LAMP and RefMe

To Birmingham at the start of last week for the latest Jisc Library Analytics and Metrics Project (http://jisclamp.mimas.ac.uk/) Community Advisory and Planning group meeting.  This was a chance to catchup with both the latest progress and also the latest thinking about how this library analytics and metrics work will develop.

At a time when learning analytics is a hot topic it’s highly relevant to libraries to consider how they might respond to the challenges of learning analytics. [The 2014 Horizon report has learning analytics in the category of one year or less to adoption and describes it as ‘data analysis to inform decisions made on every tier of the education system, leveraging student data to deliver personalized learning, enable adaptive pedagogies and practices, and identify learning issues in time for them to be solved.’

LAMP is looking at library usage data of the sort that libraries collect routinely (loans, gate counts, eresource usage) but combines it with course, demographic and achievement data to allow libraries to start to be able to analyse and identify trends and themes from the data.

LAMP will build a tool to store and analyse data and is already working with some pilot institutions to design and fine-tune the tool.  We got to see some of the work so far and input into some of the wireframes and concepts, as well as hear about some of the plans for the next few months.

The day was also the chance to hear from the developers of a reference management tool called RefMe (www.refme.com).  This referencing tool is aimed at students who often struggle with the typically complex requirements of referencing styles and tools.  To hear about one-click referencing, with thousands of styles and with features to intergrate with MS Word, or to scan in a barcode and reference a book, was really good.  RefMe is available as an iOS or Android app and as a desktop version.  As someone who’s spent a fair amount of time wrestling with the complexities of referencing in projects that have tried to get simple referencing tools in front of students it is really good to see a start-up tackling this area.