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Open | Education in a Digital World

Download this issue of Inform

In issue 29 Winter 2010...

The future of research | Collaborate to compete

Five steps to Open Access | A practical guide

Digital literacy | A new university requirement?

Contents

• Technology – a strategic issue | Sarah Porter urges managers to re-examine their technology strategy
• Learning to lead | How to create a more integrated approach to university life
• News in brief | The latest news from JISC and its services
• Five steps to Open Access | A practical guide to making Open Access work
• Open Access – the view from the ground | Results from a recent study of researchers’ attitude towards Open Access
• New horizons for research | A new report looks at future opportunities and challenges for university research in the UK
• The future of research | Highlights from the JISC research conference
• Digital literacy | Why digital literacy should be at the top of your institutional agenda
• Without a trace | Malcolm Read on personal digital records
• The case for digitisation | How investment in digital resources saves money and improves research
• How to… find audio and visual resources online | JISC Digital Media help you find the best audio and visual resources
• Debate | Should we have to pay for content online?
• When the money runs out | How to make sure that a project is viable in the long term
• Projects sustaining people | How one college has benefited from their JISC projects
• 5-minute interview | Interview with Steve Bailey of JISC infoNet
• JISC dates for your diary | Information on upcoming events

A word from the Editor

In this issue of Inform – the last before our move to digital – we are looking to the future, and new ways in which teaching, learning and research might take place in a digital world: from digital literacy, practical guidance on establishing an Open Access policy and on finding digital resources, to how we can keep Britain’s position in the world’s league tables and make sure we are investing in the right projects.

Open-ness means different things to different people but for us it’s a way of promoting the full value of publicly funded material and making the most of our shared expertise, which is highlighted in our article on steps to Open Access. This means promoting open source data and open standards across technology in order to produce research, learning materials and other products that researchers, students and managers can benefit from whether they are based in the next lecture theatre or in an institution far away. The debate in this issue takes up the thread, asking whether we should pay for content online, while at the grassroots a new report on research and Open Access looks at how today’s young academics are facing these questions.

As Sarah Porter points out in her summary of future challenges for the education sector, ‘it is not difficult to use technology badly’ and we need to think carefully how we move from the analogue to the digital to support the needs of increasingly diverse groups of learners, researchers and teachers. We are talking about some of these issues in our new blog.

To reach many more of these diverse groups in a sustainable way Inform is moving online – please sign up to receive the new format so you don’t miss out on new, interactive features as well as the familiar news and background briefings.

Sign up now to receive digital versions of JISC publications

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Opinion / Strategy

Technology: a strategic issue

Sarah Porter, JISC’s head of innovation, urges managers to re-examine their technology strategy and to be creative by working with others.

In the commercial sector, it is now well understood that technology is a significant strategic issue that needs to be considered as an integral part of any change programme. The same applies to education, particularly when considering the management and use of key data – either financial information, information about students or research outputs. Educational institutions need to think about more visionary and innovative use of ICT to support institutional management and administration. Many institutions are not satisfied that their current management information systems provide them with enough ‘business intelligence’, for example – this kind of data is of particular value in a scenario where many factors are changing at the same time and institutions need to adapt quickly.

The student as ‘customer’ will be an even more pressing reality for institutions that need to consider how they can develop a closer and more supportive relationship with their students. Few institutions are currently using Customer Relationship Management style systems to work with current and former students but there are real benefits that can be derived from these.

If fees increase and more students are working part-time as well as studying, students require an even more flexible learning experience. Institutions may look to technology to provide some of this flexibility. There are lots of benefits that can be achieved here but it is not difficult to use technology badly – careful thought needs to be put into the design of the learning experience so that it supports the needs of a range of increasingly diverse groups of learners.

Institutions need to be more streamlined in their operation. They need to consider what services and functions they need to continue to provide for themselves and which they might source from other providers. There are also options for collaboration between institutions, which can provide more efficiency or even an additional source of income.

So what services can institutions out-source or buy-in from other places? In some part of the institution, such as the library, collaboration and use of shared services (both commercial and publically funded) has been usual for some time.

Many institutions are now considering that out-sourcing some of their technology systems and using off-site data storage (or ‘the cloud’) may offer efficiency.

Digital content is one area where it makes sense for resources to be provided from a single point. The high bandwidth network that the UK benefits from (the JISC-funded JANET service which has been in place for over 25 years) means that it is far more efficient for content to be negotiated and delivered centrally rather than duplicated across institutions. All UK universities are members of the JISC Collections not-for-profit company, which has a long history of supporting collaborative negotiation with publishers to provide more cost-effective access to digital resources.

Many institutions are now considering that out-sourcing some of their technology systems and using off-site data storage (or ‘the cloud’) may offer efficiency. JISC and HEFCE are working together to put in place cloud provision that can be used by universities.

Part of this will be general data storage provision at reasonable cost. JISC is also considering what shared application services can be provided in the cloud. Research systems are one area that might benefit from additional provision at a national level. There are discussions underway about working with the commercial sector to work towards cloud-based hosting for major administrative services used by colleges and universities. Some institutions favour a completely out-sourced solution whilst others wish to continue to run their systems locally, but would welcome support in procurement of systems. The solution is likely to lie in some provision in both areas.

This isn’t the time to sit passively and wait. It’s a time to take risks and be creative by working with others who have had the experience and emulate what they have done. There may be less resource available but the higher education sector can continue to provide excellence – the right collaboration will enable competition where it really matters.

Read the JISC-developed business intelligence toolkit

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Strategy / Leadership

Learning to lead

JISC Inform speaks to university leaders from across the UK who are benefiting from a more joined-up approach to management.

Times are a-changing. The medical library at Johns Hopkins, which had a longstanding liaison librarian programme, now has a so-called ‘informationist’ among its staff, in common with many other American universities. In the UK there has been a move away from departmental library services to a centralised and increasingly converged model of information and library services, while conversely increased interaction with researchers has long meant librarians having to acquire new skills, including IT and data manipulation. A new JISC report from University College London outlines a new role called the research information manager.

There’s no doubt that as the importance of technology within teaching and learning and research grows, the input of senior managers in helping to manage data and deal with an increasingly online network of resources is becoming more critical.

One outcome is that information services managers and academics are having to work more closely together to make the most of these developments. There is now a new genre of professionals working in universities up and down the country in this new land between information services and academia who can talk in vocabulary that both sets of experts can understand.

In common with other universities, managers at City University decided two years ago that the centre for education and academic practice and the e-learning team needed to be more integrated. A new role called ‘director of learning development’ was created. Professor Susannah Quinsee, who has a background in literature research, stepped into the position.

But building relationships and trust between people from academia and information services is not always easy. Quinsee believes the key lies in shared projects. She says, ‘Often information services get criticised for just focusing on the technology – but then that’s what they do. On the academic side we’re often not good at articulating why we need to use particular things or what the drivers are. By getting people in a room discussing what the challenges are and then how technology can potentially help is a very positive way of moving forward.’

City University now runs in-house ‘Meet the geeks’ workshops, bringing together academics who have particular requirements with the technical people who have the skills in order to match-make between them. Quinsee hails the scheme as a success resulting in ‘beautiful pieces of technology’.

Liz Jolly, director of library and information services at Teesside University, agrees that the divided culture within universities is one of the biggest issues facing senior managers today – but thinks that overcoming that gap using technology is a matter of approach. She says, ‘In the past, we’ve tried to impose technology on institutional departments or schools without thinking about what we’re doing or how it helps us reach our goals.

‘But technology is an enabler that allows us to deliver learning and teaching more effectively and administer the university more effectively. Better use of technology is in fact about better management practice in making those changes.’

So where do these insights come from, and are there formal ways for people from academic, library and information services backgrounds to meet and learn from each other?

Doing the course gave me access to really skilled, knowledgeable and experienced people in other sectors that I wouldn’t necessarily have engaged with.

JISC is sponsoring people to go on the Future Leaders Programme, run by the Leadership Foundation, which is aimed at people who aspire to a strategic role within information services and e-learning – from whichever background.

Quinsee says, ‘Doing the programme gave me access to really skilled, knowledgeable and experienced people in other sectors that I wouldn’t necessarily have engaged with. By working with some people on the systems side particularly, it’s enabled me to liaise much more effectively with my own information services and understand where they’re coming from.’

Susannah and Liz were among the half of the most recent 20-strong cohort who gained promotions as a direct result of their participation.

Jolly concludes, ‘The most useful thing from the course was learning how to learn to be a better leader and developing leadership as a habit of mind. It wasn’t the end of something – it was the beginning of a journey.’

If you’d like to embark on the same journey, applications are open until Friday 7 January 2011.

The Future Leaders Programme

The Future Leaders Programme aims to help participants to take a more visionary and strategic approach to build world class leadership within their field.

Applicants will currently be at middle manager level and have proven management experience in managing a service or a small team – with aspirations for a more strategic role in information services.

Pre-programme work will include the preparation and agreement of a change project proposal with their sponsoring institution, reading, and completion of psychometric assessments.

The 13–day programme will take place over a period of one year beginning in March 2011. The deadline for applications for this next cohort is Friday 7 January 2011.

For more information about the application process including guidance notes, the programme and venues visit the Future Leaders Programme website .

For more information contact Melissa Scuturi , Programme and Events Administrator.

Find out more about the strategic toolkit JISC is developing to help universities evaluate their use of technology Key themes for leadership and management are available in a new report from the LFHE

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News in brief / Winter 2010

News in brief

New European preservation team

The Open Planets Foundation (OPF) and JISC are joining forces to encourage the UK’s universities to take up a central role in European-wide efforts to preserve our digital heritage.

Unlike parchment and paper, digital data has a life span of years not millennia. Current estimates suggest almost 3 billion euros worth of vital data is already being lost every year in the European Union alone.

JISC and the OPF will be exploring the best way of providing value and benefits to both higher education and the broader membership of the OPF, and will establish an affiliate group membership for those academic and research institutions that are looking to address digital preservation challenges.

Neil Grindley, programme manager at JISC, says: ‘We regard the Open Planets Foundation as an exemplary model for moving from a reliance on project funding to a more sustainable economic model. JISC is delighted to have an opportunity to join other charter Foundation members in setting up and supporting a community of digital preservation developers and practitioners.’

Call for Welsh war stories

Are there any old family heirlooms in your home related to the First World War? Maybe a diary tucked away in a box in your attic, written on the front line by your great grandfather – or perhaps a collection of letters put away for safe keeping at the back of a drawer?

Welsh Voices of the Great War Online is a JISC project at Cardiff University that gives you the opportunity to share your family’s history and to remember the sacrifice made by your ancestors in what they hoped would be ‘the war to end all wars’.

The project team are interested in any and all items that are related to the experiences of the Welsh in World War One, and in memories and stories that have been passed down the generations.

Once gathered, the material will be catalogued and then made available to the public via The People’s Collection website.

Contribute digital images of your items

New digitisation scanning tool

This autumn the JISC Digital Media team welcomed a tall, dark and rather handsome new asset to the team in the shape of a Zeutschel – a Zeutschel OS 1200 HQ to be precise, which is a user-friendly large format (A2) book scanner/copier with an impressive scanning time of one second.

The scanner is on loan from Best-Tec Limited, and the team will spend the next month reviewing the scanner’s capabilities for digitising cultural assets and archives.

Sue Atkinson of JISC Digital Media said: ‘So far we’re impressed – the scanner can correct book curve with its 3D scan technology (scanning books up to 100mm in depth at up to 600ppi resolution) and to assist workflow the Zeutschel has the ability to build multiple file format outputs into one scan too.’

Explore what’s possible

Online lab sparks award

A dynamic laboratory to help chemistry undergraduates at the University of Bristol has won JISC’s outstanding ICT initiative award at the Times Higher Awards.

Students can find out which experiment they are to do, carry out pre-lab experiments, submit their work, see what marks they have gained and retrieve comments on their work from the online lab called ChemLabS.

Sarah Porter, JISC’s judge, said: ‘What made the project a winner is that a lot of careful thought and effort has been put into extending the impact of ChemLabS so that it benefits school pupils, students, teachers and lecturers across the whole UK. ChemLabS is an excellent example of what can happen when innovative technology is used to dissolve the barrier between a university and the world around it.’

Explore the resource

Business engagement bookshelf online

A new web portal developed by JISC TechDis brings together a wealth of useful free resources in one place to help universities and colleges access information about engaging with business.

Developed with the help of the Higher Education Academy, it is hoped that Acumen will become an indispensable online tool to support successful engagement with small and medium sized businesses.

Informing the class of 2011

Facebook photo albums, online clips and video briefings for international students are among examples of best practice highlighted in a new report aimed at helping universities and colleges better inform their first-years about life at university.

Well-informed students are less likely to drop out, so the report illustrates innovative ways of communicating with prospective freshers, to inform and advise them while managing their expectations of higher education.

The report, Managing Students’ Expectations of University, has been produced as part of a JISC-funded project led by the 1994 group.

Download the report

Sign up for technology updates

A top-level alert providing updates on supporting your institution through technology is now available for senior managers.

The briefing points to JISC’s new ‘supporting your institution’ resources, which contain practical advice about implementing technology policy for better teaching, learning and research.

Sign up for the monthly email alert

Visit the new ‘supporting your institution’ section on the JISC website

Open access group

A new steering group focused on Open Access has just formed in the UK to coordinate evidence, policies, systems and advice to help make Open Access an easy choice for authors and universities.

The group have asked JISC to map out a programme of practical work to make progress in these areas.

For more information on how you can implement an Open Access policy, see page 8.

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Research / Open Access

Five steps to Open Access

For this year’s Open Access Week, JISC produced a hands-on guide to making Open Access work in an institutional context, from putting a policy in place to tackling the challenges of copyright and licensing.

The principles behind Open Access – that publicly funded research should be fully, freely, immediately and permanently available online where it can be access and reused – are being increasingly understood and accepted in UK higher education, and beyond. However, putting the principles into practice is not always so straightforward.

JISC put five experts on the spot and asked for their real-life examples and top tips. Here’s an overview of the key topics and their advice – find out more about the Open Access topics and watch the full video interviews with the experts on the JISC Open Access Week microsite.

Step 1: Putting Open Access policies in place

Not all universities with an institutional repository have an official Open Access policy in place but many are moving to that position. Some policies, such as the University of Salford’s, mandate that employees of the university place their research papers in the institutional repository. Other universities have policies that strongly encourage self-archiving by researchers, while not making it compulsory. For senior managers it’s the carrot or stick dilemma – a mandatory Open Access policy sends a clear message throughout the institution about the importance and value of Open Access but it can also be difficult to police.

As well as the fundamental voluntary or mandatory decision, other key areas to consider when devising an Open Access policy include ensuring that academics comply with funder policies (for example, research funded by the Wellcome Trust must be deposited in the Open Access UK PubMed Central repository), having intellectual property rights guidelines and specifying whether an author is encouraged to publish in an Open Access journal as well as self-archiving their work in a repository.

Whatever the detail of the policy, the benefits are clear for everyone involved:

Expert’s top tip:

‘With an institutional repository the main cost is not buying the software and installing it but making sure you get all the legacy material on to the site. So you have to provide some institutional support to help busy academics get their old papers on to the repository. If you don’t do that then it’s not going to happen.’

Paul Curran, vice chancellor of City University

Step 2: Making an Open Access policy effective

‘With the right research and training they find it is as easy as booking a flight online – and then they have real ownership of the process.’
Deborah Shorley, director of library services at Imperial College, London

Having an Open Access policy is a good start, but it needs to be implemented effectively. You need to explain what it is, what it means, how researchers can act on the policy efficiently, and most importantly of all, what everyone stands to gain from it.

Make it easy for researchers: an effective Open Access policy will be one that does not demand too much extra work from a busy researcher. Think about timing: the moment of deposit into the repository needs to come at just the right point in the researcher’s workflow – not too early or too late in the process – if it is to feel like a natural step rather than an additional burden. Offer researchers all the support they need but emphasise that it is ultimately their responsibility and they, as individuals as well as the institution, will see the benefits. Be clear about what those benefits are and make sure that advocacy runs right through the institution. Don’t assume it’s only the library’s role to sell the benefits of Open Access – the most effective advocacy results from having Open Access champions in faculties and departments throughout the institution.

Expert’s top tip:

‘Get the message across! Of course make sure that your institutional repository is good, make sure that the processes are good and that you have the backup to provide the information but, above all, get the message across that this is good for your institution and it’s good for research.’

Deborah Shorley, director of library services at Imperial College, London

Step 3: Funding Open Access developments

Although Open Access makes publicly funded research free at the point of use, this does not mean that it is free of cost. Repositories are relatively cheap to set up and run, but publication charges for Open Access journals can be expensive.

The basic principle is that publication charges are as much part of research costs as, for example, laboratory supplies and so publisher fees may be paid from a funder’s grant or from institutional research income. Institutions can make it easier for researchers by setting up a mechanism to enable these relatively small payments to publishers to be made efficiently, and some universities have also found it useful to set up an Open Access publication fund.

Despite the costs, Open Access is still cheaper for most institutions than the subscription model, and JISC has funded research into a model that helps you to work out the costs and benefits of moving to Open Access.

Expert’s top tip:

‘The research councils support Open Access in terms of funding. It’s very simple for researchers, it’s something they can put in the costs of their grant applications and then it will be funded.’

Paul Gemmill, chair of RCUK Research Outputs Group

Step 4: Measuring Open Access benefits

Open Access offers benefits at every level, from the individual researcher and institution to the global research community. But how can these benefits be measured and analysed?

The web makes it possible to measure access to an article by users in ways that were simply not possible in the age of paper journals. Increased visibility of Open Access articles can be seen in the way that they are indexed by search engines such as Google – put in a name or keyword and the paper pops up. Usage can be measured in the number of downloads at the repository level. And research has shown that Open Access papers are cited more often, which provides universities and authors with an indication of the importance of a research paper to other researchers.

To get the most out of these measurements and analyses senior managers need to make sure that their institutional repository is optimised for search engines, that they can get regular citation statistics and that they share this information throughout their institution.

There may be a benefit from Open Access even if there is no increase in the number of citations. For example, it might be that a researcher was able to access information in an Open Access article earlier than an article embargoed in a subscription journal, and so save time on their own research.

Expert’s top tip:

‘Keep plodding on! Keep going. There is always another challenge to be undertaken, another part of your institution that needs to know how the repository can help them. Be flexible, understand what your institution’s concerns are and respond to them.’

Dr Leslie Carr, director of the Web Science Doctoral Training Centre at Southampton University and repository manager for the School of Electronics and Computer Science

Step 5: Open Access and copyright and licensing

Researchers, funders, universities and publishers all have an interest in copyright for published research. Simply, researchers want to make sure they are attributed, funders and universities want to retain re-use rights in research reports, and publishers want publication rights.

Open Access does not mean a copyright free-for-all and there are ways to make sure that everyone’s interests can be accommodated fairly. The key lies in using licences rather than ‘giving away’ copyright in one fell swoop. Open content licences such as Creative Commons allow papers to be accessed by everyone but put the power back in the author’s hands when it comes to specifying what can be done with their work. The researcher can specify that their paper can be re-used but that they must always be attributed, and can choose whether to allow it to be used for commercial purposes or not. Open Access to the data behind the research is becoming increasingly important, and licensing data is something to take advice on.

In the digital age, greater understanding of copyright is essential for researchers. Senior managers can help by developing an institutional framework for good copyright practice, while librarians need to reassure researchers about the copyright status of their Open Access articles, and inform them about the different kinds of licences on offer.

Expert’s top tip:

‘Start by aligning all your institutional policies and strategies around a pan-university copyright and IPR framework. That’s not an easy thing to do. Secondly, hold training classes for students and academics about copyright issues. Thirdly, move copyright management from an administration area of the university to the library.’

Paul Ayris, director of UCL library services and UCL copyright officer, President of LIBER

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Research / Open Access

Open Access: the view from the ground

A team at Loughborough University is currently examining researchers’ attitudes to Open Access – with some surprising results.

This research forms the first part of a study of the behaviours and attitudes of authors towards Open Access repositories; the second part will investigate some of the findings in more depth. The study reports on a questionnaire by over 3,000 respondents, supplemented by focus groups held across Europe in summer 2009.

What is Open Access?

There are two main routes to Open Access for an author: they can submit a paper to an Open Access journal or submit to a traditional subscription-based journal and deposit the paper in a repository after it has been reviewed but before publication. Rates of submission to Open Access repositories remain variable despite substantial advocacy and both funders and universities requiring authors to make their work openly accessible.

Awareness of Open Access and repositories

All authors surveyed were familiar with the term Open Access, and generally understood the concept. However, most expressed some difficulty in defining what a repository was and what sort of material it might hold. Such uncertainty may be attributable to the fact that institutional policies regarding repositories tend to vary greatly. Just over half of the authors surveyed had deposited a peer-reviewed journal article in a repository in the past five years.

Authors from physical sciences and mathematics expressed a stronger preference for subject-based repositories, whilst authors from the social sciences, humanities and arts were more likely to have deposited in an institutional repository than any other disciplinary group.

Motivations and barriers

The authors surveyed considered the benefits to include greater visibility, increased citation rates and reputation building. Sharing outputs as widely as possible was a key driver for self-archiving, especially for those in the social sciences and arts and humanities.

Of those authors surveyed who had deposited a manuscript accepted by a publisher, 70% reported that they did so voluntarily. The most frequently cited motivations to deposit included: suggestion from a colleague (12%); invitation from the repository in question (11%); request from a co-author (10%); publisher invitation to deposit (8%); mandated by institution (8%); and funder mandate (3%). Authors acknowledged the potential benefits of making outputs publicly available but felt that they had received mixed messages from funders and institutions. Furthermore, they felt that there was a conflict between Open Access mandates and the increasing pressure placed on them by institutions to publish in high impact journals. The three most frequently cited concerns regarding depositing in an Open Access repository amongst the authors surveyed were: concerns over copyright infringement; uncertainty over embargo periods; and unwillingness to place outputs where other content had not been peer reviewed.

What does the future hold?

The findings support the related literature in showing that scholars are receptive to Open Access. Just over half of the survey respondents saw repositories as challenging the dominance of subscription-based journals, while there was perceived to be less threat to the peer-review system. While scholars’ attachment to peer review was strongly expressed in the focus groups, the overall findings of the study suggest that scholars could foresee the possibility of peer review being organised and managed outside scholarly journals. It remains to be seen what form this peer review might take, but some of the Web 2.0 tools could help develop new ways of organising peer review.

This is an abbreviated and edited version of an article published in the New Review of Academic Librarianship, Volume 16, Supplement 1 2010, ‘Dissemination Models in Scholarly Communication’ by Claire Creaser, Jenny Fry, Helen Greenwood, Charles Oppenheim, Steve Probets, Valérie Spezi and Sonya White. JISC and Routledge have collaborated to make this issue available through Open Access.

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Research / Strategy

New horizons for research

Simon Thomson and Jonathan Adams from Evidence, Thomson Reuters, look at future opportunities and challenges for university research in the UK.

Our recent report to Universities UK, ‘The Future of Research’, was written at a time of uncertainty; political changes, unprecedented economic challenges and the rise of new research economies. And while the flat-cash research budget announced in the Comprehensive Spending Review was a better result for the sector than many had expected, things remain uncertain. The CSR will still mean a nine per cent reduction in real terms over four years to the research budget, the science capital budget will not be similarly protected, and the reduction to the teaching budget and the Browne recommendations are bound to have an effect on research activity. The report looks at several key themes and makes recommendations that will allow the UK research base to adapt to the changing times in which it finds itself.

The greatest contribution that the UK university research base makes to the economy and society is the development of skilled and competent people trained in a world-leading research environment.

UK higher education research works best when it works with partners from other universities, other parts of the economy and other countries. Such partnerships are essential if we are to tackle ‘grand challenge’ issues like climate change and resource security. The UK will need to be more engaged in seeking out these partnerships as its position as a world leader is diluted by the growth of new knowledge economies. This will require a cultural and linguistic response as well as researcher mobility across sectors and national boundaries.

Characteristics of the UK higher education research base, such as the dual support system, are deeply embedded and central to sustained performance while others may be less important in future. As the ten-year science and innovation framework enters its final stages it is desirable that a government strategy should emerge which addresses the timely rebalancing of some central priorities and structures, but which does so while avoiding undue changes which might undermine achievement.

The framework in which UK higher education research operates is changing and the distribution and structure of research funding may need to be rebalanced to meet the challenges the future will bring.

With this in mind, our report recommends the following:

The UK university research base has a deservedly strong reputation and is well placed to take advantage of future opportunities. But it cannot be complacent; the world is changing and it must change too. The UK must continue to develop skilled, able researchers; it must reach out to partners and develop strong partnerships; it must change its priorities to focus on the needs of the future, and it must address issues of resourcing and efficiency if it is to continue to thrive.

Download the report

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Research / Strategy

The future of research

How can universities build and maintain institutional reputation, efficiency and effectiveness? JISC Inform looks at lessons learned from this year’s event.

Academic research is vital to the UK economy – contributing £30bn annually according to the Browne review – and to the international reputation of UK higher education. Yet, with cuts in research funding on the horizon, institutions are having to look carefully at where they can make savings.

That was the backdrop to the JISC conference on the Future of Research, which gathered vice chancellors, heads of research and UK funders to discuss how universities can build, maintain and expand their research, based on the key areas of institutional reputation, efficiency and effectiveness, and collaboration in a competitive environment.

The focus was on here-and-now advice and guidance, and senior managers left the day with not only food for thought but also practical steps to take to help their institutions face the challenges ahead. Here are some of the highlights.

Reputation

Globally, locally, and individually, academic research can enhance or damage reputations – think of the four new Nobel laureates the UK has recently gained, or the furore over the ‘climategate’ emails. Worldwide, the UK still has a strong reputation but there’s a danger of complacency, warned Professor Julia Goodfellow in her keynote speech. Other countries are catching up quickly, with China increasing its research output fourfold over ten years, overtaking all but the USA. She pointed to four key imperatives for the future if the UK is to maintain its reputation: people (we must continue to produce competent researchers); partnerships (building strong links between quality research); effectiveness (not just about doing things cheaply but doing them better); and communication (sharing our success much more).

The question of partnerships was picked up by Jonathan Adams, author of the UUK report The Future of Research. He suggested that who you partner with is crucial and urged managers to consider whether their partnerships may be enhancing someone else’s reputation rather than getting recognition for themselves.

At the institutional level, reputations can be won or lost by the quality and commitment of researchers.

At the institutional level, reputations can be won or lost by the quality and commitment of researchers. Forward-thinking IT strategy helps provide an attractive environment to recruit and retain the most talented researchers, and IT departments need to ensure they can support advanced research requirements. One way to achieve this is through facilitators, who can connect researchers to technology.

Good data management is vital for better research, and has an impact on the reputation of both the institution and the individual researcher – well-managed data can increase citations.

Reputation top tips:

• Bridge the gap between IT and researchers by employing research facilitators, who understand both the needs of researchers and the technology available
• If you get an FOI request, always consult your institution’s FOI practitioner as soon as possible

Collaboration

How can universities collaborate to compete? Quite effectively, said Professor Paul Curran, citing the example of the World Cities, World Class University (WC2) network. It was set up recently by 15 universities located in world cities that share a similar culture. It aims to enable its members to react quickly to government, and EU, proposals, exchange doctoral students and improve members’ profiles.

The UK already collaborates with a variety of international partners, although there was another word of warning about complacency – many of the expanding research communities, such as Russia and India, rank quite low in relation to their collaboration with the UK, but universities also need to look beyond other academic institutions for partners to include industry, the public and the private sector.

Monica Marinucci from Oracle had some sage advice for institutions looking to collaborate with industry. They should first identify the rationale behind the collaboration, then find a specific problem to solve to work out where the strengths lie and build trust. There should be some room for flexibility in case the project ends up going in a different direction. Expectations should also be set correctly to avoid disappointment.

Collaboration top tips:

• Ask yourself: ‘Could I be doing this better? If I could, how and who with?’
• Be selective: collaboration should be in line with overall institutional policy and strategy and offer a return on investment
• Run pilot projects to test the water and build up trust between partners
• Industry and business work at different speeds – make sure your timescales are compatible

Efficiency and effectiveness

‘Open’ was the keyword in this strand, with Professor Martin Hall declaring that if he were given £500m to build a university of the digital future, an Open Access repository would be at its heart.

The theme was picked up by Alma Swan who pointed out that Open Access was both efficient, through direct cost savings and efficiency gains, and also effective through increased visibility, usage and academic impact. Stephen Pinfield took up the baton from the institutional perspective and urged managers to address some of the concerns of researchers around Open Access: quality control, IPR, undermining the tried-and-tested system, and time constraints. There are coherent answers to these problems but they need marshalling for an academic audience. Senior academic champions need to go out to the subject communities and share their publication cultures and how they can be enhanced by Open Access.

With arts and humanities research funding likely to be at the forefront of cuts, the use of technology to reduce costs is going to become increasingly important.

JISC’s digitised resources have helped to democratise the research process by extending facilities to individuals and institutions that would not otherwise have access. Shared services can also help to lower costs, and JISC provides the JANET network, which contributes to institutional efficiency and effectiveness by connecting institutions to the rest of the world in a high speed, high capacity and highly reliable way.

Efficiency and effectiveness top tips:

• Don’t underestimate your IT needs: arts and humanities research can involve just as many resources as STEM research
• Digitisation of geographically distant resources can reduce the need for travel and enable fresh discoveries
• Research should be less about search and more about analysis – IT can help reduce the search burden

What they said
‘The watchword should be effectiveness as well as efficiency. A piece of technology may save money but does it help to fulfil missions better? Does it give students a richer, fuller experience? Does it help collaborations with partners become more meaningful? Technology solutions that increase effectiveness may be more valuable than those designed solely for efficiencies.’ Professor Rick Trainor	‘While all the evidence shows that the UK has a strong reputation we must not be complacent. Others are catching up fast – China has increased its research output fourfold over ten years, overtaking all but the USA. We are expecting cuts when other developed countries are still investing – how will this affect our reputation?’ Professor Julia Goodfellow
‘Open Access is essential to the efficient and effective use of new technologies. Paywalls and membership systems are inefficient, ineffective and counter progress. They might work for Rupert Murdoch, but not for the research community. We will live to regret it if we allow Open Access advances to be cut short.’ Professor Martin Hall	‘As competition has increased, so has collaboration both between academics and universities. The more competitive also tend to collaborate more: academics instinctively know if they collaborate with institutions overseas, they will get a wider audience.’ Professor Paul Curran

Find out more about the Future of Research, including reports from all the sessions, video coverage and links to further resources

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Student experience / Digital literacy

Digital literacy – an overview

Should digital literacy become a university requirement? JISC Inform looks at the evidence.

The nature of knowledge is changing. With an estimated 77% of UK jobs involving some form of information and communications technology (ICT) competence, the question arises as to whether this should be a university requirement. ICT is now integral to the development of early literacy and numeracy (see, for example, the National Literacy Trust study on Young People’s Writing), suggesting that far from being one among a multitude of capabilities, digital literacy is at the heart of what it means to learn, study and know.

The issues

The 2009 JISC report Thriving in the 21st century: learning literacies for a digital age concluded that learners need integrated, progressive and personalised support for developing digital literacy, both generically and relevant to their chosen subject of study. It identified evidence that all graduates require digital capabilities and attitudes to thrive in the worlds of work, citizenship and culture and to support lifelong learning. Currently there is poor support for learners’ developing strategies to make effective use of technologies for learning, and in some institutions there are still barriers to use of personal technologies and social networks.

‘Digital literacy is an agenda which aligns well with economic recovery, as it concerns the employability of UK graduates, the health of UK research and innovation, and the capacity of individuals and organisations to make use of digital opportunities.’
Helen Beetham, JISC e-learning advisor

Institutions must position themselves to respond quickly and flexibly to the need for new kinds of capability. Student expectations, student diversity and employability are the main agendas driving change in provision for learning and digital literacy. Dr Rhona Sharpe from the Oxford Centre for Staff and Learning Development, says ‘it is fundamental that institutions take seriously their responsibility to prepare learners to be able to learn effectively with the technology tools available to them. When we send them out into life and the workplace or into further research they need to be able to work collaboratively in teams which operate only online, for example, or they need to be able to search and evaluate and make use of the vast online resources available to them.’ Sharpe has just finished a JISC-funded study of how institutions are supporting learners in a digital age led by Oxford Brookes University.

Looking ahead – the devil is in the detail

Learners’ different approaches, attitudes and experiences of technology represent a new form of diversity, which institutions must address to ensure equal access. While there is useful research into digital literacy at national level it is very important to look at local data. ‘When you’ve got the combination of national work and local data that’s when you get change happening,’ comments Rhona Sharpe. ‘It is useful for institutions to find out rather than assume what their learners need and expect. Sometimes there is a very distinctive student body and institutional agenda so the needs will be contextualised by that.’

Tutors and other support staff need to be proactive in helping learners to develop learning and digital literacies. Academic staff also need to be engaged in rethinking their own knowledge practice. At the same time, learners need to be engaged in their own development, and the SLiDA case study about the University of Surrey’s CoLab is a great example of a student-led enterprise that provides a range of services for students, staff, the university, the local community and external institutions. ‘Students often knew more about Web 2.0 technologies than we did so why not let them lead us,’ explains Professor Norman Jackson, director of the Centre for Excellence in Teaching and Learning at the University of Surrey.

Under the right conditions, learners can become more critical, evaluative, self-aware, self-confident, skilled and capable in the use of technologies. ‘Compared to 20 years ago there is a huge amount of difference in terms of what today’s learners have to master,’ observes Sharpe. ‘Although they come with some familiarity with technology they don’t really have an understanding of how to use it as a tool to support their learning. Learners need to be able to choose the right tool, to use it appropriately in the right setting, to limit it as a distraction. That is a lot more than just having familiarity or ownership with technology.’

Supporting learners in a digital age (SLiDA) has produced eight case studies with evidence how institutions are building literacy into their courses

Read the final report available on our website

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Data management / Preservation

Without a trace

In ten years’ time all your work will probably have been done on a laptop. If you are an aspiring poet the first drafts that you discarded will be probably completely lost; previously the early work of a poet was usually retained somewhere in a desk drawer. When they die the drawers get raided and scholars gain valuable insights into the work processes of someone like DH Lawrence. Similarly, we will know very little about the early political drivers that made a politician who they are and might not be able to challenge their memoirs.

The hand-written annotations Charles Darwin made on 700 of the books in his personal library were painstakingly transcribed in the 1980s. Last year, thanks to high-resolution digital imagery and an international partnership between Cambridge University Library, Darwin Manuscripts Project at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, the Natural History Museum in London and the Biodiversity Heritage Library, Darwin’s marginalia were digitally married to the texts they illuminate, allowing scholars to learn his thoughts on a wide range of topics. The project was supported by the JISC/National Endowment for the Humanities transatlantic digitisation collaboration grant programme.

…there will be less and less draft material with revealing notes in the margins to scrutinise as we move away from Darwin into the 21st century.

While digitisation programmes like this will make faraway archives instantly accessible to scholars, there will be less and less draft material with revealing notes in the margins to scrutinise as we move away from Darwin into the 21st century. For the past 20 years there has been a black hole in the historical record and this hole is only likely to grow. The more people work online the poorer the records of their outputs are likely to be. Unless you know they are going to be of use, you will most probably discard early drafts, notes or compositions.

A recent high profile example of trying to effectively capture the ephemera and ‘grey literature’ that surrounds the activity of someone prominent was the Salman Rushdie archive at Emory University. It allows the general public access to the celebrated writer’s computer files, private journals, notebooks, photographs and manuscripts and provides insight into his creative process and campaigns for human rights.

Digital information is fragile – stored on a memory stick, in a spreadsheet, or even on the web, it is easily corrupted, lost or destroyed. There is no apparent solution to this problem unless you envisage a world where backups of files are done in the cloud – and there are signs of that happening. But there are enormous privacy issues: I might or might not give people permission to trawl through my working files from the past decades but I am not likely to do that when I’m dead. Does this material revert to the estate of somebody and how would that actually happen?

As part of JISC’s programme Supporting Institutional Digital Preservation and Asset Management the Personal Archives Accessible in Digital Media (PARADIGM) project brought together the major research libraries of the universities of Oxford and Manchester to explore the issues involved in preserving digital private papers. One of their outputs was the PARADIGM workbook, which provides best-practice guidelines. Another recent initiative in this area was the British Library ‘Digital Lives Research Project’, designed to provide a major study of personal digital collections and funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC).

In most areas of public life it is crucial to keep information about the circumstances in which works of art or research data are created. What we decide to do now has a bearing on what information will be available to subsequent generations. And it isn’t just a problem in the humanities, because presumably all Einstein’s notes in the margins are still available – and they wouldn’t be if he was born now!

JISC’s executive secretary Malcolm Read looks at personal digital archiving and asks whether the early work of future Einsteins might be lost for ever.

Find out more about JISC’s work in preserving data and resources

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Resource discovery / Digitisation

The case for digitisation

JISC invests every year in putting the nation’s resources online for the benefit of generations to come. Here are some of the voices arguing for that digitisation.

Inspiring research and scholarship Britain needs a sustainable national content collection of compelling, rich and accessible digital content to foster excellence in research, learning and teaching.
Early English Books Online itself has transformed research into early English literature. It has democratised the research process. Dr Sarah Carpenter, University of Edinburgh	Almost the entire field of bioinformatics has grown up because of data sharing. Dr Paul Flicek, the European Bioinformatics Institute	From beneath the pages of the prayer book a second book emerged – a virtual Archimedes. Will Noel, curator of manuscripts, The Walters Art Museum
Saving money and adding value Higher education has a key role in transferring ideas, research results and skills between universities, other research organisations, business and the wider community, conferring a whole range of benefits, economic, social and political.
Students could no longer account for their lack of preparation by complaining that theyhad not been able to get hold of the readings! Dr William Smith, University of Dundee	Many hands make light work and those many hands will profoundly touch Britain’s future capacity for learning, research and innovation. Dr Sarah Thomas, Bodleian Library, Oxford University	Users have at their fingertips source materials which they would never normally have sight of, or only with considerable difficulty and concomitant expense. Professor John Rink, Royal Holloway, University of London
Connecting people and communities Community projects allow contributors and users to interact with the people around them. Digitising resources can support lifelong learning and promote a sense of history and place.
I had no idea this was here... It is archives like this that reveal the rich history that this country has. Ellen Hogan, amateur user of the Fine Rolls of Henry III	It’s the immediate accessibility of a vast wealth of peer-reviewed resources that is most remarkable. Professor Tilli Tansey, University College London	Digital resources both create a new audience, and re-configure our analysis to favour the individual. Professor Tim Hitchcock, University of Hertfordshire
Preparing resources now for our future The vision is for a sustainable national collection of compelling rich and accessible digitised resources for excellence in research, learning and teaching.
Knowledge is power. I grew up in India and I had to wait three months for a fellow student to return a book to the library before I could study for an exam. Nikesh Arora, Google	The observations from the logbooks on wind force and weather are astonishingly good – we absolutely need to comprehend the oceans to understand future weather patterns. Dr Dennis Wheeler, University of Sunderland	Whatever our differences, I don’t think we should be deterred by misplaced worries about feasibility. We have enough expertise and experience to get the job done. Professor Robert Darnton, Harvard University
Creating digital Britain Digital content and resources support the broader government agenda to build a digital Britain and open up data for the 21st century, whilst raising the levels of digital literacy.
Around 95% of the world’s books, magazines, newspapers, videos, films, documents still lie hidden in archives and libraries, inaccessible in digital form. Alastair Dunning, JISC programme manager	We are responding to the new way in which people want to access information – in their own homes at a time that is convenient to them. Andrew Green, National Library of Wales	I want to make Britain the most connected, the most wired up, the most digitally advanced country there can be. David Cameron, Prime Minister

Read Alastair Dunning’s blog post ‘Isn’t Google digitising everything anyway?’ on the JISC blog

Find out more about the benefits of digitising resources in a new publication

Explore the impact of digitisation

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Resource discovery / Digital media

How to… find audio and visual resources online

We look at how to sift the very best audio and visual resources from the mass of information available with the help of JISC Digital Media.

Recent research by JISC into the digital information seeker indicates that people are accessing digital resources in new ways. Researchers ‘squirrel’ downloads – they conduct short, basic searches and spend little time actually using the content, instead choosing to download it in case they need it later. Moreover, in an average search, not many pages are viewed – researchers use small chunks of information and scan very quickly. We call this power browsing.

As the digital sphere expands, the number of resources and their spread becomes greater – so those who can get the most out of the web will be the best searchers among us. The following guidance is based on JISC Digital Media toolkits available online.

The shopping basket approach

Set up a way to capture useful links as you see them; services like the online favouriting site Delicious and even your own web browser can help you tag and organise top pages to find them easily later as well as share useful resources among your colleagues.

Use a specialised search engine or site

Consider using a specialised search engine or site for particular types of resources – for example, for audio files consider the search engines Metacrawler or FindSounds.com. For images, try exalead, ELZR or Google Images.

Stock photo collections like Stock.XCHNG contain hundreds of thousands of free-to-use stock images submitted by keen photographers. Other commercial providers such as iStockphoto sell vast numbers of images individually at a low price – often less than £1 each. You may find yourself sidetracked in these huge collections where a search can throw up thousands of images.

Photo sharing websites are also worth a look – but remember that these photos are not exempt from copyright and the images are generally made freely available to view only in situ.

Use Boolean operators

As with any search, you’ll get the best results if you use AND, OR and NOT in your search terms. It is also possible to perform complex Boolean searches in which more than one Boolean operator is used. To do this, enclose the terms connected with OR within parentheses. For example:

(marijuana OR cannabis) AND (therapeutic use OR medicinal use)

Check your copyright status

In the eyes of the law, it is up to you, the user, to find out if and how you may use the resource, without violating copyright. Bear in mind that search engines rarely have the means to filter by copyright status, so a large percentage of the results returned will be protected in full and so should be used only in accordance with copyright law. On photo sharing sites, permission to reuse these images in your own work is not implicit.

Check the Strategic Content Alliance toolkit and JISC Legal for up-to-date advice.

Look for Creative Commons

Creative Commons licences are not an alternative to copyright but they work alongside copyright, so that the creator of a work like a video can modify their copyright terms to best suit their needs. Flickr and Every Stock Photo contain many Creative Commons images. The area called ‘the Commons’ includes images from the Library of Congress among others.

A new taskforce led by JISC and RLUK, the research libraries body, is working to make resource discovery even more transparent. The taskforce’s vision is to make metadata about library, museum and archive collections more openly available so that new services can be created.

By joining up the underlying data about resources, it should be easier for people to discover resources and library collections in new ways, for example by subject or type.

More details

JISC Digital Media: practical advice on how to find and use digital resources effectively

Help finding audio resources

Help sourcing images

JISC Strategic Content Alliance has produced a number of publications about how to handle copyright

JISC Legal: a range of free, sector-specific guidance and detailed publications to assist you with copyright

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Debate / Paid-for content

Debate: Should we have to pay for content online?

YES

Dr Alicia Wise is Director of Universal Access at Elsevier.

As a former member of JISC staff I am a big fan of initiatives such as JORUM (an online repository to facilitate the sharing of learning resources). While it is perfectly reasonable for an individual to freely share what they have independently created, the broad dissemination of high-quality content usually involves much more than voluntary effort. When time, money, or other resources are used then these costs need to be paid for. This can be done in a variety of ways: for example through grant income, by using work time paid for by an employer, by charging for access, and so on.

Now that I am in the publishing industry I have discovered that just because resources are charged for does not prevent them from being accessed. Modern ‘pay walls’ are not solid barriers meant to keep people out: they are smart, transparent and permeable in order to maximise discovery and use. This is because publishers, like researchers themselves, want publications to be disseminated and used as widely as possible. It is in our shared interest to provide very broad access. However it is also in our shared interests to find sustainable ways to cover the costs incurred in creating and disseminating high-quality publications.

…I have discovered that just because resources are charged for does not prevent them from being accessed. Modern ‘pay walls’ are not solid barriers meant to keep people out: they are smart, transparent and permeable in order to maximise discovery and use.

In this decade alone, the scientific publishing industry has invested over £2 billion in the scholarly communication system. Publishers have digitised around 40 million journal articles so 180 years of scientific communication is now available online. A further three million articles are submitted each year to the journal publishing system globally and, of these, around 50% are rejected through the peer review process. Publishers appoint around 5,000 new editors each year and provide systems to handle submissions, check for plagiarism, copy-edit, and prepare manuscripts for digital and print dissemination. Publishers also incur costs to preserve the content in perpetuity so that researchers can refer back to the record of science.

Publishers already use a very wide array of business models to cover these costs. This includes advertising revenue, Open Access models, pay-per-view services, subscription packages and many more. Diversity in business models reflects the fact that one size does not fit all: the most efficient way to recover costs can vary across communities and titles.

The necessary investment would simply not have happened if there was no way for these costs to be funded.

A £2 billion investment is a great deal of money, and this scale of investment enables over 30 million researchers worldwide to access high-quality publications. A recent survey suggests that 93% are happy with their access to research in journal articles. The necessary investment would simply not have happened if there was no way for these costs to be funded. And without the substantial investment in digital publishing we would all still be trekking over to a library – just like we did in the 1990s – in order to read a journal article.

Not all information needs to be charged for but where costs are incurred then they need to be covered in a sustainable way.

NO

Russell Stannard (@Russell1955) is a principal teaching fellow at the University of Warwick. He spoke to Nicola Yeeles. He is a specialist in the use of media and technology in ELT and has won several big awards for his website www.teachertrainingvideos.com.

Not all content should be free – the production of some content costs money and takes organising and updating – but mine is a model for how an individual or a university might generate and offer resources without charging.

I’ve been amazed by the response to my website teachertrainingvideos.com, which makes available, for free, my videos that show teachers of English as a foreign language how to use different online tools. There’s a whole world of English teachers out there in far flung places you never even knew existed. The internet is a very interesting medium for reaching these teachers even into remote parts of Africa, and by making contact with them you can really help them.

Following the success of this free content, I started work on multimediatrainingvideos.com while teaching on the MA in Multimedia at Westminster University. The video course materials were offered for free, which meant students who found that content interesting could use them to inform a decision about coming to study at Westminster. But the site also linked to the course page itself, thereby raising its ranking in search results. The Open University sometimes offers whole course materials for free, but then only paying students are able to benefit from the certification, so allowing access needn’t be at the cost of assisting the paid-up student.

I’m fortunate to have worked in places where I can experiment with my teaching and try things out. Through making content available online I can share these ideas with people who may not have the time to take the risks – for example, teachers working over 20 contact hours a week – and say ‘this works, I’ve tried this with my students, why don’t you?’

On the back of free content you can get lots of publicity and generate work, but also develop a social network that’s extremely powerful.

You have to do work to make people aware of content if you publish it for free – and I’ve looked at things like search engine optimisation in order to maximise this – but I now have 4,000 followers on Twitter, 15–20,000 people visit my website every month and I am able to travel all around the world and build up masses of speaker opportunities. On the back of free content you can get lots of publicity and generate work, but also develop a social network that’s extremely powerful. So while you can’t make money directly out of free content, the model that I use makes that content work to generate income, such as through paid-for talks or to generate hits on a website that does have an income-stream attached to it – like a university course page.

It’s no good just putting lots of content on the web – unless it’s great content. There is such a vast amount online there is considerable pressure to keep up to date and refresh what you put on. But because of the way that referrals work through social networking, people will vote with their feet. I welcome feedback from people and will often go back and re-record something that isn’t clear or change my speech speed according to the comments. For anyone who is regularly adding quality content to the web like I am, there is an enormous amount of expectation attached to that, and I am under pressure to produce more good quality videos, so the internet remains self-selecting in its acceptance of free content.

I’ve had numerous offers to commercialise the work, but I am more determined than ever that I will continue to offer it free. The amount of goodwill that comes from people is extraordinary.

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Sustainability / Funding

When the money runs out

JISC Inform looks at how academics are turning successful projects into embedded tools, and even cash.

Eight years ago, a group of academics at Northumbria University got together with local managers to set up a company offering ‘the type of support and customer relations they would have liked from their own e-learning suppliers’. Three years ago, nLearning became a self-sustaining start up managing a JISC-funded service that provided advice on plagiarism. This summer the company merged with a US corporation to create iParadigms Europe, part of a group helping over 10,000 organisations in more than 110 countries to keep a check on academic plagiarism – and so far the company has processed over 120 million submissions.

It’s the kind of success that many project managers aspire to. Norman Wiseman, head of services and outreach at JISC, says, ‘This success is a great example of partnership between business and education leading to a self sustaining advisory service and community,’ adding that the model offers ‘significant value for money to the sector’. At a recent forum run by JISC for its innovation community, most of the audience said they wanted more guidance on how to make their projects sustainable once the final report was submitted – not only to provide value for money but also to help them show the impact of their hard work well into the future.

Making sure that a project is viable in the long term is not about continuing all the activities you started out doing, or even finding a source of revenue that continues your dependence on funding. It’s about ensuring that selected outcomes of the project have a life of their own once the final cheque’s cleared – whether those are departmental expertise, staff skills, software, data or useful tools and resources.

Managers who can step back from the project will see how their outputs could fit into the workings of their institution, which is crucial for the long term security of those outputs. It’s relatively straightforward if the project is about curriculum design for example, but still possible if you’ve gleaned some insight that could be used for staff training.

Reviews in History, the Institute of Historical Research’s online journal, is publishing its 1,000th review this December. Reviews was founded in 1996, funded by JISC for the first two years – and then priorities changed, as deputy editor Danny Millum explains: ‘A decision was made after two years that the costs of the journal should be absorbed into core funding – essentially it had been such a success that institutional priorities had changed!’

Getting your project outputs into regular use also needs careful administration, so it helps to find people with experience in change management to advise senior managers on how to embed the work.

Staying up-to-date on projects in the same topic area can make you more confident of your unique contribution. A small JISC project at a plastics museum in the University of the Arts Bournemouth is now being used across the UK as a model for how to put content online. Posting resources in open repositories, such as Jorum for learning and teaching, helps get your materials out into the world and allow you to monitor usage.

Just because your research has been theoretical doesn’t stop you developing practical tools or toolkits as an offshoot. The SusteIT project has received hundreds of downloads of its carbon footprint tool that helps universities and colleges work out how much money they could be saving. There are various stakeholders for every project. If you can work out a way to satisfy the different audiences, you can guarantee that your work will continue long after your staff have moved on.

There’s an assumption being made here that project funding should be dependent on demonstrable and documented support from potential users. Just over half the audience at the recent innovation forum disagreed with this approach. Innovation is as much about ideas as it is use, they said. One impact of your project could well be that it’s enabled you to upskill your team and then perhaps train or advise other departments in your college or university.

Simple maths shows that collaboration works: if you tell 60 people one gem of information, they will all feel indebted to you and you will receive 60 pieces of good advice in return – so argued Ross Gardler from OSSWatch in the same forum. A community of practice is one way of spreading the word and Web 2.0 platforms like Ning are a quick and cheap way to build an online network that pushes out what you’ve learnt and keeps you at the coal face of new ideas.

And the bottom line? When it comes to cash there are many ways of sourcing revenue but the key is diversity. Perhaps the user will pay, or the university itself; you may even receive further funding or, as for the creators of Plagiarism.org, find yourself in the boardroom. But as I hope we’ve shown, sustainable projects needn’t depend on the bank balance.

Plagiarism.org

How people are using Turnitin

Reviews in History

Museum of Design in Plastics

The SusteIT carbon footprinting tool

Ning online communities

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Sustainability / Skills

Projects sustaining people

Gower College Swansea is proud of its information learning technology (ILT) team. With two educational technologists, a flash developer, a graphic designer and 2.5 programmers the college is particularly well placed to develop learning materials, platforms and systems. But the success of the team’s initiatives is also down to support from managers who have prioritised the embedding of their outputs and helped them grow links with teaching and administrative staff.

The team began to grow when, in 2000, the Welsh Assembly set up ILT champions by funding at least one representative from each college in Wales to attend events and share good. The college made good practice of the scheme, often contributing to conference and training sessions and sharing the outputs of a JISC project on learning design. Out of this initiative three or four colleges in South Wales engaged further together and started collaborating across the patch, with the same happening in North Wales.

’What we quickly discovered was that though collaboration we gained more. Although we’ve led four JISC projects in our own right, significantly more projects have been done in partnership.’

The drive to collaborate was echoed in their JISC project funding. Angelo Conti, director of ILT, says: ‘What we quickly discovered was that though collaboration we gained more. Although we’ve led four JISC projects in our own right, significantly more projects have been done in partnership.’

The benefits of the partnerships are in spreading the outputs of the projects more widely and in sharing best practice across different departments, institutions and courses. For example, the ReCITE project looked at how three different institutions could reuse materials created across three different curriculum areas.

Kate Pearce, educational technologist at Gower College Swansea, explains: ‘Coming from further education you sometimes feel like the poorer cousin, but having the opportunity to work with higher education through people like JISC has enabled us to see that actually we are very groundbreaking. Often the knowledge and information goes from further education to higher education, not the other way round as one might expect. That’s really helped us realise that what we’re doing is innovative and very useful to the level four and five students and institutions.’

The success of the team in these projects has also meant they are now seen as experts by other funding councils – so when the Welsh Assembly funded JISC to provide an online diagnostic tool for the whole of Wales, the Gower College Swansea received the commission.

Angelo explains that the sustainability of the projects has been in knowledge as much as outputs: ‘There are remnants of JISC projects in the knowledge and teams that have been built up that are now able to engage in collaborative projects with other colleges – perhaps not even funded by JISC money, but with our own money, or European money – but none of that would’ve been possible without the knowledge base that we’ve gained from the JISC project work that we’ve done over a number of years.’

Angelo cites one example as the success of a tutor’s initiative to use iPods to teach adult and community students French. Technology can often prove daunting for more mature students, but using iPods for learning languages has had a positive impact on motivation and achievement in the classroom – and the college gained a commendation for an Association of Colleges Beacon Award last year for the idea.

The tutor who developed the idea, Eric Normand, had previously worked on two JISC projects with the ILT team. Angelo says: ‘It’s not coincidental. Without what he’s learnt through working with us doing project work, this wouldn’t have happened. So it’s not just about the lifespan of the project, it’s about what happens afterwards.’

‘It’s very important to emphasise the relationship that you have with JISC beyond the end of your project. It doesn’t just stop…’

Kate explains that part of that ongoing dialogue is with JISC itself: ‘I still feel very engaged with JISC as a group on an individual level and as an institution. I would quite happily seek JISC’s advice on certain things. I feel that there’s a constant relationship with them. But I probably wouldn’t have that relationship had I not worked on JISC projects in the first place.’

To date the college has been involved in over ten JISC projects, with six of those in partnership with other institutions across south Wales.

Kate concludes: ‘It’s very important to emphasise the relationship that you have with JISC beyond the end of your project. It doesn’t just stop – because of that work that relationship is ongoing. It’s made me much more outward looking and confident in reaching out to other colleges and universities.’

Gower College Swansea isn’t involved in a JISC project at the moment – but is still benefiting from past experiences through shared best practice, knowledgeable staff and repurposed outputs, as members of the team explain.

Authoring using Learning Design

The ReCITE project

Interview / Steve Bailey

5-MINUTE INTERVIEW

The Impact Calculator with Steve Bailey

What institution do you work for?

I work for the University of Northumbria in the JISC infoNet advisory service which is part of the JISC Advance umbrella service.

What’s your job title?

I am a senior advisor with particular responsibility for records and information management.

What does that involve?

I help to provide advice, guidance and support for the further and higher education sectors around all aspects of the management of information within institutions. We make sure this is done as effectively as possible and also as legally compliant as possible.

How would you describe records management to friends outside of education?

Records management is really a subset of information management more generally, and principally looks at those records which will have some sort of evidential value. It also includes the management of institutions itself, i.e. everything from financial records through to corporate governance and student records. We help institutions to demonstrate that the way they operate is legally compliant and that they are fulfilling their obligations to their stakeholders while working as effectively and accountably as possible.

What are you working on right now?

One of the big projects we are working on is called the Impact Calculator. Records management has an important role to play in terms of the overall effectiveness of an institution. Ways in which you can save money include ready access to information that informs decision-making and not storing more information on records than you need to. But sometimes it can be quite difficult to prove the contribution that improved records management is making.

So we created an Excel based tool which enables an institution to define a process that they’re looking to improve, to unpack it in terms of what it is that they want to measure, and then to record the performance of that process prior to a change happening. They can then re-measure it over an extended period of time. As a result, you can come up with some fairly compelling and rigorous data about the improvement that has been made; for example the amount of staff time that has been saved through a redesigned process, or a new system that has been introduced, or the amount of storage space that’s now been freed up because you are keeping less information than you were previously.

Were there any surprising outcomes from your work?

Yes, absolutely, because alongside the development of the tool we actually funded six institutions to pilot the Impact Calculator within their institutions. The pilots raised interesting questions about the nature of records management itself, where it is most effective and where it is perhaps less effective than we’d imagined, purely from a cost perspective. Records management often involves looking at the backlog of information and doing what we call an appraisal exercise. If you have a big storage area full of paper records or a server full of electronic records that have been allowed to accumulate in an unmanaged way over the years records managers might recommend to do a one-off retrospective appraisal in order to get rid of all the unwanted records and to move on in a more managed way from this point forward.

What our data actually showed is that from a purely financial perspective, it rarely pays to do any retrospective work. We are starting to strip away some assumptions and are better able to determine where records management activities are best targeted to make best use of this resource

What have you enjoyed most working on the Impact Calculator?

This was a particularly satisfying project because we were able to identify a need within not just the sector but also the records management profession more generally. There are a lot of calculations under the hood making the Calculator run, and to finally see this tool making a difference has been particularly gratifying

What next?

Version two! The calculator does require quite detailed information and we are now looking at the potential to have an Impact Calculator ‘light’ that enables you to do the same analysis but at a less granular level of detail. We are now going back to registered and potential users to ask them about their experience of using the Calculator with a view to us coming up with a version two, sometime before the Spring/Summer of 2011.

Listen to the full interview with Steve Bailey

Find out more about the Impact Calculator

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What’s happening / Winter 2010

JISC dates for your diary…

For details of all JISC events, please visit the blog

For details of JISC Regional Support Centre events (RSCs), visit their individual homepages

Open Access and Open Data

When: 13–14 December 2010

Where: Hyatt Hotel, Cologne

Website

Hear Malcolm Read talking about Open Access.

JISC Conference 2011

When: 14–15 March 2011

Where: BT Convention Centre, Liverpool

Website

As the cuts begin to bite and we all have to do more with less, the JISC conference will help you meet the challenges ahead and realise the opportunities that digital technologies provide. Speakers will include Eric Thomas, vice chancellor of the University of Bristol.

Power of the VHS II - Future of recording TV & radio off-air

When: 16 December 2010

Where: Sparkbox, Hoxton Square, London

Website

A one-day forum to provide solutions and guidance regarding the storage and preservation of VHS recordings, while looking forward to tomorrow’s technology and the future of off-air TV and radio recordings.

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Recent multimedia & publications…

Access unlimited, access protected

Explore how institutions use federated access management for the benefit of their students, business and the communities around them.

Inspiring research, inspiring scholarship

Read the case for digitisation through the eyes of those who benefit.

Effective assessment in a digital age

Guidance for people in colleges and universities who provide assessment and feedback for students in institutional, work-based or distance learning contexts.

Blog: Is the physical library redundant in the 21st century?

Add your comment to Sarah Porter’s thoughts on a recent British Library debate.

Business case for the adoption of a UK standard for research information interchange

Read recommendations for JISC and institutions on how to manage research information.

Successful student recruitment

Explore how digital technologies are helping universities to share reliable and consistent course information and support new students.

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Editor Maike Bohn
Associate Editor Nicola Yeeles
Design and Production Manager Greg Clemett
Dissemination and Production Coordinator Amy Butterworth
Design iD Factory
Contributors Rob Buckley, Liz Bury, Michelle Pauli and Judy Redfearn
Cover image Matthew Lincoln
JISC Inform is produced by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) to raise awareness of the use of Information and Communications Technology (ICT) to support further and higher education (FE and HE) 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.