AIB. Congressi, 46., Torino, 2000.

XLVI Congresso nazionale AIB
Oltre confini e discontinuità
Torino, 11-13 maggio 2000

Consorzi di biblioteche e gestione delle risorse elettroniche. - 2000-05-13 10:30/13:30

NOTA redazionale. Ringraziando gli autori che hanno messo a disposizione per AIB-WEB i testi delle loro relazioni, avvertiamo che potranno risultare lievi differenze tra questa versione e quella definitivamente licenziata per la stampa.

A national consortium? Building digital information resources for UK Higher Education

Mary Auckland [*],
Director of Library & Learning Resources, The London Institute

1. Introduction

I am honoured to have been invited to address your conference, and delighted to have an opportunity to visit this lovely city.

In my presentation I will introduce you to the Joint Information Systems Committee and explain what the JISC is, and what it is doing on behalf of UK higher education, and now further education as well, to provide access to relevant digital information resources. I will explain the JISC's strategy for a Distributed National Electronic Resource, and describe some of the activities which are turning vision into reality. The title of my presentation begins "A national consortium - question mark", and I hope by the end of the presentation you will have an idea of the extent to which the JISC does, and doesn't, act as a consortium. But I would like to begin with a very brief outline of the higher and further education context in the United Kingdom.

2. The Higher and Further Education context, and the Joint Information Systems Committee

Responsibility for many higher education issues, especially financial matters, are delegated by the government department to four funding bodies: the Higher Education Funding Council for England, the Scottish Higher Education Funding Council, the Higher Education Funding Council for Wales, and the Department for Higher and Further Education, Training & Employment Northern Ireland. There are 174 universities and colleges of higher education in the UK, attended by over 1.8 million students. Universities are relatively autonomous institutions governed by their own constitutions rather than by law, although they must operate within a legislative framework for higher education set out in the Further and Higher Education Act 1992.

There are funding bodies for further education as well. Further education caters for students who are taking courses up to the standard required for entry to higher education. These course are delivered in over 550 colleges, and the 3.3 million students are aged from 16 to 106.

All of these funding bodies have agreed to set aside money, totaling several million pounds, each year to support the activities of the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC). The expectation is that in return the JISC will provide higher and further education, and the research councils' communities, with a high quality national network infrastructure, and will stimulate and enable the cost-effective exploitation of information systems.

The JISC is, in effect, a committee and a set of sub-committees with members drawn from UK higher and further education institutions, and a Secretariat. The committees determine policy, make decisions about strategy and funding, and monitor and evaluate progress. The Secretariat is responsible for administrative, legal, and financial matters. I am a member of one of the JISC sub-committees, the Committee for Electronic Information. It is this experience which I am drawing upon today.

In 1996 the JISC published a five year strategy 1 which gave high priority to electronic information and the ongoing development and promotion of a Distributed National Electronic Resource (DNER). I will first describe some of the activities which the JISC undertakes for higher and further education with respect to the provision of digital information, and then go on to explain the strategy for the Distributed National Electronic Resource, and give some examples of how the strategy is being implemented.

3. Digital information resources

The JISC has for some years been active in negotiating, acquiring and delivering electronic information to the UK academic community, among the earliest being the ISI datasets in the early 1990s. With the publication of the 1996 strategy, responsibility for this element of activity, and for integrating the service and development of the broader DNER programme passed to the Committee for Electronic Information, at first under the chairmanship of Lynne Brindley and now Reg Carr. Much of the work of acquiring and creating, and ensuring access to, information resources has been delegated to a Content Working Group, which I chaired until recently, and which is now chaired by Allan Foster. The JISC is assisted in this work by a full- time Collections Manager - Alicia Wise.

Collection policy - selection criteria

"... to be effective, collection management must be based on an agreed, regularly reviewed collection development policy, formulated after an assessment of user needs and an evaluation of the existing collection." Jenkins and Morley, 1991 2

One of the first tasks of the Content Working Group (CWG) was to formulate a collection development policy for the selection, creation, de-selection, retention and preservation of electronic content for UK higher education. The resultant Collections Policy 3, which also includes sections on standards and access, was issued to higher education institutions for consultation, and met with general approval. Such is the velocity of change, however, that we have just embarked on a review of the policy.

Such a policy document assists in planning and ensures that the portfolio of electronic resources is built in a systematic, rational and responsive manner. It helps to define priorities, gives a framework in which decisions can be set, and provides guidance for acquisition and creation. This is important in that decisions on acquisition or creation are not solely based on the subject matter or quality of the content; economic pressures and the sheer quantify of content becoming available also come into play. A policy ensures transparent decision making, and acts as an independent yardstick to evaluate performance. The JISC Collections Policy is intended to ensure that decisions taken are well-understood and supported by the community. It also serves as a basis for informing co-operation with other collection providers.

The policy sets out criteria for the inclusion of digital information resources, and the concept of a critical mass of information within each discipline is important among these, as is the aim to develop a set of complementary and integrated resources which include the full range of appropriate types of data and information. The overall ambition, summed up by a quote from Cliff Lynch, the Executive Director of the American Coalition for Networked Information (CNI), is to "...weave primary content into a web of commentary, criticism, scholarship and instruction, and links to other content..." 4.

Acquisition & creation

The CWG has responsibility for advising on content provision across the whole JISC programme, and for initiating the acquisition and creation of electronic information resources. An exception to this rule is that securing access to current, full-text electronic journals is handled by another JISC body, called NESLI (the National Site Licence Initiative).

The CWG advises on, and when appropriate, arranges the renewal of, all other existing contracts and/or licences for electronic information resources. However, CWG's remit goes much wider than solely facilitating arrangements with commercial suppliers of electronic information. The Group is also charged with considering the most appropriate means for securing access to other content, and putting this into operation. This includes making recommendations for content creation. Finally CWG has responsibility for reviewing annually the status of the content portfolio, including monitoring use and take-up, and the effectiveness of delivery.

A variety of strategies are used to develop the collections. These include:

negotiating access to commercially available content on behalf of UK higher education (recent examples include Web of Science, Beilstein Crossfire Service, Art Abstracts, Ordnance Survey (map) data, Chadwyck-Healy's Literature on Line, JSTOR);
investing in electronic content creation (e.g. pilot digitisation projects undertaken by the Higher Education Digitisation Service; International Bibliography of the Social Sciences);
collaboration with other agencies and content creators nationally and internationally (e.g. Economic and Social Science Research Council data archive, JSTOR).

It is important to note that our strategy is to move beyond dealing simply with bibliographic and text-based information, and towards securing access to a much wider variety of types of information such as sound, images, and moving images. For example, we have supported a JISC Image Digitisation Initiative, and a pilot project to demonstrate how moving images might be stored, managed and delivered electronically to the higher education community. In recognition of the specialist nature of much of this material, not least in negotiating rights issues, we have recently established a Moving Images and Sound Working Group, and appointed an Image Co-ordinator, Catherine Grout.

Consultation

Consultation with members of the higher education community, especially those responsible for teaching and research is seen as an important means of deciding what content needs to be added to the DNER portfolio. Methods used include focus groups based on a particular type of resource (e.g. business information), user groups, and e-mail discussion lists. A series of half or one day events in partnership with learned societies and others are currently being explored.

Negotiation - licences, costs etc.

Negotiation on matters such as licence terms, use rights, and costs are handled in a variety of ways, often depending on the nature of the content supplier or owner. Frequently the Collections Manager, supported by Committee members, initiate the discussions. More detailed terms are sometimes negotiate by the Collections Manager and members of the JISC secretariat. Regular use is also made of the Combined Higher Education Software Team (CHEST) which undertakes negotiation on behalf of UK higher education for software, and is often used by CWG to negotiate for content and to collect subscriptions. Detailed financial arrangements have to be agreed with the JISC secretariat.

The kinds of issues which have to be resolved are:

who may have access to the content, e.g. can any user of a library use it even if they are not a member of the institution; use by learners off campus;
what use can it be put to and what are the copyright terms, e.g. can it be copied into courseware or publications;
will costs be based on a fixed fee or related to annual usage;
will use be limited to a fixed number of terminals, or a number of simultaneous users;
will the supplier host the dataset, or will it be hosted at a JISC datacentre.

Charging mechanisms

"Who pays for content and how?" is a topic which has exercised us for several years. The JISC has top-sliced funds ava ilable to use, and in the early days of electronic content delivery, national datasets were, on occasion, paid for from these funds and made available "free" to higher education in order to stimulate use. Now a full cost recovery model is the norm, although sometimes with financial underwriting. We are still experimenting with methods for setting charges to individual institutions, for example by banding them into different groups according to size, teaching and research activity, likely take up of the content etc. However, the principle of services being free at the point of use (i.e. to the end user) is well-established within UK higher education, and looks unlikely to change in the short-term.

Preservation

Looking to the future there are a variety of concerns related to the preservation of electronic content. These include:

whether the data will need to be transferred to upgraded machines over time (refreshed), and who will do this and fund it;
who will keep the "master" copies of content; is it safe to rely on the original creator or supplier especially if that is a commercial organisation.

Currently we have many questions but fewer answers, and we are not helped by the absence of legal deposit of digital publications. In recognition of the importance of preservation and the amount of work still to be done in this area, agreement has recently been reached to create a Preservation Focus. This is in addition to funding two major projects: the Cedars project, part of the eLib programme, which is also taking an international view and liaising with bodies such as National Library of Australia, the British Library, and the Research Libraries Group, and the CAMiLEON project jointly funded by JISC and NSF (National Science Foundation), with partners in the UK and US.

4. Building the Distributed National Electronic Resource

The JISC is not simply concerned with acquiring and creating content. It is also active in areas such as the delivery of information, resource discovery, and standards and interoperability. In an effort to bring a coherence to a multitude of JISC's digital information activities we have developed a strategic vision which we have called the Distributed National Electronic Resource (DNER). The remainder of this paper will focus on the DNER. Our thinking on the DNER matures month by month and our recent position is encapsulated in a vision paper. This paper describes the DNER as "… a managed environment for accessing quality assured information resources on the Internet which are available from many sources" 5.. We have very recently appointed Lorcan Dempsey as DNER Programme Director, to assist us in realising this ambition.

In essence, the overall aim of the DNER strategy is to develop a framework that will support the creation of an easily accessible, comprehensive information resource that can be used by teachers, learners and researchers within the higher and further education communities, and indeed beyond. As I have said in previous presentations we are trying to make a landscaped garden from an untamed jungle.

But let's move away from the vision to look at how this strategy is being translated into practice, and what is already being delivered.

The components of DNER

The DNER is being created in a national and international context of users needs, the JISC strategy, and commercial developments. It is also influenced by government policy, and is evolving at a time when there are a number of related national initiatives being developed including the National Electronic Library for Health (NeLH), the People's Network (formerly known as New Library), LearnDirect (previously called University for Industry), the National Grid for Learning, and the Netful of Jewels report (which relates to the resources in UK museums and galleries).

Many of the key components of the DNER are in place already, building on initiatives developed in the late 80s and early 90s, for example the Bath ISI Data Service, and translating many of the projects from the highly successful eLib programme into services. Some components, on the other hand, are still in the development or pilot stage. In addition to the content which I have already considered above, the components include:

The network - a communications network called JANET (Joint Academic Network) and Super JANET, and a series of Metropolitan Area Networks. The network is frequently up-graded to cope with more complex content, such as images, maps, and moving images. These networks are now taken for granted, but they need planning, managing and financing, and without this "plumbing" the delivery of electronic resources and services would not be possible.

Discovery and delivery mechanisms - Considerable progress is being made in the development of subject-based resource discovery, primarily through the implementation of the Resource Discovery Network, and its associated hubs. Currently there are five hubs, some of which have developed from eLib projects (for example, SOSIG, the hub for social sciences, business and law). This collaborative and distributed service will provide access to high quality Internet resources. Other examples of work going on to assist resource discovery are the Clumps and COPAC projects funded under phase 3 of the eLib programme.

The JISC funds a number of data centres and services for delivering content, for example BIDS (Bath Information and Data Service); MIMAS (Manchester InforMation and Associated Services); EDINA (Edinburgh Data and Information Access); the Arts & Humanities Data Service; the distributed image delivery service; and, in partnership with the Economic and Social Science Research Council, the Essex Data Archive.

Support services - these include advisory services, for example in the use of complex data. Examples of the services provided by the JISC, some in partnership with other bodies, are:

Higher Education Digitisation Service
Technical Advisory Service on Images
DISinHE - which provides research and publication to develop and share expertise in diminishing obstacles experienced by students and staff with disabilities
UK Office of Library Networking
British Universities Film and Video Council

Use of electronic content is pervasive in some academic institutions and some disciplines; in others take-up is slower. Many of the JISC services provide training and awareness events and help desks, and the JISC promotes events designed to demonstrate the availability of content, its value, how it can be found, and how it might be used.

Other support services include work on copyright and intellectual property rights, and research and development. The JISC funds a significant amount of R&D, although the emphasis is on development rather than pure research. In addition to funding the eLib programme (now in its third phase) a large programme of projects to promote the development of the DNER, especially in relation to the support teaching and learning, has recently been announced. The JISC, in partnership with the US National Science Foundation, has also funded a number of projects.

System management - this includes areas such as authentication and security, payment mechanisms, and standards to ensure interoperability. Authentication and interoperability are areas of work of increasing importance to the realisation of our ambitions for the DNER, and for working collaboratively with other partners. The JISC has supported the development of the ATHENS authentication system, and work has begun on a new scheme which will take into account open and distance learning. An Interoperability Focus has been established, and work is being undertaken on standards (e.g. Z39.50) that enable users to move seamlessly from one database or service to another, and international involvement with emerging metadata standards such as Dublin Core.

5. Conclusion

There are a significant number of activities taking place under the auspices of the JISC to provide appropriate digital information resources for the academic community. Do we have a national consortium? My feeling is that strictly speaking it we do not. However, many of the outcomes are consortial, and benefit the whole higher and further education community, and we are able to benefit from economies of scale and speaking with a single voice.

Whatever the answer, there is no doubt that the pace of change of technical developments, and the pervasiveness of communications networking, now make it possible to deliver electronic content to end users in ever more useful and imaginative ways. The DNER is a sophisticated and holistic strategy for delivering electronic resources to the academic community. It is also a practical, pragmatic and iterative programme of activities, which builds on experience and extensive research and development. However, we are not complacent, and are well aware of the challenges which remain.

It will be interesting to see the extent to which various national and international initiatives will collaborate and inter-relate. Currently the signs for successful integration are hopeful. In the UK we are certainly not complacent, and are well aware of the challenges ahead. However, I have no doubt that all those involved will take up the challenges and look for solutions to carry us through the 21st century.

Acknowledgments

I would like to acknowledge all the people involved in the development of the Distributed National Electronic Resource and their intellectual contribution to the ideas and activities contained in this paper. I would also like to thank the JISC for permission to draw extensively upon various of their documents in its preparation. Internet addresses for many of these documents are given in the list below.

References

Joint Information Systems Committee. Five Year Strategy 1996-2001


<http://www.jisc.ac.uk/pub/strategy.html>

[96k]

Joint Information Systems Committee. Five Year Strategy 1996-2001, 1998-9 Review <http://www.jisc.ac.uk/pub99/strat_1999rev.html> [22k]

Collection management in academic libraries; edited by Clare Jenkins and Mary Morley. Aldershot: Gower, 1991.

Joint Information Systems Committee. Collections Policy. 1998 <http://www.jisc.ac.uk/cei/dner_colpol.html> [24k]

Joint Information Systems Committee. The Current Content Collection <http://www.jisc.ac.uk/collections/>

Lynch, Clifford A., "Keynote address: The role of digitisation in building electronic collections: economic and programmatic choices", In Selecting library and archive collections for digital reformatting, Proceedings from an RLG Symposium held November 5 -6, 1995. Research Libraries Group, 1996.

Joint Information Systems Committee. Adding value to the UK's learning, teaching and research resources: the Distributed National Electronic Resource (DNER). 1999 <http://www.jisc.ac.uk/pub/index.html> [17k]

Details of other JISC services and projects, for example the UK Interoperability Focus; BIDS (Bath Information and Data Service); MIMAS (Manchester InforMation and Associated Services); EDINA (Edinburgh Data and Information Access); the Resource Discovery Network; and TASI (Technical Advisory Service for Images) can be accessed via <http://www.jisc.ac.uk>

Mary Auckland is currently Director of Library and Learning Resources at The London Institute. The Institute brings together in a single federated structure five of the world's most prestigious Colleges for art and design and related activities. Mary was formerly Librarian at the School of Oriental and African Studies, and before that held posts at the University of Southampton Library, and the British Library of Political and Economic Science (London School of Economics).

She is a member of the JISC's Committee on Electronic Information, and until very recently chair of its Content Working Group. Mary is a Chartered Librarian, and was a member of the Council of the UK Library Association for nine years, during which time she chaired Council for three years. Mary has degrees in anthropology, and industrial relations and personnel management.

[AIB-WEB] [Congressi] [46. Congresso]

XLVI Congresso nazionale AIB Oltre confini e discontinuità Torino, 11-13 maggio 2000