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
The JISC Digital Repositories and Archives Inventory project has finished phase 2 and has catalogued a total of 3,707 online collections that staff and students in higher education can access for free. These catalogue records will be added to the IESR. The brief of the inventory was to identify all the repositories and achives in … Read more
I learnt all sort of things last week at a workshop in Cardiff. The power consumption of various bits of an average server for instance. Power supply unit – 38w Fan – 10w CPU – 80w Memory – 36w Disks – 12w Slots – 50w Motherboard – 25w I learnt that you lose roughly 50% … 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
I attended a very interesting workshop for the ReStore project last week. The project is run by Southampton’s ESRC National Centre for Research Methods and is investigating the use of a repository to host and maintain orphan web resources. The problem that the project is addressing is that very useful web resources are produced by … Read more
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 … Read more
The information environment, and repositories in particular, were highlighted by Sir Ron Cooke (JISC chair), in his opening keynote at the JISC conference. (See the online conference proceedings.) He described the vision of a national e-infrastructure supporting the “body of knowledge” at the centre. He told delegates that “[his] nightmare is the challenge of the … Read more
The Repositories and Preservation Programme contains a strand called start up and enhancement. This is our straight talking strand in that all the projects are either starting up a new repository or enhancing an established one. One of the interesting things about this strand is that all the funding for projects was provided on a … Read more