SAVING LIBRARIES

This cloud service is called the Shared Academic Knowledge Base plus, or KB+, and will be a database covering all ‘subscribed resources’ from a UK higher education perspective. That includes data such like publication information, holdings and rights, subscription management, organisations, licences and evidence such as usage statistics and financial data in an online catalogue across all UK academic libraries.

Cloud computing allows data, software and computing power to be stored and accessed from a shared, remote server. It is massively beneficial for individual institutions, as it gives them far greater resource and IT capability than they could develop in-house, enabling budget to be deployed for more core areas such as research, teaching and learning.

Showers is, however, adamant that “we are not developing a new electronic resource management system”; rather, the focus is on data and harnessing the community effort and work that happens at an institutional level. JISC aims to simplify the the challenge of collating accurate, quality and timely data across UK universities.

The service will be managed by JISC Collections, the UK’s expert body on negotiation and procurement within the scholarly communications sector, to save librarians time and money. A major complaint at present from staff at many levels is that data is inconsistent or not delivered to libraries in a timely manner. Ensuring data is accurate is a major overhead for libraries. Showers explains, “The aim of the work is to ensure that the data components are of a higher quality.”

Showers is keen to point out that although savings are anticipated, the business case does not depend on these. He says, “Many libraries have already cut back on admin functions, and made savings in this area. So as well as the potential for libraries saving money, this project will free librarians to add quality to the work they already do.”

KB+ will be a service provided over the cloud with organisations accessing it from desktop PCs across the internet.

At a national level, KB+ is part of JISC’s digital library infrastructure. HEFCE is providing support with a budget of £600,000 from the university modernisation fund.

But there is also international interest in JISC’s work. Showers says, “A lot of what is done nationally could just as easily be done internationally, so we are working closely with partners like the Kuali Open Library environment project in the United States.”

The project is due to complete by August 2012, but outputs for the first phase should be appearing steadily throughout the year, so libraries and institutions could start to benefit over the next few months. The project will then begin its transition into an ongoing, JISC Collections managed service.

Showers concludes, “This project is about making sure that the data – the building blocks which the libraries use to deliver resources to researchers and students – are of the highest quality possible. It is about enabling libraries to reallocate their scarce resources from costly back office functions to next generation services that represent the future of teaching and research.”

Learn more about the aims of the initiative KB+

Find out more about how you can get involved and upload your data on the wiki space.