Hilary 2011 - IT Services - University of Oxford

Oxford University Computing Services
OUCS News Hilary Term 2011
What’s inside
InfoDev
OxPoints, OpenMeters,
and Open Data at OUCS
OxGarage
Web Design Support
TEI XML
Project Case Notes:
Lexicon of Greek Names
First Folio Shakespeare
eBooks Available for Free
New OUCS Publication
Harnessing the Power of
the Crowd
Need More Technical
Support?
William Godwin’s Diary
iTunesU
Podcasting
Nexus
WebLearn
Free Chocolate
OUCS
www.oucs.ox.ac.uk
13 Banbury Rd
Oxford
OX2 6NN
Oxon
01865 273200
OUCS - Supporting Your Research
InfoDev
‘InfoDev’ is the name for the Information and Support Group’s Development Team
in OUCS. InfoDev provides data solutions, web projects, and research support and
advice to OUCS, to the University, and also to external clients. This covers a wide
variety of activities including the creation, management, analysis, and publication of
digital information of all sorts. InfoDev incorporates several specialist teams within
OUCS, including the Web Design Consultancy and Research Technology services.
InfoDev can help in the development and management of your digital information
and materials. InfoDev undertakes charged work on a not-for-profit basis.
Research Support
The InfoDev team provides Research Support in the form of the Research
Technologies Service at OUCS which offers a range of services to assist staff in
planning and carrying out research projects. This can range from giving detailed
advice on funding applications, undertaking technical work-packages, or to
providing ongoing technical consultation and support. We’re interested in helping
you plan IT projects, start them, implement them, and sustain them once they are
finished.
Web Projects
InfoDev works on many web projects and runs the Web Design Consultancy which
will either advise or help you to design, build, maintain, host, and refresh your
websites. InfoDev also supports and maintains the University’s Google Search
Appliance to provide tailored searches and results from University sites. We can
also provide a hosted and maintained content management system to run your
website.
Data Solutions
InfoDev collaborates with research projects, and departments to provide a wide
variety of information management and data development solutions. This can range
from legacy data migration, format transformation, data up-scaling, databasebuilding,
the analysis or visualisation of information, to data collection. We’re
interested in helping you make more use of the digital information you create.
For more information about InfoDev please see: www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/infodev/ or
email infodev@oucs.ox.ac.uk
OUCS News Editor
Jane Littlehales
marketing@oucs.ox.ac.uk
OUCS News online version
www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/publicity/
Printed by
OUCS Print Department
printing@oucs.ox.ac.uk
Designed by the Web Design Consultancy service
1

OxPoints, OpenMeters, and Open Data at OUCS
OxPoints aims to provide full and accurate geolinking
information for aspects of the University of Oxford. The
OxPoints dataset consists of names, postal addresses,
web addresses and co-ordinates (latitude and longitude)
for all the departments, colleges and other buildings or
units of the University, and much more, along with some
of the relationships between them.
OUCS has recently released its OxPoints dataset under
the Creative Commons Zero license. This
allows others to use and remix the data for
any purpose with absolutely no restrictions.
We hope that this will encourage greater
reuse and integration both within the
University and beyond. InfoDev is also
working with other parts of the University,
including the Bodleian Libraries to ease the
publication of linked open data.
data to aid awareness of the University’s environmental
sustainability responsibilities. Much of this information will
be made available through a single linked data repository.
For more information about OxPoints see http://oxpoints.
oucs.ox.ac.uk/ or if you have a dataset you are interested
in making freely available contact InfoDev at: infodev@
oucs.ox.ac.uk
The OpenMeters project is a collaboration
with the Estates Department to publish
energy consumption information as linked
OxGarage
As part of an EU project they were involved with, OUCS’s InfoDev team were partly responsible for the creation of
a web-based document format conversion service called ‘OxGarage’. This allows you to convert presentations,
spreadsheets, or documents to and from a wide variety of formats through an easy-to-use web interface. For example,
OxGarage can provide easy transformations from a Microsoft Word Document to TEI XML or a PDF Those with more
technical leanings might be interested in knowing that it also has a RESTful web service API which allows scripting batch
transformations or embedding in other services.
For more information please see: www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/oxgarage/
Web Design Support for Projects
The Web Design Consultancy (WDC, www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/
webdesign/) provides web design and development support for
research projects, either simply building the project website, or
providing design and technical input into the project itself. Some
examples of recent projects are detailed below.
Runcoco: how to run a Community Collection online
RunCoCo: how to Run a Community Collection online is a project
set up to offer advice, training, and open-source software to those
interested in running a community collection online.
WDC designed the Project logo and built the project website:
http://projects.oucs.ox.ac.uk/runcoco/
2
First World War Poetry Digital Archive

Woruldhord
Woruldhord is part of the JISC-funded initiative Runcoco:
How to Run a Community Collection Online and sets out
to collect together into an online hoard, digital objects
related to the teaching, study, or research of Old English
and the Anglo-Saxon period of history.
WDC designed the project website and provided interface
design for the collection and display interfaces for the
online Community Collection.
http://projects.oucs.ox.ac.uk/woruldhord/
First World War Poetry Digital Archive
The First World War Poetry Digital Archive is an online
repository of over 7000 items of text, images, audio, and
video for teaching, learning, and research.
WDC provided extensive input into the visual identity and
interface design for the project.
www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ww1lit/
Monumenta Asiae Minoris Antiqua XI
The aim of the MAMA XI project is to make available
some 600 unpublished inscriptions and other ancient
monuments, recorded by Sir William Calder (1881-1960)
and Dr Michael Ballance (†27 July 2006) in the course of
annual expeditions to Asia Minor in 1954-1957.
WDC are providing interface design on the online edition
of the Monumenta Asiae Minoris Antiqua.
http://mama.csad.ox.ac.uk/
For advice and support on web design see
www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/webdesign/ or email: webdesign@
oucs.ox.ac.uk
A Common Technology: TEI XML
Many of the projects the OUCS’s InfoDev team has worked on (including the Lexicon of Greek Personal Names, Godwin’s
Diary, and ePub editions of Shakespeare’s contemporaries described later in OUCS News) manage data as XML valid
against the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) Guidelines (www.tei-c.org). The Epidoc conventions used in digitizing classical
inscriptions are another example of a use of the TEI.
The TEI provides a comprehensive standard for tagging
• transcribed texts (drama, poetry, speech, dictionaries etc)
• genetic editing
• links between facsimiles and transcribed text
• manuscript descriptions
• identified names, places, people and dates
• analysis, linguistic tagging, non-hierarchical structures
Here is a well-known piece from Shakespeare marked up in TEI XML:
Ariell Song.
Full fadom fiue thy Father lies,Of his bones are Corrall made:Those are pearles that
were his eies,Nothing of him that doth fade,But
doth suffer a Sea-changeInto something
rich, & strange:Sea-Nimphs hourly ring
his knell.
Burthen: ding dong.
Harke now I heare them, ding-dong bell.
The TEI Guidelines were first published 20 years ago, but the current version is the result of a large-scale revision
undertaken between 2001 and 2009 by text-encoding experts worldwide. Oxford is one of four universities which act as
special ‘hosts’ within the membership consortium which manages the TEI, and OUCS staff have played a considerable
part in TEI development. Sebastian Rahtz and James Cummings are well-known n the TEI world, and are elected
members of the organisation’s Technical Council. OUCS also undertakes much of the editorial work.
3

Project Case Notes: The Lexicon of Greek Personal Names
The Lexicon of Greek Personal Names (LGPN) was established in 1972 as a Major Research Project of the British
Academy. The overall objective of the LGPN project is to create a comprehensive and authoritative record of the names
of all individuals attested in Greek (or with Greek names attested in Latin) in the ancient Greek-speaking world, and so
provide the classical research community world-wide with a unique and fundamental resource for the study of all aspects
of the ancient Greek world.
LGPN is internationally recognised
as a resource which has transformed
the basis on which names may be
studied and used. It has done so to
date primarily through its publications;
so far, over a quarter of a million
individuals sharing over 35,000 names
have been published in six regional
volumes.
OUCS has been assisting
the LGPN with its database,
typesetting and (most recently) web
presence since the early 1980s, and
the project has successfully weathered
30 years of changes in humanities
computing.
In its most recent incarnation, an
InfoDev project has put together a new
web-based search of all the data, and
enabled the Lexicon to make its data
available in formats such as TEI XML,
JSON, KML and RDF using the CIDOC
CRM ontology (see below). The project
now participates in up-to-the minute
collaborations using linked data and
open standards.
Whatever is ....CIDOC CRM?
CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model (CRM) is an ontology
used by quite a few humanities research projects.
The CRM provides a set of definitions and a formal
structure for describing the implicit and explicit concepts
and relationships used in cultural heritage documentation.
Key elements:
• Actors (people)
• Conceptual objects
• Physical things
• Events
• Time spans
• Places
and relationships between them. e.g.
• participate in
• refer to
• have location
• within
CIDOC CRM is often expressed in the form of RDF
(Resource Description Framework) assertions, as this
example shows:
Παράμονος
-0225 to -0175
4

First Folio Shakespeare eBooks Available for Free, via Oxford on iTunes U
Shakespeare’s entire First Folio, including original
spelling, is being made available to download for free,
as Oxford University becomes one of the world’s first
universities to add ePubs to iTunes U, a dedicated area
within the iTunes Store (www.itunes.com).
Like the University’s hundreds of free audio and video
podcasts available on iTunes U (http://itunes.ox.ac.uk),
the ePubs are available for anyone to download and
enjoy. This development comes shortly after Oxford
on iTunes U celebrated its second anniversary by
surpassing five million downloads of its audio and video
material.
The University is also making six plays by
contemporaries of Shakespeare available, including The
Duchess of Malfi by John Webster.
Dr Emma Smith,
Lecturer in English
Literature at Oxford,
whose lectures on
iTunes U have been
particularly popular,
said: ‘It’s great to have
released free ePubs
of both First Folio
Shakespeare plays and
lesser known works. I
hope that this material
will be enjoyed as
widely as possible.’
Today’s ePubs include Shakespeare’s first folio of 36
plays, ePubs to accompany Oxford’s ‘Approaching
Shakespeare’ lectures and ePubs to accompany our
‘Not Shakespeare: Elizabethan and Jacobean Popular
theatre’ lectures.
Oxford is in a unique position to make historic and rare
texts available in ePub form because of its expertise in
text archiving and encoding. The University
Computing Services has run the Oxford Text
Archive (www.ota.ox.ac.uk) since 1976, and the
University is one of five worldwide hosts of the
Text Encoding Initiative Consortium
(www.tei-c.org).
The University will be adding more ePubs to
iTunes U in the future.
All the material has been released under
a Creative Commons licence for reuse in
education worldwide.
• Shakespeare’s first folio: http://tinyurl.com/
Shakespearesfirstfolio
• Approaching Shakespeare’ lectures;
http://tinyurl.com/approachingshakespeare
• Not Shakespeare: Elizabethan and
Jacobean Popular theatre: http://tinyurl.com/
notshakespeare
5

New OUCS Publication: Impact and Engagement
Recognising the growing need for advice in this important area, OUCS has produced a new guide
to using IT in activities such as impact, and business/community engagement. This is based on
work undertaken by several OUCS projects and aims to provide researchers, departments, and
colleges with a set of tips that can be easily implemented. The guide begins by discussing how
useful IT can be in terms of outreach activities, and also in assisting with ‘impact’ - which is now
becoming more and more important for research projects. It looks at the strategic background to
this, and then provides a list of suggestions covering a stakeholder analysis, effective web sites,
dissemination and community building, extending events, and extending the reach of a project.
Finally, it concludes with an overview of OUCS’s activities in terms of engagement, looking at:
economic impact and knowledge transfer, bringing learning resources to a wider audience,
widening participation, the environment, and arts and culture.
The full guide is available at: www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/publicity/leaflets-guides/impactguide.xml. Printed
copies have been circulated to Heads of Department also.
Many Hands Make Light work: Harnessing the Power of the Crowd
Would you consider telling the Government which laws
and regulations to get rid of, or helping the Guardian
examine MPs expenses? Would you like to be able to
classify galaxies, read ships logs from the First World
War, or add references to a map for others to find? All
that is now possible through a rapidly growing set of
online crowdsourcing and community collection projects.
What is community collection and
crowdsourcing?
A ‘community collection’ is where the general public or
members of a particular group are invited to contribute
to a project by uploading their own content (for example
pictures from the First World War, accounts of a day in
their lives, or suggestions of what laws to abolish) or by
adding information to existing resources (for example
classify types of galaxies, mark locations on a map, or
identify dodgy expenses claims).
Crowdsourcing initiatives, where a task is outsourced to
the public, a community or a large group of volunteers,
are becoming increasingly popular and are now used in
many different areas, including academic research. An
early example of a crowdsourcing project is Galaxy Zoo,
which invited volunteers to look at images of galaxies and
classify them according to shape - a relatively simple task
for humans but difficult to do automatically. With the help
of the crowd, astronomers got new and reliable data to
use in their work. Several projects have followed Galaxy
Zoo and can be found in the Zooniverse - a common
platform for ‘citizen science’ projects in a variety of
disciplines. See www.zooniverse.org.
RunCoCoCo – how to run a community
collection online
RunCoCo is a project based at OUCS set up to offer
advice, training, and open-source software to those
interested in running a community collection online.
The one-year project is funded by JISC and builds on
the success of the Great War Archive – a community
collection that collected First World War memorabilia
(see www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ww1lit/gwa). Part of the
RunCoCo remit is to make available and share the
experiences of the Great War Archive project, to collate
and make available useful information and tools that can
help others run a community collection in their area. In
addition to publishing guidelines and advice documents,
the project is offering support to those running or
planning community collection. The project has held four
training events, and material from these is being made
available on the project website. Another resource that
the project is making available is the CoCoCo software,
which can used for running a community collection
online.
To try out the resources and tools that are being
created, RunCoCo has run an exemplar collection. Over
the summer, Project Woruldhord (http://projects.oucs.
ox.ac.uk/woruldhord/) collected digital objects related to
the teaching, study, or research of Old English and the
Anglo-Saxon period of history. The project received a lot
of attention both in academic circles and the media and
a large number of excellent resources were submitted
by people from all over the world. These resources will
soon be made available online.
The RunCoCo project is only funded to run for one year
but the resources that are created will remain available
on the project website after the project ends.
More information
More information about RunCoCo and community
collection projects can be found via the RunCoCo
website (http://projects.oucs.ox.ac.uk/runcoco/) and blog
(http://blogs.oucs.ox.ac.uk/runcoco/).
6

Need More Technical Support?
NSMS support researchers IT requirements through a
range of services aimed at providing resources for well
defined costs and for short medium or long periods.
VM4Rent: Rent a Virtual Server for anything from 1
month to many years. Allows full access to install,
configure and maintain your system.
Premium Web Hosting: NSMS can support your project
website on a range of technologies and with support from
a team of experts. Design assistance can be provided by
the OUCS Web Consultancy service.
IT consultancy: NSMS can provide consultancy on any
area of IT provision for a research project. With skills
in a wide range of topic such as virtualisation, storage
provision, clustering, web service provision and many
more, NSMS is in an ideal position to assist.
For further details on any of these services please see
out website www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/nsms or why not call for
discussion about your project on 01865 273209.
Did You Know About ... ePub?
The success this year of the Apple iPad has brought
the ePub standard to new prominence, as the format for
electronic books, used by the excellent iBooks program.
ePub is an open standard for ebooks owned by the
International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF). The format
is really rather simple: it is a zip archive of HTML files,
just the same ones you used for the web, with associated
CSS files, images etc, and a set of metadata files written
in XML which provide information like a table of contents,
and reading order.
William Godwin’s Diary: An InfoDev Case Study
About the project
The William Godwin’s Diary project has transcribed,
edited, and annotated 48 years of William Godwin’s diary
from 1788-1836. The diary is a resource of immense
importance to researchers of history, politics, literature,
and women’s studies. It maps the radical intellectual and
political life of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries, as well as providing extensive evidence on
publishing relations, conversational coteries, artistic
circles and theatrical production over the same period.
One can also trace the developing relationships of one of
the most important families in British literature, Godwin’s
own, which included his wife Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-
1797), their daughter Mary Shelley (1797-1851) and his
son-in-law Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822). Many of
the most important figures in this period of British cultural
history feature in its pages, including Anna
Barbauld, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Charles
James Fox, William Hazlitt, Thomas Holcroft,
Elizabeth Inchbald, Charles and Mary Lamb,
Mary Robinson, Richard Brinsley Sheridan,
William Wordsworth, and many others. The
resource, which includes complete images
and detailed full-text transcriptions, is freely
available at http://godwindiary.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/
Training project staff
One of the appropriate technologies for marking up such
texts are the Guidelines of the Text Encoding Initiative
(www.tei-c.org). TEI P5 XML is a de facto standard
for the encoding of digital text which over the last
couple decades the University of Oxford has become
international leaders in the support and development in
their role as a TEI Consortium host. Two members of
InfoDev are fortunate enough to be elected members
of the TEI Technical Council and so help to shape
the ongoing developments of this important set of
recommendations.
Planning the project
OUCS’s InfoDev team (www.oucs.ox.ac.
uk/infodev) provided research advice and
support. It was involved in planning the funding
bid for the project and helped specify the
technical components of the bid and assisted
in specifying technical solutions that were
both appropriate and feasible. This was
a collaborative inter-departmental project
between Politics, OUCS and the Bodleian. The
bid was successful in receiving funding from
the Leverhulme Trust.
7

HFS Backup and Archive Services
OUCS provides a University-wide backup and long-term
file storage service for staff and postgraduate students.
The Hierarchical File Server (HFS, www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/
hfs/) provides an automated backup service for personal
computers and servers alike. Should a file be deleted
from your computer, the last backed-up version is
retained on the HFS for 90 days. If you are working away
from Oxford, for example at home or on a field trip, it is
still possible to backup and restore essential data so long
as you have a reasonable Internet connection, a remote
access account and a working VPN client. Data can
be restored to a different computer (so long as the file
system is the same) and access to data remains private
to the owner.
For the long-term, secure storage of valuable research
data the HFS provides an archive service. Research
projects, large and small, may archive up to 1 TB of
data (additional data is charged on a five yearly basis).
The scope of the service and terms of use are outlined
in the HFS archive policy, www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/hfs/policy/
archive.xml. The HFS only provides a long-term file
storage facility. Data owners are still expected to curate
and manage the data lodged with the HFS.
Nexus SharePoint for Research
The Nexus Service will be releasing a SharePoint
service in Hilary Term 2011, designed to enable online
collaboration and document sharing. Since June 2010 a
number of departments and colleges have been trialling
the service as early adopters. In particular, OUCS has
supported the use of SharePoint for the administration of
committees and for supporting collaborative research.
Any site designed to support research might include:
document and image libraries; fine-grained access
controls; site calendar, task, and customised lists; wiki
and team discussion forums; and sub-sites (e.g. to
manage a project steering committee). Individual users of
SharePoint may also have a ‘My Site’ which, for example,
can be used to maintain a research profile as well as
sharing of documents with colleagues. The service
available in Hilary Term will be based on SharePoint 2010
which also offers online versions of Office applications
(on all major platforms) and social networking tools.
Research Data Management Projects at
OUCS
OUCS has taken a leading role in gathering requirements
and piloting both infrastructure and support services for
the management of research data. Much of this activity
has been funded by JISC, with an initial project funded
by the John Fell Fund. The Embedding Institutional
Data Curation Services in research (Eidcsr, http://eidcsr.
oucs.ox.ac.uk/) project has worked with three research
groups in computing and medical sciences, investigating
tools and processes to manage large quantities of data
(especially in conjunction with the HFS).
The Supporting Data Management Infrastructure for the
Humanities (Sudamih, http://sudamih.oucs.ox.ac.uk/)
project has focussed on developing training materials
and an online database management application
(Database-as-a-Service, DaaS) to meet the requirements
of academics in the humanities. OUCS research data
management projects have been in collaboration with
academics, Research Services, and the Bodleian
Libraries.
Google Search Appliance
OUCS runs a Google Search Appliance to give improved
site-searching for web servers inside the Oxford domain.
Currently this indexes well over 734,000 documents
and allows familiar Google searching of University sites.
InfoDev provides support for maintaining this service and
integrating it with local sites.
To find out more look at: www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/googlesearch/
Conducting
a survey?
Then use WebLearn
Research Data Management Website
In collaboration with OUCS (through the Eidcsr project),
Research Services have developed a website intended
to provide a gateway to services within and beyond the
University to support researchers in the management of
their research data. The website includes a useful Data
Management Planning Checklist and discrete sections
on data backup, security, and sharing, as well as a list of
training and support facilities available. The website will
assist in the formulation of data management plans for
grant proposals. www.admin.ox.ac.uk/rdm/.
weblearn.ox.ac.uk
Course experience
Data gathering
Public survey
Oxford University
Computing Services
http://www.flickr.com/photos/ekilby/2868641206
8

iTunesU
Oxford’s iTunes U site is now 2 years old. It has had just
over 5 million downloads, contains more hours of material
than any other UK university and regularly has several
podcasts in the global top ten.
The ‘Building a Business’ series is still popular and
Marianne Talbot is following up her phenomenally
successful ‘Romp through the history of philosophy’
(more than half a million downloads) with ‘The Nature of
Arguments’, part of her ‘Critical Reasoning for Beginners’
series.
Content is being added regularly to the site. All content is
free for you to download and watch or listen to.
Recent highlights include:
• History of Tropical Medicine at Oxford
• La Bella Principessa: A Leonardo Discovered
• General Philosophy
• Oxford Climate Forum
• Stephen Garrett, News International Visiting
Professorship of Broadcast Media
• Translational Medicine
• Anthropology
• Alumni Weekend 2010
Oxford’s site: http://itunes.ox.ac.uk
Watched by Millions
Oxford’s iTunes U site features in the latest Apple iPad TV advert. It aired for the first time in the US on 1 st November
across all major networks in prime time, including during a World Series game (which Apple tell us is quite popular). This
advert also was shown throught Nov/Dec on UK prime time TV.
The advert features one of Professor James Binney’s Quantum Mechanics lectures. He has since jumped up to number
6 in the Top Downloads chart (making 4 Oxford podcasts in the Top 15)
You can see the
advert here on the
Apple website:
www.apple.com/
ipad/gallery/ads.
html#ad-electric
Many thanks to
Stuart Lee for
heroically sorting
out the legal
paperwork, to
PAD’s Carolyne
Culver, to Pete
Robinson and
Steve Pierce,
and to Professor
Binney,
9

Potential Podcasters Gather in Isis
On a bitterly cold Friday afternoon in
early December, twenty Alumni and
Development officers from colleges
and departments across the University
gathered at OUCS to hear about how
podcasting could help them provide value
to their alumni and encourage generous
donations.
Paul Jeffreys (Director of IT) introduced
the event and Peter Robinson from the
Learning Technologies Group gave a
presentation that showcased iTunesU
and the fantastic podcasting resource
that has been built up over the last
couple of years.
Delegates were treated to snippets from
a number of favourite podcasts and a
showing of the Apple advert featuring
Professor Binney giving a lecture on
quantum mechanics that has been
broadcast on UK and US television.
Peter suggested a range of approaches
to using podcasting that the delegates
might like to try and – with warm geniality
– encouraged them to ‘have a go’
themselves. He explained that there is a
great deal of support available, including
expert help, the loan of equipment,
enthusiastic student podcasting teams
and specific training for beginners at
OUCS.
The question and answer session
soon dispelled doubts about costs
and fears about technology. Ideas
were buzzing. Over tea and cakes
afterwards, delegates spoke of how
their imaginations had been sparked by
what they had seen, and many were already planning
podcasts and brainstorming how they could use the
resource to reach their alumni and highlight events
at their colleges and departments. Ideas included
showcasing material using blogs and compiling clickthrough
playlists on websites.
The message seemed clear – podcasting is accessible
and catching on in a big way!
By the beginning of December 2010, the Oxford on
iTunesU channel achieved:
• 7 million downloads
• 240 different lecture sets containing around 1,900
items
• more than 50,000 podcasts are downloaded each
week
• several Oxford talks regularly appear in the global top
20 iTunesU downloads with more than 5,000
downloads per week.
Oxford iTunes U: http://itunes.ox.ac.uk
Help, training and guides for Podcasting at Oxford:
www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/podcasts
Talks from the Alumni Weekend 2008-2010:
http://tinyurl.com/oxford-alumni
Podcasting Help
New Improved guidance pages for Oxford Podcasters
(including help videos): www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/podcasts/
how-to-podcast.xml
We’re on Twitter !
Get short, timely messages from Oxford Podcasts.
Twitter is a rich source of instantly updated information.
It’s easy to stay updated on an incredibly wide variety of
topics. Why not follow @oxfordpodcasts.
http://twitter.com/oxfordpodcasts
10

Nexus
The Next Nexus
The Oxford Nexus Exchange service, with its 46,000
accounts, has a sister service, based on SharePoint.
SharePoint should be available to all members of the
University by Trinity Term of this year and should have
already moved through some major improvements and
upgrades by that time.
Collaborating on documents with Nexus
Oxford Nexus is largely known for its Microsoft Exchange
mailboxes, including calendars, tasks, contacts, and
much shared and devolved functionality. However, for
much of 2010, we have been piloting a service to early
adopters that arose from the need for collaborative work
on documents. That collaborative work could encompass
the drafting of research papers, committee activities and
that for clubs and societies. The new service is about to
be opened up, beyond its early adopters, to the whole of
the University, and may include external collaborators.
The platform for early adopters was based on SharePoint
2007, but we have opted for an early upgrade to
SharePoint 2010. Current users will be migrated to the
2010 service by the end of January. If all goes well, we
anticipate that the SharePoint service will be available
to any member of the University by Trinity Term 2011.
SharePoint poses a real challenge to OUCS as it is not
only a completely novel service, but it is a service that
can be used so differently by different people that the
model for supporting the application may call for far more
of a ‘community-based’ approach.
Successful major migrations
Meanwhile the Nexus Team has been establishing the
Microsoft Exchange service as the central ‘nexus’ of
the University in terms of communication and working
together. Two large migrations, one complete, one
nearing completion, have been carried out recently.
Former Lotus Notes users in University Administration
Services and the ex-Groupwise users in Medical
Sciences now find themselves with Nexus accounts and
with the ability to schedule a meeting with nearly anyone
across the University at the click of a mouse.
Oxford Nexus seems never to stand still.
Updates, additional functionality and resilience
We are also working hard on moving our Microsoft
Exchange infrastructure from Exchange 2007 to
Exchange 2010. You should notice a far more equitable
experience across the major web browsers, especially
Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Safari. Unfortunately for
us, upgrading to Exchange 2010 brings with it a major
move in terms of data storage. You may know that we
have a two-site system whereby – in theory – a complete
outage of OUCS should result in the service running from
the second site at Begbroke (and vice versa of course).
We are using two powerful Storage Area Networks to
manage this. However, with Exchange 2010, we may
need to move the 25 Terabytes or so of data to a different
kind of storage, (wholly or partly, rapidly or gradually)
and/or reconfigure our current storage. This could be
somewhat of a headache as we shall aim – as always –
for little or no interruption to your service.
Positive growth
Email seems to be ever more popular, leading to eyewatering
growth in disk consumption. At the moment we
are seeing our disk usage increase at a rate of 900 GB
per month. We have also seen a 62% increase in size of
the average mailbox since March 2010. Just over a half
percent of Oxford Nexus users pay a premium charge for
a larger mailbox yet, as in all things consumer, it would
seem 70% of the data is owned by 20% of the users.
The Nexus Team, as well as many in OUCS – particularly
the Help Centre – is working tirelessly in order to cope
with the enormous growth in demand. We also hope that
our new service is found to be another invaluable tool in
the electronic work environment at Oxford.
Grand Giveaway of USB Pens
and Laptop Locks
OUCS produce a number of publications,
including OUCS News, the Impact Guide,
Annual reports, etc. and we need photos to
enhance these. Following an office clearout,
we also have lots of 1GB USB pens and
laptop locks to give away.
Simply submit your photo of an IT device
(laptop, router, phone, etc.) in an Oxford
setting and the best each month will win a
prize.
Photos can include people, or not. If the
screen is visible, it should be showing an
OUCS web or Mobile Oxford page. Nothing
rude please. Apart from that, its up to you.
Address for submissions is marketing@
oucs.ox.ac.uk or to the Oxford University
Computing Services Facebook page. The
competition will run until July 2011 to give
you a chance to take some sunshine shots!
By submitting a photo, you give OUCS
permission to use it in OUCS publications.
We’ll give you credit, of course.
11

New Module Enrolment Tool
WebLearn Survey Tool Available
The WebLearn Survey tool (released as a Beta
version) can be used to design and manage electronic
questionnaires to be delivered on-line. Surveys can be
created to gather data for research purposes, general
data gathering, or for course, lecturer or tutor evaluation,
feedback and review.
Questionnaire templates can be created from scratch, or
existing templates can be copied and modified. Various
question types are available, such as Lickert scales,
multiple choice with a single answer, multiple choice
with multiple answers, and free text questions. Detailed
settings control open and close dates, how participants
access the survey, and who may view the results.
Michaelmas term 2010 saw the introduction of a brand
new, locally written module registration tool known as
SES (Student Enrolment System). The tool works in
conjunction with a course or module database known
as DAISY which is being developed by the Social
Sciences Division with help from MPLS. DAISY currently
contains over 300 Graduate training courses hosted by
MPLS departments (as part of their Graduate Academic
Programme or GAP); Social Sciences will be adding
a selection of their Graduate training courses before
Christmas (2010).
All available courses can be browsed via the SES tool
within WebLearn and students are allowed to request a
place on one or more courses. The request is passed
along to the course administrator who can either
reject the application or accept it in which case the
student’s supervisor is contacted and asked to give their
blessing. If a student is accepted then they will receive
a confirmation email. DAISY will take care of interdepartmental
billing but this facility is not operational this
academic year.
The ‘student’ interface presents a hierarchy of divisions
and departments and the courses that are offered
(see screen-shot opposite). This can be browsed or
all courses can be searched; both course title and
description are searched. Students can also see a list of
current, upcoming and past courses but as WebLearn
does not collect attendance data, this list has no official
status.
Call for Participation – WebLearn Polls via m.ox (Mobile Oxford)
Have you ever wished your students could respond in class using personal voting
systems (‘clickers’), but never quite got around to trying it? Well now you don’t
need any special technology – the students can answer questions on their internetenabled
phones, and learn from each other while sharing phones, if necessary.
OUCS has launched Mobile Oxford (m.ox.ac.uk) (beta) which allows anyone with
an internet-enabled mobile phone to access Oxford podcasts, certain WebLearn
tools, or information on library holdings, bus times and the weather (amongst other
things).
We are running a pilot project using the WebLearn Polls tool via the mobile
platform, to enhance and support student learning.
Are you interested (or could you recommend any lecturers in your dept/division) in
participating in our pilot project using the WebLearn Polls tool via student mobile
phones during a lecture or small class? Please follow this link if you would like to
participate in the pilot project: http://tinyurl.com/35hgf85
This will enable you to join the Mobile Polls Pilot site in WebLearn and keep up to
date with developments.
A prize will be offered for the person who gets the most people to respond via a
mobile phone to a single poll in Hilary term. We will collaborate with all participants
in the pilot project to write up your case study for the OUCS collection of teaching
and learning case studies, as well as for possible inclusion in the next JISC book of
case studies documenting innovative practice.
12

New Module Enrolment Tool continued
There are interfaces for course administrators and supervisors, these show a list of course requests and the current
status of the application. It is also possible to bulk register students - this facility is typically used by the host department
to pre-register their own students before throwing the course open to others.
Social Sciences will require their
students to register for specific courses
in Hilary term 2011. The other divisions
are well aware of the system and are
carefully considering whether to use it in
the future.
There is a small amount of overlap
with HR Information System (HRIS),
however, the focus of SES is on
students whereas HRIS targets staff
training.
Late news: funding has just been agreed
for further development of the tool,
facilities include a waiting list, automated
reminders and enhanced interoperability.
MPLS Graduate Academic Programme
enrolment site: https://weblearn.ox.ac.
uk/portal/hierarchy/mpls/gap/page/
module_signup
HR Information Systems Programme:
www.admin.ox.ac.uk/hrisprogramme/
University Skills Group Online Skills
Courses Hosted in WebLearn
The WebLearn team has been working closely with
the University Skills Group (USG – formerly the
Graduate Skills Advisory Group) to move the former
‘Online courses’ (now called ‘Career Development
Skills’) into new WebLearn. The courses were
previously hosted within a different VLE service
(provided by Continuing Education) which required a
special username and password.
In addition to being moved to WebLearn which is
protected by Oxford Single Sign On credentials, the
courses have been updated to the latest versions.
They now employ the WebLearn Tests tool for
quizzes and the Survey tool for users to provide
feedback. The conversion was a major piece of
work which involved not only programming changes
to Sakai tools, but also integration with the existing
content packages.
There are 14 courses covering including Avoidance
of Plagiarism, Career Planning, Conference
Presentations and Networking, Entrepreneurship,
Ethics, Intellectual Property, Project Management,
Publishing, and Managing Your Supervisor.
Although the courses are aimed at graduate students
and researchers, they are available to all Oxford
users. Access them via the Skills Hub link on the
WebLearn Welcome Page (then select Research
Skills Toolkit), or go to this direct link: https://
weblearn.ox.ac.uk/portal/hierarchy/skills/generic
13

Get Involved in the WebLearn User
Group
Next meeting:
Hilary Term Week 8: Wednesday 9 March 2011
Meeting: 2:00-4:00 pm, followed by cream tea
When the new WebLearn system was in a beta stage,
the group of early adopters participated in a WebLearn
site for communication and announcements. This site
has now been renamed as ‘WebLearn User Group’. Visit
the site at https://weblearn.ox.ac.uk/portal/hierarchy/info/
eas and click on the link to join the site. Being a member
of the site means that you will receive email notifications,
and it will appear under your My Active Sites tab for ease
of navigation.
WebLearn Team Member Wins Slogan
Competition!
At the 4 th International Plagiarism conference hosted by
iParadigms Europe in Newcastle in June, a competition
was held for attendees to write for slogans warning
students against plagiarism.
WebLearn team member Dr Jill Fresen submitted 3
three slogans and the first one was chosen as a winner!
Congratulations Jill.
Jill’s winning slogan poster (’Is your degree worth
peanuts?’) is now available as a poster from the
plagiarismadvice.org website. Why not download it and
display it in your department or college?
A face-to-face meeting of the WLUG takes place once
a term. The cream tea after the meeting has become a
popular tradition! Be sure to take note of the date each
term, which is announced on the WLUG WebLearn site,
and book a place at the meeting:
www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/itlp/courses/detail/TOVD
The face-to-face meetings enable WebLearn users to
come together to share ideas and practices and to hear
about recent and future developments in WebLearn.
It is an opportunity for users to voice their ideas and
suggestions in order to inform the ongoing development
and support of the system.
Guest speakers give a short informal presentation
about how WebLearn works for them. Presentations
are recorded and will be available in due course on the
WLUG site. The speakers who will be presenting at the
Hilary Term 2011 meeting are:
• Dave Waters, University Lecturer in Metamorphic
Petrology, Department of Earth Sciences
• History of Art: a multiple site model. Presenters: Rachel
Woodruff (Administrator) and Victoria Brown (Visual
Resources Curator), Department of the History of Art.
Rachel and Victoria are joint winners of the OxTalent
WebLearn award, and a 2010 Oxford University
Teaching Award.
The date for Hilary Term 2011 and speaker topics will be
announced on the WebLearn site.
Poster printing at OUCS
OUCS offers a high-quality and
competitively-priced poster printing
service to University members.
For more information see;
www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/printing/
A0 Matt - £21.60 (£18.00 ex VAT)
A1 Matt - £10.80 (£9.00 ex VAT)
A2 Matt - £5.40 (£4.50 ex VAT)
A0 Satin - £42.00 (£35.00 ex VAT)
A1 Satin - £21.00 (£17.50 ex VAT)
A2 Satin - £10.50 (£8.75 ex VAT)
14

Using Turnitin for Plagiarism Detection
and Prevention
Turnitin is an online text matching system that can be
used to help with the identification of potential plagiarism
in electronically submitted student work. It can also
be used in a formative way, for tutors to help students
develop their academic writing and citation skills.
If you use Turnitin or are simply just curious then why
not follow our dedicated Turnitin Blog called Turnitin At
Oxford, see http://blogs.oucs.ox.ac.uk/tii/
Studies on the use of Turnitin
Two reports have recently been released about the use of
Turnitin in terms of its effectiveness, and student access
to originality reports.
Oxford University has a subscription to the UK Turnitin
service, so university staff members may use it at no
cost to their departments. Oxford University Computing
Services manages the service and creates instructor
accounts on request (send email to turnitin@oucs.
ox.ac.uk). OUCS offers lunch time training sessions for
staff members (bookings are essential) and guidance is
available within WebLearn on the Plagiarism Support site.
The WebLearn Assignments tool has an integration
feature with Turnitin, which means that students do not
require any additional passwords or instructions on how
to submit their assignments. Student Administration
is running a pilot project to investigate policy and
procedures for using the WebLearn/Turnitin integration
for examined work.
OUCS is currently working with the Proctors’ Office and
the Education Policy Support Unit to consolidate all the
guidance about the formative and summative use of
Turnitin into a single source of information for use across
the university. The document is still in the draft stage,
but after approval, it will be available on all the relevant
websites.
ITLP Portfolio- Top 20 Downloads
The White Paper ‘The Effectiveness of Turnitin and
WriteCycle’ reports on the use of Turnitin worldwide in
helping to ‘reduce serious incidents of unoriginal content
in student work and to produce better writers across the
entire curriculum’ (p.3). Continued use of the system can
help to support students in developing responsible writing
skills in a ‘cut-and-paste culture’ (p.3).
Martin King, Senior Learning & Technology Officer, Royal
Holloway College, University of London, conducted a
study on Turnitin practices in UK HE institutions. This
study, entitled ‘Student access to Originality Reports’,
considered the following questions:
• are students permitted to interact with Turnitin?
• is access to the Originality Reports denied or allowed?
• what sort of access is supported?
• what are the reasons behind these decisions?
It was found that allowing students to view their
Originality Reports is educational, formative, and
can form the basis for discussing and learning about
acceptable academic writing practices.
The ITLP Portfolio is our online collection of the materials we use on our taught courses.
You can find it in the ‘Quick Links’ at www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/itlp/
The service is proving very popular. In the last 12 months there were 7553 downloads of
our course books. Here’s the top 20.
Rank Number of downloads Course
1 264 Excel: Fundamentals
2 223 Access: Fundamentals
3 178 Word: Managing your thesis
4 169 Excel: Functions and cell referencing
5 166 Word: Fundamentals
6 161 Word: Building long documents
7 160 Word: Creating professional documents
8 153 InDesign: Introduction
9 150 EndNote: Introduction
10 149 Digital Images: Photoshop introduction
11 147 PowerPoint: Fundamentals
12 146 Excel: Pivot tables
13 145 Access: Database structure
14 140 Excel: Lists and querying data
15 132 Access: Creating queries , forms and reports
16 128 Excel: Arrays, macros and VBA
17 128 Statistics: Introduction
18 128 WebLearn: Fundamentals
19 121 EndNote: Building your library
20 119 Excel: Fundamentals
15

JISC OER Impact Study
We have heard a great deal
about the production of open
educational resources (OER);
however, as yet we know very
little about how they are actually
being used by lecturers in their
teaching and by students in their
learning. That picture should
become clearer over the next
eight months as a result of a new
study of the impact of OER, to be
carried out by a joint team from
the LTG and the Technology-
Assisted Lifelong Learning
Unit (TALL) in the Department
for Continuing Education with
funds from the Joint Information
Systems Committee (JISC).
We will use in-depth interviews
and workshops to investigate
the pedagogic and strategic
factors conducive to uptake and
sustained practice in the use
of OER, as well as some of the
barriers. The workshops, which
will be held in March, are intended
for lecturers who have not used
OER. In addition to helping us
gather data for the study, they
will provide an opportunity for
you to find out what OER are,
where to find them, and how
they might be incorporated into
your teaching and your students’
learning. We will issue an
invitation to the workshops during
Hilary Term, and we hope that
you will consider taking part - or
encourage colleagues who are
involved in teaching to do so.
For more information about the
study, you are very welcome to
contact the LTG researchers: liz.
masterman@oucs.ox.ac.uk and
joanna.wild@oucs.ox.ac.uk
Free Chocolate
We’d love to hear what you think of
OUCS News. Fill in our short survey at
www.surveymonkey.com/s/oucs-news
and we’ll send you a free bar of Green
and Black’s chocolate. Sorry, OUCS
staff are not eligible.
Suggestions Box
Each term, a small OUCS committee meets to consider
the good ideas which have come into our suggestions
box (via www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/suggest/suggest.xml). We
get some interesting proposals in there, and we find it
very useful.
Do please continue to send us your ideas, small or large,
and we’ll give them a friendly hearing.
Monthly Security Report
“As Head of More
Able and Talented at a
large state school, I am
constantly looking for
resources to improve our
teaching and your podcasts
are giving us just that
opportunity.”
UK teacher
The University’s OpenSpires project
is increasing the number of podcasts
freely available for non-commercial
public reuse and distribution.
Open educational resources for
everyone, for free
http://openspires.oucs.ox.ac.uk
OxCERT’s report for September 2010 is now online
www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/network/security/reports/
16