Joint Information Systems Committee Supporting Higher and Further Education Catherine Grout Assistant Director for Development, JISC/DNER Collection Description “a step on the road to cultural change through technology?” ____________

Joint Information Systems Committee Supporting Higher and Further Education Why should we invest in Collection Description? 1. Importance to technical interoperability within an Information Environment: building a common environment in the UK and looking beyond – Building block for interoperability in a diverse environment – JISC wishes to build this with a range of others 2. Importance to people and institutions – Signifying and bringing about cultural change – Way of leveraging the community resource 3. Other relevant work ongoing

Joint Information Systems Committee Supporting Higher and Further Education Collection Description is important to the development of the JISC/DNER JISC is building an Information Environment in the UK fit to serve the needs of FE and HE Wouldn’t it be great if we all described things in the same way… then everyone would know where and what they were? This is not a new problem

Joint Information Systems Committee Supporting Higher and Further Education What are the key characteristics of an evolved 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 online service providers working together to provide seamless access for users Underpinned by a common standards framework (both technical and semantic)

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 environment 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 Collection Description 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 Collection Description help? We are aiming to build a source of high quality collection descriptions accessible for searching by machines and people (Shared Services Programme) Consistent description will mean that all on-line services, portal providers, content providers, and also end users will have consistent metadata about available collections This is an important step on the way to making seamless searching by a user actually work

Joint Information Systems Committee Supporting Higher and Further Education The human factors.. Electronic environments enshrine the idea of sharing and enhanced access The availability of more CLD’s will mean that user awareness of available collections will be significantly increased In the future increased interoperability will mean that users will be able to access these from all kinds of formal and informal learning contexts

Joint Information Systems Committee Supporting Higher and Further Education More human factors.. Collection descriptions will come from a variety of contexts and will so contribute to a very rich and significant resource for learning and research Communities and institutions have rich assets; we need to make the hidden visible This idea of adding and making “community” assets more visible is dear to the heart of many significant national initiatives, JISC/DNER, Culture Online, UFI and UK online centres Focus is vital to support human factors as well as technology

Joint Information Systems Committee Supporting Higher and Further Education Ongoing relevant work Short study is just underway lead by MIMAS to scope a collection description service for FE and HE and potentially others – Starting with RSLP and Archive Hub descriptions – Examining idea of extending it to all kind of electronic collections Does collection description need to be coupled with service description?

Joint Information Systems Committee Supporting Higher and Further Education Ongoing relevant work The JISC has a commitment to providing collection descriptions as part of a service environment in the future Would welcome wider partnerships to achieve this and to build the range of collections available within it Interest within e-Europe in building a pan-European directory of relevant digitisation projects… highly relevant in this context

Joint Information Systems Committee Supporting Higher and Further Education Why it’s worth it.. There are a lot of complicated issues in making this work effectively: definition of scope of activity, implementation and use of schema, intellectual challenges It’s worth it because: – It’s about more than technology and improving searching – It can clearly be a cross-sectoral, cross-boundary activity It’s about cultural change and harnessing the best aspects of what the electronic environment has to offer