 Thank you so much for electing to come to this session where we'll be talking about mobile technologies to support field research. I want to give you a little bit of context in terms of who I am and my context at work. I'm from the University of Guelph about an hour outside of Toronto in Canada and in 2009 our library undertook a major organizational renewal process where we looked at new directions for the library and one of the things that we recognized at that time is where the library traditionally is very focused on teaching and learning that there was a need for us to engage more fully with the research aspect of the campus so we established this new team which was research enterprise and scholarly communication and so I've been the head of that team since its inception so some of the things that we do we're very focused on research data management we have a data repository where we've been recruiting data sets from researchers for purposes of preservation as well as publication sharing of research data. We also focus on the publication component of the research life cycle so we host about 20 open access scholarly peer reviewed journals. We have the institutional repository for the faculty who want to archive their publications in an open access repository. We also have a consultation service for author rights advising authors on campus about strategically the best options available to them in terms of publishing negotiating publishing agreements with publishers that sort of thing so that's sort of the context another important piece of the puzzle that I wanted to draw attention to is we recognize very early on that there were some key partnerships that we had to form so we've created sort of tripartite committee which is the library the central campus computing and the office of research to so coordinate services for researchers on campus so that's a very critical piece of the puzzle maybe I'll just check in at this point to make sure that my voice is carrying well enough for everybody to hear okay so we offer lots of support to researchers when they're working on campus but once you know almost all disciplines have some element of field research and once researchers go out on field researchers we quite literally lead them to their own devices so I wanted to have a look at how we can provide support to researchers when they're conducting field research specifically around the use of mobile technologies and even more specifically around collection in particular when researchers are out in the field and when I refer to field research that means both sort of localized field research we actually at the University of Guelph one of the main areas of research for us is agricultural research so researchers quite literally are out in the field even if they're not that far removed from the campus they're out doing research in the field but extending all the way to researchers who visit developing countries and do research there both quantitative and qualitative data that they're generating through those research projects so I'll talk a little bit about early on doing a little bit of literature review and make particular reference to a paper from the World Bank titled cutting costs boosting quality and collecting data real time typically mobile technologies mobile phones have been used extensively in the developing world for disseminating information but not as much attention has been focused on their potential for collecting data and so this report from 2011 the World Bank was very informative while research to evaluate these mobile interventions has been growing there are relatively few studies of the use of mobile technology itself as a researched research instrument in developing countries the potential mobile phones hold in this regard is striking compared to a traditional process using paper and pencil forms with later transcription to a computer system mobile devices offer immediate digitization and transmission of collected data at the point of survey followed by automated data aggregation as such mobile phones promise faster or cost effective and more accurate surveys most notably the cost savings resulting from immediate digitization and transmission of collected data with subsequent automated data aggregation offset by far the purchasing and data transmission costs of mobile phones so after the literature review that I conducted what I've really been focused on is interviews with researchers as well as shadowing researchers when they're out in the field to learn firsthand what are some of the challenges that they face and some of the ways that we could offer support to those challenges so during the interview these are sort of the areas that I cover in the interview what is their particular field environment that they're working in what are their current data collection practices how do they store data when they're away from the campus environment what use do they currently make of mobile devices and then what do they do with their data once they return to campus so those are some of the things that we cover and I'll just go through some of the researchers that I've been working with today to give you an example of what we've been doing this one represents a researcher in political science who has been traveling around Latin America interviewing and conducting surveys with indigenous NGO groups essentially what he's looking at is how disadvantaged and marginalized groups can use information to improve their position and fight for expanded political and social rights so he chose to distribute paper surveys because he didn't want to limit his subject group by only those who had access to the internet so he was collecting incredible volumes of paper surveys that he was then transporting across borders within Latin America so this became one of his challenges he also was conducting interviews where he was transcribing the interviews well conducting the interviews during the day and then transcribing those interviews in the evening and once he transcribed the interviews he was deleting the original audio recordings and this was part of his agreement for research ethics that these would be deleted another researcher here is an agricultural horticulturalist who works with tomato breeding to try to bring out through breeding programs particular qualities of the tomatoes one of the things that was noteworthy about him is the amount of paraphernalia that he was taking out into the field with him and so he deliberately posed showing you this carpenter's belt that he wears just to take care of all the paraphernalia he was working with so he's got printouts of spreadsheets where he makes recordings he's got pencils notebooks audio recorder a camera plus he has a knife for cutting open tomatoes wire flags for marking particular plants not all of this but quite a bit of it could be reduced with the simple use of a mobile device another researcher who i've been working with is in environmental sciences he works with beetles and how they choose their habitats he also works in vietnam with honeybees he is a self-described technophobe so he does all his recording on paper and then later transcription into spreadsheets and his version of backup is to photocopy the original paper forms that he's been filling out and interestingly he does use a GPS device for recording GPS coordinates but then he records them by hand on his spreadsheets and finally another researcher who works in capacity development in Bangladesh where he conducts surveys basically what he's looking at is transfer of knowledge between farming communities in Bangladesh and how video can be used as a training tool and he's contrasting professionally produced videos with peer produced videos and the efficacy of the two types of videos so again he does a lot of he has a very highly paper-based system where he's conducting focus groups surveys interviews and a huge investment in terms of transcription of all those research outputs after the fact another thing i wanted to draw your attention to is an undergraduate class that i've become involved with the class is called discovering biodiversity and what they do is quite a large class they have i think about 1500 students and essentially they're teaching them about field research so they're sending them they break them down into groups of four students each and we have a forest adjacent to the campus where they're sent into that forest given a plot of land and they have to identify all the plants within that plot of land and then all that data is then amalgamated so that the class as a whole can do analysis on the the data that they themselves have collected so it's essentially a species census training students to do field research and a quote from one of the faculty involved it's great to have them working as biologists in the field because there there's a perception that science is done in the lab with lab coats on fewer students have had the experience of immersing themselves in an ecosystem we focused on skills training to identify plants and methods to analyze species diversity so what they had been doing again all the observations were being recorded by pencil and paper and then the GAs had the assignment of transcribing all this data into spreadsheets for amalgamation and later analysis so i'm working with this class to introduce mobile technologies which will not only make it more efficient but also introduce things like authority controls so that the data will be cleaner when it is captured so i'll talk a little bit about some of the current practices observations so again the typical scenario is it a researcher captures stuff on paper transcribes it into the computer which means double entry it also means errors are introduced during the transcription process and also the vulnerability of having the original data in paper form so by using mobile technologies we cut down on the investment of time in collecting data cut down on the errors we also have added capabilities so things like capturing gps coordinates adding audio or video recording some of the concerns that were expressed by researchers included using mobile technologies when you're in environments where there are adverse conditions where your mobile technology could be damaged but at the same time they wanted technology that was going to be lightweight so one of the things that i've been looking at is some of these physical concerns of having a mobile device out in the field so one researcher in particular the horticulturist talked about the device needs to function well even in damp hot or dusty conditions but again needs to be lightweight there are many many products available to protect mobile technologies this is one example called griffin survivor which sells for about $50 and claims to have military ratings to survive shock drop wind and rain vibration sand and dust another area of concern is around theft and loss and hacking with mobile technologies just curious has anyone had a personal disaster or crisis in terms of losing a mobile device any stories that you'd want to share about what that involved yeah wow okay so that compelling example for sure so there are things that we need to try to inform researchers about when they're traveling with these mobile devices the political science researcher that i mentioned traveling in latin america he had concerns especially when he was in venezuela in terms of being in very high crime areas he actually opted to travel with a temporary very low functioning cell phone rather than taking his blackberry just because he thought he would be less a target of crime with that device but some of the things that we can help them with are apps that allow permit you to locate your device if you do lose it or if it's stolen to immediately wipe out any data that may reside on the device you also have to be concerned about hacking where there can be malicious deleting or stealing of data things like avoiding public wi-fi networks or bluetooth even turning off auto complete on a mobile device can help to protect some of your credentials that you may have used and then a brief quote from a recent USA Today article another recent study analyzed two million currently available android apps from both third parties and the google play store classifying 293 000 as outright malicious and an additional 150 000 as high risk when you factory in ios windows mobile blackberry and any other mobile platforms the it landscape is no longer centered on securing and exclusively windows based ecosystem so in terms of protecting data on the device itself encryption is key whether it's on your device or whether you're storing things in the cloud you need to have a strategy for encryption there are products available such as one called box cryptor with which offers encryption for virtually all major cloud storage providers for ios and android so then i want to turn my attention to data collection and there are various opportunities various opportunities for collecting data using mobile devices one of them is through apps that are designed for a particular research project and this doesn't necessarily have to involve a developer there are utilities available that make it very easy for the end user to custom design apps and deploy those apps for particular research projects this is something called open data kit which is an open source suite of tools from the university of washington which is the core of an ecosystem of open open source tools they receive financial support from google it's an out-of-the-box solution for users to design data collection instruments collect the data on mobile devices and send to a server it can collect text gps location photos video audio and barcodes one of the nice features about tools like this is that even when you're in a environment where you don't have connectivity it'll store the data on the device itself until you connect it to the internet and then automatically upload the data to the the server so you can aggregate the collected data on a server and extract it in useful formats it's this particular tool is used by the jane goodall institute for forest monitoring are people familiar with kiva which is a sort of a micro loan enterprise it's used by kiva for gathering borrower information it's used by the carter center for monitoring elections the harvard humanitarian initiative john hopkins global water program and the uc-berkeley blum center for developing economies um in terms of designing a data collection instrument there's a very simple drag and drop interface but that has limited functionality if you want to have more functionality things like authority controls on the data elements or business logic built into the application they've developed a form by an approach that's based on excel spreadsheets and i'll show you what that looks like so you start off by defining your data model just by filling in a simple excel spreadsheet you supplement that with any controls that you want on those data elements so for example this is an example of an authority for browsers that would appear as a drop down on the interface you deploy that form upload it to the website where it is automatically available for registering subscription on a mobile device you fill in your form automatically update it to the server where it's immediately available for visualization mapping analysis download whatever you want to do so it's an incredibly quick and easy approach to to developing a research instrument quoting the same world bank 2011 report that i quoted before they documented a 71 decrease in data collection costs compared to paper with improved quality as i mentioned this open data kit is part of an entire ecosystem of open source tools one of those is something called form hub which was developed at columbia university basically what it is is a free hosted service for the odk toolkit they also make it very easy to share forms so once you've developed a data collection instrument you can post it there and make it available to other researchers another option for data collection is via web forms there are some advantages disadvantages compared to using an app one of them is that they are totally dependent on having connectivity so where the apps can function even when you don't have connectivity with a web form you would need connectivity there's also less functionality in terms of capturing gps coordinates photos voice recording that sort of thing but it is more easily cross platform one of the limitations that you always have to consider is apps that work on one device but operating system but not all another option is data collection via relational database systems one in particular that i'll cite is file maker has something called file maker go so you can develop a complete database application application and then deploy it to an iphone or ipad and they say you can collect research data in the field by recording video and audio and adding the files directly to your database another interesting option available is data collection via sms so just simple text messaging you can send to a server and have it stored in the database again sms has been very popular for information dissemination but is also a powerful tool for data collection one option available is something called rapid sms which was developed by unicef and it's developed in a python jango framework and used among other people by the earth institute at columbia university so apart from the actual mechanism used to collect data what do researchers do in terms of data storage when they're away from campus how many people here use some form of cloud storage for your data imagine most of you do and dropbox is that probably the most common is there any other platforms that people are particularly fond of using yeah so storing data in the cloud one of the concerns i don't know if any of the people here were at the session from western canada earlier this afternoon but they referenced they are the fact that in canada there's a certain amount of unease about putting data in the cloud that's going to be on american servers partly because of the patriot act that there's it's felt to be less secure less protected from from exposure so that's one of the concerns that has to be factored in we need to be able to recommend cloud services to researchers in terms of ease of use downloading uploading syncing the ability to view multiple formats within the cloud platform cost and security another option is storing data back on the campus systems and that could be done by ftp there are many ftp tools where you can transfer data from a mobile device back to your home environment or there could be other enterprise solutions that researchers are using the researcher who i've talked about traveling through latin america he had access to our share point server back on campus and was loading data to share point while he was in transit another option that a lot of researchers take is external storage devices but again there's a vulnerability in relying on those in terms of loss or theft so some of the tools available i transfer which is available for the iphone or ipad where you can either ftp or store data to the cloud ftp on the go which not only allows you to work from your iphone but it allows you to um access the internet and see what data you've got on your phone using any web browser it features smart replace which will not break your existing files if the phone call is or a connection is lost or interrupted it will still complete the upload and also features compression on the fly so one of the things that i discovered as i was working with researchers was what i termed specialist devices i started off thinking just in terms of the common smartphones that were accustomed to but i became quickly aware that there are a lot of specialist devices that are being used by researchers a company named Allegro uses a lot or has developed a lot of technologies for agricultural research one particular researcher i worked with uses an Allegro device where it stores all of the data on the device itself and it comes with a port so that when you return to your lab or office you just plug the device into the port and it immediately downloads the data as a excel spreadsheet file and he's been using that system for three or four years another company called YSI develops a lot of water monitoring devices so sensors instruments software as well as a data collection platform for environmental water quality monitoring and testing one of the researchers that i spoke to uses it for water probes in northern manitoba interestingly he makes redundant paper records even though he's using this device because he doesn't totally divide trust the the data that's been stored on the device itself another area that i wanted to talk a little bit about is the concept of electronic laboratory notebooks can i ask how many people are familiar with the concept of electronic laboratory notebooks okay and do you know of their use on your campuses one thing that you probably wouldn't be familiar with is enterprise ELN solutions on your campuses typically ELNs have been pretty common in the commercial sector pharmaceutical labs and that sort of thing and they're really growing in their use in the academic setting so one of the reasons i'm drawing attention to this is because with an electronic laboratory notebook system you can use your mobile device and have the same kind of interaction with your data that you do when you're in your lab or office there was a major review last year at the University of Wisconsin-Madison to look at the potential for electronic laboratory notebooks they involved 55 researchers from a wide range of disciplines in a three-month pilot study by the time the study was done 91 percent of the researchers wanted to continue using the ELN some of the rationale for that paper recording is time consuming the ELN offers the design of forums and templates that make it very quick and easy especially when you're talking about iterative tests that can be populated through the ELN linking of digital assets so one of the struggles researchers have is that they've got quantitative data here they may have photographs they may have other types of digital assets trying to coordinate that can be very challenging but through the ELN they can all be linked as well as linking things like test results to samples very often there's a sample inventory component of an ELN so you can have a particular biological sample that's linked to all the tests that involve that particular sample it also facilitates sharing and collaboration within labs or within research teams it integrates all the communication with the research team makes it far easier to search for and find particular assets it also facilitates data management and archiving to comply with institutional and funder policies with capabilities for versioning and restoring earlier versions of data files and basically creates a centralized shared knowledge base with searchability excuse me it allows PIs to monitor the work of their research teams especially when a number of students may be involved and through the mobile technologies it's accessible from anywhere so your entire knowledge base of research outputs are available accessible from anywhere so through this pilot study the University of Wisconsin-Madison chose a product called R-Space from a research base and I contacted one of the researchers there to get his comments and this is what he wrote about their move to the ELN. R-Space or any ELN really has been one of the best things we've done for our lab information on protocols details on experiments treatment conditions results pictures westerns you name it and it's all available with R-Space's easy and plain word search feature this has greatly increased our lab efficiency of research and eliminates duplicating experiments because one of the members didn't know someone else already knew the answer they were after now we've used it for almost two years and we'd be lost without it so that's sort of the landscape that i've been looking at so what does this mean in terms of a research library how can we take advantage of some of these technologies and strategies that i've been talking about and i basically laying out three options in terms of support strategies for libraries one is to basically develop a knowledge base so that we can make recommendations and offer support an example of this that's occurred with me in terms of the research the interactions i've had with researchers was people just coming to me and saying okay i want to buy a device what kind of device would you recommend or i want to use cloud storage what cloud storage solution would you recommend things like that number two is to develop project specific solutions so some of the tools that we looked at like the open data kit the library could offer those to researchers and sort of support them in their deployment for their research projects and then finally enterprise solutions so for example our team we do offer share point as sort of the virtual research environment for document sharing and collaboration there are things like an el and that could be an enterprise solution but those are some of the strategies that could be considered so that's it and thank you very much for