Information Environment (IE) & Virtual Research Environments (VRE) call for proposals: Briefing Day notes/Q & A
On 15th December a briefing day on the Information Environment and e-Research JISC Circular (12/08) was held. The event was held in order to provide an overview of the circular and to give people the opportunity to ask questions. The circular has £11m of JISC funding against it which is quite substantial. The calls in 12/08 focus on: digital repositories for learning and research, virtual research environments, use of text-mining and automatic meta-data generation and digital preservation. So in short the circular is seeking projects that are mainly about the creation, management and sharing of information that is part of the research and learning process in ways that support researchers, learners, teachers and administrators.
Here are the links to the presentations from the Briefing Day:
Policy and bid submission
Automated Metadata and Text-mining- strand A1
Digital Repositories: Start-up, rapid innovation and enhancement - strands A3- A5
Developing e-infrastructure to support research disciplines and digital preservation exemplars - strands A2 and A6
Virtual Research Environments (VRE) - strands B1-B3
Notes of the discussion and questions and answers from the briefing day:
IE and VRE Circular 12/08 15 December Briefing Day questions and answers
For some notes of the whole event as it went along see Andy Powell’s (Eduserv Foundation) live blog.
A few points of context:
JISC has funded projects and services in all of these areas previously. So what is different this time? I would say there are three general issues that underpin the projects sought in this circular:
* reflecting the maturity of digital repositories and other types of ‘e-infrastructure’ this circular is seeking further and improved alignment of these systems with user requirements. An emphasis in the calls is the need to involve/take into account end-users and a bringing together of these ‘e-infrastructure’ systems with research and learning processes.
* both the IE and the VRE strands of activity are about building on previous investment and lessons - so these are not completely new areas of activity. In the case of repository and digital preservation activity for example we’re seeking more repositories, improved repositories and policies, further integration with other systems and in areas such as digital preservation we’re looking for actual implementation of solutions that have previously been developed. However although this circular is generally about implementing areas where there has already been substantial work the projects are about improvement and so will involve new ideas and development.
* recognition that in many cases cross domain teams and skills are required to create, manage, use and develop digital systems, supporting policies and related practices within institutions.
The decision to publish the IE and VRE call strands together was partly a practical one as both funding areas were due to issue circulars at the same time, but there was more to this decision than that. Publishing them together was, I think, essential in terms of showing that information systems should not be developed independently of the requirements of the research process. I think if we’d published the calls separately there would’ve been a danger of perpetuating this often unhelpful division. In particular the projects sought under A2, Developing e-infrastructure to support research disciplines bridge both areas and seek to bring the research process and scholarly communications requirements together with underlying information systems. This particular strand in the IE calls also represents the fact that developing the Information Environment (or e-infrastructure) is not just about managing and disseminating information it is about supporting and improving research (and of course learning and teaching, although the projects called for under A2 focus on research). I think the connections that are emerging between both the IE and VRE programme areas are a good thing and are inevitable to progress.
The Information Environment (and Virtual Research Environment) Call for Proposals November 2008
The JISC is calling for proposals relating to the ‘Information Environment’ and ‘Virtual Research Environments’. This blog post relates only to those elements of the Call relating to the Information Environment, that is Strands A1-A6:
- Automated metadata generation & text mining (JISC contact: Balviar Notay b.notay@jisc.ac.uk or Amber Thomas amber.thomas@jisc.ac.uk)
- Developing e-infrastructure to support research disciplines (JISC contact: Neil Grindley n.grindley@jisc.ac.uk)
- Repositories: start-up (JISC contact: Andy McGregor a.mcgregor@jisc.ac.uk)
- Repositories: rapid innovation (JISC contact: Andy McGregor a.mcgregor@jisc.ac.uk)
- Repositories: enhancement (JISC contact: Neil Jacobs n.jacobs@jisc.ac.uk or Andy McGregor a.mcgregor@jisc.ac.uk)
- Preservation exemplars (JISC contact: Neil Grindley n.grindley@jisc.ac.uk)
There is also an accompanying briefing document which describes important background information, and outlines some requirements that are being placed on repositories that are involved in bids under these headings. The Call itself spells out the aims and intended scope of projects under these headings, so I won’t repeat it all here.
There will be a Briefing Day on 15th December 2008.
The purpose of this blog post is to be the anchor for an FAQ relating to Strands A1-A6 of the Call. If you have queries relating to these strands of the Call, you can contact the relevant JISC person as noted above and in the Call document, or you can add a comment to this blog post. Either way, if the query would be relevant to other bidders then our response will be via a further comment added to this blog post. In this way we hope to build up an FAQ that all potential bidders can access easily and quickly. We’d also welcome comments (or emails) on the use of the blog for this purpose.
“… to engage or not engage…” the choice for libraries.
A couple of weeks ago I attended the RLUK conference, their first conference and one that everyone there seemed to enjoy. Unfortunately I only made it for the last day for a slot where a panel of funders, policy bodies and service providers, including JISC, said a few words about priorities and partnership with others.
I did get to hear Lynne Brindley speak. She covered a lot of ground and most of what she said chimed with JISC priorities; albeit coming from a different set of organisational boundaries. Anyway I thought I’d just jot down what Lynne said as I think the issues she raised are well worth recounting here. I might’ve misinterpreted some things, especially since it was a while ago now but on the whole I think I’ve captured the main points.
In general she was referring to the fact that in the complex digital environment offering services that remain relevant and take advantage of what Lynne called “mass creativity” can be difficult. But she said the choice for libraries is “ to engage or not engage”. Unsurprisingly the message was to engage.
A summary of issues she raised:
• Developing digital information services does incur a cost. A lot of innovative projects have been developed but we have not yet fully tackled sustainability.
• Libraries should support innovative scholarship. We’re now in a complex world where the web is a platform of “mass creativity” but offers real opportunities for innovative scholarship. She referred to some examples where digitisation and making digital resources available have led to new knowledge.
• Libraries need to move well beyond the critical role they play in licensing and recognise that things like document supply are not as relevant as they once were.
• “life beyond the document” how should libraries respond to this?
• The research data question and the skills gap – we have data librarians but not enough of them; traditionally libraries are more orientated towards humanities.
• Masses of information of different types – blogs, email etc are all important to scholarship they are the ephemeral information of today; what are we doing about versions of works or notes and annotations? Think of authorship and how notes are kept of authors that enhance research.
• Many people use information in different ways, skim reading etc, therefore should delivery be different, does it matter that people use information differently? Information literacy does that matter? Should libraries be helping to equip people with the skills to make the right judgments?
• The researchers of the future (and quite a few researching now) come from the born digital age and will use information differently, so what is information literacy?
• Web archiving: the web is a huge resource that must be accessible into the future for research; the legal issues are a problem but hopefully legal deposit will make a difference.
• The value of the library can sometimes be summarised as: authenticity, authority and long-term use – what about authority v amateur?
• Digital preservation is very important – this has been seen as important at policy and government levels but now it is getting into the public conscience - this is when libraries start to have real success with these issues. Just tell someone that all those photos will not be accessible and they can relate to it.
• She ended on intellectual property (IP) and referred to the EU Green Paper on Copyright and how IP deserved attention and organisations, such as academic libraries, needed to take action so any risk of locking information down further was mitigated. She emphasised that without reasonable copyright exceptions there is a risk to democratic society.
A lot of these issues are being addressed by libraries and organisations like the British Library and JISC, for example we’re responding to the EU Green Paper on Copyright in the Knowledge Economy. But despite that all of the issues require further debate and change.
JISC is about to launch a collaborative initiative with SCONUL, RLUK, The British Library and RIN that builds on our Libraries of the Future campaign and that will seek to further understand and shape the position of libraries into the future. Watch this space…it should be announced shortly.
Grant Funding Opportunities
An update on funding opportunities …
This month, November 2008, we will be releasing a Call for projects for grant funding. Outline details are on the Grant Funding Roadmap. UK FE/HE institutions are eligible to bid, with some types of projects restricted to HEFCE- and HEFCW- funded institutions, due to funding streams.
We’re finalising the Call at the moment, but you won’t go far wrong if you start thinking about what you want to do in:
- implementing automated metadata and textmining
- starting up repositories for research data, research papers, learning materials
- networking and enhancing repositories
- preservation in relation to repositories
- short technical projects to improve repository services
- connections between services to support particular disciplines
Bidders will have until January to prepare proposals, and succesful projects will be expected to start by 1st April 2009.
For those of you most interested in supporting research, please note there will also be a Call for projects related to Virtual Research Environments.
If learning and teaching resources are of particular interest, in December there will also be a Call for the forthcoming HEA/JISC Open Educational Content programme.
Date for your diary: Monday 15th December will be a Briefing Day for anyone who would like to come and hear about the funding opportunities related to the Information Environment and Virtual Research Environment Calls. It will be in Central London, probably 10-4. Details will be released soon.
If you’re not based in UK FE/HE, you may be interested in the Funding Roadmap for Invitations to Tender. These are open to anyone, so if you think you have expertise relevant to the sort of issues reported on this blog, then tenders are very welcome.
We will announce the Call on this blog as soon as it is released.
Changing library services…and some views on digital repositories.
I have just read the Ithaka report on Key Stakeholders in the Digital Transformation in Higher Education 2006, Housewright & Schonfeld, published August 25, 2008. I hadn’t intended to spend Sunday morning reading this but a colleague, Dicky Maidment-Otlet, sent me an email about it and it seemed well worth a read.
It sets out an analysis of the most significant findings from some surveys of academic librarians and academics (faculty) mainly focused on scholarly communication and library services. The US based surveys were carried out in 2000, 2003 and 2006 and the changes are reported. Although I would say there are not many surprises in the report, it does help reveal some trends and issues that libraries and those interested in serving learning and research need to get to grips with. The library functions are categorised as 1) purchaser 2) archive 3) gateway and the perceptions of librarians and academics toward these are set out, it tends to focus a little more on the academics views. Some of the main findings and conclusions are:
* The library is generally becoming less visible and the perceived dependency on the library reduced (humanities academics having more dependency than scientists). The report summarises this as ” although librarians may still be providing significant value to their constituency, the value of the brand is decreasing”;
* Academics see the role of the library as a gateway as less important but librarians still think this is a core function; although this is coloured by users accessing resources from other places (e.g. search engines/remotely) so they may not always realise they are accessing a library resource.
* The report says ” Libraries are providing these high growth fields [information provision to scientists] value in the acquisition of resources - for example licensing costly journal collections - but otherwise have been relatively absent from the workflow…”;
* Increased importance on electronic materials for academics and librarians and readiness to cancel print subscriptions or depose of print materials (although again there is a disciplinary difference between humanities, social scientists and scientists, with the scientists being furthest towards the electronic trend and using resources remotely);
* Librarians seeing value in e-books but academics being far less enthusiastic;
* Visibility of research being more important to scholars than open access publishing;
* The case for shared preservation initiatives for journals being made;
* In order to support cross disciplinary and cross institutional research and learning there is a need for “system-wide approaches” and shared standards and protocols.
Overall the report makes the case for the need to better understand user requirements so that relevant services can be provided, and for the ability to change where appropriate to be taken seriously. It also makes the point that: “Deep consideration of how the library community can best serve scientists and preserve scholarly values in the face of a rapidly changing and increasingly commercial ecosystem is needed, both on a local and the system level.” These all appear to be sensible and helpful conclusions that libraries (and organisations like JISC) need to respond to.
I think the changes implied by the report require work at various levels for example these changes might include any of the following: marketing, a different strategic approach to service delivery for different disciplines, tackling changes by working across a range of stakeholders not just libraries and academics, but management and funders too, providing change at a local level but also being prepared to provide what the report calls “system wide” services.
The issues raised in the report are all relevant to the UK academic library sector (the data being from the US will mean some differences) and the Information Environment programmes and other JISC activity. I think the findings mainly support work we’re doing, examples being the LOCKSS pilot, the e-journal archiving registry, work that will follow on from the JISC/SCONUL Library Management Systems study, further user requirements analysis etc. But defining how best to deliver information services is a real challenge and one we need to put a lot of effort into if we are to provide a relevant infrastructure for research and learning. Sometimes aspects of this are about significant longterm change and not about immediate benefits. We need to take a long view with regards to change and impact, whilst also dealing with the here and now and quick wins. Perhaps the report could’ve dealt with these different aspects a little more (although that probably wasn’t the purpose of the report), and it does cover them, in particular it points out that some disciplinary groups are early adopters.
Since a lot of our programme activity has centred on digital repositories over the past five years I thought I’d end on the digital repository section (pages 24-26 in the report). The following statements from the report do in some respects challenge some of ways in which digital repositories are sometimes viewed. Whilst I think none of this is cut and dried and digital repositories can both support the stewardship of resources and more effective scholarly communication (indeed I think repositories are definitely helping improve access to research) I think these points are worth raising and I’d be interested in people’s reactions to them.
“Although a popular topic of discussion is the possibility of repositories to transform scholarly communications, this objective is not widely held by librarians.”
“Faculty interest in objectives for repositories basically matches those of librarians, being interested principally in using them to organise and preserve local material.”
“…we do not foresee institutional repositories yielding a transformative influence on the business side of journal publishing. Other types of digital repositories, especially those for storing images and special collections, are much more likely to continue to grow in importance at all types of institutions.”
iPres 2008
The 5th International Conference on Preservation of Digital Objects took place at the British Library at the start of this week, as anyone who looked at the Guardian on Tuesday might have noticed.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/sep/30/internet.digitalmusic
It was a confident and very well organised conference and seemed to reflect the fact that the field of Digital Preservation is really beginning to articulate where and how it should position itself in the information management landscape. Even in comparison with December last year (at the Digital Curation conference in Washington D.C.), there seems to have been a shift in tone. Back then, it seemed as if a lot of the speakers were voicing concern that Digital Preservation was not only perceived as difficult by the wider community - but actually was difficult (even for preservation experts) - and there was no guarantee that solutions would be forthcoming! (I acknowledge that others may not have got the same impression from that conference but that’s how it seems to me now as I cast my mind back to it). 10 months later on however, there is much less talk about the general difficulty of it all … and much more focus on how to do it, how to collaborate, and how to sell the benefits more widely.
Admittedly, we were treated to a candid assessment at the end of the conference by a good-humoured but down-to-earth Steve Knight from the National Library of New Zealand, who felt he had to take issue with the determinedly upbeat theme of the conference “Joined Up and Working: Tools and Methods for Digital Preservation”, but nonetheless, an oversubscribed conference including delegates from 33 countries, featuring 66 speakers, in parallel sessions, attracting 6 different sponsors … would seem to indicate that even if things aren’t as ‘joined up and working’ as they might be - then it’s a pretty safe bet that with that level of enthusiasm from so many bright and inquisitive people, it soon will be!
One of the highlights for me was hearing Jose Carlos Ramalho (University of Minho, Portugal) describe the preservation solution that he and his colleagues had developed as part of the RODA and CRiB projects: a service oriented preservation approach to dealing with repository information using the concept of significant properties … ahhh, music to the ears! All up and running and being used by the Portuguese National Archives.
That’s not to say that others haven’t got ingenious functioning preservation solutions, but I was particularly impressed with Jose’s matter of factness and the briskness of his delivery. He made it all sound pretty straightforward - which makes a nice change and confers great credit on him, not only for making difficult things sound do-able … but also for sounding like he enjoys doing it.
Headline message from the conference - Don’t mention the ‘Preservation’ word! (it’s confusing and people worry about it) … it’s all about enabling future ACCESS to spectacular resources.
Inventory of digital resources catalogues 3,707 free collections
The JISC Digital Repositories and Archives Inventory project has finished phase 2 and has catalogued a total of 3,707 online collections that staff and students in higher education can access for free. These catalogue records will be added to the IESR.
The brief of the inventory was to identify all the repositories and achives in the UK that are relevant to UK higher education and are free at point of use. For the purposes of this project a very loose definition of repositories and archives was used. The only sites that were excluded were those that restricted access and those with little or no structure.
Phase 1 of the project discovered 1,924 resources and phase 2 discovered 1,783. The records from phase 1 are already in the IESR and records from phase 2 will be added soon.
Phase 2 also enriched the metadata collected about all the resources and contacted resource owners to approve or extend the data collected about their resources. This produced a very positive response with approximately 800 resource owners providing extra information about their collections.
The final report from the project is available now (http://ie-repository.jisc.ac.uk/244/) and has some very interesting results on preservation, usage rights, subject coverage, discovery, collection owners and the availability of information about the collections.
The JISC Preservation of Web Resources Workshop (PoWR)
The first JISC-PoWR workshop took place on Friday (27th June 2008) at Senate House Library, University of London and was attended by over 30 people from a wide range of professional groupings, including the Web management and Records Management communities. The workshop was entitled ‘Preservation of Web Resources: Making a Start’ and considered how delegates could begin to consider including Web resources in their preservation strategy. There was much interest in the case study presented by the University of Bath which illustrated the differing perspectives held by the web and records management communities. Bringing together these communities is something the project is seeking to address.The main presentations are now available for download:
http://jiscpowr.jiscinvolve.org/2008/06/30/workshop-1-resources-available/
Posted by: Neil Grindley
Research data curation
Back last year, following the Digital Curation Conference in Washington DC, JISC and the Andrew J Mellon Foundation hosted an international workshop to discuss and suggest where the international priorities are for research and development work supporting academic research data curation. It’s taken a while for the notes to become available, for which I apologise, but here they are:
Priorities for research data curation workshop 2007
(I realise this is a PDF file, which won’t please everyone, but shrunk the filesize by over an order of magnitude from MS Word)
The starting point for the workshop was a recognition that, while research data orients largely by (sub)discipline, the way in which infrastructure is developed and funded is often oriented nationally, or even around institutions. Some way is needed to square these two. I have to confess that, on the day, I wasn’t sure we’d made a lot of progress, but in drafting the notes I changed my mind somewhat. Certainly, Peter Murray-Rust seemed to identify the academic department infrastructure as a key point where intervention could serve both that department and the wider goal of data curation and sharing. The photos of flip chart diagrams are perhaps not easy to read or understand, but suggest a distinctive place for libraries and repositories.
Greg Crane’s Perseus project anticipated some of the topics that were covered later - notably how to design an infrastructure that is sustainable and yet adaptive - there are a few ideas in the notes. there are also a few ideas about how the problem space might be broken down so that an international approach can be taken, though this remains difficult. With luck and effort, JISC’s and other UK ‘data’ work will join up with that in the US (eg the NSF Datanet programme), Australia (Australian National Data Service), etc, and these notes will help us do that.
Many thanks to the workshop participants, listed at the end of the notes.
ReStore workshop
I attended a very interesting workshop for the ReStore project last week. The project is run by Southampton’s ESRC National Centre for Research Methods and is investigating the use of a repository to host and maintain orphan web resources.
The problem that the project is addressing is that very useful web resources are produced by research projects. However when the project funding stops the maintenance of the resources often stops. This means that the resources start to decay, broken links flourish and the usefulness of the resource deteriorates quickly.
ReStore aims to address this problem by accepting suitable resources after a review process and then hosting and curating the sites with a mixture of automated and manual processes.
The project is funded by ESRC and aims to produce a prototype repository that curates a few web resources that have been produced by other ESRC projects.
The workshop was chiefly concerned with introducing the project and discussing some of the major issues such as technical challenges, IPR and sustainability. The presentations from the day can be downloaded from the project website: http://www.ncrm.ac.uk/restore/slides/. These include some mockups of the proposed system and an overview of the proposed review and curation process.
The project’s work on development of a long-term strategy for ESRC in sustaining on-line resources will be very relevant to JISC.
The technical challenges in hosting a range of resources that may all use different software and hardware are significant and it may be better in the short term to use Amazon Web Services or a similar service to host the sites and avoid a large hardware bill.