Delegates gather in Birmingham for the Jisc annual conference

Over 600 delegates are gathering at the Birmingham ICC
this morning for the Jisc annual conference to hear a range of speakers
give presentations about Jisc’s work, attend workshops and demonstrations
and visit the more than 50 stands in the exhibition hall. Keynote speeches
will be delivered by Professor David Eastwood, CEO of HEFCE, and Tom
Loosemore, project director of BBC 2.0.

Professor Sir Ron Cooke, Chairman of Jisc, will welcome
delegates and outline some of the achievements of the last year, such as
the launch of SuperJANET5, the creation of Jisc Collections as a mutual
trading company and the establishment of the UK Access Management
Federation.  

Looking forward to future challenges, Sir Ron will
introduce Jisc’s newly updated three-year strategy, which reaffirms Jisc’s
commitment to the support of further and higher education but which
includes for the first time a new strand to support institutions’
engagement with business and the community.

Among the topics for discussion during the day are
repositories, the e-Framework initiative, knowledge transfer from education
to industry, virtual research environments (VREs), the impact of governance
legislation and digital preservation. 

In addition, a number of announcements will be made
today, including:

• The results of Jisc’s continuing collaboration with
  Universities UK and GuildHE on the HE sector’s compliance with
  information governance legislation. Results of a new survey released
  today reveal that the sector is continuing to meet its obligations under
  Freedom of Information and other governance legislation.

• The launch of the third of Jisc’s highly successful
  and extremely popular e-learning guides - Effective Practice with
  e-Assessment. This one looks at institutional practice in
  e-assessment, using case studies and offering insights into what could be
  on the horizon in ten years’ time.

• The launch of the Users and Innovation programme.
  Central to the new programme is a Community of Practice, involving more
  than 50 institutions, which will allow m ore than 150 practitioners to
  share their thinking and collaborate on innovation to enrich the learning
  experience of students.

• The launch of an ‘infokit’ on learning spaces. The
  eagerly-awaited Planning and designing technology-rich learning
  spaces, produced by Jisc infoNet, is richly illustrated with case
  studies and images of buildings across the sector and includes a virtual
  tour around an imaginary campus.

• The purchase in perpetuity of the Institution of Civil
  Engineers virtual library, a resource which would cost each institution
  £12,000 but which, thanks to this Jisc Collections agreement, will now be
  freely available.

Regular updates (presentations and session commentaries)
from the conference will be available during the day at: Jisc
Conference