JISC

This issue includes an interview with Wim Liebrand of SURF, a new partnership between JISC and the British Library, and how ICT can support lifelong learning.

On the move: Supporting education and research in the digital age

Contents

A partnership milestone JISC and the British Library sign agreement
In brief Latest news from JISC
Continental shift An interview with Wim Liebrand of SURF
European partners sign up to new digital forum Exchanging knowledge, sharing expertise
Accessing the eighteenth century A new resource opens up an entire century online
The journey of a lifetime How ICT can support lifelong learning
Bringing communities together Service feature on JISCmail
A wealth of resources Update on the JISC Digitisation programme
Ensuring access into the future A new programme to preserve digital information
Free thinking A JISC agreement keeps philosophy resource openly available
Making waves New JISC software creates a stir

A partnership milestone

An agreement between JISC and the British Library was recently signed committing both to a range of activities. Lawrence Christensen of the British Library looks at what the agreement means for education and research in the UK.

Right:  Malcolm Read, Executive Secretary of JISC, and Lynne Brindley, Chief Executive of the British Library, sign the Memorandum of Understanding between the two organisations. The image in the background is of one of the nineteenth century newpapers which will be digitised as part of a joint project between JISC and the British Library. The project is one of a wide range of joint activities which the agreement cements.

A partnership between the British Library and JISC was cemented in June this year by the signing of a joint agreement between the two organisations. The combination of the British Library and JISC has already proved a fruitful one through a range of joint projects, but the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) promises to bring further benefits to both organisations and the communities they serve.

Signed at a ceremony at the British Library, the MoU commits both parties to a range of collaborative activities, overseen by an annual work plan, joint strategic liaison meetings, and the sharing of knowledge and expertise between the two organisations.

The partnership has also involved the funding of a senior post - the British Library/JISC Partnership Manager. Neil Beagrie is the holder of this post. He calls the agreement a "milestone for both organisations" and sees its importance as lying in identifying future joint activities. "The MoU brings together established relationships," he says, "but also provides a framework for identifying future potential collaborations, knowledge exchange, and for us to actively manage the partnership."

The partnership has already yielded initiatives such as the digitisation of around two million pages of nineteenth-century newspapers, along with around 4,000 hours of recordings from the British Library Sound Archive (see page 17). Resource discovery tools such as SUNCAT (the serials union catalogue), copac (the union library catalogue) and zetoc (electronic tables of content) are also the products of joint activities, while an e-theses pilot which is exploring the mass digitisation of current holdings of theses in the British Library and UK universities is another project of potentially immense importance to UK research. In addition, collaborative work in the fields of digital preservation, digital repositories and many others has and will continue to pay dividends.

Add one of the most important scholarly resources in the world to innovation in ICT and the results are impressive. But, as Neil Beagrie says, there is more to come: "The relationship has already achieved a lot, but the agreement will allow us jointly to achieve more for FE, HE and research well into the future."

Lawrence Christensen
British Library

inbrief

Investment in innovation

JISC has received an extra £15m from HEFCE's (Higher Education Funding Council for England) Strategic Development Fund (SDF). This is in addition to £25m from the Spending Review agreed earlier this year.

The funds, totalling £40m, will be used for a range of activities to support and enhance further the UK's digital infrastructure, access to online content and the development of digital repositories. A particular emphasis of these and other activities will be the implementation of recommendations in the Department of Trade and Industry's "Science and Innovation Investment Framework 2004-2014" and the delivery of HEFCE's e-learning strategy published in March of this year.

£6m for e-learning in Scotland

JISC will be managing six new projects which will put to the test conclusions drawn about e-learning in further and higher education. The projects, funded through £6 million from the Scottish Funding Councils for Further and Higher Education, will develop innovative course materials, explore new approaches to assessment and encourage partnerships between FE and HE institutions.

Art for artists' sake

A new JISC agreement brings a wide range of essential visual arts publications, toolkits and other resources to the UK higher and further education communities. A-N resources is published by the Artist Information Company, widely acknowledged to be a key UK agency for supporting artists and promoting and shaping visual arts practice.

The breadth and depth of the content means that it can be used across a wide range of subject and curriculum areas at all levels including art and design, fine art, visual arts, design management, textile design and public art.

International forum

JISC hosted an international forum in June to discuss concerns about the current environment for scholarly communications and how this might be improved.

Delegates representing national consortia and other relevant bodies from around the world were invited to discuss a range of issues, including consortia, digital repositories and emerging business and access models, including open access. The statement of principles that emerged from the forum received a general consensus of support from delegates.

Sharing knowledge, widening access

A new £4m programme will continue JISC's work to encourage the growth of repositories in universities and colleges across the UK. The 23 projects within the Digital Repositories programme will explore the many cultural, technical and management aspects of creating and managing institutional and other repositories.

Although the development of repositories has up to now focused largely on making accessible the outputs of the research community, this new programme will develop the concept still further by encouraging the growth of repositories for learning materials, data and much else. Repositories have the potential to help institutions to manage their assets more effectively and to encourage the development of collaborative communities across UK education and research.

JISC signs Berlin declaration

JISC has signed the Berlin declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the Sciences and Humanities. The declaration commits signatories to the "new possibilities of knowledge dissemination not only through the classical form but also and increasingly through the open access paradigm via the Internet".

Through its work to support the development of institutional repositories and such initiatives as its open access programme, JISC has been exploring alternative models of publishing and dissemination of research outputs, including open access publishing.

Continental shift

An interview with Professor Wim Liebrand of SURF

JISC and SURF have similar remits in their respective countries. SURF's Chief Executive Professor Wim Liebrand here speaks to JISC Inform about SURF's work, its achievements, and how growing European cooperation is set to benefit learners, teachers and researchers in both the Netherlands and the UK

There are very few organisations in the world quite like JISC. But perhaps the one that bears most direct comparison is the SURF Foundation in the Netherlands. Although focused exclusively on higher education and research, its remit is, it seems, otherwise strikingly similar.

Sitting in its headquarters in the Dutch city of Utrecht, SURF's Chief Executive Professor Wim Liebrand, recalls the first meeting between the two organisations in 2002 when the close parallels first became apparent: "When we were telling each other what we were engaged in, it became very obvious to us both that there were a wide range of things we were both doing and in very similar ways," he says. "Before that time we didn"t know."

In time, he says, this realisation and these similarities led to regular meetings at both strategic and operational levels, the exchange of information, and later, in a number of areas, the development of common approaches and a range of joint activities. "There are more and more areas where we are directly working together," says Professor Liebrand, "for example in the area of international copyright, institutional repositories, authentication and authorisation, intellectual property, and e-portfolios. These are important issues where it makes sense for us to work closely together."

SURF and its achievements 

SURF was founded in 1987. Funded by the Dutch government, additional money comes direct from higher education and research institutions. This, says Professor Liebrand, has meant a greater sense of ownership on the part of those institutions. "They feel it's their business because it's their money," he says.

SURFnet, providing the network infrastructure, and SURFservices, providing a range of advice and support services, operate on a self-supporting basis from the rates they charge for their services and products. These have provided some of SURF's most important achievements, says Liebrand: "We have a world class technical infrastructure - SURFnet - and next year we will roll out a hybrid network that will combine traditional IP and advanced optical technologies. National licenses for online content and software have also been a major achievement," he says.

But he becomes particularly enthusiastic about another area of activity where SURF's investment over the last six years is soon to be repaid. "Middleware is another major achievement for us," he explains. "Middleware means the common, integrated services which sit between the network and the applications and content. Like JISC we've invested in these technologies: DAREnet which is looking at digital repositories being one example, and next January will see the launch of Study Link, a national system linking the student administration systems of all universities with student applications and registrations being digitised."

It's the cooperation and collaboration between different institutions that particularly excite Wim Liebrand about this particular project. "Where before institutions might have been competing, now they are working together," he says. "Study Link is, in effect, an application broker between government and institutional databases and the users of the system. Now institutions will also be able to exchange information."

Competition versus cooperation

ICT has played a central role in Wim Liebrand's life, at SURF, as a teacher, and earlier, as a researcher. "I was trained as a research psychologist with a couple of years" training in computer science," he says. "My research area was game theory - Prisoner's Dilemma, which explores the conflict between cooperation and competition. In 1985 I was running experiments in which human subjects played Prisoner's Dilemma against a computerised agent playing preprogrammed strategies."

Early experiences exploring this conflict may have stuck, as cooperation might perhaps best of all encapsulate the Liebrand philosophy: "The question of digital repositories is an important one in the Netherlands, as it is for you in the UK," Professor Liebrand says, emphasizing their cooperative, collaborative possibilities. He cites the Cream of Science website which showcases the research outputs of some 200 of the top Dutch scientists, with  most being openly and freely accessible. A product of SURF's Digital Academic Repositories (DARE) programme, the site, launched in May of this year, has significantly improved worldwide access to the fruits of Dutch research.

"A major driver for this area of work," says Liebrand, "is of course the open access idea - that publicly-funded research ought to be able to be accessed openly and freely. But it is not our intention to put publishers out of work. We should work together to allow access to research. Another driver is the potential of ICT which allows immediate full text access to research without the barriers of delivery, printing and so on. In other words, technology makes things more readily accessible, and we need to exploit that potential.

"But there will be cultural challenges in all this, he continues. "Like JISC we're extending the idea of repositories to include, for example, learning objects, so that teachers can share and reuse learning materials. There is a big challenge here to persuade teachers that this can be done and that this would benefit them. The joint work we're doing on common standards can only support our efforts in this area," he suggests.

The European dimension 

Such joint work is now increasingly taking on a pan-European dimension, says Professor Liebrand. With the Danish and German national bodies joining SURF and JISC as founder members of the Knowledge Exchange (see panel left), he sees European cooperation as increasingly important. "The Knowledge Exchange is a significant development," he explains. "When you meet once in a while you can only do so much. But when you have a dedicated office with staff working on a daily basis to keep track of what's going on, then you have something which can make an important difference." Is the idea, then, that other countries will be able to join the Knowledge Exchange in due course? "If they have similar issues, challenges and priorities, yes.

"Professor Liebrand is clear about the direct benefits of European cooperation to learners, teachers and researchers in the Netherlands and the UK. "Education and research are increasingly international in nature," he says. "The European Union has recently doubled its research budget and is looking to national bodies to join up more and more. Technical and other standards and specifications are also increasingly international. In addition we see that the European countries are changing their educational system to match the Anglo-American system. So we're moving more and more to an "open European education space". Students may always prefer a home base, but they are increasingly moving around, as are teachers. We need to reflect and engage with all of these realities."

Having established it as an organisation central to the competitiveness and excellence of Dutch education and research, what plans does Wim Liebrand have for SURF's future? "The needs of teachers, learners and researchers are changing all the time," he says, "and we need to respond to that and continue to develop a national e-infrastructure that is capable of meeting those needs. That is our biggest challenge and our biggest priority."

And what of the relationship with JISC? How will that continue to develop? "Perhaps we will see a merger between the two organisations," he answers, with a chuckle. "We have different systems and structures of course, but we're talking about a gradual evolution that's in everyone's interest, so in the long term, why not?" And in the meantime? "We have a common mission in our countries and a lot of work to do together. It's an exciting time for both organisations."

European partners sign up to new digital forum

Four national bodies responsible for supporting the use of ICT in education and research in their respective countries recently signed an agreement to bring into being a new pan-European organisation, the Knowledge Exchange.

With the international dimension becoming increasingly central to the use of ICT in education and research, the Knowledge Exchange will increase the profile of national research and development activity and where appropriate strive to achieve a common infrastructure based on common standards.

The four organisations which have signed the agreement are JISC, Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (Germany), Denmark's Electronic Research Library, and SURF (Netherlands).

The new body aims to develop closer working relationships in order to increase the return on investment in ICT infrastructure, services and projects and to improve the quality of learning, teaching and research. Other aims of the new body include the briefing of EU and other policy agencies in order to influence future policy and funding programmes.  The network will be coordinated from a central office, located with the Danish Electronic Research Library in Copenhagen for the first three years. 

 Accessing the eighteenth century

A JISC agreement to fund the acquisition of the Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO) content for all universities and colleges is set to bring significant benefits to the study of a wide range of subjects.  Brian Mitchell and postdoctoral student Andrew Pink (see below) investigate.

Images courtesy of Thomson Gale's Eighteenth Century Collections Online; images are also copyright of their holding libraries.

The eighteenth century was a period of war, peace and imperialist expansion, but also one of immense intellectual and cultural advance for this country. Now, for an affordable access fee, a JISC agreement brings a vitally important century to the desktop of all colleges and universities in the UK.

Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO), from publishers Thomson Gale, is the world's most comprehensive digital library of eighteenth-century printed books, and represents the  largest single digitisation project ever undertaken. It includes almost 138,000 printed titles and editions published in the United Kingdom and the colonies between 1701 and 1800, and allows the full-text searching of around 26 million pages, taking the user directly to facsimile copies of every title as first published.

ECCO reproduces works held at some of the most important and prestigious libraries in the world. The resource, and the agreement to make it available, represent a significant contribution to the continued democratisation of humanities study and research.

JISC collections team manager Lorraine Estelle led the negotiations for the e-resource. She explains why JISC has invested significantly to make this particular resource available: "ECCO is an essential resource for research across a range of disciplines. The search facilities allow scholars and students to locate works, concepts and sources in a manner that has not previously been possible and opens up the eighteenth century to students, academics and researchers in a rich and extraordinary way."

ECCO has already been recognised as a resource with enormous potential in learning, teaching and research, and not only in subjects such as English literature and history, but also in a wide range of other subjects, such as philosophy, theology, the sciences, geography, and as Andrew Pink observes (see inset box), subjects such as music studies.

The eighteenth century was a time when many of the subjects and disciplines which are taught in our colleges and universities were first formalised and studied. ECCO brings this era of almost unparalleled significance to the desktop of every learner, teacher and researcher in the country.

Brian Mitchell
JISC

ECCO and English music

Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO) is surely a crucial resource for anyone whose interests lead them into the world of eighteenth-century English music, whether double-checking references, conducting original research or producing first-rate study materials.

ECCO makes fully available many of the best known primary sources: treatises, methods, diaries, magazines and journals and, to a lesser extent, printed music. It also allows the scholar to place these sources into a wider, interdisciplinary social context with an almost sinful ease.

It is impossible to convey in a brief review the richness of the collection but for a start here are to be found Charles Burney's published travel books and diaries, and his history of music (1776-1789); musical works published by Playford, including Purcell's Orpheus Britannicus (1702) and Te Deum (1707); Avison's Essay on Musical Expression (1775) and his Concertos opus 2 (1740); and any number of part-song books and collections of psalmody.

It is perhaps the access to eighteenth-century England's "other" musicians that has given me the most pleasure in my brief acquaintance with ECCO, such as Barnabas Gunn of Gloucester (two cantatas and six songs, 1736); Elizabeth Turner of London (songs, 1758); and Thomas Wright of Stockton-on-Tees (harpsichord concerto, 1797). It goes without saying that access to, and efficient electronic searching of, the subscription lists that preface many such musical works will be of great value.

While ECCO's search facility is undoubtedly sophisticated, there is no loss of the serendipitous joy to be had from browsing a well-stocked library shelf.  Each search of ECCO throws up unexpected gems to side-track the scholar. Thus my simple search for the violinist-composer Geminiani found not only his concertos opus 2 (1757), 3 (1757), and 7 (1748) but also many others, as well as Henry Carey's poem To Geminiani at the Hague (1729). This in turn led me to Carey's verses about Geminiani's musical contemporaries including Roseingrave, Stanley and Lamp.

Andrew Pink, Doctoral student
Goldsmiths College, and Research Assistant to Professor Michael Worton, Vice Provost UCL

The journey of a lifetime

A JISC programme comes to an end having explored how ICT can help make lifelong learning a practical reality. Lisa Gray looks at what the programme has achieved and how its important work will continue.

Imagine a world in which an online learner record accompanied you throughout your career in education and work, a world in which that record could be used to support personal reflection and development from cradle to grave, a world in which online mentoring was available to help you make important decisions at crucial junctures of your career. Is this a pipedream, or a vision that could one day become a reality?

Exploring how this vision might become a reality, how learners can be supported in making the smooth transition from school, to college, university and work, as well as the wide range of educational, technical and administrative issues associated with it, has been the work of a JISC programme which has recently come to an end.

The JISC MLEs for Lifelong Learning programme and the ten projects it has funded have been investigating the issues around student progression between institutions, the support of learners in meeting their personal goals, and their building on their achievements as they make their way through different stages of personal and educational development.

Susie's journey (below) presents this vision, but demonstrates the need for it to be supported by the seamless transfer of records between institutions throughout a learner's lifetime. Central to the programme has therefore been its work on interoperability standards (called "UKLeaP") and the technical solutions which could enable this to happen. Projects have piloted the transfer of data using UKLeaP on a small scale, and outlined areas for improvements.

The NIIMLE project in Northern Ireland, for example, has developed a range of services accessible via a portal for learners in the province, services designed to help them make transitions between stages of learning and of work. The portal also includes a pathways service to all courses in the region as well as giving students access to their records of achievement.

Sinead Higgins, curriculum officer at the NIIMLE project, highlights the mentoring service which the project has developed and which supports learners faced with making those all-important career decisions: "It's available through the same portal which learners access their learner records through," she explains. "When a student is making a decision about where to study next, the service puts him or her in touch with an academic, someone best placed to support that learner. We hope that services like this, tailored to the needs of the region, can improve retention figures," she says.

The importance of e-Portfolios and Personal Development Planning (PDP) has also emerged through the programme. e-Portfolios can assist an individualised and supported approach to learning which encourages and records reflection throughout the learner's lifetime. At Loughborough College, for example, a learner-focused "eProgress File" was developed to capture and present learner data from the student record system, combining this with a process for encouraging student reflection.

Learners based in the workplace who are also studying at an educational institution face challenges in joining up their learning experiences across organisations. Based at Queen Mary, University of London, the PROSPERO project has been exploring these challenges, developing an open source "personalised learning environment" (PLE).

Zeeshan Ali at the Open and Distance Learning Unit has helped in the development of the PLE. Zeeshan sees them as being of great importance not only to work-based learners but also the organisations they work for. "The PLE provides an environment in which learners can discuss problems and difficulties and seek advice on how to resolve concerns," he says. "More importantly, learners can gather evidence of their experience and skills. These can then be presented to employers in a portfolio as a rich source of evidence about the learner's capabilities."

Common to all the projects has been the support of learners across institutional boundaries, not only FE and HE institutions, but also between educational institutions and the workplace, as well as other bodies such as trade unions.

This is particularly important for learners on flexible courses such as Foundation degrees based across FE and HE institutions. A common finding across the programme has highlighted the fact that technical interoperability is not possible without interoperability at the "personal" level - in other words, without cooperation between staff and departments across institutions.

The MLEs programme has highlighted a number of issues and has provided some excellent examples of good practice in this area. Although the programme has now come to an end and there are many questions still to be answered, the work to resolve these issues will continue through JISC's e-Learning Programme. Susie's lifetime of learning may not yet be a reality, but the journey has certainly begun.

Lisa Gray
JISC

Bringing communities together

A JISC service which provides thousands of mailing lists for the FE, HE and research communities is five years old and is now set to expand still further. Over the following pages we explore what JISCmail does, what its benefits are and look at its plans for the future.

Distributing around 12 million messages to over a third of a million people every month is not a straightforward task. But bringing subject, practitioner, local, regional and national communities together is what JISCmail does.

Founded by JISC in 2000 and now based at the CCLRC, the service offers all within the further and higher education and research communities the chance to join or to set up mailing lists, to receive up to date and relevant information from those lists, and to take part in online discussions about the things that matter to their communities.

Over 5,000 lists, some with thousands of members, others with just a handful, serve a rapidly growing number of users who find the JISCmail service and its many lists invaluable. Paul Keightley, a systems administrator at Barnet College, is a member of a number of JISCmail lists. "There are different aspects to all our jobs, and therefore we're all members of multiple communities at the same time," he says. "JISCmail allows me to be a part of those communities, to contribute, and to learn from others as well."

Central to the value of JISCmail lists is the possibility for collaboration. Sally Justice of London South Bank University runs two lists and is a member of 16 others. She says the service is "invaluable in that it enables me to communicate with like-minded people and exchange and share information."

Sally started the Data Protection Mail List for those involved and interested in data protection issues. She says: "It's been hugely successful due to the very valuable exchange of information on how others handle certain requests for data and how the law is interpreted by other institutions. It has saved probably hours of work, when for example a requirement has been to write a new procedure, by others sharing their experiences and sharing templates."

The JISCmail contract has recently been renewed until 2008 and, although it has been a considerable success story since 2000, plans are in place to develop the service still further. Calendars, facilities to incorporate images and photos, blogs, wikis and rss news services, are just some of the developments that are being considered to increase functionality. Further down the line JISCmail is considering the possibility of archiving e-mails with metadata in order to allow faster and more effective retrieval as well as exploring the retrieval opportunities that exist in subject-based repositories.

Manager of JISCmail Penny Windebank says that versatility is the key to JISCmail's success: "Flexibility and functionality are at the heart of what we're providing. Our main aim is to provide services for users that are delivered in the way that's best for them. We've achieved a lot in the last five years, but I think there's a lot more to come."

Spencer Warhurst
JISCmail

JISCmail and the digital life

I have managed JISC email lists for a range of purposes since 1997. When I was Artistic Director of the trAce Online Writing Centre we used them for public discussions and also for private workteams, research groups, conference committees and so on. Our colleagues, spread around the world, like listservs because they are easy to use via the simplest of email interfaces and also have a web-based archive.

Recently I became Professor of New Media at De Montfort University and started a new list, Writing and the digital life, where we are using the Survey tool to vote on monthly discussion topics. The JISCmail support team are always prompt to reply to my emails and as a list manager I feel very well supported.

Professor Sue Thomas
De Montfort University, and author of Hello World: travels in virtuality

JISCmail in facts and figures

5,200 lists provided by JISCmail

900,000 incoming messages annually

143 million outgoing messages annually

584 million messages distributed since 2000

526,000 virus messages stopped from reaching lists annually

171,633 international users in 193 countries

4.4 million spam messages stopped from going to lists annually

375,404 current users of JISCmail

3.5 million searches through JISCmail archives annually

A wealth of resources

The JISC Digitisation programme

Six major digitisation projects, featuring some of the UK's most important scholarly resources, are soon to begin delivering pilot demonstrators. What are these projects and what will they deliver?

18th-Century Parliamentary papers Almost 945,000 pages from all surviving printed House of Commons and House of Lords Papers, Bills, Journals and Reports for the period.

19th-Century British Newspapers at the British Library Nearly 2 million pages, totalling approximately 10 billion words of British newspapers from 1800-1900.

Newsfilm Online 60,000 segmented encodings, totalling 3,000 hours, and associated materials from the archives of ITN and Reuters Television.

Archival Sound Recordings at the British Library Nearly 12,000 segmented encodings totalling 3,900 hours of sound recordings from distinct and unique collections.

Medical Journals backfiles Nearly 1.7 million pages of complete backfiles from important and historically significant British and American medical journals through PubMed Central.

Online Historical Population reports 200,000 pages of all the published reports created by the Registrar-General's Offices and its predecessors for 1801-1920, Census Reports 1801-1933, and ancillary reports from The National Archives.

Ensuring access into the future

Universities and colleges are increasingly creating information in digital form. The implications of this are immense as institutions struggle to manage and preserve this information. Helen Hockx-Yu explains how a new JISC programme is helping to support them.

We know very well how to preserve printed materials. However, when it comes to the preservation of digital information, we face multiple challenges. New forms of information, with ever-increasing volumes, have very different management requirements to their paper-based counterparts, while the hardware and software used to store and access digital information are constantly being upgraded and superseded.

Furthermore, digital preservation is not yet a specific area of work within an institution's daily operation and therefore lacks dedicated resources and clearly defined processes, roles and responsibilities.

So, while much of our institutional knowledge and intellectual assets are now in digital form, their enduring accessibility into the future is far from assured.

A two-year JISC programme, funding 11 projects, began earlier this year in order to raise awareness and allow colleges and universities to gain hands-on experience of digital preservation issues. The programme - Supporting Digital Preservation and Asset Management in Institutions - was designed with institutions at its heart, providing them with a range of practical outcomes, both technological and organisational.

The Digital Asset Assessment Tool project at the University of London Computing Centre, is, for example, creating a tool for identifying the preservation needs of institutions" digital information so that scarce resources can be focused on areas where the risk is greatest.

The SherpaDP project, led by the Arts and Humanities Data Service, and the Southampton-led Preserv projects place preservation in the context of institutional repositories by building a shared preservation environment and adding preservation functions (see inset box) to current open source repository software. The Glasgow-based eSpida project is developing a model to create business cases for sustaining digital assets and exploring ways to bring digital preservation to the core of strategic planning.

The support for institutions in long-term digital preservation and asset management goes hand in hand with JISC's efforts to tackle those issues and challenges that are most difficult for institutions to address individually. Activities will also therefore include the funding of scoping studies, national services and international collaboration with key partners in digital preservation.

There is an increasing realisation that long-term preservation and continued access to digital resources are of strategic importance to institutions. This programme will in time provide a wide range of tools, services and exemplars to help institutions tackling the challenges.

Helen Hockx-Yu
JISC

Politics, preservation and Paradigm

Many universities, as well as national libraries, museums and galleries, collect private papers and archives. These contain a wealth of information of great importance both to education and research and, wider, to our cultural heritage.

Focussing on the papers of contemporary politicians, the Paradigm project will explore the issues surrounding the preservation of these political papers in digital format so that, as the research materials of tomorrow, they will continue to be accessible into the future.

The project is based at the Universities of Oxford and Manchester and will develop exemplar strategies and best-practice guidelines that will be of use to any institution which collects, preserves and maintains access to private papers.

Preservation and institutional repositories

While not all institutions possess the required expertise, skills or resources to ensure long-term preservation and access to digital resources, the AHDS-led Sherpa DP project will directly challenge this problem by piloting a shared preservation infrastructure for institutional repositories based on the Open Archival Information Systems (OAIS) Reference Model (an accepted ISO standard for preservation).

The functions and activities identified in the OAIS Model will be distributed among the participating institutional repositories and the AHDS, each taking responsibility for different functions. The AHDS will act as the provider of preservation services. This removes the need for individual repositories to develop their own services and employ scarce preservation management skills and expertise locally.

The collaborative model for preservation explored by Sherpa DP may be a way forward to tackle collectively the issue of long-term preservation within the setting of institutional repositories.

Free thinking

A freely and openly available online resource provides further evidence that the web can offer a collaborative environment in which the highest quality resources can be made available to all who want to use them. Philip Pothen looks at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and how a new JISC agreement is helping to keep it freely available.

"Employ your time in improving yourself by other men's writings, so that you shall gain easily what others have laboured hard for." Socrates

Since its earliest days the study of philosophy has centred on the open and free exchange of ideas. Where discourse, debate and a culture of sharing have flourished, so, invariably, has the pursuit of philosophy.

Since its founding in 1995, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has demonstrated that the World Wide Web can provide an environment for collaboration, for sharing, and one in which students of philosophy and other disciplines from all over the world can freely and openly access the writings of the finest experts in their fields.

At the outset the commitment by Stanford University's Centre for the Study of Language and Information was that the encyclopedia should be a dynamic reference work, with each entry maintained and updated by experts in the field, and refereed by members of a distinguished editorial board. Responsiveness to new research and authoritativeness are therefore two of the encyclopedia's most important features.

It was also intended that the encyclopedia should be freely available. However, public funding for the encyclopedia by the National Endowment for the Humanities began drawing to a close in September 2005 and in order to sustain its future, the encyclopedia needed the global academic and library community to act together to preserve open access to this important resource. The establishment of an operating fund at Stanford University will, it is hoped, help ensure open access for the future, while a JISC agreement on behalf of all UK education and research has contributed significantly to this fund and will in turn help secure the encyclopedia's future.

Marion Tattersall is e-services collections and user support manager at the University of Sheffield. Students at Sheffield, Marion says, have been using the encyclopedia since 2002. She says of the resource: "It is definitely a useful resource for us, providing authoritative articles in a range of central areas of the subject, at a level which is accessible to a number of different types of users."

Covering a vast range of entries and information about topics within philosophy, the encyclopedia is also heavily used by students from other disciplines. Dr Susan Stuart, senior lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Glasgow, sees this as one of its greatest assets: "It is a marvellous resource. I teach a number of interdisciplinary classes and, for example, the page by Robert Van Gulick on consciousness is a great way to bring psychology students up to speed with the background their philosophy colleagues will already possess."

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is set to continue its mission to make the very best of philosophical resources available to all who want to use them.

Philip Pothen
JISC

What philosophers are saying about the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy...

"It's a really great resource, hugely better than any of the published encyclopedias on philosophy."
Dr David McCarthy, Reader in Philosophy, University of Edinburgh

"The SEP is a fantastic resource. It has been able to secure the world's top researchers to write its articles. It ensures that they are peer-reviewed and are of a high scholarly standard. But also it ensures that they are clearly and accessibly written, making it an excellent resource for students as well as researchers. The advantages of a resource that can be incrementally improved and updated is also noteworthy."
Prof. Alexander Bird, Professor of Philosophy, University of Bristol

"SEP is a crucial and very high quality resource for lecturers, researchers and students. Open access needs to be preserved, if possible."
Dr Sean Crawford, Lecturer in Philosophy, Lancaster University

"It is one of the most useful of online resources, and all the more welcome at a time of high student numbers when library resources are overstretched."
Prof. Robin Le Poidevin, Professor of Metaphysics, University of Leeds

"This is a marvellous resource to which I direct all of my students. I really don't know what my institution would do if JISC did not fund a national agreement..." Dr Susan Stuart, Senior Lecturer in Philosophy, University of Glasgow

Making waves

A JISC project is receiving plaudits from a growing and international community of users. Susan Eales reports.

Software created by a JISC project is making waves internationally as increasing numbers of people look to share their learning materials, or to adapt materials created by others for their own use in the classroom.

With over 3,000 downloads every month and a growing community of devotees, Reload - which stands for Re-usable eLearning Object Authoring and Delivery - allows users to package up and describe online resources so that they can allow others to find and adapt these resources for their own use. The information added to the resources by the Reload software is like a packing slip which tells other systems (such as WebCT, BlackBoard and the open source Moodle) what is inside the package and how to display it.

One important advantage of the software is that content packaged in Reload can be transferred between virtual learning environment (VLE) systems, so changing systems need not be a problem. And as open source software, Reload is not only freely available, but its community of users can also build upon the software, continually developing and improving it.

Helen Foster, ILT development manager at Alton College, is one of the growing number of people who are finding considerable advantages to sharing and adapting learning materials for local use. "I've used Reload for adapting NLN materials," she says. "It allows me to create new learning objects and to edit existing ones. It's now being widely used across the world and its compliance with emerging international standards means that it has become the standard tool."

As part of the JISC Exchange for Learning (X4L) programme, which aims to create a range of online content which can be freely accessed and adapted by all in the further and higher education community, Reload provides a vital link between the design of learning materials and their availability to the wider community. Colin Milligan, the Reload project officer at Strathclyde University, explains: "X4L has created a range of content, which will be held by Jorum, the online repository for learning materials. But something is needed to package content up and describe it in such a way that it can be stored in Jorum and re-used by the wider community. That's what Reload aims to do."

But what of the future for Reload? Further funding from JISC is ensuring that Reload continues to develop to serve the needs of further and higher education, but major interest from the commercial sector promises to deliver still further benefits and ensure its long-term future. Colin Milligan is highly optimistic about the way forward: "Anyone who wants to share online materials in this way is using Reload. We now have a really solid foundation on which to build."

Susan Eales
JISC

You can order a print version (subject to availability) by emailing publications@jisc.ac.uk

JISC inform is produced by the JISC to raise awareness of the use of Information and Communications Technology (ICT) to support further and higher education in the UK. Contributing authors include members of the JISC family of services and initiatives, JISC’s partners and staff working in the FE and HE sectors.

The views expressed by contributors are not necessarily those of JISC.