Activity Data Synthesis

As you'll see from the Tabbloid digest, the synthesis team have had a busy week here on the blog. We've shared the first draft of the recommendations we've submitted to JISC. We've also published the following draft Guides:

• Strategies for collecting and storing activity data
• Identifying activity data in the library service
• Enabling student success
• Bringing activity data to life [data visualisation]

Your comments on the draft guides and recommendations are very much welcomed between now and the end of August when we will be submitting final versions of them to JISC.

The projects have been busy too:

• the SALT project has been demoing their prototype web API service
• LIDP announced that they have now received data from all the project partners and the team at Huddersfield were inspired by DMU's blogpost on the data they submitted to reflect on their own data and to ponder what data they could include in the future. DMU also blogged about the focus groups they held just before Easter and noted that the £10 print credit appears to have been an effective incentive for recruiting volunteers.
• UCAID have also been pondering data and how ontology technologies will support their user-centric approach to activity data [side note: the mention of "traces of activities around a user" has the artistic side of me wondering whether there might be an opportunity for some rather beautiful data visualisations]

A retweet by Dave Pattern about Derek Rodriguez's article on 'Understanding library impacts on student learning' led me off on a small trail of oblique serendipity:

• The Association of College and Research Libraries are considering how they follow up their Value of Academic Libraries study. [side note: at the end of last year ACRL launched a paid subscription service for online access to their academic library statistics called ACRL Metrics]
• ACRL's blogpost about 'social hacking of the library' is a reminder of the anecdotal stories of usage and abusage that lie [somewhat buried] beneath the surface of activity data.
• That got me thinking about ethnography and led me to the Ethnographic Research in Illinois Academic Libraries (ERIAL) project and their Ethnographic Research in Academic Libraries Toolkit

And, in other news, a couple of things relating to anonymisation hit our radar this week

• 'Dispelling the Myths Surrounding De-identification: Anonymization Remains a Strong Tool for Protecting Privacy' - report published by the Information and Privacy Commissioner of Ontario
• On Panopticon's information law blog there's a useful discussion of legal cases which are currently adding to our understanding of what constitutes personal data when dealing with anonymised data.