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
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
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