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.
Several people have asked what counts as a “repository”, especially with respect to strand A5 of the call.
For the purposes of this call for proposals, a repository is a managed store of content that enables sharing of that content, so the key words are ‘managed’, ‘sharing’ and ‘content’. If a filestore (etc) does this adequately for the intended users then fine, though obviously for strand A5 it would benefit from some enhancement.
Please note that whatever definition of “repository” bidders use, they must read Section 4 of the briefing document (linked from the above post) – there are some conditions the repository would have to meet by the end of the project.
Go to the following link to see the notes and record of the call Briefing Day that was held on 15 December 2008.
http://tinyurl.com/9r5spz
There have been some queries about how the structure of the proposals (outlined in para 167) maps to the evaluation criteria in para 166. In particular, para 167 includes “Impact”, which is not a headline evaluation criterion. It is, however, included under “Appropriateness and fit to programme objectives and overall value tio JISC community”. We are asking that proposals explicitly highlight the expected impact of the project, and this will be evaluated alongside other relevant aspects of the proposal, under the “Appropriateness” criterion. I hope that clarifies.