Category Archives: m-biblio

Final Project Report

Major Outputs

The m-biblio project has produced a number of significant outputs:

  • Results of a survey with students
  • Report on workshop with students
  • Software for finding, storing and exporting references:
    • A java-based web service for querying third-party bibliographic sources.
    • An iOS application that uses the camera to scan barcodes band manage citations.

Background

The m-biblio project was managed by the R&D/ILRT team of IT Services at the University of Bristol. The University, founded in 1876, is internationally distinguished as one of the best universities in the UK with world-class research and excellent teaching.

The m-biblio project wanted to look at the potential for smart phones to be used for the recording and organisation of bibliographic information for students within a library context.

The initial proposal stated:

“We propose to enhance the learning and research activities of the University of Bristol’s academic community by developing a mobile application that can record and organise references to books, journals and other resources. These references can be added actively by scanning barcodes and QR codes, or passively by automatically recording RFID tags in items being used for study and research. With permission of the user, the application will submit anonymous usage data to their library. This innovation will provide library staff with a valuable set of user-derived usage statistics. It will be able to track which resources were used, and where. The library will therefore be given a rich seam of usage patterns, including data about library items that are often confined to branches such as periodicals, journals and reference books. The application will be made available to the wider FE/HE community for use in other institutions.”

The project focussed on barcodes for books and Digital Object Identifers (DOIs) for papers and journals. The Library at the University of Bristol doesn’t use QR codes within the catalogue and it became apparent that we couldn’t read our RFID tags with an NFC capable device. However, we were successful in meeting a number of objectives, including investigation the student workflow and creating a prototype.

The challenge

Smartphone ownership among students is on the increase and the devices are bundled with a number of sensors such as cameras and, more recently, NFC readers. We wanted to investigate how we could use the phones to help students more accurately capture and manage references. A number of existing applications exist for managing references, such as Endnote, and we wanted to provide a tool that would work within a students existing study or research workflow which might already use such tools.

The Mobile Advantage

The prototype application does demonstrate the possibilities of using mobile devices to help collect and manage references. Work with students demonstrated that they had problems capturing the details of items accurately and displaying them in the correct format. In addition, a large percentage of students didn’t take advantage of bibliographic management tools. There is a gap in the market to provide a simple phone-based tool that can capture references.

Lessons Learnt

There were a number of key points:

  • The capturing and management of references is a particular stress point for students. They can find it difficult to capture accurate references and provide them in the format expected by their tutors.
  • Some students find existing bibliographic tools overly complex to use.
  • It is possible to provide a tool that can improve the capture and accuracy of references. However, references might need amending due to errors or missing information when they were originally catalogued.
  • There are copyright issues relating to the data provided by publishers that needs to be considered when deploying an app within an institution.

Technical Approach

There were two key pieces of technology developed for the project:

First, a Java web service (JAX-RS) that took a unique identifier (barcode, DOI number) and then queried a third-party bibliographic service for matching results. The results were then returned to the querying client in the JSON format. For University barcodes, the institution’s library catalogue (Aleph) was queried. COPAC was used for ISBN numbers and Crossref was used for DOI numbers.

Second, an iOS client that scanned barcodes and accepted DOI numbers from the user and queried the m-biblio web service for results. The references were stored on the phone and could be exported (via email) in Harvard or Chicago bibliographic styles. A third-party library was used for scanning and decoding barcodes, but some development effort was needed to create a decoder for the Telepen barcodes used by the University library. We opted to create a iOS native application (iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch) to take advantage of the native widgets and controls to allow rapid application development with a responsive user interface.

Conclusions and recommendations

The project does demonstrate the potential capabilities of using mobile devices to capture and manage citations and how there is a place for such a tool in the existing study and research workflow of students. The RFID tags used by the library couldn’t be read by NFC-capable devices, but further investigation is needed to look at taking advantage of new RFID library standards. The app could be developed further to provide better management of captured references, allow the export to more formats (including Endnote and Bibtex) and provide a way of capturing DOI numbers through a camera rather than the software keypad on the device.

My first impressions of using m-biblo

M-biblo is one of those great apps that solves a problem that you knew you had but had done nothing about resolving. Personally, I browse and read lots of books in the course of a project yet had never been able to easily record each book title.

This is an app that I have genuinely found helpful for my work, as I can now collect all the references to the books I discover with very little fuss by simply pointing my phone at the barcode. The app is easy to use and importantly, very quick. I will now have a full list of the books that supported an aspect of a project.

I believe that these small improvements to my book seeking/reading are worthy challenges to tackle and so I am glad that m-biblio has been made!

Now that I have had some time with m-biblio I thought i’d write a few suggestions for additions that may be useful for any future development.

  • Book activity – the ability to assign a status regarding how the book was used. This is already a feature of the Amazon kindle service where I can state that the book is “to read,  hope to read, browsed” etc as not all books are read outright.
  • Book collections – the ability to group books into collections, related to a project for instance.
  • Sending confirmations – the ability to email the app a books details. I was thinking along the idea of tripit, where you can send bookings from third party services which are they ready in the app. I see the use for books I purchase from Amazon and maybe ebooks.

A tour of the m-biblio iPhone app

The current version of the iOS application allows you to:

  • Scan ISBN numbers for book details
  • Scan University Library barcodes for book and thesis details
  • Enter DOI numbers for papers and articles
  • Extract the title of a website
  • Manually add the details of books, papers and thesis
  • Export the references via email to Rich Text Format (RTF) or HTML
  • Support for the Chicago and Harvard reference styles

The application only supports those devices that have a camera that can auto-focus (iPhone 3GS, 4 and 4S and the iPad 3). We need a camera that can autofocus for barcode reading. It would be possible to have the application check the capabilities of the device and only have the ‘scan’ option appear if you have an appropriate device.

This rest of this post provides a tour of the user interface and the functionality of the application.

The Main Screen

The main screen of the application shows a scrollable list of captured references:

The main screen of the m-biblo application (Harvard)

By default the references are displayed in the Harvard style, but it is possible to switch to the Chicago style:

The main screen of the m-biblo application (Chicago)

You can edit the details of captured references or delete them completely:

Details of the paperDeleting a reference

If you have captured a large number of references you can search by keywords (author or title):

Search for references

Adding a Reference

The ‘Add’ icon on the top right of the main screen shows a new screen that allows you to add new references:

Add a new reference

For example, we can scan a University Library barcode or an ISBN barcode with the camera on the phone:

Scan a barcode

After a successful scan, the app will query the m-biblio service for bibliographic data:

Search for data

The end user can then modify the data (if they wish) before saving:

Details of a search

You can also type in a barcode number with a custom keyboard:

Enter a barcode numberDetails from entering a barcode number

For Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) you can type in the reference:

Enter a DOI numberDetails from a DOI search

It would be better, in a future version of the app, if the DOI could be scanned in using some Optical character recognition (OCR) technique. The DOI numbers can be long and have a mix of numbers and characters which are prone to error when submitting on the iOS keyboard. For example, the DOI for J.C. Holt’s article on ‘Anglo-Norman Feudalism’ is ‘10.1111/j.1468-0289.1963.tb01721.x’.

You can also extract information about a website:

Enter a URLDetails from a Website

At the moment, you can only extract the title of a website. In the future, it would be nice to extract data from meta tags if they are relevant, such as details of authorship.

Exporting the references

On the main screen the “Share” button allows you to export the references that you have captured. You can only export data via an email attachment (although there is code to support BibServer). You choose a format (Harvard or Chicago) and whether or not you want an RTF file or HTML:

Send via emailChoose a styleChoose a formatChoose a format

Preferences

The preferences for the panel allows you to choose which reference style should be used for displaying references within the application. It also allows you to determine what information you are willing to share with the m-biblio service: (1) a unique identifier for the app; (2) the details of the captured items, i.e. the barcode or DOI number; (3) the type of device you are using (iPhone, iPad etc.) and which version of the operating system.

Preferences

What’s missing

The is missing a number of things:

  • The ability to manage references within collections. For example, you might have a collection for each assignment or task.
  • Support for Endnote – it is vital that you can export your references to existing bibliographical material.
  • More citation styles need to be supported and the ability to tweak the ones that are supported. For example, how many authors should be listed before et alias is used.
  • We support books, but not chapters within books.

Recent presentation at Mobile Technologies in Libraries event

Mike Jones recently gave a very good presentation on the MBiblio Project at a Mobile Technologies in Libraries event held in Birmingham. You can see Mike’s presentation on SlideShare: http://www.slideshare.net/MrJ1971/2012-0508mibibliomlibs

There were lots of other interesting presentations given at the event. A list of these with links to presentations and content can be found on Lanyard.com at http://lanyrd.com/2012/mlibs-may/schedule/

M-Biblio Workshop

The M-Biblio project recently ran a workshop with 10 students representing a good cross-section of the student population at Bristol. The object of the workshop was twofold. Firstly, to obtain a better picture of the challenges students typically face when collecting and organising bibliographic references and secondly, to explore potential solutions and scenarios to inform work on the phone app.

Pain points

Overall the students gave the impression that collecting and organising bibliographic references was a less than enjoyable experience. It was described as a “messy” affair complicated by a lack of uniformity with regard to presentational expectations. Different lecturers within the same departments often have different requirements as to how references are presented. This lack of consistency in presentational standards is further exacerbated by the plethora of collection and organisational methods being utilised, ranging from handwritten notes to using dedicated packages such as Endnote. Where software was utilised there was the repeatedly flagged up issue of it not working as the students expected, or desired. And with applications such as Endnote, considerable time is needed in order to learn how to use the application efficiently – time students were reluctant to dedicate to something viewed as being peripheral to their central studies.

Mission Impossible

After assessing the status quo the workshop moved on to phase 2 which encouraged the attendees to design their own ideal reference collection and management solution based around a mobile phone. The only constraint was that they had to utilise real features currently available on smart phones.

Some of the ideas that emerged during this stage of the workshop were the ability to:

  • add references from Google Scholar/Web of Science et al
  • easily extract references from PDFs! (i.e. allowing copy & paste, rather than being restricted by locked files)
  • Manually add references
  • photograph book cover, with app automatically recognizing book and pulling in reference
  • scan barcodes
  • scan text information inside front cover (eg ISBN)
  • OCR text (for references or notes)
  • order collected references (alphabetical, by first author is most wanted, but maybe numerically sometimes)
  • filter and winnow references (will collect more than needed to start with, some will be rejected for the actual essay)
  • link or check references are cited within the essay or report
  • format references according to common formats, such as Harvard. Freedom to define custom formats is very important too (to meet whims of lecturers!)
  • export reference list to text/pdf/word formats
  • share list via email/text/store in cloud
  • produce sensible layout for URIs for web resources (incl correct layout and date viewed)
  • be smart (e.g. identify Smith 2007 as a citation in the essay text and suggest possible references)
  • automatically translate text in documents (like Google Goggles?)
  • manage reference lists

Creating Bibliographies – a survey of students

Stuart Church (@stuchurch) of Pure Usability is helping with the student engagement and the user experience aspects of the m-biblio project. Using Bristol Online Surveys, Stuart recently ran a survey of University of Bristol students with some questions on creating bibliographies. There were 67 respondents that covered a range of disciplines and degree schemes, including undergraduates, taught postgraduates and research postgraduates.

Ten of the students then joined a two hour workshop to further investigate the journey they make in creating bibliographies and to identify the pain points. It also examined how mobile devices might be used in the process of capturing and managing citations.

Work from the workshop with students

We will provide a detailed report on the workshop in a future blog post, but I thought it would be useful to provide the responses to the original survey.

1. Approximately how many references do you usually put in your essays?

None: 0.0% 0
1-5 4.5% 3
5-10 17.9% 12
10-20 41.8% 28
More than 20: 35.8% 24

2. What tends to be the approximate ratio of books to journal articles in your reference lists?

Pretty much all books 4.5% 3
25% books / 75% journal articles 34.3% 23
50% books / 50% journal articles 19.4% 13
75% books / 25% journal articles 17.9% 12
Pretty much all journal articles 17.9% 12
Varies too much to say 6.0% 4

3. How do you usually find your references?

Online citation databases (e.g. Web of Knowledge) 36
Google Scholar 49
University library system 38
Via reading lists provided by lecturers 44
Other (please specify): 7

For other, respondents included “a mix of the above”, “academia.edu”, JSTOR, “reference list from other journal articles” and “using bibliographies from relevant books”.

4. Where do you store your references?

In word processor format (e.g. Word) 50
Using bibliographic software (e.g. EndNote, Papers) 14
In a hand-written notebook 15
I don’t store my references 6
Other (please specify): 1

For the “other”, there was a single comment: “When online, I bookmark them”.

5. What’s your biggest frustration about managing references?

This was a free text response but there were a number of common themes:

  • Citing the reference in the correct format
  • Copying the reference format easily from a paper
  • Different lecturers have different preferences for style of referencing, so its difficult to know what style to choose.
  • Endnote not supporting the style I want in word…
  • having to put them all in the exact harvard style of referencing
  • Inputting the data into Endnote
  • Missing information in the sources
  • Needing to know exact page numbers and having to look them up if i forgot to write them down
  • Remembering page numbers for quotations
  • Time-consuming
  • Too many references, often keeping track can be difficult

6. If you could design a simple piece of software to help you manage your references better, what would it do?

Once again, this was a free text response with a number of responses, including:

  • Allow me to: Record according to chosen system (Harvard, etc) Copy directly into essay/thesis Go back to original source (eg. to re-download or checkout of library)
  • Automatically put in references as I put in the sentences
  • Compile them, format them to the desired style and alphabetise
  • format my references
  • insert into word easily without adding random other numbers and things in/li>
  • it could help me to make a right order and help me to check what part I am missing for the references
  • it would automatically put them in alphabetically order and split them into the types of references they are eg books, journals etc
  • It would house your entire bibliography and help in shortening and referencing in the correct style for your department. it would also allow you to keep track of how many times you had referenced a certain source
  • Quick and easy to learn, will format in necessary style
  • Shape the references into the same referencing system.
  • take the journals and books you’ve read and write them in the correct format
  • You would type in title, author, chapter and page refs and the software would automatically create the bibliography reference in the correct standardised format

Sources of Bibliographic Data

For the app to work well it needs to reference reliable sources of bibliographic data. Already in progress is some code that is capable of pulling bibliographic data from the University’s library system Aleph via the XService API. But more are needed.

The question we need to answer is which sources to concentrate our efforts on in terms of 3rd party services to lookup ISBN numbers.

Initial feedback from members of the team and other developers in the University are as follows:

——————-
“I would rank Amazon below COPAC and British Library for bibliographic record accuracy as it is primarily for buying books which are in print, and the older out of print records are often sketchy ‘marketplace’ records.”
——————-
“Some 3rd party options.”

<http://www.freebase.com/view/book>
<http://www4.wiwiss.fu-berlin.de/bizer/bookmashup/>
——————-

“I used COPAC and Amazon. However you ought to be able to use the British Library national bibliographic records now they’re open.”

These initial recommendations have given us a good starting point. We’ll discuss, test and feedback on findings in a later post.

M-Library Report Highlights Interesting Stats for Mobile Use in Libraries

By virtue of a discussion taking place on the  LIS-MMIT JISCMAIL list I recently found the M-Library Project (http://mlib.blog.com/) which (to paraphrase) is a collaborative project between the University of the Highlands & Islands (UHI) and Edinburgh Napier University.  Funded by the Scottish Library and Information Council (SLIC) it examines user attitudes towards the creation of mobile support services in UK academic libraries, and looks at technologies currently in use in UK academic libraries.

They’ve recently published a report of their findings (http://mlib.blog.com/files/2011/09/The-M-Library-Project-UK-Academic-Libraries-Going-Mobile.pdf) and it draws out some interesting statistics.  Firstly, and most interesting to me, was the question of whether or not the students knew what a QR code was: 82% replied saying that they didn’t.  Only 8% were found to have actually downloaded a QR code reader to their phone and this certainly suggests that for a project like M-biblio (which will utilise QR codes but also other technology), that some effort will need to be put into raising awareness of both the project and the technologies involved.

“82% of students questioned didn’t know what a QR code was”

The second interesting set of statistics drawn out in the report were that nearly 70% of students taking part in the survey (1061 in total) said they owned a smart phone and 50% of those said that they regularly use their mobile phone to browse the web.

More pertinent to this project however were the stats on those utilising their mobile phone for investigating library resources, with only 15% having used it to access the web pages or services of the universities’ libraries in question.  The most common service found to be used was for renewing books online.  However, and perhaps critically, 90% responded saying that they would like access to at least one library service directly on their mobile phone.  It seems from this that the market for an app which can facilitate the collection of bibliographic references may well be there waiting for us.

“90% of students said they would like access to at least one library service on their mobile phone“

Both Mike and I feel slightly disappointed that the technology on current smart phones is not really existent to enable us to pursue the idea of looking into near field communications (NFC).  This would have enabled a smart phone app to capture data from RFID tags on books and journals passively.  However, in the near future, this should be feasible and we need to keep our eye on the mobile phone market in order to track what technologies are included on the latest models, such as the upcoming iPhone 5 if and when it finally appears.

“NFC technology isn’t sufficiently developed on current mobile phones to enable passive capture of data via RFID tags”

It certainly won’t be long before these kinds of technologies are widely available and with this in mind it’s interesting to note another statistic that the M-Library report pulled out which was that within the UK there was a 70% rise in smart phone numbers between 2009 and 2010.  It’s also interesting to note that students seem to change their mobile phones on a very regular basis.  81% of those surveyed had owned their current mobile for less than 18 months and 61% had owned their current mobile phone for less than a year.  This shows that new technologies emerging within the mobile phone field very quickly saturate the market.

The report is a very interesting one for anybody considering employing mobile technology within a library context and it also has a good reference section which points towards a lot of other reports and articles around the centre – highly recommended.

Budget

The general shape and form of the budget for this project is available in the budget sheet below.  All data is anonymous.  But for those more keen on graphics than numbers here’s a pie chart showing a simplified version of where the money is allocated.

M-biblio Budget

M-biblio Budget

 

m-biblio
Directly Incurred
Aug 11 – Jul 12
      TOTAL £
Actual grant
Project Management £5,741.00 £5,741.00 £5,741.00
Technical Development £19,727.00 £19,727.00 £19,727.00
Total Directly Incurred Staff (A) £25,468.00 £25,468.00 £25,468.00
Non-Staff
Aug 11 – Jul 12
      TOTAL £
RFID tag readers £600.00 £600.00 £600.00
User incentives £250.00 £250.00 £0.00
Travel to JISC meetings £300.00 £300.00 £300.00
User Engagement £1,500.00 £1,500.00 £1,500.00
Website design £1,400.00 £1,400.00 £1,400.00
Total Directly Incurred Non-Staff (B) £4,050.00 £4,050.00 £3,800.00
Directly Incurred Total (A+B=C) (C) £29,518.00 £29,518.00 £29,268.00
Directly Allocated
Aug 11 – Jul 12
      TOTAL £
Advisory Group Member £1,519.00 £1,519.00
Advisory Group Member £1,264.00 £1,264.00
Advisory Group Member £1,264.00 £1,264.00
Central staff salary costs £1,761.57 £1,761.57
Estates – Bristol £3,517.03 £3,517.03
Directly Allocated Total (D) £9,325.60 £9,325.60
Indirect
Aug 11 – Jul 12
      TOTAL £
Bristol £26,024.36 £26,024.36 £732.00
Indirect Costs (E) £26,024.36 £26,024.36 £732.00
Total Project Cost (C+D+E) £64,867.96 £64,867.96 £30,000.00
Amount Requested from JISC £30,000.02 £30,000.02
Institutional Contributions £34,867.94 £34,867.94
Total cost of project £64,867.96 £64,867.96
Percentage Contributions over the life of the project              JISC         Partner           Total
0.46 0.54 1

Scanning Barcodes – supporting Telepen

One of the key pieces of information for discovering bibliographic data will be the barcodes on the books – either the barcode used by the Library at the University of Bristol or the ISBN numbers associated with the books.

It would be nice if we could take advantage of the camera on the device to scan the barcode and save the user from having to type the numbers in manually. There are a couple of libraries for scanning barcodes:

  • ZXing (Zebra Crossing) – a Java library with Android support. There is also a partial port to iOS that only supports QR Codes.
  • ZBar – a C library that has bindings for a number of languages and includes an SDK for the iPhone.

These libraries have good support for a number of formats such as UPC-A, EAN-8, Code 128 and QR Codes. However, they don’t support the proprietary telepen format that is very popular in UK academic and public libraries.

It therefore seems that one of the first key development tasks will be adapting one of the libraries to support for telepen barcodes.