How will Jisc help me use data in the future?
Using data in different ways is critical to education and research, but it also has a use in informing important organisational and business decisions. It’s fair to say that data is fast becoming ‘king’ in the digital environment, from educational analytics to open government data , to linked data , to data produced through research that is then becoming a... >>
No such thing as a free MOOC
And that brings me to our recent decision in the University of Edinburgh to join our colleagues in North America and offer our own MOOCs - or massive open online courses - through the Coursera consortium. It has been a very busy few weeks. After taking the in principle decision, there has been a tsunami of sorting the legals (you... >>
Jisc and crowdfunding
What links an e-paper watch , a statue of RoboCop and an open alternative to Facebook ? The answer is that all of these ideas have been funded via the crowdfunding site Kickstarter . Crowdfunding is an exciting new approach where individuals can choose to dedicate some of their own money to an idea that piques their interest. Here at... >>
How to feed, nourish and sustain your digital resources
From the late Nineties, European and UK funding agencies across sectors, from education to cultural heritage, have invested significant resources in the creation of digital content in the not-for-profit sector. The grants have facilitated major digitisation and encouraged innovative work that paved the way for forms of scholarship and communities possible only in an online environment. In the words of... >>
Where the open things are
The issue of making Open Access books discoverable was discussed in nearly all of our focus groups that we held earlier this year as part of the OAPEN -UK project. It’s not just about putting the PDF onto a platform and hoping that readers will find it, it’s about getting metadata out into the web, search and library systems where... >>
St David's Day: Researching Wales or Welsh history?/ Dydd Gŵyl Dewi: Ymchwilio i Gymru neu hanes Cymru?
One of the most enduring miracles attributed to St David is that while he was preaching, he caused the ground to rise under him so that his audience could see and hear him, according to the Museum of Wales . There is in Wales a strong oral tradition, rich artistic and literary threads, historic and modern folk music, and ongoing... >>
Apple's new iBooks: a force for good?
Jisc has long been associated with licensing and exploring ebooks for education, and research by Jisc Collections has shown increasing numbers of students enthusiastic about such resources as publishers and librarians seek to find suitable business models in a changing environment. So it didn’t come as much of a surprise to me to hear that now Apple’s released their own... >>
What is activity data and why is it useful?
Activity data is big business. We see it in the recommendations we get every time we look at something on Amazon, we see its importance every time we get asked if we have a club/nectar/loyalty card when we buy something and we see it in the fascinating story of the Netflix million dollar prize to improve film recommendations for their... >>
App-ortunity Knocks: Mobile and the future of the library
How do universities and their libraries respond to an increasingly mobile world? At what point does mobile find itself at the heart of what a university does? Are we at a tipping point with those that fail to address students’ mobile expectations experiencing falling numbers? Prompted by a recent Jisc mobile infrastructure for libraries funding call, I wanted to outline... >>
UK repositories: working together
We now have approximately 198 repositories in the UK and Jisc programmes have played a major part in the set up and development of this infrastructure. Drivers for this growth vary from open access to research, to better information management or easy access to digital collections for teachers, learners and researchers. There now are a range of projects that have... >>
