Joint Information Systems Committee Supporting Higher and Further Education Catherine Grout Assistant Director for Development, JISC/DNER OAI and potential “the whole, the complicate, the amassing harmony” ____________ “the dark encroachment of that old catastrophe/Why should she give her bounty to the dead?”

Joint Information Systems Committee Supporting Higher and Further Education JISC/DNER and OAI? BROADER CONTEXT of OAI – More efficient way of achieving interoperability – Signifying and bringing about cultural change – JISC wishes to contribute to this broader agenda FOR THE JISC/DNER – Technical approach to cementing DNER architecture and building the JISC’s Information Environment – Way of leveraging the community resource

Joint Information Systems Committee Supporting Higher and Further Education JISC/DNER and OAI? TODAY – Developing the agenda for e-print archives (and other materials) – Looking at ways institutional archives, services and funders can move forward together

Joint Information Systems Committee Supporting Higher and Further Education OAI and the JISC/DNER Technical Development Agenda

Joint Information Systems Committee Supporting Higher and Further Education What is the Information Environment? Key aspect of JISC 5 Year Strategy “to build an on-line information environment providing secure and convenient access to a comprehensive collection of scholarly and educational material". How does it relate to the DNER? “ We can characterise an Information Environment as the set of network services that support publishing and use of information resources” – DNER refers to distributed learning and research resources – The Information Environment is needed to enable students and staff to access and use those resources in ways meaningful to them

Joint Information Systems Committee Supporting Higher and Further Education What are the high level strategic aims for the Information Environment? Fit to serve all kinds of digital content Fully supporting the submission and sharing of research and learning objects. Providing a range of meaningful, rich and innovative methods of accessing electronic materials. A collaborative landscape of networked service providers who work together to seamlessly cater for the needs of the community on a national basis.

Joint Information Systems Committee Supporting Higher and Further Education What architectural elements does it contain? Provision = the storage and delivery of Content Fusion = the bringing together of Content from multiple providers either by machine to machine Brokers and Aggregators or Portals which are visible to end users Presentation = interaction with the end users in a direct and visible manner to give them access to Content Infrastructure = Shared Middleware Services which support other activities

Joint Information Systems Committee Supporting Higher and Further Education Web Content (local and remote) End-user End-user needs to join services together manually - as well as learning multiple user interfaces Current service architecture Authentication Authorisation

Joint Information Systems Committee Supporting Higher and Further Education Web Searching in the Future Content End-user Portal Broker or Aggregator Authentication Authorisation Collect’n Desc. User Profiles End-user is “automatically” presented with relevant resources through relevant channels Thesauri Service Desc.

Joint Information Systems Committee Supporting Higher and Further Education How will people be effected? For Students and Staff; – They will have access routes into information in ways that make sense to them, e.g by subject, learning objective – They will not have to search multiple websites, or just rely on Google or Altavista for a wide internet search – They will be able to proceed more seamlessly from discovering information to achieving a learning aim – They will be routed to the most appropriate copy of a given resource – They will be able to contribute to the DNER

Joint Information Systems Committee Supporting Higher and Further Education How will people be effected? For Services and Content Providers – They will be able to make use of shared services – They will know more about users and their preferences – They will have more easily obtainable information about analogous content – They will be found by more users and their content will be more actively used

Joint Information Systems Committee Supporting Higher and Further Education Web Sharing Content End-user Portal Open Archives Initiative Aggregator HTTP Authentication Authorisation Collect’n Desc. User Profiles Thesauri Service Desc.

Joint Information Systems Committee Supporting Higher and Further Education OAI key approach for developing interoperability Z39.50 is also an approach that we continue to support – Is already implemented in some places to achieve interoperability of JISC/DNER content services – Useful for approaches to develop in parallel OAI is “simple” approach to sharing metadata records does not rely on sending and receiving queries to distributed content hosts at time of searching – Looks as if it “may” have some efficiency advantages over Zed – Will need support and development to flourish

Joint Information Systems Committee Supporting Higher and Further Education OAI key approach for developing interoperability Portals are a key area of investment over the next period They will use harvested metadata to created tailored services by subject, resource type, learning aim By portals we mean cross searching based on deep metadata (concept of deep and shallow portals)

Joint Information Systems Committee Supporting Higher and Further Education How will the technical development process take place?

Joint Information Systems Committee Supporting Higher and Further Education Leveraging the community resource

Joint Information Systems Committee Supporting Higher and Further Education Primary Content Secondary Content Funded Institutional External Web pages Museums home pages theses research papers OPACs Institutional gateways Google Yahoo Northern Light RDN A&I images Full-text statistics Map data COPAC Amazon Public libraries courseware JISC/DNER scope by content

Joint Information Systems Committee Supporting Higher and Further Education Content submission mechanisms Approaches to submission and sharing of content – Community resources will be more relevant resources – The community is rich in libraries, archives and museums – Providing mechanisms for community content to be brought together in specific ways Adding actual content to an existing resource Making visible to machines for searching, metadata about a relevant resource (OAI) Exchanging content to make multiple learning objects – Enabling technologies need to be implemented but a lot of human and organisational barriers to overcome

Joint Information Systems Committee Supporting Higher and Further Education JISC and OAI, the future? Achieve a metadata sharing infastructure Cement DNER architecture – Facilitate (fund) service providers to implement OAI – Benchmarking exercise, service provider architecture RDN (Resource Discovery Network) - internal sharing using OAI MIMAS - exposing collection descriptions – More investment needed to implement this approach more widely

Joint Information Systems Committee Supporting Higher and Further Education JISC and OAI, the future? Today is mainly about: leveraging the community resource (?) Support for the institutional agenda for using OAI for e-print archives and the disclosure of other assets Some current support for e-print work, e.g. – Open Sourcing e-prints.org software – Providing support for open source software more broadly – Open Citation Project (JISC/NSF/DLI) What else should we (collectively) be doing?

Joint Information Systems Committee Supporting Higher and Further Education Roles What can institutions do? – What support do they need What can service providers do? – (particularly given parallel investments in portalisation) What can centralised funding practically support? – How do we help seed and develop a sustainable model for this activity – How might we scale this up to include other types of community archives

Joint Information Systems Committee Supporting Higher and Further Education Outcomes (?) Practical outcomes – tools? – Guidelines? – best practice case studies? – pilot projects? – “Open Archiving will not get off the ground until the day I can go to a website, download open-archiving software, then say make archive and an interoperable, OAI-compliant archive is up and running and ready to be filled” (2nd OAI archive meeting participant)