JISC

The interim Digital Britain report published today by Lord Stephen Carter raises a number of issues that JISC is looking forward to exploring.
 
Through partnerships in the UK and internationally, we work across education and public sector organisations, such as the BBC and NHS, to remove the barriers to accessing publicly funded research and information. We work to reduce the technical and policy barriers to digital inclusion which are raised in the report.

By putting UK and international license agreements in place JISC and JISC Collections are delivering value for money through investing in partnerships and activities that give access to previously unseen resources. In our Value for Money report it showed for every £1 funded to JISC Collections to negotiate licensing agreements, the education community received services with a commercial value of over £26.*

Dr Malcolm Read, JISC Executive Secretary, said: “We work to make information available online for teaching, learning and research with many of the resources being freely publicly available.

“We also give best practise guidance to train academics and teachers on how to use these new digital resources through our advisory services while highlighting the legal implications through JISC Legal and our web2rights project.

“We are not only looking at delivering access to information today through our award winning network JANET, but also towards the future and how to create sustainable models where this information can continue to be accessed as technology develops.”

JISC has invested over £22 million in digitising learning resources for education, with many of the licence agreements enabling anyone to access the resources through public libraries. This is in addition to its continuing work for the UK’s digital infrastructure, innovation activity, provision of content and support services, which all work to improve digital inclusion across the UK.

This can be seen through the work of our Strategic Content Alliance, the UK Access Managment Federation and the Knowledge Exchange.

 Digital Britain interim report