Just weeks into the New Year and already there is a new ebooks revelation that colleges and universities need to digest. January saw the launch of Apple’s new iBooks2 software which grabbed headlines (see the BBC article here) and sparked heated debate across the academic community.

Quietly underpinning the technology of the iBooks software is ePub.  ePub is the ‘defacto’ ebook standard, with the latest version of ePub3 supporting complex layouts and rich media and interactivity for eTextbooks and professional and scientific publications.

Supporting institutions and academics in taking advantage of these new technologies saw JISC fund the creation of a thinktank to explore the potential of ePub for the academic community.  JISC, the members of the thinktank and Edina at the University of Edinburgh, undertook a study on ePub and the current ebook landscape.

Digital Monographs: Technical landscape exemplars and Recommendations peers beneath the eye-catching headlines and provides an important message for institutions and how they increasingly adapt their teaching and support services to an online, interactive and digital future.

Importantly, the report identifies areas where ePub3 can help institutions, students and researchers confront some of the problems they currently face. For example, students face a continued rise in the costs associated with buying print text books.  Researchers too find that they have to adjust to an increasingly open mandate from funders and institutions.

Listen to a podcast about this with JISC programme manager Ben Showers:

Podcast

EPub provides opportunities for institutions to answer critical problems such as those above and others:

• Academics and researchers can publish their work cheaply and easily, benefitting students as well as researchers who may be outside an academic institution;
• It is easily readable on multiple devices (from phones to tablets and desktop) and can be accessed from popular platforms;
• It provides a clean copy of text or data for quoting – essential for the scholarly process;
• ePub3 realises the potential for highly interactive and rich academic content,
• It has no legal restrictions or patents preventing its open use,

The report also provides a picture of the current ebook landscape and the impact that ebooks and mobile access are having on the support institutions provide to their students and academics. In particular there is a lot of talk about student expectations; but scholars’ expectations are changing rapidly.

As the report makes clear: The next generation of scholars will be educated in a context of increasingly-digital learning materials. Their expectations for ease of discovery, format-shifting, mobile access and multimedia exemplars will extend beyond e-textbooks used at the undergraduate level (P. 15).

Increasingly these expectations are focussing around mobile access and consumption: “…mobile devices are ubiquitous, personal and always at hand; even if they are not the locus of sustained content consumption, they are a critical adjunct” (p. 38).

JISC has been interested in the transformations taking place in scholarly publishing and communications for a number of years, most recently with its work on scholarly communications and the idea of campus-based publishing. Indeed, the availability of cheap and easy e-book publishing platforms combined with open licensing is the basis for a growth in open textbooks , often with significant public investment (for example in California).

While processes such as peer-review ensure the quality and value of scholarly outputs, ePub3 could see academia exploit a trend that’s already witnessing blockbuster authors such as JK Rowling withholding digital rights and publishing ebooks directly.

The once high barriers to such a future are being rapidly lowered with ePub and similar standards. Criticlaly, ePub reuses existing technologies wherever possible, for example, XML, XHTML, and has led to ePub being described as “a website in a box”:

Its technology stack is heavily borrowed from web technologies. This allowed a number of ebook readers to be developed quickly using web browsers as base platforms

It also means that the technologies and tools are ones familiar to many in the academic community; this is based on existing technologies, ensuring it is quickly adopted within the academy.

With open standards like ePub3 and the JISC Digital Monographs: Technical landscape exemplars and Recommendations report institutions are in a great position to start taking advantage of these technologies and providing students and their researchers with the tools enhance their learning and research and give UK institutions a cutting-edge in the competitive world of education.

Find out more about the report and its 10 recommendations for the future of ebooks in education.

Amber Thomas, programme manager at JISC, knows the issues well because she works on our open educational resources programme and gave a presentation earlier in the month (see her slides here) which outlined the benefits of content sharing and reuse.  Amber says, “Personally I welcome the provision of easy content creation tools, and the ability to create attractive usable content.”

However, she also raises concerns about the proprietary nature of Apple’s resources, adding, “What concerns me is that Apple control a ‘technology stack’ through devices, software apps, content collections and delivery platforms. I am not sure that the drivers on them to ensure interoperability will be strong enough to avoid their business model being a form of vendor lock-in.”

There are complex issues around intellectual property when it comes to sharing resources.  Amber says, “We all need to be savvy about the ownership of our content and data these days, so that we are at least aware of the trade-offs we are making, and the effect it has on our ability to share content with each other.”

If you’re concerned about these issues you might be interested to consult the advice in our infokit around the legal aspects of OER.

Doug Belshaw, of JISC Infonet, echoes Ambers concerns.  Doug is a practising teacher and  former Director of e-Learning and he welcomes Apple’s new software.

He says, “Yes, it involves significant vendor lock-in, but so long as you go into it with your eyes open there’s potential for really engaging, contextualised content to be produced by both teachers and learners.”

Doug points out as others have done, that “where Apple leads others tend to follow.”  His hope for the future?  “We’ll end up with equally shiny, but more open, versions of iBooks Author.”  That remains to be seen – but it wouldn’t be the first time that Apple’s announcements act as a catalyst.

Which leaves the final say to JISC programme manager and OER expert David Kernohan, who is a staunch supporter of the move.  He agrees with David Riley who blogs about it here that “the announcement is an outright win for advocates of affordability and open textbooks.”

David explains, “iBooks looks like an attempt to prove that the idea of a text book (the single, codified, unmodifiable, static source of information) is still pedagogically and technologically valid.”

However he does have concerns about using the web effectively for learning and is concerned whether we are simply replicating analogue artefacts.

He concludes, “The question should not be how cheap textbooks should be, or how shiny, but whether we need them at all.”

If you’re new to ebooks, you can learn more by joining in the JISC Advance webinar on ‘getting started with ebooks’ http://www.jiscdigitalmedia.ac.uk/surgery

What do you think about the Apple iBooks?  Have you used any in your classes?  We’d be interested to hear your thoughts in the comments below.

What strikes me about the post is that is latches on to some recent synthesis work on digital humanities, extracting some of its findings and treating them as an ideology to be critiqued.

This implies there is a coherent philosophy to the digital humanities. A set of founding ideas, an essential ideology, that will either determine its success or failure.

The trouble is that the Digital Humanities is not reducible to a manifesto. Rather it is the evolving set of humanistic traditions and practices about investigation, analysis, critique, communication and publication that are coming under pressure in the Internet age. The whole practice of scholarship is evolving / being revolutionised (delete to taste) because of the digital realm.

All scholars are affected by this. Are there really any scholars who don’t use emails, mailing lists, JSTOR, digitised resources, Google Search, electronic journals, Wikipedia? Are there really any scholars who’ve not worried about peer review, or taken advantage of open access?

No, of course not. Although they might pretend that this is all mere convenience and doesn’t help come them closer to the ‘explanation of aesthetic works’?

But the ‘convenience’ of the digital can drive their work in different directions; a radical reduction in the hours spent travelling to libraries and browsing through print archives changes the research process.

And as the tools created by digital humanities projects grow in their scope and functionality – projects in 3D scanning, data mining, textual analysis, crowdsourcing – these too will change research practices.

I don’t disagree with Fish that we need to measure the contribution of digital tools to scholarship, but this should be with the aim of refining these tools, not just throwing them all away.

Arguing against the Digital Humanities is a little like arguing the Internet itself. It’s there, and it surrounds you. It won’t go away.

This post originally appeared on the JISC digitisation blog here.

Flickr: peterkaminski

Is your institution adapting and responding to the fast changing marketplace as quickly as it might?

Changing demographics, government policies and shifts in economic pressure are all taking their toll on education organisations and now, as the UK seeks to strengthen its world-class reputation in teaching, learning and research, leaders in our universities and colleges need to ensure they maintain their competitive advantage.

To keep pace with the challenges, institutions need to be flexible and adapt quickly to change, so that every member of staff understands, identifies with, and contributes to, the vision, mission and values of the whole organisation.

Much of the potential in university and college people and processes can be lost through ineffective use of ICT, especially in communication and information sharing.

However, much can be gained by ensuring ICT is completely integrated and aligned with the institutional strategic planning, decision-making and delivery of business goals and that every resource, person and process is pulling its weight.

Studies undertaken by JISC in partnership with Nottingham University have shown that institutions differ widely in the maturity of their strategic ICT use and in the way ICT adds value strategically or operationally.

I recently watched a JISC webinar that introduced a new Strategic Information and Communications Technology (S-ICT) toolkit and it seems to me that it could add real value in measuring the strategic ICT maturity for an organisation, ie how well ICT is integrated into the institutional strategy and how well it is able to deliver maximum value and agility in reaching business goals.

Listening to the webinar as someone with a general interest in the subject rather than as an ICT specialist, I found the case study from Lucy Nelson at University of Central Lancashire really highlighted the instant impact S-ICT could have on an institution, showing the business benefits from a practical viewpoint.

She also gave a clear picture of the huge scope of the toolkit – its ability to quickly pinpoint gaps in understanding and in areas such as communication and engagement.

S-ICT produces a results profile, which gives ratings on operational, strategic and transformational levels, then assists leaders in using ICT to support decision making and planning and engage staff in working together more effectively and productively for the benefit of the organisation as a whole.

Part of the challenge of making decisions is having a clear and truthful picture of how your organisation is performing, its strengths and areas for development. It was really interesting to see how the case studies were being proactive, turning strategy into action and responding to the challenges of growth, diversification and mergers.

S-ICT developers have taken into account the unique qualities of every institution acknowledging that each department needs to be aware of attributes and values that set them apart in order to be able to positively contribute to the organisation as a whole. This versatile toolkit also has the scope to focus down on a particular faculty as well as a particular need or ambition.

S-ICT is available for downloading here.

Watch the webinar recording.

This was the question that JISC set out to answer by funding 9 experimental projects to analyse and exploit activity data to provide new services to researchers and students or to improve existing services. These projects covered recommendation services for library and repository content, access grid usage patterns, analysing data for student retention, virtual learning environment usage data, the link between student attainment and library usage and the possibility of taking a user centered approach to activity data.

The simple answer is yes, there are lots of ways that working with activity data could be useful. But there are many technical, legal, skills and policy issues that need to be addressed in order to do so. To enable others to learn from the experience of these projects and to copy the technical and legal solutions they developed we have produced a site that summarises all that was learned in the programme. The site is live now. It provides a high level overview of what activity data is, why it is useful and how it can be exploited and also contains detailed recipes for anyone who wants to start the process of exploiting activity data at their institution. You can also read more about the projects that made up the programme.

The site was produced by Sero Consulting working with Tom Franklin and Mark van Harmelen.

One interesting question about activity data is should it be made openly available? There are plenty of challenging issues here to do with anonymisation, compliance with data protection and ensuring that the users are appropriately informed and it is what they want. But there are also benefits to open data. A good illustration of what can happen with open activity data is the Book Galaxy app below that uses the library circulation data released as part of the JISC Mosaic project to provide an innovative interface for exploring the relationship between books. The activity data guide includes resources that address the question of open data and links to open data released by some of the projects.

Here’s the Book Galaxy – move your mouse around the galaxy to see the titles. Blue dots are books, yellow dots are courses. If nothing is appearing, you might not have Java installed. Download Java

It seems to me that there is likely to be appetite for further innovation with activity data as it offers the potential for more efficient institutional services and new functionality that can enrich the research and learning experience. Both of which are important drivers in the current climate. We will be funding further work on 4 of the 9 projects to explore whether they can develop further answers or produce useful services. There is also a programme of projects on Business Intelligence managed by my colleague Myles Danson, these projects are building solutions for storing and analysing data about the business critical operations within universities. You can read an overview of the projects on the JISC website and there is a useful JISC Infonet Infokit on the topic of business intelligence. Within JISC we are also starting to think about the bigger picture of business intelligence for universities and what we can do to help universities exploit emerging opportunities so look out for future work in this area.

Find out more about this work and that of the digital infrastructure team on their blog.

Image from The First World War Poetry Digital Archive, University of Oxford www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ww1lit © The Imperial War Museum

The legacy of World War One in terms of social, economic and political global change cannot be overstated; it changed the individual’s view of society and their place within it with far-reaching effects into their future and our past. In the words of H.G. Wells: ‘This is the end and the beginning of an age’.

To mark this event in international history is therefore a key priority for custodians of heritage and educators alike.

We’ve already made considerable efforts to preserve online the memories and writings of those active during the First World War.  The popular Great War Poetry Archive was funded by JISC to digitise precious documents relating to the poetry of the Great War – including Wilfred Owen’s original notes for the well known poem Dulce et Decorum Est.

It also includes podcasts with eminent historians and veterans including the writer and broadcaster Ian Hislop talking about his grandfather’s experience in action and why he is so ‘obsessed’ with the First World War.  The Serving Soldier collection might also interest you as a way of finding out about the lives of soldiers from 1899 to 1918, a period which spans the Second Boer War, Younghusband Expedition and World War One.

But now it’s time to commemorate the 2014 anniversary.  Higher and further education has a  unique part to play in the WW1 commemoration because it can offer an academic appraisal and reappraisal of themes, events and perceptions.  To help people in education who are studying the period, we are promoting a joined-up approach across many different organisations that currently hold audiovisual, images, text based works and film relating to the First World War. JISC wants to explore how providing this in a more seamless way could help those working in education and research to access the resources. So as a result we’re planning two activities:

• JISC WW1 Discovery programme- to aggregate digital content such as films from a range of digital collections and find new and innovative ways of presenting this content for the benefit of education and research on WW1.

• JISC WW1 OER project- to create innovative Open Educational Resources around WW1 relevant across disciplines for embedding in teaching and learning using a range of content pertaining to WW1 in the UK and internationally, ready for release in March 2012

JISC’s overriding goal for both activities is to work for researchers, teachers and students to produce digital content and resources that are comprehensive, open and sustainable, but that answer differing, specific needs within higher and further education.  The plans are underpinned by a common strategic ‘direction of travel’ which is outlined most clearly in the JISC Statement of Intent.

I look forward to updating you further as these projects progress.

To find out more about what’s planned visit the blog.

With the uncertainties of a new funding model to deal with, it is becoming harder than ever to convince institutional managers to support nice-to-have projects. Everything needs to be justified, both on a balance sheet and within a wider battle for hearts and minds. But the way in which open educational resources (OER) allow institutions to meet their strategic goals alongside making the world a better place means that it is moving from being nice-to-have to becoming an essential component of academic practice.

More than 10 years on from the formal establishment of the OpenCourseWare project at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the casual observer could be forgiven for assuming that the case for OER (materials suitable for learning and teaching, made available for reuse under an open licence) had been made and accepted. MIT, alongside many other institutions, both great and small, and including Nottingham, Oxford, University College Falmouth and the Open University in the UK, is currently supporting the ongoing release of resources with their own funds. The likes of YouTube and iTunes are establishing themselves as platforms for the discovery of learning material, and institutions are beginning to see open resources as a major component of their student recruitment strategies. But it can often feel, as Javiera Atenas described last week, as if we are going round the same discussions without building on what already has been discovered.

To try and condense some of the vast amount that has been learnt about the benefits of OER releases in the past 10 years, the Higher Education Academy and JISC have developed an InfoKit. This now includes materials specifically aimed at advocacy to senior institutional staff, talking about business models for openness and making arguments around institutional ethos, alongside sound evidence-based advice about every aspect of getting to a stage where releasing materials openly online is as natural as creating them. We also have an interactive tool – how open are you – which uses your responses to make a recommendation concerning how much openness your institution is ready for.

Jorum, the UK’s national learning repository, is refocusing itself around OER, introducing new features and tools to aid the deposit and discovery of resources. It is now as easy, – and increasingly, as expected – to deposit in Jorum as it is to upload to Youtube, WordPress or Twitter.

There are parallels between OER releases and the ways in which universities and colleges have begun to make more intelligent and active use of social media. For example, in following major political stories readers, bloggers and professional journalists are increasingly making use of sites such as British Politics and Society at LSE, Nottingham University’s Ballots & Bullets and the University of Oxford’s Politics in Spires to understand the background and meaning of news stories, drawing on the passion and expertise of academic specialists to further their own understanding. Strictly speaking, only the last of these is available under an open licence allowing for reuse, but all of these bloggers expect to be retweeted, quoted, referenced and their work drawn upon. It’s the point of blogging, and in many ways the point of academic practice.

One theme emerging from the research around OER is the idea of open academic practice – it comes out strongly from our ongoing evaluation and synthesis of the UKOER programme, and from other linked research such as a recent Oxford University study into the practicalities of academic reuse. Open academic practice draws a link between OER, open access to research outputs and research data, and the general practice of “professing” (in the late-medieval sense) a subject, by what we now call a “public intellectual”. By seeing OER as a component of what is traditionally expected of academia, rather than as a new imposition, we are arguing from a much stronger foundation based on what many in the sector see as their primary motivation – to explain to people the importance and relevance of the subject specialisms they have devoted many years to understanding.

Evidence is increasingly being identified that students, both traditional, and wider open learners, are getting a lot of benefit from openly available materials. From on-campus students having access to a range of supporting materials (as reported by Steve Carson at MIT), to prospective students using OER to think more clearly about subject and institution choices, there are a range of benefits that can be accessed. A recent literature review highlighted these issues, but also alerts us to gaps in our understanding where further research would help improve our understanding.

JISC and the Academy have recently supported a range of new projects (under UKOER phase 3, details to be announced soon), investigating ways in which we can use the approaches and affordances of OER to meet other key societal goals. Goals such as supporting alternate forms of delivery, making meaningful links with employers and publishers, working across sectors even preserving subject areas and teaching approaches that would otherwise be lost.

The world of OER may not be as new and as ground breaking as it was 10 years ago but for such a radical idea to survive for 10 years, and to become almost mainstream in the process, is an incredible achievement of which the global OER community, and in particular those working in the UK, should be proud.

This blog post first appeared on the Guardian Higher Education Network on 28 October 2011.  Visit the Guardian site

First, a question: how much are resources re-used? The Value of Reuse report pictures our knowledge of re-use as an iceberg where much use is invisible.

That suggests that a better question might be: why so little visible reuse of educational resources? I think it stems from how we measure re-use. The e-learning world has been so focused on repurposing that we are expecting to see the content being copied/changed. But reading is use too. Interestingly, there is a strange discomfort with talking about tracking/measuring the use of open content, which I’ve started to explore. Perhaps it stems from an anxiety that measurement means metrics, and that metrics are at odds with the “long tail” nature of academic work. But I have a lot still to understand about how to provide meaningful evidence of digital impact that supports individual and institutional drivers.  So perhaps the right question to ask is around what reuse might look like in different contexts.

To encourage reuse, we need to be clear on what might motivate people to share their resources. Attention is reward, as is intrinsic motivation. People who share blog posts, tweets, slides, images on the web know it is rewarding in its own right.

Should that translate into official recognition by the employer of the academic? I guess there are different ways of carrying out the role of an academic. We see that variation in openness in the research process: different attitudes in different discipline areas and different points in their career, and probably different personalities. So I agree that no-one should be forced. It should be choice, and at the moment, most institutional reward structures are neutral on OER: the reward is individual and social.

However, the HE sector is changing. Maybe academics do need to do more of their thinking in the open. Researchers are being encouraged to think about impact and engagement. Then there are the economic and ethical arguments for open access for research, which are perhaps starting to raise expectations about opening up other academic outputs.

My biggest interest at the moment is how technology can support the changes in practice of the early majority, which I think is happening, even if it’s off the radar. Making use visible is important, connecting content and people. Of course to make use of this, as others have commented, we need to support digital literacies.

We’d love feedback on how services like Jorum and innovation programmes like the joint HEAcademy/JISC OER Programme can help keep moving open academic practices forward. And if you’re new to the concept, visit the OER Infokit to get started.

You can participate in the discussion on the oer-discuss list which we run with the UK OU: please join in!

• Recommendation 1 – the need to take steps to enhance the transparency of costs of operational activities within higher education in order to help demonstrate where and how value for money is being delivered.

We’ve developed two tools that can help here. Firstly, the JISC IT Service Costing Toolkit that was funded under the JISC Flexible Service Delivery programme is designed to help universities calculate the cost of their current IT infrastructure and future investments. It can also help managers make the case for alternative service models by allowing you to weigh up investments in new infrastructure versus shared services or hosted services. The toolkit is now used by Oxford University Computing Service in order to provide a sound method for costing their legacy IT Service provision

Under the Digital Preservation programme the JISC Impact Calculator was funded and is available at JISC Infonet. This allows HEIs to baseline and forecast the quantitative impact (including costs) of investing in new ICT solutions. Although the impact calculator’s genesis is in information management it can be applied more widely.

• Recommendation 3 – The report also helps to articulate the sophisticated approach that needs to be taken to the adoption of shared services; that is that shared services are more effective if work is done on streamlining processes prior to implementing changes to shared services.

Within a number of shared services that JISC has worked with the sector on, we’ve examined processes to define where these can be better supported and streamlined. For example JISC has worked with SCONUL as a precursor to taking forward a shared electronic resource management support service on the examination of processes within university libraries. After significant prior work JISC Collections is now managing the establishment of a shared service to support the management of electronic library resources in colleges and universities.

If you’re looking for examples of how other universities and colleges have handled changes to their service delivery, JISC’s Flexible Service Delivery Programme supported the production of some “Process and Service Improvement” case studies. These case studies demonstrate how that with mapping and costing legacy service provision, HEIs can plan for change across a range of business and academic areas.

• Recommendation 10: Developing and implementing new ICT systems and facilities can play an important role in reducing energy costs and lowering carbon emissions, with energy savings from more efficient ICT solutions (including outsourcing)

Through our investments in greening ICT JISC has developed a wealth of knowledge in this area, and this agenda is being further explored with European infrastructure partners through the e-Infranet project.

It is pleasing to see the report note that JISC’s work adds value by developing shared practice, and of course in particular by providing shared services. On page 44 of the report the role of JISC Collections, innovation programmes and other services are noted in terms of offering value for money.

As is highlighted on page 55, JISC is working with HEFCE on the development of University Modernisation Fund (UMF) cloud services, for example the development of a shared cloud brokerage service for universities via Janet. Recommendation 11 mentions the need for procurement expertise and JISC Advance is already taking forward plans, also via UMF, to establish a service to help universities procure the best value administrative systems. The businesses cases for these activities clearly show that they will help drive efficiencies in universities.

JISC welcomes the report and UUK’s leadership in undertaking this work. We look forward to seeing UUK’s plans on implementation, and in particular working with UUK on recommendation number 6, where an ‘efficiency hub’ is proposed to promote relevant services to the sector and to share good practice and innovative developments.

Before I go I have to acknowledge that colleagues Craig Wentworth, Alex Hawker, John Chapman, Neil Grindley and others helped provide information to UUK to show examples of how the sector is working on achieving change and efficiency.

This is part two of a two-part series in response to the UUK report – you can read Rachel’s first blog post commenting on the overall direction of the report here.

I think the report gives a really useful overview of the terrain and sets out the evidence that shows how the university sector is already addressing the agenda but also states how the higher education sector might start to better address efficiency into the future. The report’s  findings are set out against a backdrop of the reduction in the amount of public funding directed at the learning and teaching grant in England alongside the drive across the UK for better value for money.

I was fortunate enough to be involved in the Sub Group that UUK established with representatives from relevant sector agencies and organisations. The Sub Group helped to identify issues and highlight relevant activities for the UK Efficiency and Modernisation Task Group, which was chaired by Professor Ian Diamond, and UUK, to take into account in their deliberations and research.  There’s an overview of the task group’s work here (PDF).  When the work began there was, as you’d expect, quite a focus on shared services, but quite quickly a richer picture emerged of activities that needed to be addressed in order for the sector to move further forward.

As the report states the UK university sector is already pretty effective in its contribution to the economy. As calculated a few years ago, it contributes £59 billion of output to the UK economy, and generates £5.3 billion of export earnings annually.  But UUK recognises the need to do more.  The report shone a light on a wealth of good work already underway, which is heartening.  It states that  perhaps the biggest hurdles to overcome in becoming more efficient lies in the fragmentation of good practice and that there is need for more coordination around solutions and sharing of good practice required.  In his foreword Professor Diamond says,“The sector has been remarkably good at hiding this progress… it will be important that [the many good examples of efficiency are] promoted more widely.”

So key issues that the report says need to be addressed include: further transparency around costs; sharing of good practice and solutions; streamlining internal processes prior to any shared service identification and implementation; further coordination of higher education procurement at a national level and improved frameworks for benchmarking so it can be used as way to drive efficiency.

The report places efficiency in a strategic context and a long-term view of a diverse sector. This takes us to that often mentioned tension around collaboration and competition; this is something that I think the sector already handles in a number of areas and I think the recommendations that UUK set out are a good basis for understanding where efficiencies and collaboration can take place in order to allow for difference and competition to flourish where it makes sense.

So in short this is a useful report, one that looks more broadly than JISC’s mission, but shows how JISC can be part of a more effective and efficient sector through partnership with other agencies, UUK and universities.  I look forward in anticipation to the follow up to the report.

On Monday I’ll share with you the specifics of how we believe JISC can help organisations respond to UUK’s recommendations.  We’d be interested to hear what people think of the recommendations and how JISC can respond. 

This is the first post in a two-part series responding to the UUK report on efficiency and effectiveness in higher education. 

Read Rachel’s second blog post commenting on specific recommendations on Monday.

Discuss the issues raised here on the Guardian Higher Education Network online today at 2pm where the topic of discussion is “Do universities need to become more efficient?”

Through the Open Access Implementation Group we have been both gathering evidence of the case for open access, and exploring practically how it can be implemented.  There remains a gap, however, in our evidence of how open access can benefit the estimated 1.8m knowledge workers in the UK, and thereby enable full exploitation of the public science base. Three research studies have been commissioned by the OAIG and funded by JISC to look into this, and will report in the next few months. We are also looking forward to the release this autumn of the findings of the study, co-funded by JISC, RIN and the Publishing Research Consortium, to see where there are gaps in the provision of articles and conference papers. So, while evidence of the need for OA is now strong and widely accepted, it could be stronger still by the end of the year.

However, there are a number of thorny questions to be answered before OA will be widespread, either via repositories and/or journals.

For repositories, these questions include how researchers can get more value from their repositories. Several JISC projects are developing solutions, and the best of these will be rolled out over the next year, and are likely to include improvements to the ways in which repositories work with other systems. JISC is supporting shared repository services, and a new community-driven set of guidance on how this can be achieved.

There are a number of challenges facing OA journals, summarised in Neil Jacobs’ recent blog post, which include the different costs faced by diverse universities under subscription and OA models. JISC funded work to model the costs and benefits of OA to universities in 2010, with similar raw findings to those quoted recently by the THE. However, it is important to remember that, for much journal publishing, the costs of OA can be covered from research grants. The administrative processes for this need improving by universities, funders and publishers. The OAIG has commissioned work that will chart ways forward, and this will report in the next few weeks.

Members of the OAIG have had constructive discussions with representatives of the publishing industry, and look forward to working together on our numerous areas of common interest in implementing OA. Expect more news on this during the autumn.

Some of the casualties of the current system can be smaller journals, outside the “big deals”, and research monographs. Small learned and professional societies are communities of scholars who often publish a journal. Increasingly, they turn to commercial publishing houses to run their journal for them. The OAIG has funded one professional society to use its own experiences to develop guidance for others on how to manage this, and how to consider the role of OA for their journal. Furthermore, responding to a groundswell of interest, JISC has funded a number of small “campus-based publishing” projects, allowing researchers to use new technologies to run their own journals.

Research monographs are widely seen to be in crisis, with library budgets for them being squeezed by the rising costs of STM journals.

This is important, as there are many disciplines where a 7000 word article is simply inadequate to develop a nuanced and detailed argument, especially in the humanities and social sciences. JISC is among several organisations (including the publisher Bloomsbury Academic) investigating whether OA monographs might be a route forward.

In summary, there is now a consensus that OA is both viable and here to stay. The discussions now are practical, about how to make it work for the research community, with its interests in dissemination, quality, and cost-effectiveness, and for the UK economy and society more broadly.

How universities and researchers manage the issues around research data varies massively – and of course will depend on the type of data they hold – whether sound recordings of bird songs, text mining results from Shakespeare’s plays, thousands of measurements provided by space probes, hours of rare film recordings, DNA sequences or qualitative data from psychological research interviews.

JISC is live streaming its conference next Tuesday 13 September around research integrity – specifically on the importance of good research data management.  Our aim is to bring together the current thinking on effective practice and give senior staff and researchers an opportunity to debate the thornier issues, like whose responsibility this is and how to manage freedom of information requests.

We welcome your input: submit your questions via twitter by using #jiscres11 and we’ll put them to our panel.  You can also watch the keynote speakers live on Tuesday, who alongside me include:

• Professor David Baker, deputy chair of JISC
• Professor Dave De Roure, professor of e-research, Oxford University e-Research Centre and national strategic director of Digital Social Research
• Professor Sir Tim O’Shea, principal and vice chancellor of University of Edinburgh and chair of JISC
• Professor Kevin Schürer, pro vice chancellor (Research and Enterprise), University of Leicester

During the conference you will:

• Learn why research data management matters and who should be responsible for research data management in your organisation
• Read recommended reports and resources as they are referred to by the speakers
• Understand from case studies what success might look like
• Watch key experts describe the routes to successful data management
• Participate on Twitter and ask questions of the speakers using #jiscres11

It’s the kind of discussion we think could be helpful to professionals in the UK and internationally so if you know people who you think would be interested I’d really value you sending this information on.

There’s no need to register – simply add a date in your diary for 10am on 13 September 2011 and join us online here.

Watch a video about how JISC can support your research reputation:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Visit JISC’s Youtube channel to watch similar videos on research efficiency and collaboration

In addition, the rapid growth in personal ownership of new and more powerful technologies such as mobile phones and tablet PCs, along with the pervasive use of social software is changing the way we work, socialise, communicate and collaborate.  It is only natural that students will expect to see the powerful benefits these technologies offer – technologies that are common-place in many aspects of our working lives – used to support their learning ambitions as they endeavour to balance the competing pressures of study, work, caring and social responsibilities.

So how are colleges and universities responding to these challenges and preparing for the future?JISC’s new guide on Emerging Practice in a Digital Age shows how colleges and universities are continuing to embrace innovation in use of mobile technologies, social software and virtual worlds despite constraints on public funding.  The guide shows how they are harnessing new and emerging technologies to enhance the learning experience and respond to changes in economic, social and technological circumstances in a fast-changing world.
Through the three themes of: working in partnership with students, developing students’ employability potential and preparing for the future, the guide demonstrates how considered and innovative use of technology can enhance learning. It highlights opportunities to transform practice and explore some of the benefits and challenges using written, video case studies and podcasts of expert voices from the JISC 2011 Emerging Practice symposium.
For me, key messages include the need to go beyond listening to students to working with them as co-collaborators of their own learning, the need to focus on learning design as an integral aspect of introducing new technologies, the importance of working with employers and the need to develop digital literacy skills for both staff and students.

The change in culture and shifting locus of control from institution to learner is something that David White, Co-manager, Technology Assisted Lifelong Learning (TALL), Department for Continuing Education, University of Oxford highlights: “I think we need to accept that the culture has changed, that institutions don’t need to own or control that culture but they need to take advantage of it and to equip their students to engage with it in new forms of literacy. We can’t just slide across traditional forms of literacy, and I think that is where the challenge is set.”

With an emphasis on emerging practice, the guide makes the case for strong leadership at a senior level to ensure the vision and opportunities presented by these emerging technologies are realised with due consideration to the support mechanisms necessary to make their introduction successful.  The need to look ahead, embrace change and create the right culture by developing strategies that engage staff and students is something that Clare Killen, the author of the guide suggests is likely to lead to longer-lasting transformation, “in the longer term, efforts to create the right culture and to engage others in the process of change may prove to be more valuable and lead to more sustainable and responsive practice in a world of rapid change”.

For information about the JISC e-Learning programme, visit: www.jisc.ac.uk/elearningprogramme

In short, the University of Lincoln undertook a four month project for JISC called ‘Linking You’, which surveyed 40 different websites across the .ac.uk domain – ten from each university group – and compared the similarities between the URLs (location addresses) of those websites. The project found there was a lot of inconsistency in the representation of information for graduates and undergraduates. However, there were also good conventions that have emerged across the sector and out of all this, the ‘Linking You’ project proposed a common set of URL syntaxes that could be used in principle across multiple corporate institutional websites:

http://lncn.eu/toolkit/model

Before you get upset and think that we are suggesting you change your current URL structures, you should know that we are NOT suggesting anything of the sort! Rather we are suggesting that via a transparent mapping exercise (using 303 or 301 redirects) you can mint all the suggested URLs that the ‘Linking You’ project proposes and then link them to the actual URLs that have grown up as part of your organic system. For example,

If you use: http://foo.ac.uk/study/undergraduate/courses

You could follow the ‘linking you’ recommendations and mint a new URL that points to the above URL using HTTP code 303 or 301 to:

http://foo.ac.uk/courses/

In short, you’re just mapping what we hope will become a common URI structure (the compact sequence of characters that identifies an abstract or physical resource) to your current link architecture, which means you can continue to change and add more links to your architecture as the organisation changes and you would just continue to redirect the ‘common’ link as recommend by ‘linking you’ to the underlying link. This process need not affect the design or apparent structure of your website.

So why should you mint the suggested set of ‘linking you’ URLs for your institution? We recognise this work of minting and maintaining the redirects would be ‘yet another thing to deal with’ across your complex and growing .ac.uk websites, however we think there is potential value both in time savings and value add we could all communally benefit from in considering these URL conventions.

Below we list ten reasons that we think will result if we can get multiple institutions to start adopting this syntax and vocabulary:

1. Better search engine optimisation: As a sector we can go to Google and say, “Hi we are the University sector and we think you should give priority to these URLs when people are searching for things like courses.”

2. robot.txt: If a group of Universities started adopting these URL syntaxes, we could save time and money by generating a common robot.txt for all of us so to use so we don’t have to each write a robot.tx file, this would also make doing analytics across the sector enhanced as we could understand patters of clicking across all .ac.uk websites.

3. A simple mapping tool: An apache mod_rewrite (or IIS, nginx, etc. equivalent) tool that will do most of this work for you that could be written once and support many!

4. Improve discovery: Clear human-readable URLs are now integral to browser search and lookup technology and becoming essential if you want to enable ease by a student experiencing your website.

5. Predictable, consistent, aggregations: It will be easier to build tools on behalf of the entire sector because people will know where to go for the data. See the below reasons (no. 6, 7, 8 ) for immediate experimentation JISC is already undertaking and just think what else could be leveraged if we could bring our data together:

6. A course catalogue: As many of you know JISC is actively encouraging universities to create XCRI feeds for their courses. If everyone producing an XCRI feed put it at the following URL foo.ac.uk/courses/xcri we’d lay the groundwork for persistent, structured course data that developers (many of them students) could use to build new and engaging apps and websites that we could all benefit from.

7. A news feed: If we all knew where all the corporate news feeds were e.g. http://foo.ac.uk/news/rss we could create a University News App where the sector could have their news published on demand, let alone text mining goodness and other filters for highlight key news developments across all higher and further education institutions.

8. A sector wide directory: Common information such as institutional policies, contact information, news, about, events, etc. could be aggregated into a searchable directory; useful to both the public and higher education institution data geeks.

9. Know your assets: Your .ac.uk addresses can be understood as your ‘virtual real estate’. Adopting a well-formed, widely understood and persistent ‘portfolio’ of core web addresses will help web managers manage these increasingly valuable assets.

10. Cool URLs: Simple, stable, manageable URLs make sense. They are recommended by the worldwide web consortium or W3C, to make web managers’ lives easier and keep users happy, too.

Those are some of the reasons we can think of and we think there are many more if even a little imagination is implied. We’re convinced that if we all worked together as university web managers we could achieve more than the sum of our parts by producing this URL structure for each institution.

What kind of idea do you think you could achieve by adopting the ‘Linking You’ toolkit? We’re thinking of funding a several short projects to review and standardise the toolkit, put it into practice and then write up your case study for the sector on how it worked for you and what value you see in doing this work. Are you interested? What are your thoughts on all of this?

Prompted by a recent JISC mobile infrastructure for libraries funding call, I wanted to outline some of the challenges for institutions, and in particular academic libraries, in coming to terms with ‘mobile’:

Re-conceptualisation of services

Hardly a day passes where we’re not confronted by yet another paradigm breaking technology or event.  Yet, mobile offers organisations, and academic libraries in particular, an opportunity to re-conceptualise services,. Not just taking existing services and relationships to make them accessible on mobile devices but how new services can be built specifically with the mobile device in mind.

Mobile helps to refocus the potential inherent in the physical space, services, systems and collections of the library, and to transform relationships away from purely service delivery to a more social context.  The librarian and library become facilitator and enabler: providing personalised information at the right time and in the right place.

Changing our relationship to space

Mobile services and devices force a reconsideration of concepts like ‘library’ and more interestingly ‘digital library’.  There is an obvious impact on the physical nature of the library, but one that has yet to be fully thought through: the re-prioritisation of space, with a move away from the physical and static (books, desktops, desks) to the mobile, interactive and social.  A library in your pocket.

For a long time the ‘library’ has transgressed beyond the physical boundaries of the buildings within an institution.  But the digital library hasn’t, in general, had a fundamental impact on the design, focus or existence of those buildings.  Mobile, it might be argued, will necessitate the re-examination of physical space.

Similarly, the digital space of the library will need re-examining.  There is no longer a separation between the physical and the digital; rather the two bleed into each other and the boundaries between the two are constantly exceeded.  What does the inherent functionality of the device bring to the discoverability and accessibility of content and services? Augmented reality (where a view of the physical environment is modified by a computer) and near field communication (transactions at a touch: such as barcodes and QR codes) are just two examples of how mobile is challenging the user’s relationship to information and services.

Changing institutional support strategy
The implications for institutions supporting hardware and software that is not owned or managed by the university or its library has huge implications.  Mobile devices are owned by and managed by the user.  How do institutions manage the support expectations of users who have a problem with their personal device?  What role will libraries or departments play in the loaning of devices to ensure equality of access?

This change requires a radically different support policy; the intensely personal and one-to-one nature of most mobile devices has significant ramifications.

Legal implications
The implications of confidentiality and privacy lurk in the background of any discussion around the institutional management of mobile hardware and software.  A major challenge for institutions is the confidentiality and privacy of the user.  The implications of data breaches and privacy make institutionally owned and managed devices less attractive; it is difficult to loan such hyper-personalised hardware and software.

Recent policy briefings from organisations such as Educause in the US on Data Privacy Legislation and the EU’s exploration of data breach rules highlight the significance of these challenges.

Not waving, but drowning
In a field as rapidly evolving as mobile, not having a clear focus and direction is likely to result in mobile provision being caught in a maelstrom of new developments and competing devices.  To realise the potential and ensure sustainability it is essential that institutional investment is ‘built upon a commonly-understood foundation and within the scope of a wider digital strategy’ (Mobile and Wireless Technologies Review).

The implementation of mobile services currently suffer from a fractured and ad hoc roll-out  within many academic institutions.  While there will undoubtedly be pockets of excellence across universities and within departments, there is rarely a coherent institutional strategy when it comes to mobile.

New opportunities…
The potential of mobile devices to transform and enhance the student experience has been demonstrated by innovative projects such as Bristol’s Mobile Campus Assistant and Edinburgh’s Walking through Time.

But I think it is now time to fully realise the opportunities that mobile offers to institutions, and ensure that these innovations are embedded in institutional strategies and services.  The mobile infrastructure for libraries funding call is an occasion to realise those opportunities and to put ideas into action.

There now are a range of projects that have been developing  and delivering shared infrastructure services to support people managing these repositories – such as Sherpa Romeo, Open Access Repository Junction and PIRUS2.  But to help further this, with particular focus on research papers, JISC has recently awarded EDINA funding to deliver key shared infrastructure services that meet shared needs, such as usage statistics, copyright management, search, preservation and deposit facilities.

The aim of this work is to make our repositories more coherent by bringing together key services and providing  them at a national level.  Neil Jacobs, Programme Director, Digital Infrastructure, comments that, “this work will build on the successful and widely used innovative shared infrastructure projects.”

What does this mean for universities? It means institutions and research organisations will be able to run their systems and processes more efficiently and effectively to better manage their textual research outputs.  This will support university requirements, such as reporting around the Research Excellence Framework and make the related outputs more accessible and reusable.  Rachel Bruce, Innovation Director, Digital Infrastructure says that, “this work is an opportunity to further enhance JISC Services to meet sector needs.”

In order to deliver a successful service environment for repositories, we’ll need to address sustainability issues and this is particularly challenging in our current shifting financial environment. I am aware we also need wide engagement with the university sector and other stakeholders such as the Research Councils and funders in the UK, and where appropriate with international initiatives. The benefit of working internationally is that there are some aspects of the service infrastructure that are also relevant to others outside of the UK; after all research is global.

I know that this latest investment in services will provide an opportunity for stakeholders to work together to meet common goals such as better research management and increased access to research findings. This phase of funded work will complete by March 2013 and more information will be available soon on the JISC website.

See resources and tool-kits on how JISC can help you with your research excellence.

The committee’s report, now available online, describes access to data as ‘fundamental’ for researchers to reproduce, verify and build on each other’s results.  It highlights that reproducibility should be the gold standard that all peer reviewers and editors aim for when assessing a manuscript. This spirit of openness is something JISC supports, through its work with the UK Research Councils.But researchers will also be aware of the challenges of making their data sets available to reviewers.  In the longer term, there are technical and economic challenges associated with making data available, especially as different types of data require different treatment. A lot of social data that is created through longitudinal studies makes sense only if the entire length of the study is available. Other data, such as environmental data, must be kept permanently available – you can’t repeat an earthquake.

Keeping data like this available in perpetuity is expensive and could end up as a cost that universities across the world simply cannot afford.  JISC is funding Dryad-UK which mirrors a US initiative to help researchers control who sees their data and when.  Researchers can deposit their data in a secure environment and then give privileged access to reviewers, for example, and then make the data available more widely once the article is published.

However, in some areas of science the data is produced by computers and programs and is correspondingly huge. Storing indefinitely the mass of outputs of Large Hadron Collider experiments is unfeasible. So we have to make it possible for people to re-run the programme, something that requires you know quite a lot about the machine and the environment it is running on in order to understand the data.  As long as the researcher defines the input conditions, and what the program is designed to do, you should be able to trust the outputs. And if we ensure that authors make clear the nature of the program they are running and the algorithms then people in the future should be able to re-run the program to retrieve the data.  I’m hinting of course that beyond the software or statistical test is something much more fundamental – the accuracy of the data itself.

As part of the report’s consultation process I was asked to comment on whether, in some cases, peer review might encourage a tendency towards conservative judgements among reviewers. But peer review in one form or another has been an underpinning aspect of research arguably since before journals as we know existed. As the report highlights, journal editors are well-placed to find the right experts to review unusual research, so the process itself cuts against the conservatism. Online publication affords us a great deal more flexibility in how the peer review process works.  In the past, two different forms of assessment have happened as part of a single process.  Both the technical assessment and the impact assessment have happened after publication of a research paper.  But separating the two processes is important because of the longer time scale over which you get your answer – so it’s encouraging that the committee’s report recommends a pre-publication technical assessment.

Another criticism sometimes levelled at peer review is that it is a burden on academics who have to do this in their own time.  But few researchers feel they have a nine-to-five existence anyway. In my experience reviewing manuscripts outside of a regular working day is part of the mentality in the research community. The situation would only become worrying if researchers had to spend more time on peer review proportionate to their own research. Greater transparency in the process might also help garner more recognition for peer reviewers, by ensuring that an individual reviewer’s work is known to their peers.  The committee report rightly highlights that we need to encourage researchers to deposit their data, rather than enforce it. Researchers deserve credit and recognition for working in an open way. It’s a complex situation, so a blanket mandate on open data might not be feasible but we need to create the right conditions so it is easier for researchers to make their data openly available.

This blog post first appeared in Research Information.

It is becoming evident that the conflicts and indeed the events of the 20th century can be fully investigated only when today’s historians have the equivalent relationship to the moving image as they have to the recorded text.

This short video by the JISC Film & Sound Think Tank highlights the issues involved in opening up access to film archives.

Film and television archives, delivered over the web, are as essential for learning today as libraries of books. Students already expect to use the full gamut of rich media in their education, and by 2014 video will account for 91% of global consumer traffic on the internet.

However, a recent report from the JISC Film & Sound Think Tank identifies what it refers to as the “AV gap” (the Audio Visual gap) between the expectations of learners and the reality of education today.

The report says, “The engines of our screen culture – film, television, and radio – were the dominant media of the 20th century, and many of the most important and most memorable messages of the 20th and 21st centuries have been expressed in moving images and sound. Yet education has far to go still to incorporate them systematically in teaching and learning.”

The Film & Sound Think Tank was convened with the aim of advising  JISC on all issues relating to the creation, discovery, use, delivery and preservation of film and sound resources in education and to input into relevant strategic and policy areas.

Contributors came from a broad set of organisations within broadcast, production, archives, research and education.  Those who contributed to the work clearly recognised that there was an opportunity to work in partnership to enhance film and sound archive provision – and all were interested in the challenges and opportunities around enhancing usage for education, research and beyond.

The report marks the culmination of the group’s work and proposes a series of strategic recommendations aimed at promoting current audiovisual collections and making them easily findable and usable for educational purposes.

The recommendations include, among others, strategies for improving resource discovery, clarifying licensing information, allowing more sophisticated manipulation and citation of moving images, and partnership work between Higher Education institutions and producers and broadcasters.

These high level approaches echo the more practical, every day, barriers to embed sound and moving images in education also identified in this blog post.

We are currently exploring how the recommendations made by the group can be taken forward in collaboration with JISC Services and other organizations working in this area. For example through enhancements to relevant JISC Services such as BUFVC, JISC Digital Media and MediaHub as well as through forthcoming projects to commemorate the anniversary of the First World War and activities around the BBC-led Digital Public Space.

The report was written by Paul Gerhardt and Peter B. Kaufman and can be found here together with a range of video resources and podcasts.

A summary downloadable pdf version of the report is available here.

Planning and designing the curriculum involves every aspect of the business from market research and course development to quality assurance and enhancement, resource allocation, timetabling, recruitment and assessment.

During the past two year I have been working  on the Transforming Curriculum Delivery through Technology Programme which funded 15 projects based in universities and colleges  with the aim of enhancing curriculum design and delivery through innovative uses of technology.

This work has focused on some of the key challenges that universities and colleges all face such as: improving  motivation, achievement and retention;  managing large cohorts; supporting remote and distance learners; engaging learners with feedback; ensuring ongoing responsiveness to stakeholder needs and delivering resource efficiencies which enhance rather than reduce the quality of the learning experience. By exploring new, creative and flexible models of delivering curriculum we have learned more about how and where technology can  add value and even transform the way in which the curriculum is delivered in different contexts.

We’ve found, for example, that students’ learning can benefit from efficient, integrated systems. At Lewisham college, for example, students on the new 14-19 diploma course are no longer dealing with printouts but getting instant access to their timetables, attendance and punctuality records through the college’s new learning portal.  The result is more motivated students who are more in control of their own progress, as student Sherrane Scott highlighted, “I use [the portal] for many things. The main use for me is to check my work in the courses section of the site. I use it because it is useful and convenient. It is also set out in a clear and understandable way.“

If you are interested in finding out more about this project, and the other work in the programme and want to understand more about the potential of technology-enhanced curricula on , our new guide Transforming curriculum delivery through technology: Stories of challenge, benefit and change is now available. This guide provides an overview of the outcomes from the programme and offers some insights into the ways in which institutions and individual curriculum areas can make use of technology to respond more robustly to the demands of a changing world. Copies can be downloaded or ordered from www.jisc.ac.uk/curriculumdeliveryguide (allow 2 weeks for delivery). For further information about the work of the projects and access to all our programme-related resources, please see the Design Studio. A recording of a presentation I gave recently providing an overview of the programme and its achievements, is also available.

Accompanying the guide, our latest radio show in the ‘JISC On Air’ series looks at how technology can deliver curriculum changeand  includes interviews with representatives from projects involved in the programme whodiscuss the impact achieved in two very different contexts and disciplines.

When we started creating a search environment to look at multiple databases in one we were given the oddest, but most precious piece of advice: ‘lose the search box’. The stunned looks around the project team’s faces said it all… isn’t searching about, well, searching?

At the BUFVC we offer access to many different types of datasets, from listings of practically everything that was broadcast on British TV and radio since 2001, to newsreels produced throughout the 20th century. In the United Kingdom there is no audiovisual equivalent for the British Library legal deposit. We therefore work hard to fill that information gap and find ways for education institutions to gain access to audiovisual content.

When we thought of ‘federating’ most of our data (searching it all at once) we thought it would be easy. And it was. We know our data well and could map it quickly.  But that wasn’t the real challenge. It was by looking at how users interacted with the developing system that we learnt the key lessons. If you are searching our 13 million records there are two difficult steps: what to type in that search box and how to then get rid of all the stuff you don’t want.

The answer to the first dilemma – how to stop users worrying about the empty search box – was to make it less important. We needed to make sure that whatever the exact search term, users should be able to make interesting discoveries even if the results were not the best. To do this we created relationships between our records based on semantics. This means that users will see suggestions for searches and records that may take them in different (but related) journeys.

The second dilemma is all about filtering. The search results page became our control centre, allowing users to filter results, tweak searches, see the suggestions for related searches and use a variety of additional tools. All this makes for a busy page but after many rounds of user testing we think our designer hit the right balance between complexity and elegance. Some of these features include:
•    Human-friendly filters such as identifying results by availability (‘can I see it online, do I need to order it from someone?), media type (moving image, audio, documents), genre or collection
•    A comprehensive history function that keeps track of viewed records, searches and tweaks to searches and the ability to mark and cite or export records in a variety of standards

When reflecting back on the project, I remember mostly the sense of fun, the permission we gave ourselves to think creatively, and our exciting user testing rounds. Developers and users don’t often mix but with good moderation these sessions proved magical. These are three elements I would urge anyone to replicate in future projects.

We are not alone in this development; sites that enable discovery and aggregate results from multiple collections are increasing in number – Edina’s JISC Media Hub is well worth a visit. We hope to have created something which rewards users with new connections through discovery. Work will only be completed in September and there are many plans beyond that. In the meantime if you are looking for moving image and sound, be it television or radio, newsreels or commercially available programmes for education pay a visit to our beta site and give us your feedback. If you are reading this from a UK higher or further education institution, please remember to login to access all areas.

The open-source based software and interface will be released as a package under an Open Source licence later this year. This project was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and led by Royal Holloway, University of London.

Luis Carrasqueiro is Chief Executive, British Universities Film & Video Council
luis@bufvc.ac.uk

Why all this interest now? One reason might be the overwhelming evidence that open access is a desirable destination for all kinds of reasons.  A joint report was released last month from JISC, RIN, Publishing Research Consortium, RLUK and the Wellcome Trust, which showed clearly that moves toward open access were supported by an analysis of the costs, benefits and risks in scholarly communication.  A recent Danish study of SMEs showed that most of them struggle to access findings from publicly funded research, which surely inhibits innovation.  JISC, on behalf of the UK Open Access Implementation Group, is commissioning three further studies to discover how open access can support the work of the private, public and third sectors, and these studies will report over the next six months or so.

But there are other reasons why open access is gaining a lot of attention from governments.  We have known for some time that the knowledge economy depends on the application of codified, technical knowledge.  As David Cameron and Barack Obama pointed out this week  “science and higher education are the foundation stones of their two nations’ 21st century economies”.

Most readers will know that JISC has been an advocate of open access for some time but that does not mean we have taken an uncritical stance.  Now that the direction of travel is established and widely accepted, there are some tricky practical challenges to overcome.  For example:

• Open access is likely to look different, and emerge at different speeds in different disciplines.  In some disciplines such as the life sciences, there are major, innovative publishers such as the Public Library of Science, and repositories such as UK PubMedCentral supported by research funders.  In other disciplines, such as chemistry, open access is not yet growing fast.
• The transition to open access will need to be co-ordinated to ensure the continuity and rigour of the peer review system.  Again, the Public Library of Science is leading the way here, exploiting the opportunities of digital technologies while preserving academic rigour.  JISC’s new programme in campus-based publishing is exploring an alternative approach that has had success in other countries already.
• The institutional repository infrastructure, while mature and reasonably comprehensive, is not yet as joined-up as it needs to be.  JISC will be commissioning work in this area during 2011-12, and will be working with international initiatives such as the European OpenAIRE project.

Open access publishing faces a number of specific challenges, which could be summarised under the following six headings:

a)      Funding outputs from research that is not grant-supported.  This is a real challenge, and one that is likely to fall mainly to universities, who might want to act collectively to address it, as in the COPE scheme in the US.  Some publishers offer waivers, which is helpful.

b)      Funding outputs produced after the end of the grant.  This can be addressed by changing the ways in which grants are administered, for example by making it clearer and more straightforward for indirect costs to be used in this way.

c)      Complexity of funding arrangements from an author’s perspective.  Here, I think funders, universities and publishers do simply need a way to sit down together and develop a better set of arrangements.  There may be lessons from the approach taken by the Wellcome Trust, especially if research grant funding becomes more concentrated.

d)      Need for transparency in costing, especially for hybrid journals.  There seems to be no consensus that these are a way to transition to open access.

e)      Absolute cost.  Recent research shows that the average article processing charge needs to be under £2000 for the cost-benefits to work for the UK.  It seems likely that the PLoS-One publishing model, now widely emulated, must be a large part of the answer.  In the medium term, this needs to be combined with agreements on the wider sharing of usage statistics and citation data , and review services such as the Faculty of 1000, to open up a market in services to help readers navigate the literature.

f)       Distribution of costs / benefits among the sector.  Will research intensive universities have to pay more?  This is not necessarily the case, if arrangements are in place to ensure that research papers from grant-funded research are supported via those grants.  However, this will require close monitoring and perhaps collective action, and JISC Collections may well have a role in seeing a way through this.

We are working towards making open access in the UK both good for the research community and good for UK plc.

JISC Podcast:
How you can build a business case for open access policy

This statement is revealing of wider issues institutions face in today’s times of financial constraints: how do we know if a digital resource is having an impact on its target audience? How do we reach and speak to scholars, teachers and students to measure their satisfaction? What metrics should be adopted in the context of digitised scholarly material? How much does a digital resource tell about the institution that created it? And above all, has the investment paid back? These are not easy things to assess and often impact just takes time to materialise.

In order to support content creators, resources managers and information professionals within institutions in the task of assessing the usage and impact of their digital resources, JISC has supported the development of the Toolkit for the Impact of Digitised Scholarly Resources (TIDSR), by the Oxford Internet Institute (OII).

The toolkit, first developed in 2009 and recently updated, provides a framework for conducting this kind of analysis and offers guidance on a range of qualitative and quantitative methodologies that can be used such as webometrics, content analysis, surveys and focus groups. The TIDSR was used by projects in the JISC Impact and embedding of digitised resources programme, of which the Old Bailey was one, to conduct an analysis of their collections, identify where resources were working well and what could be done to improve them and better embed their content within teaching and research.

The case studies drawn from the experience of the projects are available in the toolkit and are a useful starting point for beginners in the field. They also provided fertile ground for the programme’s final report, “Splashes and Ripples: Synthesising the Evidence on the Impacts of Digital Resources” (PDF), by Eric Meyer. The report begins to sketch a picture, based on evidence rather than anecdotes, of how digitised resources in the humanities are currently being used and provides a set of recommendations to content creators on how to go about maximising the impact of their resource such as:

[quote from report]

1.     Remember in advance that you will want to contact your users. A number of projects had a difficult time finding users to survey or interview, but users are a key resource that you will want to approach from time to time.

2.     Use the media to your advantage. One of the undeniable advantages that arts and humanities resources have in the United Kingdom is that there is considerable public interest in these topics. […] The Old Bailey Proceedings Online project has benefitted from inclusion in popular BBC programmes (see page 11).

3.     The media and the public are influenced by numbers and metrics. Being able to demonstrate your impact numerically can be a means of convincing others to visit your resource, and thus increase the resource’s future impact. For instance, the amount of traffic and size of iTunesU featured prominently in early press reports (see page 21).

4.     Make your resource easy to find. This can involve a number of strategies, including search engine optimization (SEO), partnerships with more prominent related sources (see page 31), links in related sites, and inclusion in Wikipedia and other sources. A Vision of Britain through Time has been the most proactive resource in this regard, (see page 28),

5.     Give your resource an unambiguous name and acronym/initialism, both to increase the likelihood that your resource turns up at the top of relevant searches, and to make measuring mentions of your resource result in as few false positives as possible.

6.     Create quick wins for new visitors to your collection. By finding things that they can quickly learn, do, see, or contribute, you can increase the stickiness of your site, and increase the likelihood that your resources will be used. Oxford University’s podcasts, for instance, are easy to immediately access and hear (see page 23).

7.     Leverage your wins. Using the most popular aspects of your resource to attract people to other parts of the collection via features such as suggested links and recommendations for further information can increase the time spent with your collection.

8.     Adopt Cool URLs as persistent, consistent, human-readable, and citable links to digital resources. The British History Online collection has used this method to increase the readability of its links (see page 39).

9.     Provide the ability to export citations directly to reference management software such as Zotero and EndNote.

10.     APIs are the future. Linked data, apps, and other ways that enable researchers to access and combine the data in your resource will increase its utility.

The site contains recent content that users are likely to want to access whilst on the move, such as news items or podcasts. It doesn’t contain all the content on the JISC website and links are provided on every page back to the main site for those who want to explore further (although the main site is not optimised for mobile devices).

JISC Mobile is a pilot service and we have deliberately started small to assess demand and get early feedback from users. Please help us to improve the site by telling us what you think, if you value such a service, and what other JISC content you would like to access on your mobile device.

It is also a ‘beta’ service, i.e. it uses new technology that is still in its development cycle. The site might sometimes fail or give unexpected results. Again, you can help us to improve it by reporting any bugs.

JISC Mobile was developed for us by ILRT at the University of Bristol, based upon their Mobile Campus Assistant software. The software was initially developed via a JISC-funded Rapid Innovation project and is being further developed in the MyMobileBristol project under the JISC Business and Community Engagement programme.

The application harvests content from a number of external sources (in our case, RSS feeds from the JISC website) and converts them into RDF for storage in a database. This RDF Store is then queried via a RESTful interface that outputs the content in mobile-optimised HTML. The benefit of this approach is that we are not having to create and maintain content separately for the mobile website. It uses existing data that only needs to be managed in one place.

JISC Mobile has extended the functionality of Mobile Campus Assistant. One of the main challenges was the developers needed to build code to identify and transform data structures within the source RSS so they are optimised for mobile. For example, tables are linearised in the mobile version as multi-column tables do not work on a small screen and we took the decision to remove all images to increase the performance of the pages, especially over 3G (and slower) networks. As with Mobile Campus Assistant, the code developed in this project is open source and is available on Github.

Some interesting issues arose as a result of working within the limitations that mobile imposes. For example, the importance of microcopy came to the fore. We needed to change the ‘Supporting Your Institution’ section on the main website to ‘Institutional Support’ on the mobile version because the former label would not fit on a small screen. It’s a less than ideal compromise as it subtly changes the meaning, from an active to a passive mode. Unless we want to maintain 2 separate versions of our content (and we don’t have the resources for that), this illustrates the need for content strategists to consider the mobile experience from the outset, from the length of headings to the use of data structures within pages. As the demand for mobile access to the web is increasing rapidly (and will overtake desktop access in a matter of years), our content needs to get in shape; snappier, leaner and more flexible.

JISC Mobile is available at http://m.jisc.ac.uk/. We’d love to hear your comments and please report any bugs. There is a feedback page on the site itself or email us at web@jisc.ac.uk. If you blog or tweet about it, please mark your posts with #jiscweb so we can find them.

In an example from the University of Edinburgh’s School of Divinity, a virtual learning environment-based blogging tool has been used to enhance the dynamics of tutorials and seminars and to improve the consistency of students’ engagement with more challenging elements of the curriculum. Following successful trials commencing in 2005, the School of Divinity has used blogging as part of a wider blended learning strategy to develop student skills of critical thinking and reflection.

The detailed case study is a word doc you can download: Engaging learners in critical reflection – University of Edinburgh

What are the advantages?  In my experience, group blogging helps to unite a diverse body of students and makes it easier to identify individuals’ difficulties. The quality of discussion on the blogs is often high, with more competent students raising the performance of weaker students, and contributions made as part of these discussions can later become aids for revision. The time involved in monitoring blogs has not proved excessive – in fact the blogging activity may have reduced the time spent supporting students experiencing difficulties.

What’s your experience of using blogs with students? I would welcome your comments.

Find out more about JISC’s work in online learning

That’s a good strong statement, but what are the questions? Before you read on, let’s just establish that you are interested in long term access to, and use of, digital information, otherwise known as Digital Preservation, because let’s face it, this isn’t a topic that gets a lot of people fired up. However, if you are still reading, then this is your chance to learn why the OPF seems to have some of the answers.

The OPF is an international membership organisation that was setup early last year following on from an influential 4 year long EU funded digital preservation project called PLANETS (Preservation and Long-Term Access through Networked services. This project delivered a suite of open-source free tools for planning and carrying out preservation tasks and by the end of it, it was clear that some way was needed to continue to support and develop this important work outside of the context of continued funding from the European Commission. So … led by the British Library, they decided to join forces to keep this work going.

It seems to be working well so the first question they appeared to have answered is – ‘how do we transition from project funding to a more sustainable model?’. The OPF is an unusual and effective example of a funded project finding a sustainable route for continuing its work and the calibre and nature of the organisations that are involved as charter and affiliate members testify to the importance of the work it is undertaking.

Another question it seems to be answering is ‘how can we collaborate effectively?’. One of the goals of the OPF is to identify and foster an international community of developers that is capable of creating, enhancing and refining the tools we have at our collective disposal for preserving all kinds of digital objects. It makes sense that the OPF will become an indispensable ally for organisations with a preservation problem or projects that need expert input with technical solutions. Developers with the right technical skills in this domain are a critical resource and any initiative that focuses on supporting and promoting this particular group of people is an initiative that is worth supporting.

The third question that I think the OPF is well positioned to answer is ‘how do I know that I can trust the digital preservation solution that is on offer?’. This issue of trust is a pivotal and ongoing issue for many different aspects of information strategy. Can I trust this agency to look after my information properly?; how do I know that this service will remain viable for the foreseeable future?; do I believe that this persistent identifier scheme really will be persistent?; and so on and so forth. I’m not suggesting that the OPF instantly solves all of these difficult and enduring challenges, but given the structure, remit and nature of the organisation, it is well positioned, certainly in a European context but possibly globally as well, to become a trusted broker of advice, guidance, capability and assurance of effective tools and methods for preservation.

JISC joined the OPF as a charter member in November 2010 so you might expect that we would approve of it and wish to sing its praises, but I do think it is significant that a group of UK university members has also had various conversations with the OPF and have decided that they would also like to collaborate with this initiative. The affiliate members that have recently joined are:

University of Southampton
University of Oxford
University of Portsmouth
University of Cambridge
King’s College London (Centre for e-Research)
University of Glasgow (Humanities Advanced Technology & Information Institute)
Digital Curation Centre

If any other UK universities (or associated bodies) are interested in joining this affiliate group then they should get in touch with either me (n.grindley@jisc.ac.uk), or Bram van der Werf (vanderwerfbram@gmail.com)

Photograph (C) Andrew Hewson http://t.co/6g3ENKP

The higher and further education sectors in the UK are fortunate to employ talented and dedicated software developers. Without them, many kinds of technical innovation would be significantly more difficult, more expensive or even impossible. While the patterns of employment of ‘local’ (locally employed) developers varies considerably between higher/further education institutions, it is rare for such institutions to invest strategically in their local development capacity.
Recognising this, the JISC-funded DevCSI project (managed by UKOLN) was introduced to work with local developers, to understand better their potential as an under-utilised resource and to create opportunities for them to network together, sharing resources, ideas, code and solutions. With the network that DevCSI has successfully pioneered, an institution which employs a handful of developers locally gains the benefit of a sector-wide network of peers bringing different perspectives and experiences to bear in a shared context. Beyond the immediate sector, DevCSI has worked with open-source and commercial suppliers who recognise the value in the networked pool of development talent and expertise.

JISC has been consistent in maintaining that the sector needs to continue to innovate if it is to be able to meet the long-term challenges of a radically changing environment. Institutions must be careful to maintain the capacity for technical innovation – indeed a recession is the right time to invest in change and innovation in order to emerge ready to exploit the opportunities of better economic times. In the difficult period ahead, one predictable response will be to outsource some software services, seeking the cost-savings and efficiencies promised by service-delivery paradigms such as Software as a Service. But there are risks associated with outsourcing services entirely, such as the associated reduction in local understanding and expertise, and the loss of capability to adapt to meet particular local requirements.

In the DevCSI project, we are working to establish an understanding of the changing role of the local developer in this likely new landscape with its greater dependency on remote, shared services. While recognising that they have some common requirements, we should not forget that our institutions have their individual ‘flavours’ too (this is surely part of what makes higher education in the UK so attractive internationally). For shared, remote services to be truly effective in a local context, they must be tailored to the needs of the users in that context.

DevCSI is steadily gaining traction in the UK – we have worked with related organisations such as OSSWatch and The Software Sustainability Institute and have organised events at many higher and further education institutions. Our work is even being recognised internationally, and we have been recently invited to help establish a similar initiative in Australia.

Where next for DevCSI? We’ve established a nascent community of developers in the UK and can already point to evidence of the value of this, some of which (such as peer-peer training) is even measurable in pounds, shillings and pence! While maintaining and growing this, we are now considering where best to focus our resources at a sector-wide level. One issue we have identified in the sector is the lack of career options for successful developers – other than to move into less technical management roles. Many of our best developers simply move out of the sector entirely in order to progress in their careers. An idea we are starting to explore is the possible development of a new role in the sector – the Strategic Developer – a developer who has both technical and domain experience, and who can contribute to strategic planning and decision making. Establishing such a role may take time but, as technology is undoubtedly going to play an increasingly important role in the future of further and higher education, so must we ensure that the people who understand the technology stick around long enough to be able to contribute at this level.

For more information, go to the DevCSI blog. Please do email me (p.walk@ukoln.ac.uk) if you have questions about this work. My UKOLN colleague, Mahendra Mahey and I also presented on this work at the JISC Conference, 2011 (slides).

Photograph (C) Andrew Hewson http://t.co/6g3ENKP

As Eric pointed out, being innovative can help show prospective students that the university means business when it comes to staying at the top, thereby helping to drive revenue from course fees.  It can also support widening participation by reaching out to students in non-traditional areas – as at the University of the Highlands and Islands, where technology is conquering geography and allowing students to tap into the network of over 80 different learning centres from their own homes and workplaces.  There’s no doubt that smart technology use can enhance students’ experience of university, whether that be keeping in touch with a tutor out of hours or logging on to an online learning environment -  like the University of Bristol’s online laboratory ChemLabs, which better prepares undergraduates for their real-life practical work.

Technology can drive income from business, too. I’m aware that the vast majority of the work that goes on between universities and their business and community partners is heavily dependent on virtual collaboration through email, telephone or web tools and resources.  Last year a JISC project at the University of Glamorgan developed a ‘listening zone’ for feedback, ideas and partner-making, and acted as a marketplace for business referrals and contacts.  Building an online community takes time but can be a valuable way to add value to what’s happening every day between local entrepreneurs and academics.

Now that higher education is entering an unregulated market, we’re bound to see increased competition between universities.  But shared services can achieve cost savings by providing economies of scale. The recent upgrade of JANET, the UK’s education and research network, will save £63.2 million over its five years of operation.  We’ve also seen the success of the Bloomsbury Colleges group in London which was set up in 2004 to collaborate together in academic administrative matters to avoid unnecessary duplication of effort while maintaining the colleges’ independence.

In addition to sharing these strategic approaches, we need to get better at learning from one another about which technology works, and where.  Risks taken by individual institutions need not be repeated.  For instance, JISC has investigated the possibilities for an academic cloud specifically for researchers – and decided that at the moment, the arguments are not persuasive.  You can read the report from 2010. There are countless examples of good technology use available across the sector and it’s encouraging to see groups like the enterprise architecture practice group for strategists coming together on a regular basis to ask how we can discover from each other.

I sometimes feel that the word ‘technology’ sounds expensive.  You can estimate how much your ICT equipment is costing your university and the environment using the JISC carbon footprinting tool. But the simplest technology can have a really big impact.  We’re all aware, for example, of the potential for energy saving light bulbs to help us cut our bills at home, and the same principle can be applied to green ICT on an institution-wide scale. JISC funded a project at Cardiff University to make better use of storage solutions for files that aren’t being accessed every day.  It’s simple technology but when put into full production at Cardiff, it is anticipated that this will save 10kW of energy (approx 51 tonnes of CO2) per year, which at current prices is around £10,000 per annum.  A green agenda can also help you make better use of space on campus by strategically outsourcing ICT functions using cloud computing, resulting in lower cooling costs and new space that used to be taken up with servers.

Having said that, there’s no doubt that investing in new ICT facilities can be costly.  As universities try to prioritise, what should they do if buying a new system becomes unavoidable? JISC ProcureWeb is a shared service which enables institutions to save money through efficient procurement and was estimated to have saved the sector £1,350,000 in 2008/09. You can read JISC’s advice on getting the best price for any new equipment you’re consider on the JISC Infonet contract negotiation infokit I’d also encourage universities to ensure that they’re not paying more than they have to for their existing services.  For example, there’s a searchable list of all the free and discounted licensed digital resources available through JISC at the content website.  In 2009/10 alone, JISC Collections saved UK colleges and universities over £50m on subscription costs.

You can find out more about how JISC can help you in the reducing costs area of our website – which focuses on how we can help support your institution with strategic thinking, background documents, practical advice and downloadable resources on all the topics I’ve mentioned in this post.   By wisely investing in technology, I believe a university can save costs, generate revenue and share the burden of spending – but I also don’t want us to lose the innovative spark that keeps UK plc at the forefront of research globally.  We must continue to take calculated risks with technology if we want to support our students and researchers with their bright ideas and ensure that our universities attract people who are themselves forward looking and innovative.

This blog post first appeared on the Guardian Higher Education Network on 18 April 2011.  Visit the Guardian site

I believe rewards for better research information management are significant. By taking the friction out of reporting, universities can make genuine efficiency savings both of cash and time. Businesses and other potential partners can find out more about current research and can seek and find the researcher with the expertise they need. Researchers spend less time duplicating information in different systems, freeing them to get on with their real business: research.

In order to make the exchange and management of research information easier and more efficient, JISC has joined with the research councils, HEFCE, HESA, ARMA, UCISA and a number of universities, projects and companies to form the Research Information Management Group (RIMG).

The group has played a successful role in helping the sector to respond to a rapidly evolving environment. It has made the technical and business case for the adoption of a common research information standard, pointed the way to greater harmonisation of systems across the sector and created an opportunity for all the members of the group to come together behind a strategic vision.

JISC has taken forward a suite of projects which build on this vision. They have addressed many of the practical issues of improving research information management, from supporting researchers in their daily work to sharing large volumes of information between research partners and REF reporting. JISC infoNet has added its own research and case studies to the experience of these projects, built on the work of the RIMG and created a Research Information Management infoKit.

The infoKit is designed to provide senior managers with the key information they need to build better policies. It provides those tasked with procuring and evaluating systems with solid advice and gives staff who wish to implement better management and technical systems the benefit of a lot of hands-on experience.

But for me what is enjoyable about this work is that is it constantly evolving. The infoKit will be updated and adapted as the RIMG develops its vision and JISC projects create new tools and resources. It is already a valuable resource, but it will repay a fresh look now and again, as it grows and more value is added. Improved research information management strengthens all the partners in the world of research and JISC, by partnering with the RIMG and developing the infoKit is helping the UK to realise those benefits.

If you’re interested in our work in research information management find out more.

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Universities are facing such fundamental challenges, rare the senior manager who isn’t taking a closer look at the efficiency of their operations. But having invested in management, technology and systems integration for a number of years, JISC is well placed to offer support.

This week, JISC presented  at BUFDG’s annual conference, emphasising the need to integrate business systems to inform decision making and help reduce costs. At JISC we are realistic about the effort and expertise required to enable the sector to cope with current challenges and opportunities. Our approach is to create useful, useable and used resources to help with these processes. A JISC pilot at the University of Nottingham, for example, showed that the introduction of a new system to manage student case records would recoup the initial investment costs during its third year of implementation and would thereafter save the university a little over £4,500 per annum.

It’s not all about spending money to save money. We also recently funded a further education college in Hertfordshire to investigate whether operating certain finance functions and activities through a shared service might be practical. In fact, it did not result in a shared or outsourced ICT service, but the review, re-design and streamlining of key finance admin processes resulted in efficiency savings of £120k through a reduction in headcount within six months.  See a full list of this and related pilots here.

If you’re particularly interested and want to learn more about systems integration, JISC has funded a growing number of UK universities to explore and exploit approaches in ‘Enterprise Architecture’. With senior management support, the Enterprise Architectures approach enables consistency between business processes and all aspect of the technology architecture – information, applications, services, data, infrastructure and security.

Indeed there are already a significant number of UK universities exploring and exploiting a range of JISC’s management toolkits to positive effect. And that’s why you might take a closer look at some of the JISC resources readily available to support your decision making.

Our business intelligence infokit helps you understand your institutional environment and target limited resources to better effect.

JISC resources on administrative systems can help you take a strategic approach to improving existing systems through to planning new integrated information technology systems.

Our strategic scenario planning tool guides you through flexible long term plans.

Keep in touch with JISC, sign up for our strategic alert for senior managers.

In my role at JISC I look after our content programme which brings scholarly collections into the digital age – taking journals, newspapers, manuscripts, photographs and other material and putting them on the web. I have the pleasure of working with many outstanding collections in the UK and have helped unearth some real treasures that can be shared and used for education and research.

The British Cartoon Archive is one such example. Hosted by the University of Kent, it represents a visual history of British history whether through the social comedies of Carl Giles or the political satire of Steve Bell. It provides the student with an alternative viewpoint on the century – not official documents, but a more slanted approach that provides a more accurate portrayal of public opinion. The video explains more.

The First World War Poetry archive, curated by the University of Oxford, is another astonishing collection. Incorporating the Great War Archive, where members of the general public where asked to submit images of objects relating to the war (letters, diaries, photos etc.), the resource is a seminal example of a crowd sourced website. The accompanying video tells some amazing stories that have been collected by the archive. In one story, we hear of a Scottish soldier, enlisted for war without the chance to say goodbye his family. He placed his goodbye message inside a matchbox and threw it onto the platform in the hope it would get to his loved ones. This video recounts the full story.

Most of the time I am looking at ways to promote these resources and create awareness amongst academics, researchers and learners that they exist. The JISC content site lists all the resources JISC has either funded or licensed for educational use. But one also needs to remember digitisation from the perspective of the creator, and the many things to take into account when putting collections online.

There are five pieces of advice that recent JISC funded projects have discovered have been crucial to successful digitisation projects.

Five top tips

1. Embedding digitisation within a university needs engagement, you need people on your side from across the whole of the organisation from researchers, academics and IT staff as well as senior management

2. Partnership is vital for those developing digitised content. Not just with other universities but with innovative publishers and producers

3. Digitised resources will achieve maximum impact when part of universities’ teaching and research strategies

4. Users love speed and convenience – one quick search over a federated website works better than multiple searches over disparate websites

5. Engaging external communities in digital content needs to be a two way process. It’s not just about universities broadcasting their expertise and exposing their digital content