The current buzz and enthusiasm around data is difficult to avoid. Whether it’s the challenges of ‘big data’, the potential of data-driven techniques, or simply the power and clarity of data visualisations; data is inescapably entwined with much of what we do, and the systems and services we provide and use. Long before we were all swept … Read more
Background to this blog post The OER Rapid Innovation Call for Proposals was announced in November 2011. It is open to HEFCE-funded institutions to bid. I am very aware that the issues in scope for this Call are broader then the UK. It includes a snapshot of the digital infrastructure space at November 2011, it … Read more
***THIS CALL FOR PROPOSALS CLOSED ON 27TH JANUARY 2012 and this blog post will no longer be updated*** The Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) and the Higher Education Academy (HEA) invites institutions to submit funding proposals for projects to enhance digital infrastructure to support open content for education. Read the Call for Proposals. Supplementary Information … Read more
Released later this month, with a deadline of mid January, this Call will be for short (max 6 month) projects to develop solutions to enhance the digital infrastructure to support the use of open content in education. Eligible institutions (HEFCE capital) can bid for between £10,000 and £25,000. Technical staff should already be in place. … Read more
Updates, reflections and next steps on digital infrastructure issues in UK’s OER Programme Read more
We have recently funded a new programme to focus on the ways that universities can benefit from collecting, analysing and reusing the data about the way that their staff and students interact with institutional systems. There are obvious examples of this type of innovation paying dividends in the commercial world such as Tesco’s use of … Read more
EDINA runs a service called the OpenURL router. This service helps link the OpenURL resolvers run by institutions to information services provided by publishers and other suppliers. This service logs interesting and potentially useful activity data about the way that it is used and JISC have commissioned EDINA to investigate whether this data can be … Read more
The JISC Information Environment and eResearch team have been working on a grant funding call which should be released on or around 4th October. There will be a briefing day in London on 11th October; more information to follow about that. Those who keep a close eye on the JISC website and in particular the … Read more
Business intelligence resulting from ‘user activity data’ could help universities to manage resources more efficiently, budget more effectively, make smarter purchasing decisions, improve their services and demonstrate impact. The likes of Amazon and Tesco use activity data to make business decisions and to also provide recommender services on top of this data. They know a … Read more
The PIRUS2 (Publisher and Insitutional Repository Usage Statistics) project – which I blogged about briefly in September and which is exploring technical, organisational and economic issues in collecting and aggregating article usage statistics from repositories and publishers – has now been underway for a few months. The project plan is available from the JISC Web … Read more