The content framework
From the Digital Britain report to the Reuse of Public Sector Information initiative to the wider European Union context, there is now the political will to embrace and maximise consistent creation and delivery, use and reuse of electronic resources created by and for the public sector.
Significant effort has been made to establish technical standards for interoperability to underpin a more coherent information environment and these standards are gradually being adopted by both public and commercial sector content providers. The need now is to consolidate this work, while taking a broad overview of the digital content activities in the public sector with a view to establishing a framework for information provision that fully supports lifelong learning, teaching, research and cultural use.
Public and not for profit sector initiatives have so far been largely fragmented. Coordination has not taken place on any significant scale between initiatives to share expertise, identify suitable content and avoid duplication of effort. The uncoordinated nature of the activities to date is resulting in a patchy network of digital content with different management and business models, with no comprehensive gap analysis or tools to support previous, current or planned activity.
To achieve the best possible return on investment, avoid duplication of effort, and to empower the citizen, key stakeholders need to be brought together to work towards a common set of principles and guidelines for best practice that will provide a common policy framework for digital content activities across the domains of lifelong learning and teaching, research, and cultural heritage.
The Alliance has therefore developed a framework of ‘best practice’ to aid, inform and provide guidance to all those involved in the digital lifecycle from creation to curation; from those at a strategic and policy-making level, to practitioners ‘at the coal face’. The Alliance has published a suite of products covering the different elements of its work, from audience research to intellectual property rights: the Content Framework.
All products have been developed for broad use across the public sector. The Alliance encourages disaggregation and repurposing of the materials and so they are published under a Creative Commons licence. The publications encompass guides, briefing papers, navigation guides and toolkits covering the following:
What is the content framework? It is principles and good practices comprising: - Policy and procedures synthesis of findings from analysis of sponsors policies; identifications of common areas for action, identification and dissemination of best practice
- Audit and register scope and develop a pilot online register of collections and materials, born digital, digitised, or earmarked for digitisation
- Standards and good practices common technical standards and good practices document; 'advocacy' strategy to promote further adoption of documented standards
- Service convergence modelling document recommending where more converged online content services would offer benefits to users and the steps to achieve this
- Exchange (interoperability) model development a number of interoperability pilots testing: scalability, sustainability and market/user need for a more common information environment
- Advice, support and embedding a report presenting current support services landscape and recommendations for future support
- Advocacy, dissemination and policy development a range of communication mechanisms geared at key stakeholders in the online content arena including advocacy documentation and events to publicise the framework
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