How can we share images more effectively for use in teaching and learning? The CLiC report (“Community-Led Image Collections) looked at this question a couple of years ago and, more recently JISC and the Higher Education Academy co-funded some case studies building on that report. The results are perhaps unsurprising, but worth bearing in mind … Read more
There are more and more opportunities for universities to take advantage of services offered by third parties on the web. It isn’t hard to see where exploiting Facebook or Twitter, or more ‘academic’ services such as SherpaRoMEO, can add value to a university’s ICT offer to its staff and students. Obviously there are issues, some … Read more
Data on usage events can be the basis for a variety of services, the most obvious being the generation of metrics similar to COUNTER statistics. A report from a small review study supported by JISC outlines one approach to sharing such data. Based on a consultation workshop, and drawing on the architecture proposed by Johan … Read more
Manuel Castells and Professor John Barrow featured in a recent edition of the Forum programme on the BBC World Service. It was an interesting discussion, touching on Castells’ view of the emerging network organisation and society, and Professor Barrow’s observations on scientific practice in that context. Castells sees ICT as affording advantage to organisational arrangements … Read more
I was talking with a researcher the other day who said that, despite his institution mandating deposit of research papers in his institutional repository, he didn’t comply – prefering to deposit in an international subject repository. Naturally, I asked him ‘why?’. He said that it was because he wanted each of his papers to be … Read more
With the release of the beta OAI-ORE specification this week, I thought it was worth highlighting some of the JISC work in the UK that is contributing to this initiative. Two short projects are looking to experiment with ORE and feed back into its development. The FORESITE project at Liverpool, run by Rob Sanderson, has … Read more
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, … Read more
There’s a new report on the JISC website, authored by Neil Beagrie, Julia Chruszcz and Brian Lavoie. It looks at how much it costs to preserve research data and, perhaps as importantly, how institutions and others could calculate this. There are lots of reasons why this report is likely to have an impact – looking … Read more
What do researchers care about? It’s probably uncontentious to say that they care about access, cost, copyright and quality. There’s a report published last month from the JISC Scholarly Communications Group that goes into a bit more detail: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/aboutus/workinggroups/topconcernsreport.doc There are perhaps few surprises – the concerns might be paraphrased as ‘lack of access’, ‘some … Read more
We’re hoping to present some themed web pages on the innovation work being funded under the JISC Information Environment area, including one on research data. I thought I’d use this blog to offer preview / pilot that page. I’m not sure if that’s an acceptable use of a blog, but I’m sure I’ll find out. … Read more