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Going global: JISC in the international scene
Reg Carr,Director of University Library Services, University of Oxford. Chair of JISC Committee for Electronic Information
Synopsis
The presentation will
offer a synthesis of the emerging international agenda of the JISC in the
context of the developing globalisation of the information networks supporting
research and teaching at post-18 level. The talk will review the organisational
context and strategy of the JISC in the UK's provision of high quality networked
facilities for Higher and Further Education, set against the background
of the UK HE Funding Councils' increasingly global agendas. The particular
areas ofJISC's international activities and links will be described in summary
form, with an overview of formal programmes, alliances, and shared information
resources which contribute to the 'internationalisation' of JISC. The final
part of the presentation will attempt to map all the activities against
the agenda of a single UK HE institution, to illustrate the 'local' added
value of the JISC's wider role in the national and international arenas.
Emerging Standards for Complex Works
Howard Besser, Associate Professor, School of Information and Education, University of California, Los Angeles
Synopsis
In this talk, Howard Besser will discuss a variety of recent
standards and metadata activities around complex works (including bit-mapped
images, moving images, and multi-part documents). He will discuss structural
and administrative metadata standards as part of the Making of America II
Project. He will discuss developments in the US National Information Standards
Organization's efforts to establish a framework for still image technical
metadata standards. And he will mention rich media standardization activities
such as SMIL and MPEG 4 and 7.
Biography
Howard Besser is an Associate Professor at UCLAs School of Education & Information where he teaches courses and does research on multimedia, image databases, digital libraries, web design, information literacy, distance learning, intellectual property, and the social and cultural impact of new information technologies. Dr. Besser has been involved with the Dublin Core metadata standard since its inception. He was an organizer of both the Dublin Core meeting on digital images, and the National Information Standards Organization/DLF meeting to develop and promote digital image standards. He was also a member of the Metadata Committee of the joint US/European Community Digital Library Collaboratory. In recent years Besser has been actively promoting the extension of metadata activities beyond the "discovery" orientation of the Dublin Core. In addition to his work on structural and administrative metadata for the Making of America II testbed project, he is an active member of the Technical Architecture and Standards Committee for the California Digital Library. And he has been involved in a number of efforts around digital longevity. Dr. Besser consults widely on automation projects for libraries, museums, and archives. He has authored dozens of articles in a wide variety of information technology and cultural heritage journals. And he is a frequent speaker at professional conferences.
Microsoft Research - what, why, and where
Roger Needham, Microsoft Research
Synopsis
Why does Microsoft do
research? Why does it do it in Cambridge What does it do there? The talk
will consider and hopefully answer all these questions.
Opening Up the Refereed Research
Literature Through Open Archiving
Stevan Harnad, Professor of Cognitive Sciences, Southampton University
Synopsis
It is a foregone conclusion
that all refereed journals will soon be available online; most of them already
are. This means that one can access them from any networked desk-top. The
literature will all be interconnected by citation, author, and keyword/subject
links, allowing for unheard-of power and ease of access and navigability.
Successive drafts of pre-refereeing preprints will be linked to the official
refereed draft, as well as to any subsequent corrections, revisions, updates,
comments, responses, and underlying empirical databases, all enhancing the
self-correctiveness and interactiveness of scholarly and scientific research
and communication in remarkable new ways See MSF/JISC-supported reference
linkign service at <opcit.eprints.org>. But there is still one last
frontier to cross before science reaches the optimal and the inevitable:
Just as there is no longer any need to be constrained by the access-blocking
restrictions of paper distribution, there is no longer any need to be constrained
by the access-blocking financial fire-walls of Subscription/Site-License/Pay-Per-View
(S/L/P) tolls for this give-away literature that its authors have always
donated for free (and its referees have refereed for free), with the sole
goal of maximizing their impact on research (by accessing the eyes and minds
of fellow-research) and hence on society. Authors can now self-archive their
refereed papers publicly in Open Archives <http://www.openarchives.org/>
for free. JISC-supported software for the creation of generic Open Archives
will shortly be released at <http://www.eprints.org>.This
will usher in the optimal and the inevitable: Journal publication will down-size
to just implementing the service of Quality-Control and Certification (QC/C,
through peer review and editing), which will be paid for up-front at the
author-institution end out of only a small portion (about $300 per paper)
of the annual savings from the cancellation of all S/L/P tolls at the reader-institution
end. Journal publishers are best advised to prepare for and accommodate
the optimal/inevitable solution for science in the
new era of "Scholarly Skywriting," rather than to try to delay or block
it via restrictive submissions and copyright policies that merely amplify
the conflict of interest inherent in the revolutionary possibilities for
scholarly and scientific communication opened up by the PostGutenberg Galaxy
Biography
STEVAN HARNAD was born in Hungary, did his undergraduate work at McGill
University and his dostorate at Princeton University and is currently Professor
of Cognitive Science at Southampton University. His research is on categorisation,
communication and cognition. Founder and Editor of Behavioral and Brain
Sciences (a paper journal published by Cambridge University Press), Psycoloquy
(an electronic journal sponsored by the American Psychological Association)
and the CogPrints Electronic Preprint Archive in the Cognitive Sciences
(modeled in the Los Alamos Physics Eprint Archive and supported by JISC/eLib),
he is Past President of the Society for Philosopy and Psychology, Comite
Scientifique UPR 9012, Marseille 95-99, and author and contributor to over
100 publications, including Origins and Evolution of Language and Speech
(NY Acad Sci 1976), Lateralization in the Nervous System (Acad Pr 1977),
Peer Commentary on Peer Review: A Case Study in Scientific Quality Control
(CUP 1982), Categorical Perception: The Groundwork of Cognition (CUP 1987),
The Selection of Behavior: The Operant Behaviorism of BF Skinner: Comments
and Consequences (CUP 1988) and Icon, Category, Symbol: Essays on the Foundations
and Fringes of Cognition (in prep).