JISC

Introduction

As part of the Digital Repositories and Repositories and Preservation Programmes, JISC have established the Repositories Research Team. The remit for the work of the research team is quite wide and includes helping projects find and exploit synergies across the programme and beyond, gathering scenarios and use cases from projects, liaising with other national and international repositories activities, including liaison with the e-Framework, synthesizing project and programme outcomes, and engaging with interoperability standards activity and repository architectures.

The Repositories Research Team is a collaboration between UKOLN and JISC CETIS. UKOLN have worked previously on repositories in a number of contexts including ePrints UK, the Open Archives Forum and Delos, and JISC CETIS, the JISC Centre for Educational Technology and Interoperability Standards, has considerable experience in supporting the development of digital repositories for e-learning. The members of the support team are identified below.

Much of the work of the team is recorded on the 'DigiRep' wiki

Workpackages

1 Management and reporting

a. Reporting to JISC, including six-monthly progress reports

b. To establish working methods and structures for the support team, including discussion lists, wikis, websites

c. Ensuring delivery of other workpackages

2 EFramework-related work

a. Representing the RRT and the Repositories Programmes on the JISC eFramework and eFIG groups

b. Identifying, collating, formatting and submitting to eFIG any potential additions to the eFramework emerging from repositories work

c. Identifying and implementing good practice for projects to work with the eFramework

d. Collaborating with international eFramework partners

3 Programme-level synthesis activities and support for evaluation planning

a. Undertaking thematic syntheses of 3/05 programme outputs

b. Supporting the 3/05 programme evaluation activities (evaluation study to be funded outside this workplan)

c. Undertaking thematic synthesis of Capital programme outputs (details to be arranged nearer the time)

d. Supporting evaluation activities for the Capital programme (details to be arranged nearer the time)

e. Maintain collection of Scenarios and Use Cases, documented in a standard format, including UML diagrams where available

f. Reviewing good practice in documenting workflows

g. Collation of documented workflows

h. Liaison with synthesis consultants

i. Establish and facilitate themed discussions

4 Support for JISC strategic direction

a. Advising JISC on the scope and direction of future development programmes, studies and other activities, and internal and external partnerships.

b. Advising JISC on the potential for, and scope of, particular services identified as being relevant to repositories (certification, metadata authority, etc)

c. Supporting JISC in taking forward links and partnerships with UK and international bodies (eg SURF)

d. Investigate Records Management approaches in relation to Repositories working more closely with the Records Management community

e. Specific research projects as agreed

f. Baseline study and benchmark against international comparators and against Repositories Roadmap

g. Maintain ecology / typology

5 Interoperability specifications and standards Scope: identifiers, terminology and factual authority, metadata (item and collection level, descriptive, administrative, preservation, etc)

a. Coordinate work funded elsewhere, and conduct work commissioned by JISC.

b. To identify where projects are working with particular specs and standards, and draw out the lessons that might be of wider interest

c. Content packaging workshop, working with experts

d. Maintain the DC Eprints Application Profile and community acceptance activities

e. Facilitate Deposit API development

6 Interoperability architectures

a. Participate in, coordinate and support a UK working group on repository interfaces

b. Identifying, reviewing, evaluating (etc) abstract architectures and reference models being developed internationally (current examples include aDORe, CORDRA, OAIS and DELOS Digital Library Manifesto)

c. Building relations with Information Environment and core UKOLN and CETIS work

7 Communications and dissemination

a. Develop and wiki and web site strategy, building on the current web presence to ensure:

* sustainability

* ease of use

* participation and engagement by the community

b. To produce a three-monthly newsletter (or similar) on the team’s activities and other development work in the repositories domain – relation with the RSP to be settled.

c. Contribution to Programme meetings and Programme-level workshops and conferences

d. Dissemination to external meetings, workshops and conferences

 Outputs