Virtual Research Environments: VRE Programme Phases 2 & 3
This booklet outlines the present (second) phase of the JISC Virtual Research Environment programme and plans for the third phase.
A Virtual Research Environment (VRE) enables a group of researchers, often across several institutions, to work collaboratively by forming a social structure and sharing resources over the internet. According to Michael Fraser, University of Oxford, ‘a VRE comprises a set of online tools and other network resources and technologies interoperating with each other to facilitate or enhance the processes of research practitioners within and across institutional boundaries’.
When the JISC VRE programme began in 2004, the aim was to develop an ‘off-the-shelf’ VRE that a group of collaborating researchers could integrate into their normal research cycle no matter what their discipline. The focus was on developing technologies and testing their effectiveness across disciplines. Since those early days, the emphasis has shifted away from ‘one-size-fits-all’ towards the definition and development of a common VRE framework that researchers can populate with applications, services and resources appropriate to their needs to create their own bespoke VREs.
The key aims of the present programme are:
- To enhance research practices through the development and deployment of VREs
- To involve and engage the research community in building and deploying VREs
- To start exploiting and extending VREs in higher education
- To continue raising awareness of the benefits of VREs amongst researchers
Four pilot projects are taking this work forward. They involve a wide range of users in real-life research settings within UK higher education and partner institutions. As well as working to define a common VRE framework, they are looking at the need for discipline-specific tools and how VREs can be embedded in different types of institution. They are also evaluating the impact of VRE technologies on research practices and identifying and addressing any barriers to their adoption, whether social, behavioural, technical or institutional. A brief description of each project follows along with an outline of plans for the third phase of the programme.
‘A VRE comprises a set of online tools and other network resources and technologies interoperating with each other to facilitate or enhance the processes of research practitioners within and across institutional boundaries’
Michael Fraser, University of Oxford
Plans for the future
The third phase of the JISC VRE programme will begin in spring 2009 and continue for two years.
It will take forward the goals of the second phase plus the following aims:
- To build self-supporting communities of practice and expertise
- To investigate how VREs can be embedded in institutions
Activity will be grouped under the following headings:
VRE community A VRE community hub will act as a nerve centre for the exchange of tools and experiences. It will collect demonstrators that are exchangeable between disciplines and that inspire and help people to find ways to cater to their own research needs. A VRE archive of expertise will include a tools and standards inventory, user engagement reports and papers and international reports. The aim will be to facilitate self-supporting communities of practice
VRE frameworks This strand will support further research on the development of generic tools and investigate how they can be embedded within VRE frameworks
VRE tools and interoperability Research into tools and interoperability, undertaken during the first two VRE phases, will be taken forward. The tools inventory developed for the VRE community will serve as a resource for further projects
National embedding of VRE resources The aim will be to embed VREs at every stage of the research lifecycle, including:
- Resource discovery, involving databases, data preservation, curation and access
- Research processes, which are different for different disciplines
- Research administration and linking to institutional systems
- Publication of results including deposit in repositories
Projects in this strand will integrate tools and frameworks used in resource discovery, research processes and publication of results. They will be jointly funded with the JISC Repositories programme
Institutional embedding and systems integration This strand will fund feasibility studies into the interoperability of VREs with administrative systems. If VREs are to be sustainable, it is essential that they are embedded within institutional systems, such as Virtual Learning Environments and Library Management Systems
JISC continuously evaluates and learns from the experiences of projects so that it can be ready for the future. One initiative it will also embark on early in 2009 is a Young Researchers Study which will analyse the needs and views of the next generation of researchers. The results will be used to inform the future development of collaborative research technologies and advise higher education institutions on the training such researchers will need in future.
The VERA project is developing a comprehensive VRE for the archaeological community with three aims: to streamline data gathering at archaeological excavations, to facilitate online collaboration between researchers, and to make databases interoperable.
Various electronic devices, such as digital pens and memo pads, have been deployed at the Silchester Roman Town excavations, enabling archaeologists to enter details of finds directly into a database. Digital methods are also being used at Silchester to create a 3D plan of the site, accurate to within a few centimetres, onto which the position and context of a find can be entered. The project has also achieved interoperability between several databases, including one held by the Study of Documents and Manuscripts project at Oxford (see below).
Enhancements to the underlying VRE technology include altering the layout of the user interface, adding further utilities and creating additional tools that can expand the scope of the research undertaken.
VERA is being undertaken in the School of Systems Engineering and the Department of Archaeology, University of Reading.
CREW is capturing and publishing the scholarly communication that occurs at events such as conferences and workshops. It is developing tools so that presentations and sessions can be recorded and annotated, and powerful searches can be made across distributed conference and related research data. Searches yield results within written documents, such as abstracts and papers, and also in audio-visual content, such as clips from presentations or questions asked at a talk.
The project builds upon the success of two previous projects, Iugo and Memetic, by further developing their technologies and embedding them in a variety of authentic research settings. These include Intute, a national JISC service to provide UK universities with access to web resources for research, the Institute of Health Sciences, which promotes health sciences research in Manchester, and scientific visualisation research groups.
The project is a collaboration between the universities of Manchester, Bristol and Bangor.
SDM is supporting research into damaged and illegible documents by enabling researchers to access image collections from around the world. Communication and collaboration tools allow researchers to work with widely dispersed colleagues. The project is also providing access to advanced imaging tools that allow researchers to:
- View, manipulate and enhance digitised images of documents and manuscripts
- Search across multiple, distributed data sets, images and texts
- Select, store and organise items in a ‘personal workspace’
- Annotate these items to store personal thoughts and responses
- Support collaboration by allowing multiple researchers in separate locations to share a common view of the workspace
- Allow a collaborator to comment on or annotate items in the shared workspace
The project is also gathering comprehensive user requirements and expanding the use of the VRE for documentary and manuscript scholars in fields across humanities research.
The project is led by the Centre for the Study of Ancient Documents at the University of Oxford.
myExperiment is a collaborative environment where researchers can safely publish their workflows, share them with groups and find the workflows of others. Users can find collaborators by posting their profiles and outlining their research interests and any questions they may have. They can make their scientific workflows available together with information on how they used them and instructions on how to execute them. Packs of workflows and other files can also be shared, together with advice, guidance and know-how. myExperiment enables researchers to share, reuse and repurpose workflows and so reduce and avoid reinvention of workflows and processes.
More than 1,000 users, mainly in the life sciences, are already signed up. New user communities are growing in the fields of chemistry, social statistics and music information retrieval. The software that powers myexperiment.org is downloadable and the myExperiment wiki provides information on how to join the user and developer communities.
myExperiment is led by the universities of Southampton and Manchester.
Further information about the VRE programme