The Joint Information Systems Committee

The Joint Information Systems Committee & The Coalition for Networked Information

Bringing Coherence to Networked Information for the New Century

A THREE-DAY MEETING co-ordinated by UKOLN

Wednesday 14^th – Friday 16^th June 2000 Moat House Hotel, Stratford upon Avon, U.K.

Synopses

Highways and Byways in the ICT Age
Professor Maxwell Irvine, Vice-Chancellor. University of Birmingham and Chairman of JISC.

An introduction to the JISC plans for the next generation of broadband width academic super highways.

NSF Support for International Collaborations in Digital Libraries and Information Technology

This talk will review current topics in digital library research, with emphasis on the opportunities and needs for international projects. We need collaborations across national boundaries to demonstrate that such projects benefit both participants, and to prove the advantages of collaboration over pointless competition in such areas as standards, archiving, and to exploit complementary skills across nations. International research can also help with problems such as copyright, economics, and education where different national systems are involved. NSF and JISC already fund a set of joint projects, and NSF is negotiating with other countries and the EU to extend international cooperation in digital libraries. We are still seeking the right kind of incentives and structures to best encourage top researchers to engage in international collaborations.

From the virtual map library to Geospatial Digital Libraries – EDINA Digimap and beyond

EDINA is a JISC-funded national datacentre that offers the UK tertiary education and research community networked access to a library of data, information and research resources.
Digimap is a new Web based service offered by EDINA providing online access to Ordnance Survey (GB) digital map datasets. As well as exploring the history and background of the Digimap service, this talk will look at how we see Digimap developing and its relationship to other geo-related projects being undertaken by EDINA and others within the Distributed National Electronic

Resource (DNER). The talk will end by comparing these developments to the aspirations of the Alexandria Digital Library Project and its successor, the Alexandria Digital Earth Prototype (ADEPT).

NSF/JISC Project Report. London Redivivus: Automatic Integration of a City-Scale Digital Library

The Perseus Digital Library has been an electronic version of the Bolles Archive on the History and Topography of London and its Environs, a collection of books, maps and illustrations in the Tufts University Library. This paper will describe the ways in which we have structured the various categories of information to complement each other. In particular, our goal has been to extract key information from the constituent parts to create an automatically integrated environment with rich links between geospatial, textual and visual information. The collection currently includes 10,000 images, a dozen georeferenced maps, and 5 million words of documentary information and we expect these holdings to increase substantially over the coming months. Descriptions of London ranging from Stowe's Survey to Booth's four volume description of poverty in London have been digitized and are being prepared for publication. The one volume abstract of the Dictionary of National Biography has been entered to provide an authority list for personal names. Various sources are providing geographic data. The presentation will focus on the problems of structure and organization.

Architectural Directions for Distributed Geolibraries
Greg Janee, US Alexandria Project UC Santa Barbara

How can distributed, heterogeneous, georeferenced information be discovered? Accessed? Managed? This talk will examine the Alexandria Digital Library's old and new solutions to such problems.

The paper considers three areas of development in intellectual property law in the UK and EU potentially relevant to JISC. The first is the EU draft Directive on copyright and related rights, which is currently held up at its final stages; the second is the development of the eCLA digitisation licence scheme; and the third is the development of domain name issues.

Advanced technologies are having a profound effect on our economic and cultural systems. The rise of middleware will bring new and unforeseen consequences. This talk will focus on some technology design principles that have emerged over the last fifteen years and their considerable societal impacts. It will offer some observations on how future decisions in advanced technologies and middleware may affect our basic values. The talk will rely heavily on clichés.

SMETE. Towards a Federated Digital Library for Science, Mathematics Engineering and Technology Education Digital Library. www.smete.org

Our vision for the SMETE Digital Library at www.smete.org is a learning space with horizontal and vertical integration of disciplinary collections, services and targeted research. www.smete.org has entered into an alliance with twenty partner organizations, encompassing disciplinary collections, educational institutions, industry and non-profit organizations. The intent of this alliance is to establish a national digital library for SMET education that is much more than a static information repository; the alliance intends to create a dynamic learning community that promotes and supports SMET education in the 21st century. Www.smete.org will be a place where members of the community of learners interact with one another to develop, locate, use and discuss digital resources that enhance teaching and learning. The SMETE community will be provided with seamless access to partner collections and shared services to support both novices and experts in technology-enhanced learning in their classrooms, in their coursework, across disciplines and with each other.

In this session we will report on a new National Science Foundation (NSF) Initiative, the National Science, Mathematics, Engineering, and Technology Education Digital Library (NSDL) Program. A short description of the vision and goals of the program will be presented, along with a synopsis of related projects in the area on which the NSDL Program is built. We will also provide an update on the portfolio of proposals currently under consideration for support in the initial funding cycle. Finally, we will share observations and outcomes from a pilot project that is developing functional aspects of a digital library for SMET education.

EASY - electronic Inter Library Loan Pilot for UKHE.
Lyn Norris Technical Director, ingenta plc

In January 2000, ingenta and Lancaster University were awarded the contract to deliver the electronic inter library loan pilot for UKHE under the auspices of the JISC and the Publishers' Association. The project will bring together the electronic journal articles held in the ingentaJournals service with the Inter Library Loan product ILLOS developed by the University of Lancaster. This combined service will provide a pilot service for UKHE to deliver electronic
articles through the ILL channels. A key element of the project will be the licence under which these articles will be delivered. Publisher acceptance of this licence will be crucial to the
success of the project.

SPARC and its UK-based partners, Royal Society of Chemistry, Institute of Physics, and Geometry & Topology, will discuss the ways SPARC has changed the journals landscape with its emphasis on competition in the scientific communication marketplace.

My talk will focus on the SPARC-endorsed RSC journals, PhysChemComm and Geochemical Transactions. I will talk about the content of the journals, their innovative elements and how SPARC support has helped and is helping the journals become established with researchers.

The presentation will describe the motivation for launching New Journal of Physics (www.njp.org), an on-line general physics journal available free of charge to readers and funded by an article charge on authors. The presentation will also summarise the current situation and describe the response from authors, readers and librarians. It is hoped that there will be time for discussion of key questions, for example:
· Authorship - what are authors paying for?
· Will this model appeal to other disciplines?
· Will research bodies allocate specific funds for publication in NJP-type journals?
· Archive and long-term preservation. Who will do this and how? Is the article charge enough to cover this? If not, who will pay?
· How can libraries support NJP and encourage authors to publish there?

"Geometry and Topology" is a primarily electronic journal with a.paper edition published at 10c (US) per page plus handling on an annual basis.

I shall describe the circumstances which lead us to start the journal and I shall give a brief description of its organisation.

Professor John Slater, PVC Learning and Teaching, University of Kent, Canterbury

To meet government aims of improved retention, higher quality and widening access, it is increasingly recognised that educational establishments need to improve the information available not only to learners about their progress but also to academic, administrative and support people. To do this one needs to bring together administrative, social, academic, and support data.
This leads to the concept of an Integrated Environment for Learners. Systems need for instance to prompt learners.about deadlines, remind them of their timetable, allow access to data and resources on demand, and identify problems ahead. At the moment there is little available but pilots are underway.

IMS Project: Eliminating Digital Divisions
Ed Walker, Chief Executive Officer, IMS

The IMS Global Learning Consortium is rapidly developing implementable specifications for distributed learning resources and promoting their world wide use in products and services. This talk will discuss the IMS role in standards evolution, report on released specifications, and describe on-going work.

Archives and Access in the Electronic Era: Are We Coming to a Fork in the
Road?
Kevin Guthrie, President JSTOR

In the print medium, providing access to information required that one also own or possess that information and store it locally. In order to continue to provide access to a book, manuscript or journal, one had to take responsibility for preserving and protecting it. With the advent of electronic technologies and developing network infrastructure, it is theoretically possible for the responsibility for preservation to be distinct from the responsibility for providing access. What are the implications of such a separation for various constituents involved in the scholarly communications process? Is it possible to imagine a sustainable scenario in which the entities

responsible for storing information are separate and distinct from those delivering access to it?

These and related questions will be explored from the perspective of JSTOR, a not-for-profit organization with a mission to provide access to an enduring archive.

Lynne Brindley, Pro-Vice-Chancellor, Leeds University and Chief Executive Designate of the British Library

The talk aims to share some early thoughts and messages about directions at the British Library; it will describe some important initiatives for engagement; and set these in the context of the overall theme of the conference – digital coherence, collaboration and international developments. Themes will include e-strategy, the contribution of curators, widening public access to the British Library’s collections, and collaboration and partnership, particularly with the higher education community.

Enhancing Access to the Internet for Learning, Teaching and Research: The Resource Discovery Network
Justine Kitchen, Information and Training Manager, Resource Discovery Network

Provide a vision of the RDN's future as a national network of subject portals, providing rich entry points to the JISC's emerging managed learning environment: the DNER (Distributed National Electronic Resource)

Emma Place, Research Officer, Institute for Learning and Research Technology, University of Bristol

The RDN Virtual Training Suite aims to enhance the value of the RDN for the learning and teaching communities. It comprises a series of subject-based tutorials delivered over the World Wide Web. The tutorials offer "any time, any place" training by supporting independent, self-paced learning over the Web. There are quizzes and exercises to lighten the learning experience. Many people know how to make good use of a traditional library but have not yet got to grips
with how to make good use of a virtual library. The RDN Virtual Training Suite covers the key information skills for the new Internet environment. The tutorials enable lecturers and students to:

- TOUR key Internet resources for their subject
- DISCOVER tools and techniques for Internet searching
- REVIEW the critical thinking required when using information found on the Internet
- REFLECT on practical ways to use the Internet to support learning and teaching
The RDN Virtual Training suite can be used as a "teach yourself" resource or as a tool for lecturers and trainers wanting to teach their students Internet information skills.

Jeremy Atkinson Head of Learning Resources Centre, University of Glamorgan.Chair of JISC Moving Pictures & Sound Working Group

The session will survey the contents, rights and delivery issues highlighted in the JISC-funded Imagination/Universities Network Pilot project on networking moving images and examine how these are being taken forward in the work of the JISC Moving Images & Sound Working Group,

including the setting up of two national services - the Managing Agent and Advisory Service for Moving Pictures and Sound. The work of the sister committee, the JISC Multimedia Rights Working Group, will also be outlined.

The electronic book is a huge business opportunity for the bookselling industry and related technology companies, but it presents special requirements for rights management. We need

standards that allow interoperability with reasonable security, and we need them to reflect both current and future practices in book publishing, selling, and lending.

Assessment of Cost, Quality, and Value in University IT Services
Christopher Peebles, Associate Vice President and Dean for Information Technology,
Professor of Anthropology, Indiana University

Information Technology (IT) has become an essential element in all aspects of higher education. No longer is research computing (High Performance Computing) the flagship service, although it remains a significant part of the IT portfolio. Instead there is e-commerce and student recruitment through the WWW; there is pervasive student computing, electronic delivery of courses, and Internet connectivity for the entire university community; there is massive data storage, digital libraries, and copyright issues. There are the various support services that make IT useable in the business, and scholarship of the university. Given the large and increasing share of the higher education budget consumed by IT, several questions are worth asking: What IT services are actually produced? How much do these IT services cost? Are the costs for these services reasonable? Are they competitive with the private sector? Do customers for these services (faculty, students, staff, and those outside the university) perceive them to be of high quality? What value do these IT services add to the mission and operation of the university? Methods and measures exist that can answer these questions. Indiana University has pursued a program of cost, quality, and value management and improvement of IT services for a bit more than a decade. An overview of this assessment effort and its benefits will be presented in the context of what has come to be called The Balanced Scorecard.

Preserving the intellectual and cultural heritage being generated in electronic formats is one of the greatest challenges facing libraries over the next decade. The challenges are not only technological but organisational requiring collaboration between many different stakeholders and institutions.
Within the UK and internationally, the Joint Information Systems Committee has been one of the leading agencies in this field. In June 2000, following the recommendations of the Warwick II

workshop, it established the post of JISC Digital Preservation Focus with the aims of:
* developing a long-term retention strategy for digital materials of relevance to Higher and Further Education institutions in the UK

* providing a UK focus for the development of practices, policies and strategies for the preservation of digital materials

* generating support, collaborative working, and inter-working with appropriate agencies worldwide
This paper addresses the work of this new post and the challenges and opportunities ahead.

This paper will introduce the motivation for the DNER initiative, will describe some current activities which will implement it, and will outline some of the technical and service issues involved in further development. It will discuss how the DNER will support evolving needs within higher and further education over coming years.