Joint Information Systems Committee Supporting Higher and Further Education Rachel Bruce Programme Manager, JISC Executive Collection Description Moving towards a collection description service for the UK ____________

Joint Information Systems Committee Supporting Higher and Further Education Outline: Context What a service might look like Plans Challenges

Joint Information Systems Committee Supporting Higher and Further Education Context: the JISC communities digital environment Lots of diverse content: abstracts, full text, bibliographic dbs, images, moving images, learning materials, maps, sound, catalogues,websites… Delivered via different services: national data centres hosting & delivering content by subject, domain,type,COPAC, Zetoc,RDN, RSLP projects, NOF projects, publishers,local information, other data providers… Mostly based on key standards but ultimately content delivery is via different interfaces. For the user this means: navigating between various services, having to get to know diverse user interfaces- probably missing out on a lot of relevant information, frustration ( User = person or machine).

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

Joint Information Systems Committee Supporting Higher and Further Education Context… Information Environment sets out to solve the discovery & access issues that the current situation leaves us with. Key characteristics that underpin the Information Environment plan

Joint Information Systems Committee Supporting Higher and Further Education Web Information Environment architecture…where we are going 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 Shared Services Middleware: key to the effective delivery of information & Interoperability [allow machines & people to make sense of the environment] Collection description service: what is it for? Provide information about collections available in a consistent way Enable aggregators to automatically determine what collections are available to end-users Make relevant collections from across diverse services more visible to the user Seamless access

Joint Information Systems Committee Supporting Higher and Further Education What is it for? ‘Audiences’ for Collection Descriptions People – Collection Managers – Collection Owners e.g. publishers – Those who use collection: Subscribers (individuals or organisational reps) Teachers looking for appropriate materials Researchers looking for appropriate information – Those who don’t use collections but might like to Machines – Fusion Services (e.g. managed learning environments, portals) – Commercial portal service providers (e.g. ingenta, TDNet, etc.) – Publishers and aggregators offering value-added services (e.g. Sirus) – Online catalogues

Joint Information Systems Committee Supporting Higher and Further Education What the Collection description Service might contain: Collection descriptions about the content of collections RSLP projects Licensed collections Archives Hub NOF projects etc. Probably based on RSLP collection schema high level No substitute for domain specific metadata Just gets you (person /machine) where you want to get at a broad level..\..\UKOLN\SERVICE DESC\jiscmult.mdb

Joint Information Systems Committee Supporting Higher and Further Education Some challenges MIMAS scoping work Matthew Dovey/UKOLN : service description scoping: machine readable technical information so portals/aggregators know how to interact with services PILOT Collection/Service Description Service or Registry Issues: – granularity of collection description – schema implementation – architecture – should there be harvested indexes, what protocols – maintenance –ownership – tools – relationship between service & collection description

Joint Information Systems Committee Supporting Higher and Further Education Challenges Pilot : resolve the issues by DOING – we could theorise forever. There will be other challenges – being convinced of the need & continuing momentum Collection Description focus work is key to helping us towards the provision of the service