JISC

This scoping study by EDINA has considered the functional requirements for two components of the JISC Information Environment that have been identified in the Shared Services Development Plan, but have not yet received detailed attention.

Executive Summary

The two components are an Institutional Profiling service which resolvers will inspect to discover institutional preferences for OpenURL resolution; and a Terms & Conditions service which provides machine-readable information about rights held in resources in the Information Environment (IE).

Four categories of data that might be included in an Institutional Profile were considered:  

• institutional contact data, including postal, telephone, web page, and institutional roles
• institutional telematic service data, including directory access, Z39.50 services, IP range, OpenURL resolver, Shibboleth handle service
• learning and teaching information, including course data, learning object repository descriptors
• subscriptions data for electronic resources.

Several sources from which these data may be obtained were identified:  

• institutional deposition, for information such as contact data
• national authorities, such as the JISC Monitoring Unit, JISC Collections, UKERNA, and the IESR
• subscription agents/publishers, who hold licence information for journal subscriptions
• commercial vendors of catalogue records for journal aggregations

While much of the data described can be readily obtained from reliable sources, there are major difficulties in acquiring rights data for electronic resources. As this is a central purpose of the Institutional Profiling and Terms & Conditions services, and concerns the data needed to link users to those services where they enjoy access rights, this deserves closer inspection. There are two broad approaches: licencee assertion and licensor disclosure. In licencee assertion, the licencee attempts to record details of its subscriptions in a local administrative database. This is a burdensome process, prone to inaccuracy, and represents an ongoing maintenance commitment. In licensor disclosure, the publisher or subscriptions agent discloses the institution’s licensing information in machine-readable form. Two approaches are under investigation: firstly, OCLC are developing a Cooperative Rights Database where licensors deposit rights data (licensing authority tables) with a trusted third party; secondly, NISO and EDItEUR are developing data definition standards to describe licence terms (licence agreement records). This would provide the institution with administrative metadata that could be processed by a library automation system.

The main conclusion of the study is that provision of an Institutional Profile service would improve communication with the members and services of an institution. Given the local nature of this data, and the problems of imposing central control, the service should be distributed rather than centralised and treated as a local responsibility. Development could be productively undertaken in the following areas:  

1. Institutional contact data. A schema should be developed that would enable institutions to generate XML data objects describing local contact or telematic services and make this available for machine-to-machine access by external services
2. IP address range. Open discussion with UKERNA on the feasibility of creating a service that provides data defining the IP address ranges of institutions
3. Subscriptions data. The two positive developments here, licensing authority tables (OCLC) and licence agreement records (ONIX) should be kept under review
4. IESR. Possible extension to the scope of the IESR should be considered, both to store additional information required for automated use, and to accommodate additional data types.

A further conclusion is that while a Terms & Conditions service would be of substantial value to institutional librarians, the difficulties in developing the service are equally substantial. Again, the need for co-operation from publishers to adopt standardised terms and conditions is the key factor in resolving the problem of managing large numbers of licences with arbitrary variability and complexity, expressed in legal terminology. The JISC has long recognised the need for standardisation in licence conditions (in the development of the PA/JISC Model Licence, for example) and this work should be continued. 

Read the final report below