JISC

The JISC  Information Environment is envisaged as a virtual place where members of colleges and universities can deposit and share useful content (eg, research outputs). The current collection of JISC funded content has the potential to grow to embrace both externally generated content from publishers and aggregators and community-generated resources. To achieve the latter, staff and students will need a ‘place’ or 'places' in which to lodge suitable content and products and a means for exchanging and adding to it. This is an important part of developing a relevant and useful portfolio of resources.  The FAIR programme has been developed to create the mechanisms and supporting services to allow this process to prosper and these 'places' to be built.  The work of this programme has been inspired by the success of the Open Archives Initiative (OAI) – a simple mechanism that allows metadata about resources to be harvested into services that can be searched by staff and students.

Proposals for projects in the FAIR programme were invited through JISC  circular 1/02.

The results from the FAIR programme are available as a FAIR Synthesis microsite. A lessons learned report  is also available, covering both processes and outcomes, at project and programme level. 

Aims and objectives

This programme aims to evaluate and explore different mechanisms for the disclosure and sharing of content (and the related challenges) to fulfil the vision of a web of resources built by groups with a long term stake in the future of those resources, but made available to the whole community of learning. 

Specific objectives are to:

• explore the OAI protocol as a mechanism for disclosure and sharing a range of resource types, eg images, museum content, e-prints, e-theses
• explore, in addition, possible alternative mechanisms for disclosure
• explore the challenges associated with disclosure and sharing, including IPR and the role of institutional respositories
• test out the delivery of disclosed information through established JISC services and investigate other means of delivery
• inform work towards developing the JISC Information Environment

Work under this programme will be undertaken through a range of projects and studies. For programme specific information, please follow links to the following:

• Project clusters 
  • In order to focus the impact of relative fields of work the projects have been arranged into a number of clusters
  • There has also been an associated project during the first year of the programme providing guidance and advice on evaluation with the FAIR projects, called EFX

  A number of events have been and are being organised during tr programme to provide training and support to projects, and to facilitate exchange of experience and ideas. Presentations from these are given at the links below where applicable. 

  • Intellectual Property Rights meeting 29 May 2003
  • FAIR and X4L programme meeting 23-24 June 2003

  An outcome from the IPR meeting has been the formation of a working group to consider the use of licences in depositing and sharing resources, under the title Share Alike for UK Education. The group will initially be focussing on learning objects, but will be considering other materials in time. The work will involve an examination of Creative Commons licences and RoMEO project staff have been invited to join the working group to contribute their experience in this area.

  Work on the preservation of assets being disclosed within the FAIR programme is funded under the Digital Preservation and Records Management programme. A relevant study is:   Feasibility study on the preservation of e-prints.

• Programme Advisory Board is run in accordance with agreed  terms of reference