Training for JISC project staff starting up and enhancing repositories
The Repositories and Preservation Programme contains a strand called start up and enhancement. This is our straight talking strand in that all the projects are either starting up a new repository or enhancing an established one.
One of the interesting things about this strand is that all the funding for projects was provided on a matched basis, i.e. JISC funded a maximum of 50% of the project costs. The idea behind this was that if the institution invested in the project then there was a greater chance of them continuing to invest in the resulting repository once the JISC funding had ceased, therefore leading to more sustainable outputs. However sustainability is not just about pumping money into technology, it is also about the people involved and their skills. The 44 projects in this strand contain a lot of project staff and the skills they develop during their projects will be invaluable in developing the repository infrastructure in the UK over the coming years. Therefore it is important that JISC do all they can to support project staff in developing their skills. One way we are addressing this issue is to fund a programme of training for the start up and enhancement project staff.
The project to provide this training is called SUETR (Start Up and Enhancement TRaining) and will be run by Maureen Pennock at UKOLN over the next year. The project will start with a training requirements gathering exercise which will assess what training is required and what is the most appropriate delivery method for that training. The SUETR project will work very closely with the Repositories Support Project and any online training materials such as podcasts, slides and notes will be distributed to the wider community via the Repositories Support Project website.
While this training programme is provided for project staff in the start up and enhancement strand, it is possible that there will be spare places at some of the training sessions. When this happens the spare places will be offered to the wider community so keep your eye on this blog and the JISC-repositories mailing list for announcement of any training opportunities.
If you want to know more about this training, please feel free to contact me.
Posted by: Andy McGregor
The Research Data Management Forum
This week I went to an early meeting of the Research Data Management Forum, co-sponsored by the Digital Curation Centre and the Research Information Network. The management and curation of research data is both a hot topic and a major challenge – not always a happy combination. This meeting of the Forum was open to anyone, and a diverse group attended, including several directly involved in managing research data and several more, like me, who have an interest supporting that work. In many ways the challenge of managing the digital data deluge is beyond the capacity of a single forum, and at times the list of unanswered questions prompted by the discussion threatened to sink the enthusiasm of even the keenest curator. There seems to be so much that needs doing. However, the main message I took away was the urgent need for more and better evidence: What are the benefits of curating and sharing research data? What are the benefits of having people in UK higher education skilled in data management? To whom do these benefits accrue? The evidence may be of a variety of kinds. Certainly, case studies can help show where these benefits arise and to whom in particular cases. However, what’s also needed is some serious economic modelling of the kind recently deployed by Professors Newbery and Bently and Rufus Pollock in their recent report on ‘Models of Public Sector Information Provision’ and, in a different context, by John Houghton and his colleagues on ‘Research Communication Costs in Australia’.
To supplement this message, and assuming the evidence shows that data curation and sharing is beneficial to UK higher education, to the UK more widely, and to research in general, the question arises what’s in it for researchers? In many disciplines data sharing is not common, and this can be for good reasons. The forthcoming report on ‘data publication’, commissioned by the Research Information Network, Natural Environment Research Council and JISC, will document the picture in some detail. A missing piece in the puzzle is the full citation of specific datasets, which is uncommon. Should this become common, metrics could be derived from aggregated citations to indicate the extent to which datasets were referenced, and academic credit (and therefore incentive) could follow. The difficulty is less in principle (for example, datasets from the UK Data Archive should already be cited whenever used, and can be easily) but in practice; it just rarely happens. JISC is funding several projects that might help – CLADDIER, StoreLink and OJIMS are the most obvious examples, but it’s not necessarily something that a JISC project alone can address.
Posted by: Neil Jacobs
Open Repositories 2008
2008 … is that the date that it’s happening or is that the number of delegates that have decided to come along! This year’s Open Repositories conference (to take place in Southampton 1- 4 April) has easily surpassed the number of registrants that signed up for the same conference last year when it took place in Texas. This is interesting for two reasons I think. Firstly, some people have entertained the notion recently that maybe repositories haven’t lived up to their own hype … that they don’t contain enough material to be taken seriously … and that academics will never be persuaded to engage with them in a sustained and serious way. Well if you want to argue this, where better to do it than amongst more than 400 people from all over the world, almost all of whom are committed to ensuring that repositories are open, interoperable and as effective as possible for everyone involved with research and teaching. Except of course if you do want to do that (and you haven’t registered already) then you’re a bit late … ‘cos registration has closed! What you can do though is look at this blog during the conference because I’m intending to do some posts during the conference.
I said there were two interesting things didn’t I? The other thing is about size. I always thought they like to do everything big in Texas. Big hats. Big steaks. Big country. I didn’t realise that Southampton had even bigger aspirations. I’ll have to remember to pack my fifteen-gallon hat when I set off down South in two weeks time.
Posted by: Neil Grindley
Keeping up with the SUEs
The Repositories and Preservation programme has a strand called Start Up and Enhancement (SUE). This strand deals with the starting up and enhancing of repositories. There are 44 projects involved in this strand and they are incredibly varied.
As the projects are numerous and varied, we are using a number of methods to help people interested in the projects find out more about them and follow their progress:
- There is a webpage which categorises the projects by the themes they are addressing.
- Another webpage categorises the projects by the software they are using.
- A number of the projects use blogs to communicate their progress. We have collected all the feeds from the SUE blogs into one place. (I can send an opml file to anyone interested, my contact details are on the JISC website).
Contact details for all the SUE projects can be found by following the links on the JISC webpages linked above.
Posted by: Andy McGregor
Opportunity to help make HILT’s terminology services useful in your information service
The JISC -funded HILT project is looking to make contact with staff in information services or projects interested in helping it test and refine its developing terminology services. The project is currently working to create pilot web services that will deliver machine-readable terminology and cross-terminology mappings data likely to be useful to information services wishing to extend or enhance the efficacy of their subject search or browse services. Based on SRW/U , SOAP , and SKOS , the HILT facilities, when fully operational, will permit such services to improve their own subject search and browse mechanisms by using HILT data in a fashion transparent to their users. On request, HILT will serve up machine-processable data on individual subject schemes (broader terms, narrower terms, hierarchy information, preferred and non-preferred terms, and so on) and interoperability data (usually intellectual or automated mappings between schemes, but the architecture allows for the use of other methods) – data that can be used to enhance user services. The project is also developing an associated toolkit that will help service technical staff to embed HILT-related functionality into their services. The primary aim is to serve JISC funded information services or services at JISC institutions, but information services outside the JISC domain may also find the proposed services useful and wish to participate in the test and refine process.
Although the primary focus of the work is to improve interoperability during cross-search or browse by subject, the facilities offered can also be used for other purposes. Examples of possible uses include:
- Providing the best terms for a subject search in a remote service that uses a subject scheme unfamiliar to ‘home service’ users. HILT currently has the following KOS mounted and available: AAT, CAB, GCMD, HASSET, IPSV, LCSH, MeSH, NMR, SCAS, UNESCO, and DDC.
- Improving recall in a subject search of one or more databases by enriching the set of terms known to a user by providing synonyms and related terms.
- Generating an interactive browse structure where a scheme is arranged hierarchically.
- Taking a user’s subject term and using it to identify available information services with subject coverage relevant to the query via collections and/or services databases such as IESR and SCONE
The project is also looking to test other associated facilities it intends to offer for embedding in JISC or institutional information services – for example a spell-check mechanism and machine to machine delivery of Wordnet data.
The test and refine process is likely to begin towards the end of March 2008 and continue for at least six months beyond that. Individuals or services interested in participating, should begin by joining the HILT-Collaborators email list at http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?SUBED1=hilt-collaborators&A=1 .
Note that, at this stage, both the facilities and the subject schemes are only being made available for testing purposes – to allow services to help us test and refine them (and, in time, evaluate their usefulness). They cannot and should not be built into operational services.
HILT Web page
HILT Contacts page
Posted by: Andy McGregor
Now THAT is what I call preservation …
For those interested in the e-journal archiving field … Portico (long-term archiving specialists) have signed a deal to place an offline copy of their 6 million articles in the e-Depot archive (long-term archiving specialists) based at the Koninklijke Bibliotheek, the National Library of the Netherlands (the KB).
http://www.portico.org/news/022708.html
Portico are clearly taking this preservation business VERY seriously indeed! … and good for them.
thanks to Steve Hitchcock for seeing this
Posted by: Neil Grindley