Briefing Paper for eResearch & IE Call – 10/2010

This briefing paper is intended to support bidders drafting proposals against the October 2010 JISC Grant Funding Call 15/10 for Infrastructure for Education and Research. Bidders are strongly advised to read at least the relevant sections of this briefing paper alongside the main Call document. This document is intended to offer further information relevant to the programme areas in the Call; in all cases, the terms of reference given in the main Call document are definitive. A ‘Freque [...]

Toolkit Aims The Identity Management Toolkit Project[1] ran from 1 January 2009 to 30 June 2010 and was based on direct experience gained by project partners from work undertaken in The Identity Project[2]. The aim of the Toolkit project was to produce downloadable and online versions of the Toolkit for use by executive and technical staff in Further and Higher Education institutions who wanted to review, assess and improve the performance of Identity Management in their organisations. A sec [...]

Context Research information is structured information about projects, researchers, research outputs and their value and impact, research impact more widely, funding streams, organisations such as funders and universities, and so on.  A general background is available on the JISC website[1] The intended outcome of work in this area is to bring some further coherence to data exchange activities between and within UK research stakeholders, with funding aimed at helping to reduce duplication, was [...]

Context In March of 2001 JISC commissioned a TechWatch Report into the use of CMS systems for University Web Sites[1]. Since then we have seen an exponential increase in the number of institutional staff who have editorial control of the public-facing web pages.  This has been one factor in a significant growth in the number of .ac.uk web pages created each day.  While there is value in allowing public .ac.uk web pages to be created by institutional staff (especially highly-rated teachers and [...]

Context JISC has invested in geospatial data and supporting infrastructure services over a number of years. For example back in 1996 JISC invested in trialing infrastructure to serve Ordnance Survey data to the academic community; this resulted in the Digimap service[1].  Investment in resources and infrastructure has continued, resulting in the creation of multiple geospatial resources, tools and infrastructure[2].  The use of geospatial information has become prevalent in the day-to-day liv [...]

In 2009 JISC and RLUK convened a group of Higher Education library, museum and archive experts to think about what national services were required for supporting online discovery and reuse of collection metadata. This group was called the resource discovery taskforce (RDTF) and it met four times throughout 2009. The taskforce produced a vision and an implementation plan focused on making metadata about collections openly available therefore supporting the development of flexible and innovative s [...]

Context Companies such as Amazon have proved that careful use of data about users’ actions and attention can improve services to end users and provide advantages in managing and targeting the service. Many systems in institutions store data about the actions of students, teachers and researchers. The purpose of this funding is to experiment with this data with the aim of improving the user experience or the administration of services. Projects funded under this strand will identify tools a [...]

Context As indicated in the Call, JISC has been working towards a vision of a rich scholarly communications and learning environment that is supported by an extensive network of repositories, where content is widely available and can be re-used. JISC believes that there is now a solid foundation for a UK repository infrastructure.  This infrastructure has been developed from JISC programmes/projects and independent work undertaken by institutions and other organisations in the UK and internati [...]

Context The projects in this strand are geared towards institutions, groups or individuals who perceive themselves to have specific problems with the short, medium or long-term preservation of digital materials. The funding is designed to enable bidders to engage with the range of tools and methods that have been developed over the years to assist people with the sort of information management tasks that are relevant to sustaining the integrity of, and access to, digital materials over time. [...]

Context The purpose of this work is to identify, clarify and disseminate emerging good practice relating to the preservation of digital materials that have predominantly visual properties, and which may feature: properties of interactivity; complex interdependencies between objects (often of different formats); and time-based components. Related Work The Call text cites some areas of related work that may have some bearing on the nature and scope of the work in this strand. The sustainabil [...]

Context This call is an opportunity to sustain resources otherwise at risk, and to tackle their sustainability in such a way that lessons can be shared across the sector. It is anticipated that initial planning and preparation will have been under taken and bids should show an understanding of the work involved. Projects should make use of available advice on good practice in the management of digital resources. Bidders will need to identify the new home for the content. Examples of potentia [...]