Repositories and Preservation Programme Synthesis
We are proposing to undertake a synthesis of the repositories and preservation programme which will support action. This means that the outputs need to be targeted at decision makers with additional information for those that will have to implement the decisions.
We have taken as a starting point the idea that decision makers are most likely to take note of what we are saying if repositories or preservation address problems that they are already worried about, and that many of these will stem from government, funding council or similar policies which they have to implement.
We have identified policies, decision makers who are concerned with them and ways in which we think that repositories or preservation can help.
We are aware that there will be other policies out there that we should be considering, that there may be other ways in which repositories or preservation could help and there may be other people we need to address.
We would very much welcome comments and thoughts on our thinking so that we can take it forward and start the synthesis.
Please comment either by posting comments or by email to Tom Franklin who is leading on this (tom@franklin-consulting.co.uk).
Research
The Research Excellence Framework is of concern to many at the moment including senior managers, research managers, researchers and librarians. We believe that it is likely that institutional repositories will make collection of the relevant information easier and cheaper and will support whatever metrics are likely to be selected. It is also possible that open access repositories will lead to research being found more easily and therefore cited more widely. This also supports increasing research recognition.
Funding mandates from funding bodies such as research councils and Wellcome can be addressed through the use of required repositories (such as UK Pubmed Central), but through the use of suitable institutional repositories that support things like embargo periods.
Community and business engagement requires that information is made accessible to those that might effective use of it. Institutional repositories may assist here.
Teaching and learning
Cost reduction may be achieved through better sharing of learning materials, including learning objects, this will be of interest to both managers and teachers who need to then implement and make use of repositories, but contributors will also have to think about using appropriate standards. Integration with the VLE would also enable the most current version of materials to be easily accessible.
Quality assurance of courses, especially franchised courses for instance between a university and FE colleges is of concern to senior managers and teachers and could be supported by making learning resources available across the group through use of repositories.
Many institutions and their managers are concerned with retaining control over the IPR of their learning materials, institutional repositories for learning objects offer one way of controlling access effectively.
Information services and libraries
All managers and Staff are concerned with meeting their legal and Contractual requirements including self-deposit / open access and being able to enforce embargoes. Institutional repositories can help with these issues.
Help wanted
Are these the most important drivers?
Are there other drivers that we should consider?
Have we correctly identified the key audiences who can help to identify these things?
Posted by: Tom Franklin
Click streams -Library Managment Systems
I’ve been meaning to do a short post about the recent library systems study that JISC commissioned with SCONUL so people know about it. So here it is. I’ve been reminded of it as I’m at the Eduserv Symposium today and Ken Chad who worked on the study asked a question related to it.
The Eduserv Symposium is focusing on disruptive technologies and what the impact might be on the organisation. So in our case universities and colleges, and as Andy Powell pointed out in his introduction there is also disruption for related service providers such as Eduserv (and for that matter JISC). So one question is how should the academic/education sector respond to the ‘disruptive’ technologies (for that read web 2.0/ service provision on the network e.g. google and amazon services). Ken Chad mentioned the opportunity that the sector has in terms of the data known about users;for example click streams. The library management systems study (that Ken worked on with Sero Consulting) sees this as an opportunity for academic libraries to make their services more relevant to users. Of course there are delicate issues surrounding the use of click streams; not in the least privacy as Larry Johnston, NMC, pointed out in response to Ken’s question at the Eduserv Symposium.
The report covers far more ground that click streams, it is a horizon scan of what is happening in the UK academic sector in terms of LMS provision and what might be the requirements in the changing context that libraries now find themselves.
http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/resourcediscovery/libraryms.aspx
Metadata for stuff in repositories …
I just wanted to highlight some metadata application profile work that is underway as part of the information environment repository programme. Having attended the birds of a feather session (coordinated by Rosemary Russell, UKOLN and Julie Allinson, University of York) about this at OR08 I finally got to see what JISC had funded. Today at the JISC Repositories and Preservation Advisory Group we discussed some of the work and I guess it made me think it was worth making a few more people aware of it. JISC has funded the development of:
metadata application profiles based on Dublin Core for:
Scholarly works
Geo-spatial data/information
Images
Multi-media
And we’ve also funded some work to assess what might be done in terms of application profiles for the following:
Learning objects
Scientific data
A little bit of context…
After using OAI-PMH across repositories in the JISC Focus on Access to Institutional Repositories (FAIR) programme the experience was that Dublin Core was often not rich enough to be very useful to end user applications. The requirement for both metadata and full text indexing was a specific recommendation of the FAIR ePrints UK harvest and search project. After other work also confirmed this the response was to seek to add to basic DC by developing an application profile. The scholarly works application profile (SWAP) was developed by Julie Allinson (at the time UKOLN now University of York) and Andy Powell (Eduserv Foundation). SWAP aims to help support richer search functions and also to support full text indexing, and as I understand it another benefit is navigation between different versions. It is based on the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) model which uses the following entities: work, expression, manifestation and item.
You can read more about SWAP here:
http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue50/allinson-et-al/
SWAP, although based on a FRBR type model was kept quite simple. It seems that when creating SWAP some hard lines were drawn to avoid too much complexity and from the feedback I have heard it seems to have addressed requirements. It was certainly good to hear from one of the attendees at the OR08 meeting that SWAP was “exactly what they required”. Mick Eadie (Visual Arts Data Service, University College for the Creative Arts) also described the images AP at the OR08 meeting, and it seems to have tried to keep a simple approach too. A draft of the images AP is now out for comment. See:
http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/repositories/digirep/index/Images_Application_Profile
Of course to get the real benefit of these application profiles the implementation of them has to be made as easy as possible and we need to encourage take-up. Working with repository software providers to support the APs is one thing that might be possible and the teams supporting the work intend to do this. SWAP has been implemented at Warwick University as they customised EPrints software to support it.
If you really want to help or know someone that can 
a job advert is currently out for a related metadata advocacy post at UKOLN: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/vacancies/08H127A/job-ad/
Note that SWAP is the most mature of the APs; the other areas are in initial draft and are still being developed.
Here are some related links:
SWAP:
http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/repositories/digirep/index/Eprints_Application_Profile
The geo spatial work that James Reid, EDINA (University of Edinburgh) is leading on is currently out for comment:
http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/repositories/digirep/images/e/ef/Geospatial_Application_Profile.doc
Work done by Phil Barker, CETIS, (Heriot-Watt University) on the learning material application profile is here:
http://www.icbl.hw.ac.uk/lmap/domainModel.draft1.html
It is probably worth mentioning that previously some work has been done for learning materials/objects. See information on RLLOMAP: http://www.intute.ac.uk/publications/rdn-ltsn/ap/
and: http://standards-catalogue.ukoln.ac.uk/index/UK_LOM_Core
RLLOMAP seems to have a similar aim to the current work in that it was to support the exchange of metadata using OAI-PMH and UK LOM did build on this.
Not surprisingly the multi-media application profile is a tough one and drafts are not yet available as far as I know. But I do know via Pete Johnston (Eduserv Foundation) that there are some early results being reviewed! Gayle Calverley is leading the work in this area.
There is also the DCMI Scholarly Communications Community where discussion should take place about the application profiles once the work picks up as a whole (coordination and outreach is currently being planned):
http://dublincore.org/groups/scholar/
Jorum to move to Open Access
Jorum has recently been awarded £2.4m by JIIE to do what so many people have said needs doing: it is going open access! The new service (“JorumOpen”) will operate under a Creative Commons License and will not require user registration to access and download its content. Users that have already contributed content through existing licences will be contacted to ask if they wish to sign a new open access licence or continue to store their content under the same terms in a parallel service (“JorumPrivilege”).
The new services (collectively known as “Jorum2”) will start being rolled out this Autumn. There will be a range of added value services - such as a development bay to explore integration with VLE’s and to allow users to experiment with learning object reuse - as well as continued R&D. The full press release is attached.
www.jorum.ac.uk
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 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
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