Host your own programme meeting
JISC regularly holds meetings for the people involved in the projects funded under a particular programme. These programme meetings are popular. Well, some parts are, the networking parts are popular, the parts where we discuss JISC objectives and reporting are less popular.
Because the Repositories and Preservation Programme is very large (circa 80 projects) and addresses a variety of themes, it is very difficult for JISC to design programme meetings that meet the networking and sharing needs of all the project staff while still acheiving those pesky JISC objectives.
To help with this difficulty we decided to offer extra funding to project staff to enable them to host their own programme meetings. These meetings would be free from JISC interference (unless desired) and would be based around themes chosen by the project staff. The only restriction we placed on the meetings was that they had to include case studies and networking.
We got a healthy response to this idea and as a result the following meetings will be funded:
20th May 2008 - Differences between research repositories and repositories for learning and teaching purposes - DRAW project (University of Worcester).
June 2008 - From VLE to Repository: How do we do it? - CURVE project (University of Coventry).
June 2008 - Digital Curation and Preservation Projects Forum – Placing Ourselves in the Bigger Picture - The preservation strand of the Repositories and Preservation Programme.
September 2008 - The Impact of Organisational Culture on Repository Growth and Development - Embed project (Cranfield University).
November 2008 - Advocacy issues in populating institutional repositories - BURP project (University of Bradford).
November or December 2008 - Demonstrating and exploiting repository value - NECTAR (University of Northampton) and WRAP (University of Warwick) projects.
All dates may be subject to change.
The meetings are primarily for staff working on projects funded under the repositories and preservation programme however some people from outside may be invited and any spare capacity will be opened up to the wider community.
Further details will be blogged in due course.
Posted by: Andy McGregor
1,924 collections added to the Information Environment Service Registry
The Information Environment Service Registry is now richer by nearly 2,000 resources. These resources are collections of content that are hosted in the UK, relevant to UK higher education and free at point of use. The information about these collections was collected by the recent Digital Repositories and Archives Inventory.
The inventory completed in October and discovered 1,924 collections. Phase 2 of the inventory is due to complete in June 2008 and is expected to push the total number of collections up to approximately 3,000. The collections gathered from phase 2 will be added to the Information Environment Service Registry sometime after June 2008.
Users will benefit from this content being added to the Information Environment Service Registry as the resources can be easily discovered by portals and other applications. Similarly the collection owners will benefit as this represents another mechanism for discovering their resource.
Posted by: Andy McGregor
The Repository Challenge at OR08
The judging of the repository challenge is in full swing and our august panel of judges are being treated to fast and furious demonstrations from eighteen different teams made up of delegates at the Open Repositories 2008 conference. This competition has been organised by the Common Repositories Interfaces Group and $5000 prize money is at stake for the best demonstration of some capacity to create a new and useful item of functionality that will work across at least two different repository platforms. Entrants have 5 minutes to put their idea over to our panel of 5 judges and then have to face a further five minutes of questioning. This is tough …! but all the participants are doing a great job of communicating their hard work, some of which has been created in hotel rooms and at various refectory tables around the campus of Southampton University over the last two days. The prize will be awarded at the conference dinner this evening.
Posted by: Neil Grindley
Changing faces in the JISC IE Team
On 9th May Phil Vaughan will be leaving the JISC to join the British Library and work on UK PubMed Central. Phil has managed the Tools and Innovation programme and the JORUM learning objects repository work while at JISC. As part of this Phil has worked with the JORUM team in thinking through a range of service models that will offer a platform for the sharing of learning objects. We all wish Phil well and hope to see him around in his new role managing UK PubMed Central programme.
Along with sad news there is also good news! Amber Thomas came back to work at JISC last month after her maternity leave. So as well as being a mother now she is working part-time. She will be managing the Tools and Innovation Programme, the JORUM and the Repositories Support Project. So she’ll be busy! Welcome back Amber.
Posted by: Rachel Bruce