De Montfort’s new leader uses Twitter to engage with staff and students. Sarah Cunnane reports

A university vice-chancellor is hoping for tweet success in his new role by reaching out to his staff and students and others in the sector via the social networking site Twitter.

Since taking the reins at De Montfort University last month, Dominic Shellard (@t) has been quick to embrace the Twittersphere.

In doing so, he joins university heads from around the world including E. Gordon Gee (@presidentgee) of Ohio State University, Richard Descoings (@rdescoings) of Sciences Po in France and Steven Schwartz (@macquarievc), vice-chancellor of Macquarie University in Australia.

But Professor Shellard’s UK peers have been slow to take to social media. He is only the second to personally twitter, following Martin Hall of the University of Salford (@VCSalford).

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Oxbridge libraries embark on joint digitisation initiatives with donor’s aid. Matthew Reisz writes

Substantial parallel donations to the university libraries of Oxford and Cambridge have allowed them to ramp up their digitisation efforts in a rare spirit of collaboration.

Bodleian Libraries in Oxford was seeking to raise £3 million for its digitisation plans when it was given half the sum by Leonard S. Polonsky, an alumnus of Lincoln College, Oxford, and executive chairman of Hansard Global.

He had already donated the same amount to the Cambridge University Library to support its plans to create a “digital library for the 21st century”.

Sarah Thomas, Bodley’s Librarian in Oxford, said the libraries “realise the potency of digitisation in terms of reaching a wider audience and helping scholars do things they couldn’t do before”. She added that it also helped preserve collections.

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This morning we welcome Andy Wilson from the University of Loughborough, and Donna Cullen from the University of Strathclyde in person – and Marina Janetzky from the University of Middlesex virtually, at the University of Winchester, to discuss the implementation of IT projects within a Higher Education context.

The British Library’s new researcher-in-residence will use both her media and academic expertise, writes Hannah Fearn

With an enviable career as a television presenter and popular technology pundit, entry into the academy seemed an unlikely path for Aleks Krotoski.

But a year after completing a PhD at the University of Surrey, she has found the ideal post, which allows her to do work with “academic rigour” and to make the most of her ability to inspire non-specialist audiences about the potential of emerging technologies.

Dr Krotoski was this week unveiled as researcher-in-residence for the British Library’s forthcoming exhibition Growing Knowledge: The Evolution of Research.

The exhibition, held in partnership with Times Higher Education, will showcase current and future technologies that could revolutionise the conduct of research the world over. The British Library’s partners include technology companies such as Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard, and institutions such as Brown University in the US. Input will also be sought from other leading libraries such as the New York Public Library and Columbia University’s library.

• Read full story
• Read about ‘Growing Knowledge: The Evolution of Research‘, which runs from 12th October 2010 to 16th July 2011
• Follow @aleksk on Twitter

Libraries can aid academics with resource discovery by helping them to use cutting-edge technologies, says Richard Boulderstone

The Garibaldi Panorama is one of the most striking treasures held by Brown University in the US. It was originally displayed to large, paying audiences in the 1860s, at the height of Giuseppe Garibaldi’s international popularity: 4ft high and 273ft long and painted on both sides, it scrolls through depictions of the life and adventures of the great Italian hero.

Its unusual format means that the physical artefact is not readily accessible to large numbers of researchers – but recent advances in digitisation and display technologies mean that the Panorama has a rich, inspiring future.

Painstakingly scanned in 6ft sections and then stitched together into a seamless whole, a virtual version of the Panorama can now be viewed via a Microsoft Surface “tabletop” viewer. Groups of researchers can scroll, extract and zoom in on details of the painting. Extra information, such as contemporary newspaper reports of Garibaldi’s exploits, can be viewed alongside, opening up new possibilities for collaborative research.

The cutting-edge technology used on the Panorama is just one of a wide range of applications that allow people to interact and collaborate, in real time, regardless of previously critical limitations such as distance, space and number of participants.

But while these technologies are widely used for social interaction, there is evidence that many researchers are not yet taking advantage of these tools, despite their potential.

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Ongoing research can now be shared face-to-face in full digital detail across the globe. Paul Jump reports

Roman slaves may have lived a dog’s life, but surely few can have suffered being mistaken for an ox. This, however, was the posthumous fate that befell Carus of Frisia.

In the early years of the 20th century, the remains of a Roman tablet were found near the village of Tolsum in the Netherlands. The original translation, published in 1917, had it that the tablet was the contract for the sale of an ox. “But it mostly didn’t make sense and even the original editor said he thought he hadn’t read it all correctly,” said Alan Bowman, director of the Centre for the Study of Ancient Documents (CSAD) at the University of Oxford.

The solution, years later, was to combine Professor Bowman’s existing eSAD project, which uses sophisticated medical imaging to help decipher damaged or illegible documents, with a bespoke “virtual research environment” (VRE) developed by the Joint Information Systems Committee, the UK academy’s IT development body, to allow researchers from across the world to work on the images.

“Effectively, the VRE is Skype, but on it you can have face-to-face conversations, point to images of the object and manipulate and annotate it as you go along,” Professor Bowman explained. It also provides online access to dictionaries and reference books, and allows searches for information across differently distributed data sets, images and texts.

“It is like having a seminar but with someone several hundred miles away,” he said.

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Project Title: Digital disruption and value creation (Read full details)

The research focuses on how small businesses in the knowledge-intensive services sector can realise value from mobile communications.  It embraces innovation theory and business strategy and will enhance competitiveness in UK plc.

Supervisor: Dr Lorraine Warren (@doclorraine)

Start Date: October 2010

Details of the Project:

The rapid development of digital technologies now presents a nexus of possibilities: widespread access to broadband/mobile technologies; smartphones enabling new forms of communication, handheld internet access and bespoke applications development; software platforms that enable a high degree of networked connectivity and communication  with the potential to amplify to (potentially) a global audience; readily available real-time geographical data; increasing availability of government datasets to the public.  This nexus produces a new locus of innovation, a shift from the corporation to the individual, recognised in new so-called paradigms for innovation, ‘open innovation’ (Chesbrough) and ‘democratic innovation’ (von Hippel) across the distributed innovation networks foreseen by Rothwell.  The barriers to digital innovation by non-computer scientists have been significantly lowered as the plethora of new businesses in the fields of social media, or smartphone applications demonstrate.  It should now easier than it has ever been to not only access and use new technologies, but to extend them, customise them, develop new combinations, and to access and develop new sectors and markets.  Thus the potential for not only incremental innovation but transformative, disruptive innovation is also possible.

However the roadmap for inductive thinking that will create value in novel and unforeseen ways in new contexts and settings is not clear.  Classical technology transfer models are too linear to translate into this milieu and are also too focussed on economic value creation at the expense of the other forms of value – social, cultural, creative, artistic and technological – that are so significant in the 21st century.

At the heart of this project is a continuation, development and extension of ongoing research on the use of complexity theory to provide an understanding of value creation in disruptive contexts because of its potential to: conceptualise across multiple, interlinked levels of analysis (ie non linear); relate initial conditions to indeterminate outcomes.  To explore the above, the project will take as its starting point the use of the iphone/smartphone as a tool for small businesses in the knowledge-intensive services sector, now that people are using mobile applications  for a wide range of tasks, from purchases, service access communication and information retrieval, bypassing traditional web access.

The Student

The project would suit a School of Management student with an MSc in a relevant qualitative discipline, or a mature student with industry experience.  In terms of future employability, the student would graduate with detailed knowledge and practical understandings that would support entry into the industry, or the

A web project may help to shake up the academy and academic publishing. Paul Jump reports

Two history professors are hoping to shake up the academy and academic publishing with a project that in a single week has generated more than enough “crowd-sourced” content for a new book on academia.

Dan Cohen and Tom Scheinfeldt, directors of the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, Virginia, launched a website, “Hacking the Academy”, on 21 May. They gave users seven days to submit articles, blogs, videos and comments on topics relating to the academy.

Professor Cohen said he and Professor Scheinfeldt planned to compile the best submissions in a book, to be published by the University of Michigan Press, for the benefit of members of the academy who are less comfortable with digital media.

But he admitted that the one-week submission deadline was intended to be provocative and express academics’ frustration with the “calcified” structures of the academy in the digital age, such as the “years and years” it could take presses to publish edited volumes.

Read full story in Times Higher Education.

The code of practice said: “Social-networking sites must not be used as a platform for airing dissatisfaction or criticism of the university, its staff, students or facilities.”

However, it was taken down after provoking a barrage of criticism online.

One of several critical postings on Facebook says: “Once again the University of Leeds excellently demonstrates that it is a bastion of free speech, liberty and rational enquiry.”

Read full story in Times Higher Education.