JISC

Strategic aim four: to develop mutually advantageous partnerships with organisations in the UK and abroad.

To be met through:

• developing strategic partnerships with other organisations particularly in the areas of the development of a common, integrated information and communications environment; VLE and MLE development; embedding eLearning and eResearch; and the management of online resources
• engaging with suppliers

Uniform standards have long been fundamental to network communications and are becoming increasingly essential to other services. Collaboration, particularly international collaboration, is necessary if UK users are to be able to both exploit developments from outside the UK education and research spheres, and to benefit from the developments made by JISC supported projects. To this end it is essential that JISC and JISC service providers are aware of, and collaborate with other organisations and that JISC supported developments integrate with developments internationally.

The value of collaboration and participation is difficult to quantify and is most clearly demonstrated in the negative – if there were little or no collaboration the consequences would be:

• Higher development costs as fewer ‘off the shelf’ solutions would be available
• Reduced services/less functionality.
• Externally developed innovations would be more difficult/expensive to integrate with current services
• Running costs would be higher as functionality and efficiency would be reduced.
• Security (an international issue) would be increasingly difficult to maintain

The JISC community benefits from the use of international standards and from participation in the creation of those standards.  The advantages are particularly apparent in networking and communications, authentication, searching and search engines, web publishing and other e-resources.

The European network and communications community sees UKERNA as being very active internationally in two areas in particular: computer and network security and communication with customers. Computer security incidents are not contained within national boundaries and international cooperation is imperative for any CERT. UKERNA is recognised as successfully liaising with worldwide organisations and providing valued advice and support.

However UKERNA are perceived as less visible at the strategic technical level, possibly because they have a limited budget for participation in international development projects.  According to the UKERNA international benchmarking study there is a risk that UKERNA might fall behind in their understanding of how best to develop and deploy novel production services on the current production network, or how best to plan future production networks.

UKOLN

UKOLN (UK Office for Library and Information Networking), a JISC service, is a centre of expertise in digital information management, providing advice and services to the library, information, education and cultural heritage communities by:

• Influencing policy and informing practice
• Promoting community-building and consensus-making
• Advancing knowledge through research and development
• Building innovative systems and services based on Web technologies
• Acting as an agent for knowledge transfer 

A review of UKOLN commissioned by Resource (now known as MLA) and carried out by Mel Collier, (formerly University of Northumberland at Newcastle) concluded that UKOLN has had a significant impact at a technical and strategic level in the networking, standards, metadata and interoperability communities. Their sphere of influence and activity beyond UK education and research embraces the national and international library, museum and archive communities. 

This review recognised UKOLN as enabling important national developments to be rolled out more quickly than would otherwise have been the case, and recognised that their involvement in standards issues has helped ensure that initiatives will be better value for money over time.

The review concludes that: ‘Having reviewed the funding proposals for the last three years and the outcomes of the work we consider UKOLN’s work to have delivered and to have been good value for money.’ 

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