The work of SALT is continuing as the Copac Activity Data project. Our new blog (including all the SALT posts) is here: http://copac.ac.uk/innovations/activity-data/
And our first post is here: http://copac.ac.uk/innovations/activity-data/?p=453
Announcing Copac Activity Data Project (SALT 2) and new blog
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Introducing the SALT recommender API ( based on 10 years of University of Manchester circulation data)
I’m pleased to announce the release of the SALT recommender API which works with over ten years of circulation data from the University of Manchester’s John Rylands Library.
The data source is currently static, but nonetheless yields excellent results. Please experiment and let us know how you get on. Stay tuned for a future post detailing some work we have planned for continuing this project, which will include assessing additional use cases, aggregating more data sources (and adding them to the API) and producing a shared service feasibility report for JISC.
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User Feedback Results – Super 8
In an effort to find the magic number the SALT team opened its testing labs again this week. Another 6 University of Manchester post graduate students spent the afternoon interrogating the Copac and John Rylands library catalogues to evaluate the recommendations thrown back by the SALT API.
With searches ranging from ’The Archaeology of Islam in Sub Saharan Africa’ to ‘Volunteering and Society: Principles and Practice’ no aspect of the Arts and Humanities was left unturned, or at least it felt that way. We tried to find students with diverse interests within Arts and Humanities to test the recommendations from as many angles as possible. Using the same format as the previous groups (documented in our earlier blog post ‘What do users think of the SALT recommender?’), the library users were asked to complete an evaluation of the recommendations they were given. Previously the users tested SALT when the threshold was set at 3(that is 3 people borrowed the book which therefore made it eligible to be thrown back as a recommendation), however we felt that the results could be improved. Previously, although 77.5% found at least one recommendation useful, too many recommendations were rated as ’not that useful’,(see the charts in ‘What do users think of the SALT recommender?’).
This time, we set the threshold at 15 in the John Rylands library catalogue and 8 in Copac. Like the LIDP team at Huddersfield, (http://library.hud.ac.uk/blogs/projects/lidp/2011/08/30/focus-group-analysis/), we have a lot of data to work with now, and we’d like to spend some more time interrogating the results to find out whether clear patterns emerge. Although, our initial analysis has also raised some further questions, it’s also revealed some interesting and encouraging results. Here are the highlights of what we found out.
The Results
On initial inspection the JRUL with its threshold of 15 improved on previous results;
Do any of the recommendations look useful:
92.3 % of the searches returned at least one item the user thought was useful, however when the user was asked if they would borrow at least one item only 56.2% answered that they would.
When asked, a lot of the users stated that they knew the book and so wouldn’t need to borrow it again, or that although the book was useful, their area of research was so niche that it wasn’t specifically useful to them but they would deem it as ‘useful’ to others in their field.
One of the key factors which came up in the discussions with users was the year that the book had been published. The majority of researchers are in need of up to date material, many preferring the use of journals rather than monographs, and this was taken into account when deciding whether a book is worth borrowing. Many users wouldn’t borrow anything more than 10 years old;
‘Three of the recommendations are ‘out of date’ 1957, 1961, 1964 as such I would immediately discount them from my search’ 30/08/11 University of Manchester, Postgraduate, Arts and Humanities, SALT testing group.
So the book could be a key text, and ‘useful’ but it wouldn’t necessarily be borrowed. Quite often, one user explained, rather than reading a key text she would search for journal articles about the key text, to get up to date discussion and analysis about it. This has an impact on our hypothesis which is to discover the long tail. Quite often the long tail that is discovered includes older texts, which some users discount.
Copac, with a threshold of 8 was also tested. Results here were encouraging;
Do any of the recommendations look useful;
Admittedly further tests would need to be done on both thresholds as the number of searches conducted (25) do not give enough results to draw concrete conclusions from but it does seem as if the results are vastly improved on increase of the threshold.
No concerns about privacy
The issue of privacy was raised again. Many of the postgraduate students are studying niche areas and seemed to understand how this could affect them should the recommendations be attributed back to them. However, as much as they were concerned about their research being followed, they were also keen to use the tool themselves and so their concerns were outweighed by the perceived benefits. As a group they agreed that a borrowing rate of 5 would offer them enough protection whilst still returning interesting results. The group had no concerns about the way in which the data was being used and indeed trusted the libraries to collect this data and use it in such a productive way.
‘It’s not as if it is being used for commercial gain, then what is the issue?’ 30/08/11 University of Manchester, Postgraduate, Arts and Humanities, SALT testing group.
Unanimous support for the recommender
The most encouraging outcome from the group was the uniform support for the book recommender. Every person in the group agreed that the principle of the book recommender was a good one, and they gave their resolute approval that their data was collected and used in a positive way.
All of them would use the book recommender if it was available. Indeed one researcher asked, ‘can we have it now?’
Janine Rigby and Lisa Charnock 31/08/11
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Tagged activity data, activitydata, humanities, jiscad, jiscsalt, libraries, personalisation, recommender, usage data, userbehaviour, users
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Final blog post
In this final post I’m going to sum up what this project has produced, potential next steps, key lessons learned, and what we’d pass on to others working in this area.
In the last five months, the SALT project has produced a number of outputs:
- Data extraction recipe: https://salt11.wordpress.com/recipe-data-extraction-from-talis/
- Details on how the algorithm can support recommendations (courtesy Dave Pattern): http://www.daveyp.com/blog/archives/1453
- Technical processes documentation for processing the data and supporting the recommender API (though the API itself is not yet published): https://salt11.wordpress.com/technical-processes/
- An open licensing statement from JRUL which means the data can be made available for reuse (we’ve yet to determine how to make this happen, given the size of the dataset; and we also need to explore whether CC-BY is the most appropriate license going forward): https://salt11.wordpress.com/2011/07/26/agreeing-licensing-of-data/
- A trial recommender functionality in the live Copac prototype: https://salt11.files.wordpress.com/2011/07/copac_recommender.jpg
- A recommender function the JRUL library search interface prototype: https://salt11.files.wordpress.com/2011/08/salt_jrul.jpg
- User testing instruments:SALT Postgraduate User Discussion Guide SALT user response sheet and results
- Feedback from collections managers & potential data contributors helping us consider weaknesses and opportunities, as well as possible sustainable next steps.
Next steps:
There are a number of steps that can be taken as a result of this project – some imminent ‘quick wins’ which we plan to take on after the official end, and then others that are ‘bigger’ than this project.
What we plan to do next anyway:
- Adjust the threshold to a higher level (using the ‘usefulness’ benchmark given to us as users as a basis) so as to suppress some of the more off-base recommendations our users were bemused by.
- Implement the recommender in the JRUL library search interface
- Once the threshold has been reset, consider implementing the recommender as an option feature in the new Copac interface. We’d really like to, but we’d need to assess if the results are too JRUL-centric.
- Work with JRUL to determine most appropriate mechanisms for hosting the data and supporting the API in the longer term (decisions here are dependent on how, if at all, we continue with this work from a Shared Services perspective)
- Work with JRUL to assess the impact of this in the longer term (on user satisfaction, and on borrowing behaviour)
The Big Picture (what else we’d like to see happen):
1. Aggregate more data. Combine the normalised data from JRUL with processed data from additional libraries that represent a wider range of institutions, including learning and teaching. Our hunch is that only a few more would make the critical difference in ironing out some of the skewed results we get from focusing on one data set (i.e. results skewed to JRUL course listings)
2. Assess longer term impact. Longer-term analysis of the impact of the recommender functionality on JRUL user satisfaction and borrowing behaviour. Is there, as with Huddersfield, more borrowing from ‘across the shelf’? Is our original hypothesis borne out?
3. Requirements and costs gathering for a shared service. Establish the requirements and potential costs for a shared service to support processing, aggregation, and sharing of activity data via an API. Based on this project, we have a fair idea of what those requirements might be, but our experience with JRUL indicates that such provision need to adequately support the handling and processing of large quantities of data. How much FTE, processing power, and storage would we need if we scaled to handling more libraries? Part of this requirements gathering exercise would involve identifying additional contributing libraries, and the size of their data.
4. Experiment with different UI designs and algorithm thresholds to support different use cases. For example, undergraduate users vs ‘advanced’ researcher users might benefit from the thresholds being set differently; in addition, there are users who want to see items held elsewhere and how to get them vs those who don’t. Some libraries will be keen to manage user expectations if they are ‘finding’ stock that’s not held at the home institution.
5. Establish more recipes to simplify data extraction from the more common LMS’s beyond Talis (Horizon, ExLibris Voyager, and Innovative).
6. Investigate how local activity data can help collections managers identify collection strengths and recognise items that should be retained because of association with valued collections. We thought about this as a form of “stock management by association.” Librarians might treat some long-tail items (e.g. items with limited borrowing) with caution if they were aware of links/associations to other collections (although there is also the caveat that this wouldn’t be possible with local activity data reports in isolation)
7. More ambitiously, investigate how nationally aggregated activity data could support activities such as stock weeding by revealing collection strengths or gaps and allowing librarians to cross check against other collections nationally. This could also inform the number of copies a library should buy, and which books from reading lists are required in multiple copies.
8. Learning and teaching support. Explore the relationship between recommended lists and reading lists, and how it can be used as a tool to support academic teaching staff.
9. Communicate the benefits to decision-makers. If work were to continue along these lines, then a recommendation that has come out strongly from our collaborators is the need to accompany any development activity with a targeted communications plan, which continually articulates the benefits of utilising activity data to support search to decision-makers within libraries. While within our community a significant amount of momentum is building in this area, our meetings with librarians indicates that the ‘why should I care?’ and more to the point ‘why should I make this a priority?’ questions are not adequately answered. In a nutshell, ‘leveraging activity data’ can easily fall down or off the priority lists of most library managers. It would be particularly useful to tie these benefits to the strategic aims and objectives of University libraries as a means to get such work embedded in annual operational planning.
What can other institutions do to benefit from our work?
- For those using the Talis LMS (and with a few years of data stored), institutions can extract data, and create their own API to pull in as a recommender function using these recipes.
- Institutions can benefit from the work we did with users to understand their perceptions of the function, and can be assured that students (undergraduates and postgraduates) can see the immediate benefit (as long as we get rid of some of the odd stuff by setting the threshold higher)
- Use the findings of this project to support a business case for this work to their colleagues
How can they go about this?
- Assess the quality and quantity of the data stored in your LMS to determine if there’s potential there. For this project (and for the simple recommender based on ‘people who borrowed) you only need data that ties unique individuals to borrowed items (see more from Andy Land on the data extraction process and how anonymisation is handled here: https://salt11.wordpress.com/recipe-data-extraction-from-talis/).
- To understand how the recommender algorithm works, see this post Dave Pattern wrote for us: http://www.daveyp.com/blog/archives/1453
- To follow our steps in terms of data format, loading, processing, and setting up an API see Dave Chaplin’s explanation: https://salt11.wordpress.com/technical-processes/
- To conduct user-testing and focus groups to assess the recommender, feel free to draw from our SALT Postgraduate User Discussion Guide and SALT user response sheet.
Our most significant lessons:
- A lower threshold may throw up ‘long tail’ items, but they are likely to not be deemed relevant or useful by users (although they might be seen as ‘interesting’ and something they might look into further). Set a threshold of ten or so, as the University of Hudderfield has, and the quality of recommendations is relatively sound.
- Concerns over anonymisation and data privacy are not remotely shared by the users we spoke to. While we might question this response as potentially naive, this does indicate that users trust libraries to handle their data in a way that protects them and also benefits them.
- You don’t necessarily need a significant backlog of data to make this work locally. Yes, we had ten years worth from JRUL, which turned out to be a vast amount of data to crunch. But interestingly in our testing phases when we worked with only 5 weeks of data, the recommendations were remarkably good. Of course, whether this is true elsewhere, depends on the nature and size of the institution. But it’s certainly worth investigating.
- If the API is to work on the shared service level, then we need more (but potentially not many more) representative libraries to aggregate data from in order to ensure that recommendations aren’t skewed to represent one institution’s holdings, course listings or niche research interests, and can support different use cases (i.e. learning and teaching).
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Tagged activity data, activitydata, humanities, jiscad, jiscsalt, libraries, personalisation, recommender, usage data, users
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Lessons learned from the user evaluation perspective (or can we define the ‘long tail’?)
The key lesson we’ve learned during this project is that the assumptions behind the hypothesis of this project need to be reconsidered, as in this context the ‘long tail’ is complex and difficult to measure. Firstly how do we evaluate what is ‘long tail’ from a user perspective? We may draw a line in the sand in terms of number of times an item has been borrowed, but this doesn’t necessarily translate into individual or community contexts. Most of this project was taken up with processing the data and creating the API and UI; if we’d had a bit more time we could have spent more resource dealing with these questions as they arose during testing.
The focus groups highlight how diverse and unique each researcher and what they are researching is. We chose humanities postgrads, PhD’s and masters level, but in this group alone we have a huge range of topic areas, from the incredibly niche to the rather more popular. Therefore we had some respondents who found the niche searches fruitful and others who found nothing, because their research area is so niche, hardly any material they don’t already know about doesn’t exist. In addition, when long tail is revealed, some researchers find it outdated or irrelevant. This is why it isn’t borrowed that often. So is there any merit in bringing it to the attention of the research community?
Further more in-depth testing in this area needs to be done in order to find answers to some of these problems. The testing for this project asked the respondents to rate their searches and pick out some of the more interesting texts. But we need to sit with fewer researchers and broaden the discussions. What is relevant? How do you guage it as relevant? Some of the respondents said the books were not relevant but more said they would borrow them, so where does this discrepancy come from? Perhaps ‘relevant’ is not the correct term, can the long tail of discovery produce new perspectives, interesting associations perhaps previously not thought of? Only one-to-one in-depth testing can give the right data which will then indicate which level the threshold should be set.
After all is there any point in having a recommender which only gives you recommendations you expect or know about already? However, some participants wanted this from a recommender or expected it and were disappointed when they got results they could not predict. I know if I search for a CD on Amazon that I’m familiar with I sometimes get recommendations I know about or already own. So the recommender means different things to different people. There is a group that are satisfied they know all the recommended texts and can sleep soundly knowing they have completely saturated their research topic and there is a group that need new material.
The long tail hypothesis is a difficult one to prove in a short term project of 6 months. As its name suggests the long tail needs to be explored over a long time. Monitoring borrowing patterns in the library, click through and feedback from the user community and librarians will help to refine the recommender tool for ultimate effectiveness.
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Tagged activity data, activitydata, humanities, jiscad, jiscsalt, libraries, personalisation, recommender, usage data, users
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What do the users think of the SALT recommender?
Following internal in house testing the recommender was open to the users. In the last week of July 18 humanities postgraduates passed through the SALT testing labs, (11 PhD students, 3 taught Masters students and 4 research students). Lisa and I held three focus groups and grilled our potential users about the SALT recommender. The research methods used were designed to answer our objectives, with an informal discussion to begin with to find out how postgraduate students approach library research and to gauge the potential support for the book recommender. Following the discussion we began testing the actual recommender to answer our other research objectives which were:
- Does SALT give you recommendations which are logical and useful?
- Does it make you borrow more library books?
- Does it suggest to you books and materials you may not have known about but are useful and interesting?
As a team we agreed to set the threshold of the SALT recommender deliberately low, with a view to increasing this and testing again if results were not good. As our hypothesis is based on discovering the hidden long tail of library research we wanted the recommender to return results that were unexpected – research gems that were treasured and worthy items but had somehow been lost and only borrowed a few times.
42 searches in total were done on the SALT recommender and of those 42, 77.5% returned at least one recommendation, (usually many more) that participants said would be useful. (As an aside, one of the focus groups participants found something so relevant she immediately went to borrow it after the group has finished!)
However the deliberately low threshold may have caused some illogical returns. The groups were asked to comment on the relevance of the first 5 recommendations, but quite often it was the books further down the list that were of more relevance and interest. One respondent referred to it as a ‘Curate’s egg’ however, assured me this was in reference to some good and some bad. His first five were of little relevance, ‘only tangentially linked’, his 6th, 7th, 8th, 9th, 11th and even 17th recommendations were all ‘very relevant’. Unfortunately this gave disappointing results when the first 5 suggested texts were rated for relevance, as demonstrated in the pie chart below.
However the likelihood of borrowing these items gave slightly more encouraging results;
Clearly we’ve been keen on the threshold count. Lessons need to be learnt about the threshold number and this perhaps is a reflection of our initial hypothesis. We think that there would be much merit in increasing the threshold number and retesting.
On a positive note, initial discussions with the researchers (and just a reminder these are seasoned researchers, experts in their chosen fields familiar and long term users of the John Ryland’s University Research Library) told us that the recommender would be a welcome addition to Copac and the library catalogue. 99% of the researchers in the groups had used and were familiar with Amazons recommender function and 100% would welcome a similar function on the catalogues based on circulation records.
Another very pertinent point, and I cannot stress this strongly enough, was the reactions expressed in regards to privacy and collection and subsequent use of this data. The groups were slightly bemused by questions regarding privacy. No one expressed any concern about the collection of activity data and its use in the recommender. In fact most assumed this data was collected anyway and encouraged us to use it in this way, as ultimately it is being used to develop a tool which helps them to research more effectively and efficiently.
Overwhelmingly, the groups found the recommender useful. They were keen that their comments be fed back to developers and that work should continue on the recommender to get the results right as they were keen to use it and hoped it would be available soon.
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Tagged activity data, activitydata, humanities, jiscad, jiscsalt, libraries, recommender, usage data, userbehaviour, users
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Refining SALT (techie lessons learned)
While early tests with a sample set of data from JRUL were encouraging, see See SALT – a demo, an overhaul of the methodology behind the recommender API was required once the full set of loan transactions was obtained.
It was feared that processing the data into the nborrowers table – containing, for each combination of two items, a count of the unique number of library users to have borrowed both items – might become too onerous with the anticipated 3 million records. That fear turned to blind panic when 8 million loan records actually arrived!
The approach for processing the data for the API was thus re-jigged. As before the data was loaded into two MySQL tables, items and loans, and then some simple processing pushed the total number of loans for each item into a further, nloans, table. The remainder of the logic for the recommender was moved to run, on demand, in the API.
Given the ISBN of a certain item, let’s say ITEM A, and a threshold value, the PHP script for the API was coded to do the following:
- Find the list of all users in the loans table who have borrowed ITEM A
- For each user found in 1. find the list of all items in the loans table that have been borrowed by that user
- Sum across the lists of items found in 2. to compile a single list of all possible suggested items which includes, for each of these items, the number of unique users to have borrowed both that item and ITEM A
- From the list in 3. remove ITEM A and any items for which the number of unique users falls below the given threshold
- For each item in the list derived in 4. divide the number of unique users of that item by the total number of times that item has been borrowed, from the nloans table
- Rank the items in the list in 5. by the ratio of unique users to total loans
- Find the details of each item in the list in 6. from the items table and return the list of suggestions
Testing showed that certain queries of the MySQL database involved in the above process were time consuming and affected the responsiveness of the API. The following extra pre-processing was thus performed:
- The items table was split into 10 smaller tables
- The loans table was split into 5 smaller tables
With queries rewritten so that searches access each of these smaller tables in turn rather than just looking at the original, large tables there was a significant boost in API performance. The number of divisions for the above splits was somewhat arbitrary but was sufficient to render the API usable for testing.
Further analysis would more than likely bring additional performance benefits, especially relevant as the amount of data is only going to grow (*). Also on the to-do list is expanding the range of output formats for the API; at present only xml and json are offered though both of the developers implementing the API in Copac and in JRUL respectively suggested that jsonp would be easier to work with.
(*) For reference, just over 8 million loan transactions are used for the current SALT recommender covering all available records up to July 2011, and these loans feature around 628,000 individual library items.
A sampling of SALT. How the recommender is working and initial feedback from postgrads
We’re gearing up to meet with some of our collaborators tomorrow from the M25 consortium and Cambridge University Library; they’re helping us explore whether the model we’re developing for SALT (i.e. a centralised aggregation service & a shared API) is something we should pursue further). In preparation for that I am working furiously to gather all the learning that has happened (and is happening) so far. As I write, Lisa and Janine are running user testing and focus groups with postgraduate humanities student from the University of Manchester using the live prototype we have up from Copac. We’ve asked this group to run their own searches and assess the results. Below you can see a sampling of what they’ve been looking for, and what recommendations they’re getting.
The overall reaction is very positive, although in general people find the recommendations further down the rankings to be more relevant. Up top, some of the recommendations are at times off-base. My own favourite book to search, Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble, is no exception — some apparently random items at the top of the list when you look at that one. (I do wonder if this represents a particular reading list for a theatre studies course at JRUL, and this is why it’s happening. Worth exploring). Overall, though, we think this is because we’ve set the threshold (only 3 borrowers in common) deliberately low to test out our long tail hypothesis (Dave Pattern kindly explains here how the algorithm works). What we’re also hearing is that students are finding items they’ve not discovered before now which they deem relevant and likely to borrow. A few have commented that the recommendations get them thinking a bit more laterally — that the concepts they are exploring are picked up in different disciplinary contexts. I find this part particularly interesting when considering in light of the search and research behaviour of humanities researchers. A fuller report on the user testing will be published shortly.
It will be interesting to see if some of the lower ranked recommendations might still be considered ‘long tail’ (and we need to consider how we’re defining ‘long tail’ in this context, of course). This will be an interesting topic for discussion for tomorrow, and we’d definitely welcome the views of any readers on this score (as well as the question of relevancy).
Another interesting note: I ran a search for items in the University of Huddersfield OPAC to compare the recommendations. Interestingly, none of the items (admittedly miniscule sample here!) are in the Huddersfield OPAC. Obviously we’re dealing with two very different libraries and use cases here, but it drives home to me how differentiated the benefits will be at the local level, and raises questions over the utility of sharing activity data for use at the local level. That said, I think what we have with the JRUL data (10 years worth) is something that could likely be of real value to a lot of libraries. How much of a ‘critical mass’ do we need for this to be critical? Do libraries need to have a similar core user base and mission to JRUL to derive benefit from this set, I wonder?
Anyway, enough musing. Here are the recommendations. (btw: For now the below links go to the Copac protoytpe, but this is only going to be public for a while –we’re planning to launch formally in the autumn, but we’ve got work to do yet!)
Translation and censorship patterns of communication and interference
Published: Dublin ; Portland, OR : Four Courts Press, c2009.
Physical description: 256 p. ; 24 cm.
Notes:
Papers from a conference on translation and censorship held in Trinity College Dublin in October 2005.
Includes bibliographical references (p. 221-236) and index.
Contents:
Introduction — Part 1, Theory : Censorship and self-censorship in translation : ethics and ideology, resistance and collusion / Maria Tymoczko — Censorship as a collaborative project : a systematic approach / Piotr Kuhiwczak — Translators, the tacit censors / Elisabeth Gibbels — Part 2, Classical and renaissance : Censoring these ‘racy morsels of the vernacular’ : loss and gain in the translation of Apuleius and Catullus / Carol O’Sullivan — The Petrarch they tried to ban / Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin & Deirdre Serjeantson — Part 3, Censoring regimes : Translating under pressure : censorship of foreign literature in Italy between the wars / Jane Dunnett — Pasternak’s Hamlet : translation, censorship and indirect communication / Aoife Gallagher — Censorship in Francoist Spain and the importation of translations from South America : the case of Lawrence Durrell’s Justine / Cristina Gómez Castro — Part 4, Sensitivities : The case of Don Quixote : one hundred years of Portuguese translations / Filipe Alves Machado — Translation as hagiographical weapon : the French perception of Katherine Mansfield / Gerri Kimber — More than a childhood revisited? : ideological dimensions in the American and British translations of Astrid Lindgren’s Madicken / Angelika Nikolowski-Bogomoloff — … comme des nègres : : whitewashed in translation / Cormac Ó Cuilleanáin — ‘Razom nas begato, nas ne podolati’ : remixes of the orange revolution anthem / Sarah Smyth.
Subject:
- Translating and interpreting — Philosophy — Congresses.
- Censorship — Congresses.
- Translating and interpreting — Congresses.
- Translation
Other names
Ní Chuilleanáin, Eiléan, 1942-
Ó Cuilleanáin, Cormac.
Parris, David L.
SALT Recommendations
| Sturge, Kate. – “The alien within” : translation into German during the Nazi Regime; Kate St 2004 | |
| Constructing a sociology of translation / edited by Michaela Wolf, Alexandra 2007 | |
| Audiovisual translation : language transfer on screen / edited by Jorge Diáz 2009 | |
| Torresi, Ira. – Translating promotional and advertising texts / Ira Torresi 2010 | |
| Brodzki, Bella. – Can these bones live? : translation, survival, and cultural memory / Bella B 2007 | |
| The didactics of audiovisual translation / edited by Jorge Diáz Cintas 2008 | |
| Claims, changes and challenges in translation studies : selected contributio 2004 | |
| Translation in undergraduate degree programmes / edited by Kirsten Malmkjær 2004 | |
| Modes of censorship and translation : national contexts and diverse media / 2007 | |
| Pym, Anthony, 1956-. – Epistemological problems in translation and its teaching : a seminar for thi 1993 | |
| Rimbaud’s rainbow : literary translation in higher education / edited by Pet 1998 | |
| Zatlin, Phyllis, 1938-. – Theatrical translation and film adaptation : a practitioner’s view / Phyllis 2005 | |
| Moving target : theatre translation and cultural relocation / edited by Caro 2000 | |
| {no authors}. – Translation perspectives 1995 | |
| The translation of children’s literature : a reader / edited by Gillian Lath 2006 | |
| Sociocultural aspects of translating and interpreting / edited by Anthony Py 2006 | |
| Kiraly, Donald C., 1953-. – Pathways to translation : pedagogy and process / Donald C. Kiraly 1995 | |
| CTIS occasional papers 2002 | |
| Kiraly, Donald C., 1953-. – A social constructivist approach to translator education : empowerment from 2000 | |
| A companion to translation studies / edited by Piotr Kuhiwczak and Karin Lit 2007 | |
| Tymoczko, Maria. – Enlarging translation, empowering translators / Maria Tymoczko 2007 | |
| Children’s literature in translation : challenges and strategies / edited by 2006 | |
| Translating poetry : the double labyrinth / edited by Daniel Weissbort 1989 | |
| Venuti, Lawrence, 1953-. – The translator’s invisibility : a history of translation / Lawrence Venuti. – 2nd ed. 2008 | |
| Nation, language, and the ethics of translation / edited by Sandra Bermann a 2005 | |
| Bourdieu and the sociology of translation and Interpreting : special Issue / 2005 | |
| Bowker, Lynne. – Computer-aided translation technology : a practical introduction / Lynne Bow 2002 | |
| Critical readings in translation studies / edited by Mona Baker 2010 | |
| Translating others / edited by Theo Hermans 2006 | |
| Diáz-Cintas, Jorge. – Audiovisual translation : subtitling / Jorge Diáz Cintas & Aline Remael 2007 | |
| Luyken, Georg-Michael. – Overcoming language barriers in television : dubbing and subtitling for the 1991 | |
| {no authors}. – The Manipulation of literature : studies in literary translation / edited by 1985 | |
| Kelly, Dorothy. – A handbook for translator trainers : a guide to reflective practice / Doroth 2005 | |
| Wagner, Emma. – Translating for the European Union institutions / Emma Wagner, Svend Bech, J 2002 | |
| Boase-Beier, Jean. – Stylistic approaches to translation / Jean Boase-Beier 2006 | |
| Niranjana, Tejaswini, 1958-. – Siting translation : history, post-structuralism, and the colonial context / 1992 | |
| {no authors}. – Translation research and interpreting research : traditions, gaps and synerg 2004 | |
| {no authors}. – Translation and cultural change : studies in history, norms and image-projec 2005 | |
| {no authors}. – Translation, power, subversion / edited by Román Álvarez and M. Carmen-Áfric 1996 | |
| {no authors}. – Translators through history / edited and directed by Jean Delisle, Judith Wo 1995 |
Investment, profit, and tenancy the jurists and the Roman agrarian economy
Author: by Kehoe, Dennis P..
Published: Ann Arbor : University of Michigan Press, c1997.
Physical description: xiv, 269 p. ; 24 cm.
ISBN: 0472108026
Notes: Spine title: Investment, profit, and tenancy.
Includes index.
Includes bibliographical references (p. 241-260) and index.
Summary:
“In Investment, Profit, and Tenancy: The Jurists and the Roman Agrarian Economy Dennis P. Kehoe defines the economic mentality of upper-class Romans by analyzing the assumptions that Roman jurists in the Digest of Justinian made about investment and profit in agriculture as they addressed legal issues involving private property. In particular the author analyzes the duties of guardians in managing the property of their wards and the bequeathing of agricultural property. He bases his analysis on Roman legal sources, which offer a comprehensive picture of the economic interests of upper-class Romans. Farm tenancy was crucial to these interests and Kehoe carefully examines how Roman landowners contended with the legal, social, and economic institutions surrounding farm tenancy as they pursued security from their agricultural investments.” “Investment, Profit, and Tenancy will be of interest to students of Roman history, particularly the legal, social, and economic history of the Roman empire.”–BOOK JACKET.
Subject
- Digesta.
- Farm tenancy — Rome.
- Farm management — Economic aspects — Rome.
- Agriculture — Rome — Finance.
- Agricultural laws and legislation (Roman law)
- Agriculture — Economic aspects — Rome.
SALT Recommendations
Luxury and pleasure in eighteenth-century Britain
Author: by Berg, Maxine, 1950-.
Published: Oxford : Oxford University Press, 2005.
Physical description: xvii, 373 p. : ill., maps ; 25 cm.
ISBN:
Notes:
Title from e-book title screen (viewed June 17, 2008).
Includes bibliographical references (p. 332-356) and index.
Also available online.
Electronic reproduction. UK : MyiLibrary, 2008 Available via World Wide Web. Access may be limited to MIL affiliated libraries.
Dates of available copies: 2005, 2007.
Contents
Part 1: Luxury, Quality, and Delight — 1. The Delights of Luxury — 2. Goods from the East — 3. Invention, Imitation, and Design — Part 2: How it was Made — 4. Glass and Chinaware: The Grammar of the Polite Table — 5. Metal Things: Useful Devices and Agreeable Trinkets — Part 3: A Nation of Shoppers — 6. The Middling Classes: Acquisitiveness and Self-Respect — 7. ‘Shopping is a Place to Go’: Fashion, Shopping, and Advertising — 8. Mercantile Theatres: British Commodities and American Consumers.
Summary
Luxury and Pleasure in Eighteenth-Century Britain explores the invention, making, and buying of new, semi-luxury, and fashionable consumer goods during the eighteenth century. It follows these goods, from china tea ware to all sorts of metal ornaments such as candlesticks, cutlery, buckles, and buttons, as they were made and shopped for, then displayed in the private domestic settings of Britain’s urban middling classes. It tells the stories and analyses the developments that led from a global trade in Eastern luxuries beginning in the sixteenth century to the new global trade in British-made consumer goods by the end of the eighteenth century. These new products, regarded as luxuries by the rapidly growing urban and middling-class people of the eighteenth century, played an important part in helping to proclaim personal identities,and guide social interaction. Customers enjoyed shopping for them; they took pleasure in their beauty, ingenuity or convenience. All manner of new products appeared in shop windows; sophisticated mixed-media advertising seduced customers and created new wants.This unparalleled ‘product revolution’ provoked philosophers and pundits to proclaim a ‘new luxury’, one that reached out to the middling and trading classes, unlike the elite and corrupt luxury of old. Luxury and Pleasure in Eighteenth-Century Britain is cultural history at its best, built on a fresh empirical base drawn directly from customs accounts, advertising material, company papers, and contemporary correspondence. Maxine Berg traces how this new consumer society of the eighteenth century and the products first traded, then invented to satisfy it, stimulated industrialization itself. Global markets for the consumer goods of private and domestic life inspired the industrial revolution and British products ‘won the world’.
Review
…deserves to be the final word on the luxury debate in Britian Martyn Powell, Annual Bulletin of Historical Literature Luxury and Pleasure is an interesting, accessible and well-illustrated synthesis of new research and recent writing, and helpfully concludes by pointing to further areas of research Hannah Smith, History Journal Readers will find this book valuable Joyce Burnette, English Historical Review
Subject
- Affluent consumers — Great Britain — History — 18th century.
- Middle class — Great Britain — History — 18th century.
- Consumer goods — Great Britain — History — 18th century.
- Luxury goods industry — Great Britain — History — 18th century.
- Consumption (Economics) — Great Britain — History — 18th century.
- Great Britain — Social conditions — 18th century.
- Affluent consumers – Great Britain – History – 18th century
- British & Irish history: c 1700 to c 1900 ; Social & cultural history ; Consumer issues
- British Isles ; c 1700 to c 1800
- Consumer goods – Great Britain – History – 18th century
- Consumption (Economics) – Great Britain – History – 18th century
- Great Britain – Social conditions – 18th century
- HISTORY / Europe / Great Britain
- HISTORY / Social History
- Luxury goods industry – Great Britain – History – 18th century
- Middle class – Great Britain – History – 18th century
- Social & cultural history ; Economic history
- United Kingdom, Great Britain ; c 1700 to c 1800
SALT Recommendations
Title: The nature of human values
Author: by Rokeach, Milton..
Published: New York : Free Press ; London : Collier-Macmillan, 1973.
Physical description: x,438p. ; 24cm.
ISBN: 0029267501
Notes:
Includes index and bibliography: p. 341-354.
Bibl.: p.341-354. – Index.
Subject
SALT Recommendations
Textile production at 16-22 Coppergate
Author: by Walton Rogers, Penelope..
Series
The Archaeology of York ; vol.17 : The small finds, fasc.11
The Archaeology of York. 17, The small finds ; fasc.11
Archaeology of York. fasc.11.
Published: York : Published for the York Archaeological Trust by Council for British Archaeology, 1997.
Physical description: viii, p. 1687-1867 : ill., (some col), maps ; 25 cm.
ISBN
Notes:
Published in association with the York Archaeological Trust.
Includes bibliographical references (p. 1863-1867) and index.
Published in association with the York Archaeological Trust.
In English.
Summary
A great deal of material was recovered from Coppergate during archaeological excavations. Of 1147 artefa cts found there, 1006 are from the 9th to 13th centuries and nearly 700 are from the Anglo-Scandinavian period. Many rel ate to the textile industry ‘
Subject
- Excavations (Archaeology) — England — York.
- Textile fabrics — England — York — History.
- Antiquities.
- Archaeology — York.
- Textile fabrics, Ancient — England — York.
- Textile industry — England — York — History.
- Textile fabrics, Medieval — England — York.
- TEXTILE INDUSTRY, EARLY MEDIEVAL.
- England.
- Great Britain — History — Medieval period, 1066-1485.
- Coppergate Site (York, England)
- York (England) — Antiquities, Scandinavian.
- Yorkshire (England) – Migration & Early Medieval – Objects/Finds.
- Textiles industry – British Isles.
- York (City) – Archaeology
- York (City) – Art – Textiles.
- Archaeology by period / region
- England
- SOCIAL SCIENCE / Archaeology
- Textile fabrics ; England ; York ; History ; Textile industry
Other names
York Archaeological Trust.
Council for British Archaeology.
SALT Recommendations
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Tagged activitydata, humanities, jiscad, jiscsalt, libraries, opac, recommender, users
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Agreeing licensing of data
The John Rylands University Library New Directions Library strategy includes a commitment to ” investigate innovative ways to extract, reuse and expose data across our systems to enhance the searching and usage of our resources.” The release of JRUL loan data (details of about 8 million transactions going back 10 years) is viewed by the JRUL as part of this commitment.
The main issue to address in releasing this data is how you do this in way that protects personal information whilst ensuring that the data can be used in a meaningful way. Within JRUL the following approach was agreed.
The first step was to anonymise the data. This was partly done by removing all details about an individual for each loan transaction apart from a single user ID field which provides a system generated ID unique to that system. Following discussion with colleagues on the project it was then agreed that student course details would also be removed to eliminate the small risk that an individual could be identified in this way.
In joining the SALT project, the JRUL agreed to make its loan data available for use by the SALT recommender service and to make the data available to others. The second step was to agree the terms on which this data would be released. JISC and the Resource Discovery Taskforce argue, in the context of bibliographic data, that the most open licence possible should be used and that restrictions, such as restricting use to non-commercial activities, should only be applied if the impact of this is fully understood. They also strongly recommend that institutions use the standard licences now widely available rather than developing their own http://obd.jisc.ac.uk/rights-and-licensing. Whilst there are common principles between the sharing of activity data and bibliographic data there are also some differences. In particular, activity data is unique to that particular institution and is generated from the behaviour of individuals within the institution. Rather than waiving all rights, therefore, a recommendation was made to the University Librarian that JRUL activity data be licensed for use outside of the University and that this be done using the most open licence available.
The University Librarian has now agreed that JRUL anonymised loan data will be made available under a Creative Commons attribution only licence (CC BY).
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The benefits of reusing activity data
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A working prototype based on just 5 weeks of data from John Rylands UL
July is proving to be a fast and furious month in terms of presenting on SALT, crunching the remainder of the gargantuan amount of data we’re receiving from our partners at JRUL, finessing the API, implementing the developments in the Copac prototype (and showing it off to people at the CILIP Umbrella conference), and running various workshops and user testing sessions to test our hypothesis (as much as we can in this time frame) and see whether the ‘shared service’ side of all this might actually scale.
We’re working intensely, but reflecting too. The workshop hosted by the RISE project earlier this month was an excellent opportunity to step back and see the bigger picture, and reflect on the benefits we’re aiming to realise for libraries and their users. A reminder of what we’re attempting to find out:
Hypothesis…
Library circulation activity data can be used to support humanities research by surfacing underused ‘long tail’ library materials through search
Also… how sustainable would an API-based national shared service be?
And can such a service support users and also library workflows such as collections management?
What we already know
We know that arts and humanities students and academics borrow books.
Research conducted in-house by Mimas, and also by others (for example Carole Palmer ) also highlights the differences in search methodologies between this demographic and their STEM counterparts. In short, humanities researchers tend to search centrifugally, ‘berry picking’ from various trails. Mimas’ recent research with Mindset and Curtis and Cartwright indicates that newer postgraduates tend to work in quite an isolated way – asking few if any for advice on where to search (supervisors feature heavily in this regard, whereas subject librarians do not at all) and sticking with a few ‘known’ resources). While these users are typically suspicious of the idea that allowing other users to annotate, tag, or rate items would be of benefit to them, there is generally a positive response when asked about the usefulness of a recommender function; in fact Amazon is used significantly in this regard to help users find related materials that are not surfacing through a ‘traditional’ library search.
Library recommendation systems are already achieving benefits for undergraduates – University of Huddersfield being the obvious example. Indeed, Huddersfield’s system helps students move beyond the ‘nose’ to the long tail of library collections – and there is some evidence that new borrowing patterns are emerging, with students taking out books from outside what is assigned. In humanities research especially, the long tail is obviously much more relevant.
The benefits
So what additional benefits might we realise through this work, especially if we move on t
o aggregating data from additional libraries?
- Key to our hypothesis is the belief that such systems can help surface and hopefully increase the usage of hidden collections. Obviously circulation data is only going to offer a partial solution to this problem of discoverability (i.e. many ‘hidden gems’ are of course non-circulating) but nonetheless, we believethat the long tail argument borne out by Chris Anderson can also hold true for libraries – that the collective ‘share’ or recommendation of items can turn the Pareto Principle on its head. For libraries this means being able to demonstrate the value of the collections by pointing to increased usage. It might also give libraries a better sense of what is of value to users, and what perhaps is not.
- For users, particularly those in the humanities, a recommender function can help providing new routes to discovery based on use and disciplinary contexts (not traditional classification). In other words, what you areviewing through ‘recommenders’ are patterns of real usage, how other users with similar academic interests are aggregating texts. This is particularly useful for finding conceptually related groupings of texts that cut across differentdisciplines, and which will not ordinarily sit together in a standard results set.
- It also means we can support humanities users in their preferred mode of discovery, powering ‘centrifugal searching’ and discovery through serendipity. The downstream benefits of this concern the emergence of new, original research, new knowledge and ideas.
Last week we sat down with a group of collections managers from JRUL as well as Leeds University and talked with them about other possible benefits related to library workflows which we weren’t yet seeing. Here are the potential benefits we came up with:
- Aggregated activity data could support activities such as stock weeding by revealing collection strengths and allowing librarians to cross check against other collections.
- By combining aggregated collection data and aggregated activity data, librarians will see a fuller picture. This means they can identify collection strengths and recognise items that should be retained because of association with valued collections. We thought about this as a form of “stock management by association.” Librarians might treat some long-tail items (e.g. items with limited borrowing) with caution if they were aware of links/associations to other collections (although there is also the caveat that this wouldn’t be possible with local activity data reports in isolation)
- Aggregated activity data could have benefits for collection development. Seeing the national picture might allow librarians to identify related items – “if your collection has this, it should also have…”
- This could also inform the number of copies a library should buy, and which books from reading lists are required in multiple copies.
- Thinking more outside the box, we thought it might also inform digitization decision-making – i.e. if you digitized this, you might also consider digitizing…
- Aggregated activity data could inform stock purchase – allow librarians to see what’s new, what’s being used elsewhere and therefore what’s worth buying.
- This could also have benefits when discussing reading lists and stock purchases with academic staff, and thus enhance academic engagement
Over the next couple of weeks we’ll have quite a bit more to report as we analyse sustainability issues with other libraries, and perhaps most importantly, put the recommender itself in front of postgraduate humanities researchers to see if our hypothesis is likely to be proven true — at least based on what they tell us (the true test will happen over the next year as we monitor impact via JRUL and Copac).
SALT - Surfacing the Academic Long Tail 
