JISC

JISC funded programmes in recent years have led to an acceptance of the need for and the value of shared infrastructure services and a shared platform – the eFramework – by the UK HE sector. Some services have been developed and are widely used – e.g. the JISCmail service and ATHENS and Shibboleth authentication services. Others are still at varying stages of the development, service roll-out and user take-up continuum: for example identifier services, metadata registries, JORUM, ROMEO/Sherpa, geoXwalk, HILT and the SWORD application profile for institutional repositories. In practice, actual use and views on whether a service meets a specific user need have been variable. Services have sometimes turned out to be, or are experienced by the user as, not user-friendly and/or not easily interoperable in the Web environment.

This has resulted in users increasingly using services developed outside the academic sector by global enterprise. Not only is the academic sector using these services but in some cases they may also be engaged in ‘mashups’, where a combination of services are used for a single application, or a service is used to provide added value to data already held.

Currently, much of the evidence for such usage is anecdotal or hidden, recorded only by references within articles and reports on other topics. This study will provide a snapshot of what content services (ranging from generic web resources to specialist scientific databases and datasets) are currently being used by HEI in the UK. The project timescale and the staff effort available preclude a comprehensive survey approach and interviews with large numbers of individuals. The approach will therefore focus on desk-based research, although it is planned to include some case studies as illustrations of typical use patterns. Given that collaborations are often international, at least one parallel study will be undertaken in another region of the world; this will enable differences and trends to be identified. [UPDATE] One parallel study was completed in Australia.

Both studies are now available in the JISC IE Repository.  The UK study is at http://ie-repository.jisc.ac.uk/438/ and the Australian study is at  http://ie-repository.jisc.ac.uk/439/.