The DAEDALUS Project : filling the repositories

In the breakout session "the FAIR and DARE experience" was presented DAEDALUS Project funded by JISC (FAIR Programme until July 2005) to build institutional repositories at Glasgow

Co-ordination to improve access in the UK : the response of the JISC to the parliamentary report 'Scientific publications: free for all?'

JISC is the Joint Information Systems Committee of the four Higher Education Funding Councils in the UK and also has a responsibility for networked services to the Further Education Colleges. JISC Strategy includes “improving the effectiveness of scholarly communication”. This involves implementing cost-effective improvements in access to academic content for learners and researchers in colleges and universities. One route to cost-effective improvements in access through negotiation of “big deals” – Pilot Site Licence Initiative 1996-99, NESLI 1999-2002, NESLi2 2002-. This route partially effective but many difficulties – e.g. long negotiations, small publishers not included, many universities and colleges unable to buy in. Push for Open Access coming from both JISC Journals Working Group and JISC Scholarly Communication Group

HaIRST: Harvesting Institutional Resources in Scotland Testbed. Final Project Report

The HaIRST project conducted research into the design, implementation and deployment of a pilot service for UK-wide access of autonomously created institutional resources in Scotland, the aim being to investigate and advise on some of the technical, cultural, and organisational requirements associated with the deposit, disclosure, and discovery of institutional resources in the JISC Information Environment. The project involved a consortium of Scottish higher and further education institutions, with significant assistance from the Scottish Library and Information Council. The project investigated the use of technologies based on the Open Archives Initiative (OAI), including the implementation of OAI-compatible repositories for metadata which describe and link to institutional digital resources, the use of the OAI protocol for metadata harvesting (OAI-PMH) to automatically copy the metadata from multiple repositories to a central repository, and the creation of a service to search and identify resources described in the central repository. An important aim of the project was to identify issues of metadata interoperability arising from the requirements of individual institutional repositories and their impact on services based on the aggregation of metadata through harvesting. The project also sought to investigate issues in using these technologies for a wide range of resources including learning, teaching and administrative materials as well as the research and scholarly communication materials considered by many of the other projects in the JISC Focus on Access to Institutional Resources (FAIR) Programme, of which HaIRST was a part. The project tested and implemented a number of open source software packages supporting OAI, and was successful in creating a pilot service which provides effective information retrieval of a range of resources created by the project consortium institutions. The pilot service has been extended to cover research and scholarly communication materials produced by other Scottish universities, and administrative materials produced by a non-educational institution in Scotland. It is an effective testbed for further research and development in these areas. The project has worked extensively with a new OAI standard for 'static repositories' which offers a low-barrier, low-cost mechanism for participation in OAI-based consortia by smaller institutions with a low volume of resources. The project identified and successfully tested tools for transforming pre-existing metadata into a format compliant with OAI standards. The project identified and assessed OAI-related documentation in English from around the world, and has produced metadata for retrieving and accessing it. The project created a Web-based advisory service for institutions and consortia. The OAI Scotland Information Service (OAISIS) provides links to related standards, guidance and documentation, and discusses the findings of HaIRST relating to interoperability and the pilot harvesting service. The project found that open source packages relating to OAI can be installed and made to interoperate to create a viable method of sharing institutional resources within a consortium. HaIRST identified issues affecting the interoperability of shared metadata and suggested ways of resolving them to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of shared information retrieval environments based on OAI. The project demonstrated that application of OAI technologies to administrative materials is an effective way for institutions to meet obligations under Freedom of Information legislation

TARDis Project Final Report

The TARDis Project Final Report outlines the background, methodology and implementation of e-Prints Soton. It identifies outcomes of the project and its evolution to a centrally funded University research repository, embedded within the research landscape of the organization

Enrich: improving integration between an institutional repository and a CRIS at the University of Glasgow

This paper provide details of the work and the lessons learned by the JISC funded Enrich project run by the University of Glasgow in the United Kingdom. Enrich provided a clear focus for the integration and enhancement of the University of Glasgow’s repository, Enlighten, with other institutional systems, including our Research System [CRIS] (for funder data) and our Data Vault (for staff records). The Enrich project has demonstrated that partnership between the University Library and the Research Office, in conjunction with researchers, administrators and IT Services is critical to ensuring the successful integration of a repository and a CRIS. Enrich is part of a wider JISC funded programme in the UK: “Information Environment 2009-11” which focuses on the management, discovery and use of information resources. It was completed at the end of March 2010

Developing a model for e-prints and open access journal content in UK further and higher education

A study carried out for the UK Joint Information Systems Committee examined models for the provision of access to material in institutional and subject-based archives and in open access journals. Their relative merits were considered, addressing not only technical concerns but also how e-print provision (by authors) can be achieved – an essential factor for an effective e-print delivery service (for users). A "harvesting" model is recommended, where the metadata of articles deposited in distributed archives are harvested, stored and enhanced by a national service. This model has major advantages over the alternatives of a national centralized service or a completely decentralized one. Options for the implementation of a service based on the harvesting model are presented

Journeys to Open Educational Practice: UKOER/SCORE Review Final Report

In 2008 the JISC Good Intentions report concluded that the landscape around learning materials had changed sufficiently to support a range of sustainable models for sharing. The report charted and acknowledged the long history of approaches to support sharing that had helped to shape the landscape. Most of the models highlight a growing acknowledgement of the need to build and support open and sustainable communities to share practice and resources. Indeed such communities are often the key to sustaining the service, whichever model is adopted. This is the type of model most likely to encourage sharing between teachers as well as learners. The growing OER community is taking collaborative approaches to tackling the ongoing challenges of raising awareness, licensing and trust issues, and standards and technologies. The challenge for the UK now is to ensure that our HE institutions are enabled to create policies, practices and support their staff to accelerate the transformations required to contribute and benefit from this global movement. It is also vital to ensure that we capture the real picture of use and re-use of such services and collections to inform future OER programmes. HEFCE funding for OER initiatives followed this report in 2009 and has, in many ways, provided some of the scaffolding and support for a variety of individuals, communities and institutions to move forwards in their own journeys, whether they started years before in other contexts or had just joined on the road to open sharing