Priority investment area - Aim one
Aim One: Provide cost-effective and sustainable shared national services and resources
| Theme |
Here and now |
Coming soon |
On the horizon |
| For immediate use by the majority of institutions |
Work that will be of most interest to innovators and early adopters with more general take up in 2-5 years |
Longer term investment that may have impact in 3-10 years |
Network |
Investing in a network that is reliable, flexible and with the capacity to meet requirements of a wide spectrum of users |
Ensuring that the network is responsive to increasing and emerging demands, such as potential shared data centres |
Ensuring that the network uses new technologies to remain world-class with the capacity to respond to increasing demands |
Access |
Providing secure and convenient access to digital content |
Investigating technologies and policies to support, for example, individual identity transfer to reflect the diverse user population, including business and community engagement partners |
Investigating the implementation of technologies designed to ensure confidentiality, integrity and accountability |
Content |
Providing a wide range of digital content, to a variety of audiences (including those beyond the academic sector) through digitisation, licensing and sharing of learning materials and the business models which underpin this |
Addressing the complex issues associated with access to different types of resources and overcoming barriers to use |
Delivering a content strategy that encompasses the wide range of resources available from different sources to provide a critical mass of digital content |
Advice and good practice |
Ensuring advice and good practice is available to support institutions in their activities, including, for example, standards (technical, content), legal issues, accessibility and use of technologies |
Identifying requirements for good practice and exemplars in emerging technologies and standards (eg security and encryption standards) |
|
Infrastructure |
Provision of the infrastructure necessary to manage, share, discover, access and preserve digital content |
Development of the infrastructure to support the open sharing of content, supported by appropriate business models |
Investigation and exploitation of technologies to support resource discovery, such as semantic web and personalisation |
Shared services |
Exploring the requirements and priorities for shared services to support the sector |
Developing or brokering shared services recognising the diversity of requirements of the sector |
Developing technologies, policies and protocols to support distributed approaches to services and resources, including Grid, cloud, Software as a Service, Infrastructure as a service and shared services |