JISC

JISC’s annual review is published today and is for the first time an entirely online publication. The review documents a year of achievement in the key areas of JISC’s activities and includes podcast interviews with senior JISC figures and the chairs of its committees, an image gallery and a Year in View giving the highlights of JISC’s activities during the academic year 2006-2007.

Among the highlights of a busy and important year, outlined in the review, are:  

• the launch of SuperJANET5, the upgrade to the JANET network
• international activities, including the worldwide open access petition, the launch of the JISC/SURF ‘Licence to Publish’ and international repositories activities
• a further £12m investment in the digitisation of major scholarly resources
• the publication of the national e-infrastructure report
• the launch of the UK Access Management Federation
• new research and reports on Web 2.0, plagiarism, open source software and IPR

For the first time the JISC annual review includes podcast interviews, and in an introductory interview Professor Sir Ron Cooke, Chair of JISC, speaks about another highlight of the year, the publication of JISC’s updated strategy, and its impact on some of the key challenges facing the sector: ‘The updated strategy is helping us deal with a whole series of issues, such as continued and rapid technological change, the rise in staff and student expectations, the need to rationalise systems and ensure their compatibility, and the growing need to archive research data.’  

In another podcast interview, Dr Malcolm Read, JISC’s Executive Secretary, gives the foreword to the annual review, emphasising the role of partnership in JISC’s work: ‘It’s difficult to think of anything that JISC does that doesn’t involve working in partnership with another organisation. The Internet internationalises so much of higher education and research such that we do have to work closely with other countries. So we have very strong international partnerships, as this review indicates, to help ensure that we can maintain our position and so that in some areas – such as repositories, for example - we can influence other countries.’

Podcast interviews with the chairs of all JISC sub-committees give for the first time first-hand accounts of JISC’s work from senior figures in the education and research community, including analysis of the impact of ICT and discussions of some of the future challenges facing the sector as it seeks to integrate the use of ICT in learning, teaching, research and the management of institutions. 

An introductory leaflet is being sent out to colleges, universities and partner organisations giving a summary of what’s available in the online Annual Review.

To read the full online annual review, please go to: JISC Annual Review 2006-2007