What makes a “good” API”? Can we say anything about good practice in providing or using machine interfaces to third party services on the web? UKOLN have consulted widely and suggest, among other things, that providers of APIs should make it useful, keep it simple, follow standards and use consistent naming structures. For API users … Read more
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 … Read more
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 … Read more
At the JISCCETIS08 conference session on Open Educational Content/Resources (OEC/OER), we had a really useful discussion about what “minimal tagging” might mean in terms of OEC today. It was part of my presentation on technical infrastructure for the JISC/HEA OEC Programme. By infrastructure, I think I mean Paul Walk’s soft definition of infrastructure The discussion … Read more
This question comes up reasonably often: what is / should be the relation between institutional and subject OA repositories? There are some surprisingly strong views on this question. A JISC report just completed takes a very pragmatic line, simply asking where are the areas of common interest and where can the two types of repository … Read more
At one end of the spectrum there are standards such as SWAP (Scholarly Works -DC- Application Profile) and CERIF. At the other end of the spectrum we have unstructured tags and full-text indexing. A new JISC report looks at this question from the point of view of resource discovery (there are many others, of course). … Read more
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 … Read more
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