"A centre of excellence in digital information management, providing advice and services to the library, information and cultural heritage communities."

UKOLN is based at the University of Bath.

Job Title

Director

Contact Details

UKOLN,
University of Bath,
Bath,
BA2 7AY
tel: +44 (0) 1225 386580
fax: +44 (0) 1225 386838
email: e.j.lyon@ukoln.ac.uk

The Job I Do

As Director, I am responsible for the leadership, strategic direction and overall management of the organisation as described in the UKOLN Strategy. In all our activities, we work closely with our core funders, JISC, MLA and the University of Bath.

More specifically, I am involved with the development and implementation of an open and interoperable information environment in both scholarly and cultural heritage domains. This has included identifying strategies to promote open science and associated models for distributed digital libraries, and it is in this context that open data repository developments are being investigated and partnerships developed with the e-Science / e-Research community.

UKOLN is a partner in the UK Digital Curation Centre (DCC) and I am leading the organisation's contribution to this major initiative through the role of DCC Associate Director (Community Development). I was also Project Director for the JISC-funded eBank project which explored links between research data, scholarly communications and learning. UKOLN is now a partner in the follow-on Project: the eCrystals Federation.

In 2007, I completed a piece of consultancy for JISC, to investigate the relationships between data centres and institutions which may develop data repositories. The resulting direction-setting Report "Dealing with Data", is being used to advance the digital repository development agenda within the JISC Capital programme (2006-2009), to assist in the co-ordination of research data repositories and to inform an emerging Vision and Roadmap.

For four years, I represented UKOLN in the European Union funded Delos Network of Excellence and led the Knowledge Extraction and Semantic Interoperability cluster. UKOLN is a now a partner in the DRIVER Project, which is promoting a pan-European Federation of Repositories.

UKOLN also works closely with a number of other key organisations, and I serve on a range of international Committees and Boards. I am currently Programme Chair for Open Repositories 2008 Conference to be held in Southampton in April 2008. From May 2008, I will be a member of the US National Science Foundation Advisory Commmittee for CyberInfrastructure.

In May 2008, I co-authored the The Scaling Up Report, which presents the results of a JISC-funded scoping study to assess the feasibility of a federated model for data repositories in the domain of crystallography.

More information is given in the list of selected publications and presentations.