CALL ANNOUNCEMENT: Exposing Digital Content for Education and Research
PLEASE WATCH THIS SPACE (subscribe to the feed for this blog) FOR FURTHER INFORMATION ABOUT THE “EXPOSING DIGITAL CONTENT FOR EDUCATION AND RESEARCH” (aka Linkeddata) CALL.
London, University of London Student Union. Today at the #Linkeddata #London meetup JISC announced that a Call will be issued in March requesting bids for projects to make content available on the Web working using linked data approaches.
To note, the above announced call was originally labelled on the JISC funding Roadmap as “Innovative ways to Deposit, Expose and Discover Web Resources”. The original grant funding call was planned for issue in early January but due to the funding letter from DBIS to HEFCE on 22 December 2009 it was put on hold whilst funding implications were assessed. At the HEFCE Board meeting in late January the decisions regarding the final impacts on current capital budgets were agreed. As a result of this the grant funding Call will now go ahead, albeit with a changed scope and a lower budget, it’s emphasis will still be upon deposit and exposure of content. The re-scoped Call is summarised below. We aim to have this call out in March and there will be a six week bid preparation period.
| Strand | Title | Description | Total £ | Max £ per project | Range £ per project | Max number of projects | Max Duration |
| B | Expose | Projects that enable content to be made available on the Web using structured data, in particular linked data which increases its potential value to researchers, teachers and learners. | £750,000 | £100,000 | £10-£100k | 20 | 12 months |
As soon as this call is approved by policy we will announce that the call is live and that we welcome proposals. If you have any queries in the meantime please contact d.flanders@jisc.ac.uk for further information.
This Call strand will also be released with the Deposit strand of the Call. Please see separate post for further information about the Deposit Call.
Repositories and the cloud - useful links
JISC and Eduserv are jointly hosting a meeting to discuss repositories and the cloud on Tuesday 23rd of February. Full details are on the event website and Andy Powell has written a great blog post introducing the event and asking for people’s views.
To accompany Andy’s post I thought I’d share a selection of links to information that might be useful to those attending the event and to people interested in cloud computing and repositories.
Repository specific links:
- The JISC Fedorazon project looked at setting up a repository on Amazon’s cloud offering
- The ePrints team are investigating the use of the cloud
- Information about DuraSpace’s DuraCloud project
- The national institute of Science and Technology produced a good definition of cloud computing
- There’s a JISC CETIS activity group looking at cloud computing in institutions which has produced some really useful documents
- The Tower and the Cloud, an Educause ebook about cloud computing is a detailed overview of the cloud and Higer Education
- Cornell University has a useful overview on outsourcing and cloud computing for universities
- Berkeley published an interesting, academic view of the cloud
JISC links:
- Cloud computing in the JISC strategy
- Technical review of cloud computing for research
- Using cloud computing for research
- Review of the environmental impacts of the cloud
- My colleague James Farnhill collects links to resources about cloud computing that he’s found useful on his delicious account
That’s the list we’ve got so far, what else do you think is worth reading in this area? Leave a comment and I’ll add it in.
For those of you who are not able to attend the event, we will be writing up the event to ensure there are useful outputs from the day and you can follow and join discussion at the event on Twitter by using the #repcloud tag.
Library systems call - thanks for proposals
Thanks to everyone who has put in a proposal under Call 12/09 on enhancing library management systems for all their time and effort.
Proposals are now with markers. As you know from the Call, we hope to get back to proposers with outcomes during week beginning March 22 (the intervening time is to allow for marking and then for the marks to be collated and the Evaluation Panel to meet etc.).
An update on PIRUS2 and article level usage statistics
The PIRUS2 (Publisher and Insitutional Repository Usage Statistics) project - which I blogged about briefly in September and which is exploring technical, organisational and economic issues in collecting and aggregating article usage statistics from repositories and publishers - has now been underway for a few months.
The project plan is available from the JISC Web site, with further information available from the project Web site. The primary partners in this project are MIMAS, Cranfield University, COUNTER, CrossRef and Oxford University Press - which means that it is well placed to consider the many issues to which the collection, aggregation and use of article level statistics gives rise.
PIRUS2 is not alone in considering these issues and is in contact with the Open Access Statistik and SURFSure projects in Germany and the Netherlands respectively which are also working on collecting article level usage data from repositories. The projects are taking similar technical approaches. One key decision - which is in line with a recommendation of the JISC usage statistics review of 2008 - has been to format log data as OpenURL context objects. One explanation of OpenURL context objects can be found on the SURF Web site. Other standards being used are OAI-PMH and SUSHI for harvesting the usage data.
PIRUS2 continues to the end of 2010.