems and allowing different users selective access to those databases, depending on their needs and their authority. For example, the latest generation of courseware development tools, Virtual Learning Environments, provide integrated systems for course development, delivery and management. Digital library developments have progressed to the point where the DNER will create a single, integrated information access and management environment for the HE community. However these developments are not yet interconnected and neither are they integrated with university management information systems.
Internet-based services of all types in all walks of life are developing versions that are customised to the individual, as net technologies mature and rich integration of content strands becomes achievable. In the context of learning and information services in HE, this trend is emerging in commercial products, but there is just as much requirement to provide customised services within the environment of the developing DNER.
“A next stage might be to create several exemplar institutional environments where information, learning and other resources are brought together in a user's normal working environment, together with rich communications and other tools" [17].
Although they are characterised by high levels of guidance, feedback and support for users, "Learning environments…imply a model with a closed resource base of learning Resources" (JISC circular 5/99). Digital library developments have put increasingly rich and powerful data sets at the disposal of the academic user but the problem students and staff face when they switch to these richer, open resources is that they leave behind the supportive learning environment designed to help them make best use of the resource.
The aim of the ANGEL Project is to create a system that brings together Digital Library technology with Learning & Teaching resources in a way that:
Most uses of digital libraries typically help the user to identify and access resources from a wide range of online databases. These resources however are “context free" - they are found according to the specific search criteria employed and do not in themselves embody any pedagogic strategy.
The ANGEL Guided Environment for Learning (or ‘GEL’) will utilise the search and retrieval capabilities of digital libraries to identify specific clusters of resources that when combined with contextualising material would form the resource base for a specific “learning episode” or activity. This learning activity would be delivered online using a virtual learning environment (VLE) such as WebCT and alternative proprietary or 'open' solutions. It will facilitate access to DNER resources for users, removing from their navigation the frequent authorisation challenges which are such a familiar and frustrating part of the current environment, and will allow any authenticated member of a participating institution to connect, using a single personal identifier and password or a digital certificate, from anywhere on the Internet, to:
Of course, recognition of these potential synergies didn't take colossal imagination from many groups who had started by working on better end-user access to management information and pedagogic resources, either. Historically (at least in UK HE) there has not been a great deal of communication between the three communities involved in university administration, teaching and learning technologies, and library services. Indeed, there is a strong possibility that within the same university, several independent groups may each be developing their own ‘one portal for everything’, leading to potential battles for global supremacy as they all attempt to engulf the traditional information territory of the others. Rather than joining these battles, we should battle against some of the academic politics that tends to enforce these divisions, and try working towards becoming ‘joined-up universities’.
Finally, it’s worth mentioning that the ANGEL Project is tasked with a further, and highly complementary strand of development (through one of those quirks of the JISC committee processes that is probably best left to drift into the mists of history). In addition to development of the Guided Environment for Learning, ANGEL is also producing the first working implementation to satisfy the requirements for the ‘next generation’ of user authentication and access management. The specification, currently code-named 'Sparta', is being developed by JCAS - the JISC Committee for Authentication & Security. A national scale service based on the Sparta specification will eventually supersede Athens [18] as the authentication and access-management infrastructure connecting users in HE (and further education) with information and learning resources mediated by the DNER, and from many commercial suppliers. But that's the subject for an entirely different article...
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John Paschoud
London School of Economics Library
j.paschoud@lse.ac.uk
<http://www.headline.ac.uk/public/people/people-john.html>
John Paschoud is the national project manager of the HeadLine and ANGEL projects, and is an information systems engineer working at the Library of the London School of Economics.
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For citation purposes:
Paschoud, J. "Making the PIE ...GEL", Cultivate Interactive, issue
4, 7 May 2001
URL: <http://www.cultivate-int.org/issue4/pie/>
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