Last week saw a two-day workshop, held at Warwick University, exploring the future of library systems. I wanted to briefly highlight the format of the two days, and reflect on some of the outcomes from the event. In particular, how the workshop has helped inform a new funding call that will be published in early … Read more
Over the last couple of weeks 3 very interesting reports have drifted through my news feeds on libraries and linked data: The library of congress has announced plans for pursuing a replacement for MARC and these plans “will be focused on the Web environment, Linked Data principles and mechanisms, and the Resource Description Framework (RDF) as … Read more
As part of the Mobile Infrastructure for Libraries programme I am pleased to announce that 6 new projects have recently received funding, with projects starting in November and finishing in August 2012. The majority of the projects are innovating around library content and services to develop prototypes for the innovative delivery of scholarly content and library services. … Read more
Yesterday saw the shared academic knowledge base (KB+) briefing day for approx. 60 library directors and senior managers take place in London, at the Wellcome Trust. The project, known as KB+, is developing a shared community service that will improve the quality, accuracy, coverage and availability of data for the management, selection, licensing, negotiation, review … Read more
Today sees the start of a new programme of work that’s exploring Research Support Services for Scholars (RSS4S) being undertaken by Ithaka S+R. As the blog for the projects makes clear: This series of discipline-specific projects aims to provide critically needed research about the evolving behavior of scholars to the information support service providers who … Read more
My colleagues and I in the digital infrastructure team are currently knee deep in preparations for releasing a number of funding calls at the end of July. The calls will cover 4 areas: Library infrastructure – focusing on mobile devices. Ben Showers is responsible for this area. Background information on this call can be found … Read more
JISC has recently funded a number of projects as part of the grant funding call 01/11: Digital infrastructure: Embedding usability & improving the uptake of resources & tools. Most projects have just started, and over the next few weeks they will begin publishing their project plans and initial blog posts. The support project at Southampton … Read more
EDINA have released a fascinating dataset derived from their OpenURL Router service. The data has been made available under an ODC-PDDL licence with BY-SA community norms which allows it to be reused by anyone with an interest in the data. The OpenURL Router Data is derived from the logs of the OpenURL Router, a service for institutions who have … Read more
In the next couple of weeks JISC will be issuing a funding call to investigate Developing a Digital Infrastructure for the effective delivery of library content and services to mobile devices. In what is essentially an experiment I have decided to post the ‘background’ section of the funding call on the blog. I have done … Read more
The information environment programme 2009-11 (mercifully shortened to inf11) is drawing to a close and we are starting to reflect on what it has achieved. We chose to manage this programme as one very broad programme rather than a number of smaller programmes and it has included work on: Preservation Activity data Automatic metadata generation … Read more