1. © National Rural National Rural Knowledge Exchange CETIS Metadata and Digital Repositories SIG 6th May 2008 Roger Greenhalgh Information Manager (Information Architect ?! )

2. © National Rural 1976 - joining things up

3. © National Rural What are Knowledge Exchanges.? Centres of Excellence in work between Universities, Business and the Community, funded by HEFCE since 2004 (but often based on earlier ‘3 rd Mission/’Reach-out’/’Extension’ activities) There are 22 of them nationally, and they are normally Regional Consortia. Normally the ‘One stop shop’ or Gateway for Regional Universities to promote their consultancy activities, access to facilities, Graduate Employment Schemes, short course and conference programmes. Maximum funding is £500k per year, which translates to 7 or 8 staff per Exchange…

4. © National Rural The National Rural Knowledge Exchange A 14 University Consortium: Newcastle Central Lancashire Hull Keele Birmingham Harper Adams Warwick Worcester Royal Agricultural College West of England Gloucester Writtle Reading Bournemouth Initially planned to ‘broker’ (personally & via email) the following Knowledge Transfer services of the 14 Partners: - Joint projects - Consultancy - Bespoke training courses - Lab and field trial facilities - Visiting speakers - Graduates on short or long-term placements schemes, including Knowledge Transfer Partnerships (aka Teaching Company Schemes)

5. © National Rural Practitioners Universities & their Rural Departments Research Institutes PLCs Are Research Priorities right? Consultants Individual clients Clubs and Hubs Land-based Colleges Academic Journals Trade Press Product sales licensing A Rural Knowledge Supply Chain.. ?? ? Academic conferences Open Days Shows Talks, meetings Technical conferences Skills & business training Graduates LANTRA Bus Link RDAs FBAS, RDS Etc etc Talking to friends

6. © National Rural The NRKE project aims to help by… Establishing a National Rural Portal, specifically aimed at: –Including all parts of the supply chain as members… –Universities, Colleges, Research Institutes, Practitioner Clubs, Sectoral Organisations… –Allowing members to upload their current contact details, services and ‘events’ through on-line forms i.e. to be in control of their own information on the database-driven portal. –Having the portal map driven so that locating events and organisations by area is straightforward: a National Rural ‘What’s On’, and Who’s Who?’ –Providing search facilities by technical subject area (around 130 subjects). And by establishing a 'honeypot'… –Providing access to University and College work brokerage through the Portal.

7. © National Rural Portal focus Current distribution of rural organisations in our ‘National Rural Directory ’ National coverage + local and regional relevance and usability

8. © National Rural NationalRural Portal (2004-2005) Aimed be good at: Signposting and mapping Finding events Finding news Did not intended to : Publish technical articles Publish review articles Hold research findings…

9. © National Rural NationalRural Portal (2006 - to date)

10. © National Rural Listing and Searching

11. © National Rural

12. Nationally and regionally…

13. © National Rural Organisation profiles

14. © National Rural Relationships between organisations

15. © National Rural Discoverability Content is very findable by our audience… Usually more so than its source !!!

16. © National Rural Syndication

17. © National Rural The challenge is not the technology RSS is a bit like sex… you only really understand it when you've tried it out !

18. © National Rural JISC e-infrastructure

19. © National Rural www.nationalrural.org websitewww.nationalrural.org RSS / ATOM /XCRI / XML data feeds : inbound and outbound  bulk email updates Workflow Business logic layer Presentation layer Data access layer Data storage layer AD provider SQL provider Active Directory name service SQL2005 database Google map tiles Access management Serialisation: self-instantiation & self-actualisation of business objectsProcess scheduling Content management & moderationLocation geocoding NationalRural web application Land-based Library web application www.landbasedlibrary.org websitewww.landbasedlibrary.org Accessions management & moderation Full text indexing MS Windows file storage Video- streams Web-services & APIs Object inter-relationships Micro-sites Sub-sites Access & ownership N-tiered infrastructure

20. © National Rural

21. XML instantiation / serialisation The ultimate in normalisation… …by making stuff handle-able consistently

22. © National Rural Aggregation

23. © National Rural The challenge Vision Boundaries Skills Perception