OUseful.Info, the blog…

It’s been some time since I last had a look at the “My Library” service in Google Books, but with the announcement of Google eBooks store (currently US only, except for out-of-copyright free downloads) I popped over to my Google Books account to see whether anything else had changed…

One of the little known (I think?) features of Google Books is the “My Library” personalisation which allows you to create a collection of books and search over them. Searching your library finds all the books in your library collection that contain the search phrase; if a preview of the book is available returns deep links into the book to the point(s) at which the search terms appear:

I’ve previously commented on the My Library aspect of Google Books in the context of its possible use by libraries for providing a full-text search option over books in their collection (e.g. Complementing the OPAC With a Full Text Search Book Catalogue where I describe the use of the service by Wiltshire Heritage Library (example) and the Penn State University Press booksearch (example)).

(At the moment I don’t think you can get statistics back on the searches carried out on a My Library profile, though Google books can do stats for publishers e.g. Google Books for Publishers).

Anyway – one of the problems I originally had with My Library was that you could only maintain a single collection. But it seems that it’s now possible to create separate collections by tagging books in your Library onto “shelves”:

(Shelves appeared at the start of 2010, it seems: Updated Books Home Page and My Library.)

So what immediately comes to mind is that if you’re running several courses, you could add the books used in the course to a My Library shelf, and then publish a link to a search context for that shelf to give a full text searchable version of the books on the list (assuming they’ve been scanned by the Goog, of course). Where previews are available, deep links into books will be available as part of the search results.

I haven’t really populated any shelves yet, but here’s the idea:

I haven’t explored the Book Search Data API yet, bit it does seem to offer the ability to search over a particular user’s public library, as well as retrieve lists of books from the library. API options also exist for adding books to a library, though the API seems to only support adding labels, rather than updating shelves (or maybe legacy handlers map labelled books onto shelves?). With a bit of digging, it might be possible to find a route to automate the creation of a library shelf from a list of books. (Hmmm, maybe I should try this with the OU Set books list?!;-)

Google Books shelves thus seem to provide a way of creating different lists of books within a single user library, although I’m not sure if there is a limit on the number of books contained within a shelf, or in the library as a whole. Another nice feature is that it’s possible to select a shelf based filter to just display books from a similar shelf (click on the label in the left-hand sidebar to filter by shelf); this search facet also seems to be passed through to a bookmarkable URL for the filtered search via the as_coll argument (I think?). (Which is to say: you can share a link for a search within a particular shelf in a particular user’s library.)

I’m not sure if Google Books is available through Google Apps for Education, but it could be a useful component of a full text book search context around books on a reading list?

PS As Google Scholar appears to be improving its coverage, it strikes me that the Goog still doesn’t offer a Google service for building searchable reference lists, although it does let you customise the addition of links that will bookmark a reference to a service for you:

Here’s how the links are displayed:

Given you can build weblink search contexts using Google custom search engines, full text book search contexts using the Books My Library service, search over content from bundled feeds in Google Reader and even run things like video search by user on Youtube*, the Goog must surely be looking to offer a collection building and searching over service for Google Scholar? So I wonder… could Google end up taking over a service like CiteULike or Mendeley to complement and bootstrap personalisation of their Google Scholar offering? Or would they just build their own (cut down) version of these services?

* Hmm… I wonder if there’s a Youtube API switch that lets you search playlists? It’s definitely possible to get a playlist feed out…

PPS the Goog is also lacking a way of exposing all these personal search contexts to a logged in user through the same interface. If it were down to me, I’d start to expose them in the left hand sidebar of Google websearch, so I’m guessing this will be a labs/experimental service in the new year, if it isn’t already so…

…maybe…?;-)

Jod ads come and go, so I thought I’d capture the main elements of this one from the BBC:

Data Journalist – Role Purpose and Aims

You will be required to humanize statistics; to make sense of potentially complicated data and present it in a user friendly format.

You will be asked to focus on a range of data-rich subjects relating to long-term projects or high impact daily new stories, in line with Global News editorial priorities. These could include the following: reports on development, global poverty, Afghanistan casualties, internet connectivity around the world, or global recession figures.

Key Knowledge and Experience

You will be a self-starter, brimming with story ideas who is comfortable with statistics and has the expertise to delve beneath the headline figures and explain the fuller picture.
You will have significant journalistic experience gained ideally from working in an international news environment.
The successful candidate should have experience (or at least awareness) of visualising data and visualisation tools.
You should be excited about developing the way that data is interpreted and presented on the web, from heavy number crunching, to dynamic mapping and interactive graphics. You must have demonstrated knowledge of statistics, statistical analysis, with a good understanding of the range and breadth of data sources in the UK and internationally, broad experience with data sources, data mining and have good visual and statistical skills.
You must have a Computer-assisted reporting background or similar, including a good knowledge of the relevant software (including Excel and mapping software).
Experience of producing and developing data driven web content a senior level within time and budget constraints.
A thorough understanding of the BBC World Service’s aims and the part this initiative plays in meeting them.
Excellent communication and interpersonal skills with ability to present information concisely to a broad audience including journalists and commissioning editors. You should be able to demonstrate the ability to influence, negotiate with and persuade others.
Central to the role is an ability to analyse complicated information and present it to our readers in a way that is visually engaging and easy to understand, using a range of web-based technologies, for which you should have familiarity with database interfaces and web presentation layers, as well as database concepting, content entry and management.
You will be expected to have your own original ideas on how to best apply data driven journalism, either to complement stories when appropriate or to identify potential original stories while interpreting data, researching and investigating them, crunching the data yourself and working with designers and developers on creating content that will engage our audience, and provide them with useful, personalised information.
You will work in a multimedia way, when appropriate, liaising with online but also radio and TV and specialist output producers as required, from a range of language services. You will help lead the development of computer-assisted reporting skills in the wider news specials team.

MAIN RESPONSIBILITIES

To identify a range of significant statistics and data -driven stories that can be developed and result in finished graphics that can be used across BBC News websites.
To take a lead role in devising compelling ways of telling data-driven stories on the web, working with specials team designers, developers and journalists as required. Also liaising with radio and TV and specialist output producers across World Service as required, providing a joined-up multi-platform proposition for the audience.
To work with senior stakeholders and programme teams and be an internal expert who can interpret and concisely explain the significance of data to others, and related good practice.
Support the College of Journalism – to help devise training sessions in order to spread the knowledge and best practices of data driven journalism
To help inform the future development by FM&T of tools which enable data-driven stories to be told more quickly and effectively on the web.
To keep abreast of developments in data driven journalism, and pursue collaboration with other teams working on the same area, both within the BBC and also with external organisations.
Willingness to work across a range of online production skills in a flexible manner to BBC standards and values.
· Using their own initiative the successful candidate will be required to build relationships with major sources of content (e.g. BBC networks, programmes, external interest groups) and promote opportunities for cross-media production

COMPETENCIES

Editorial Judgement
Makes the right editorial and policy decisions based upon a clear understanding of the BBC’s distinctive news agenda, the requirements of news and current affairs coverage.

Planning & Organising
Is able to think ahead in order to establish an effective and appropriate course of action for self and others. Prioritises and plans activities taking into account all the relevant issues and factors such as deadlines and resources requirements.

Analytical Thinking
Able to simplify complex problems, process projects into component parts, explore and evaluate them systematically.

Creative Thinking
Is able to transform creative ideas/impulses into practical reality. Can look at existing situations and problems in novel ways and come up with creative solutions.

Resilience
Can maintain personal effectiveness by managing own emotions in the face of pressure, set backs or when dealing with provocative situations. Can demonstrate an approach to work that is characterised by commitment, motivation and energy.

Communication
The ability to get one’s message understood clearly by adopting a range of styles, tools and techniques appropriate to the audience and the nature of the information.

Influencing and Persuading
Ability to present sound and well reasoned arguments to convince others. Can draw from a range of strategies to persuade people in a way that results in agreement or behaviour change.

Managing Relationships and Team Working
Able to build and maintain effective working relationships with a range of people. Highly effective team player.

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been trying to look at the Linked Data project from different points of view. Part of the reason for this is to try to find one or more practical ways in that minimise the need to engage too much with the scary looking syntax. (Whether it really is scary or not, I think the fact that it looks scary makes it hard for novices to see past.)

Here’s my latest attempt, which uses Yahoo Pipes (sigh, yes, I know…) and BBC programme pages to engage with the BBC programme Linked Data: iPlayer clips and videos from OU/BBC co-pros

In particular, a couple of hacks that demonstrate how to:

- find all the clips associated with a particular episode of a BBC programme;
- find all the programmes associated with a parrticular series;
- find all the OU/BBC co-produced programmes that are currently available on iPlayer.

Rather than (or maybe as well as?) dumping all the programme data into a single Linked Data triple store, the data is exposed via programme pages on the BBC website. As well as HTML versions of each programme pages (that is, pages for each series, each episode in a series, each clip from a programme), the BBC also publish RDF and XML views over the data represented in each page. This machine readable data is all linked, so for example, a series page includes well defined links to the programme pages for each episode included in that series.

The RDF and XML views over the data (just add .rdf or .xml respectively as a suffix on the end of a programme page URL) are slightly different in content (I think), with the added difference that the XML view is naturally in a hierarchical/tree like structure, whereas the RDF would rather define a more loosely structured graph. [A JSON representation of the data is also available - just add .json]

So for example, to get the XML version of the series page http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006mvlc add the suffix .xml to give http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006mvlc.xml.

In the following demos, I’m going to make use of the XML rather than RDF expression of the data, partly to demonstrate that the whole linked data thing can work without RDF as well as without SPARQL…

There are also a couple of other URL mappings that can be useful, as described on the BBC Programmes Developers’ site:

- episodes available on iPlayer:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006mvlc/episodes/player
- episodes upcoming
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006mvlc/episodes/upcoming

Again, the .xml suffix can be used to get the xml version of the page.

So – let’s start with looking a the details of a series, such as @liamgh’s favourite – Coast, and pulling out the episodes that are currently available on iPlayer:

We can use a Yahoo Pipes Fetch Data block to get the XML from the Coast episodes/player page:

The resulting output is a feed of episodes of Coast currently available. The link can be easily rewritten from a programme page form (e.g. http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00lyljl) so that it points to the iPlayer page for the episode (e.g. http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00lyljl). If the programme is not available on iPlayer, I think the iPlayer link redirects to the programme page?

This extended pipe will accept a BBC series code, look for current episodes on iPlayer, and then link to the appropriate iPlayer page. Subscribing to the RSS output of the pipe should work in the Boxee RSS app. You should also be able to compile a standalone Python runnable version of the Pipe using Pipe2Py.

Now let’s look at some linked data action..(?!) Err… sort of…

Here’s the front half of a pipe that grabs the RDF version of a series page and extracts the identifiers of available clips from the series:

By extracting the programme identifier from the list of programme clips, we can generate the URL of the programme page for that programme (as well as the URI for the XML version of the page); or we might call on another pipe that grabs “processed” data from the clip programme page:

Here’s the structure of the subpipe – it pulls together some details from the programme episode page:

To recap – given a programme page identifier (in this case for a series), we can get a list of clips associated with the series; for each clip, we can then pull in the data version of the clip’s programme page.

We can also use this compound pipe within another pipe that contains series programme codes. For example, I have a list of OU/BBC co-produced series bookmarked on delicious (OU/BBC co-pros). If I pull this list into a pipe via a delicious RSS feed, and extract the series/programme ID from each URL, we can then go and find the clips…

Which is to say: grab a feed from delicious, extract programmme/series IDs, lookup clips for each series from the programme page for the series, then for each clip, lookup clip details from the clip’s programme page.

And if the dependence on Yahoo Pipes is too much for you, there’s always pipe2py, which can compile it to a Python equivalent.

Having a tinker with a couple of Yahoo Pipes that pull down RDF and XML versions of BBC series and programme pages for programmes that the OU had a hand in co-producing, an earlier post on Some Thoughts on My Changing TV Habits came to mind, and in particular the thought that:

a lot of TV related PR activity (which we go in for at the OU because of our co-pro arrangement with the BBC) is aimed at getting previews of programmes into the press. But from my own viewing habits, a large part of my viewing (particularly over iPlayer content) is guided by post hoc reviews appearing in the weekend press of programmes broadcast over the previous seven days, as well as “last week’s” Radio Times, and (occasionally) social media comments from people I follow relating to programmes they have recently watched themselves. From a PR point of view, there may be an increasing benefit in considering “after-TX” PR opportunities to exploit the fact that content remains viewable over a 7 or 28 day period (or even longer for series linked content or content that is rebroadcast on other BBC channels).

In particular, as more and more content is available on a catchup basis, might we see media players who publish television review columns, and particularly those who do so on a weekly basis in the weekend papers, publishing “easy viewing” tools that make it easy to watch in one go the programmes reviewed in that week’s review column?

That is, might we see reviewers reviewing programmes from throughout the previous week becoming de facto schedulers of content for readers to watch one evening later in the next week? Read the review, then watch for yourself..

(Thinking back, maybe that thought was also influenced by this post on YouTube Leanback Brings Personalized Channels To Your TV, which I remember reading earlier today; in particular the “notion of leaning back and just watching is something that will take some getting used to. That said, YouTube reports that Leanback users are consuming 30 minutes at a time — twice as much as they do using the normal site — so obviously it’s working for some people.”)

PS as to that pipework:

- BBC/OU co-pro programmes currently available on iPLayer
- clips from OU/BBC co-pro programmes currently available on iPlayer

PPS I also did a cutdown demo pipe, especially for Liam… episodes of Coast currently available on iPlayer