Academics are choosing the library as their first choice for getting hold of scholarly material because access is quick, it helps them make new connections to related information and the library may be the only place they can access that material.
Academics are then using their reading to inspire new thinking and improve their research results.
This picture of the library at the heart of university life has emerged as part of a new JISC Collections report which canvassed over 1000 academic and associate staff at six UK universities in 2011.
Lorraine Estelle is chief executive of JISC Collections which is responsible for negotiating journal and database deals for the higher and further education communities as a whole. She said: "This report provides further evidence about the value and impact of the resources and discovery systems which UK academic libraries make available. This makes it even more important for JISC Collections to continue to work with publishers and libraries to secure affordable and sustainable journal deals for the future."
Although the survey focuses on academics, reading articles also helps them teach, so staff and students alike are benefiting from access to these resources.
Dr Hazel Woodward, chair of the electronic information resources working group and librarian at Cranfield University said: "At this time of economic constraint, it is important for policy makers and Library directors to provide additional evidence of the value of library-provided resources. Whilst in the past these resources have been regarded as implicitly valuable, this research goes some way to making that value more explicit by focusing on specific benefits and outcomes for academics."
The research is part of a wider international Lib-Value project being coordinated by the Center for Information and Communication Studies at the University of Tennessee.
via Jisc news
Are you looking to secure JISC funding this year? As competition grows for funds, our advice on successful bidding can help you make a strong application.
Sarah Porter, JISC director of innovation, said: “We want to attract bids from a wide range of universities and colleges, those that know JISC well and others that might be bidding for the first time or need additional help with their application. We know bidding for funds is a time-consuming process and we are therefore aiming to give organisations the best possible chance of being successful in their applications.”
More useful resources:
Read a briefing paper about applying successfully for funding (PDF)
Find out what we’re looking for from responses to tender invitations
JISC advice for successful bidding includes:
Dominic Tate, repository and digital assets manager at Royal Holloway, university of London, who has compiled advice on successful JISC funding bids, said: “I would recommend an email or telephone call to the contact at JISC to sound them out about whether your idea for a bid is in scope for the call for funding. I would also recommend that you ask someone else outside your immediate team/colleagues to review a draft of your bid and give you feedback on the clarity of what you are proposing to do and deliver.”
Joss Winn, senior lecturer at the University of Lincoln who has managed a number of JISC projects, said: “When I write a bid, it is a somewhat open, collaborative process that proposes to formalise and build on work that we’re already doing and what we already know. I know that this is not uncommon and is not a guaranteed ‘secret to success’, but it is worth underlining.”
He adds: “Bid writing can be a useful reflective exercise - rather than simply 'bidding for money', it's part of the overall narrative of the project itself that starts with the bid and ends with the project outputs and papers.”
via Jisc news
He also leaves Jisc with an OBE, awarded in 2009 for his services to further and higher education.
Malcolm said: “In my time at Jisc I have steered the organisation from its earliest foundations focussed on networking and the library sector to a world-class organisation supporting education and research. I am immensely proud of Jisc’s achievements, largely due to the enthusiasm and hard work of its staff and funded services. I look forward to following its future successes with interest. My retirement begins with a trip to Antarctica. Such plans, combined with my confidence in Martyn Harrow and colleagues, means I am looking forward to moving into the next stage of my life.”
Read more recognition for Malcolm on his retirement:
JISC EMBEDDED OBJECT
Watch Malcolm’s personal milestones from his time at JISC: http://youtu.be/cI6WF4eDhU8
Martyn joins Jisc from Cardiff University, where he was chief information officer, and has previous experience in global business (Unilever and ICI), local government and running his own IT leadership consultancy and coaching practice.
Read more about Martyn’s appointment
via Jisc news
A new website designed to help students make the transition between school, university and employment is launched today, by Queen Mary, University of London's Thinking Writing team.
The 'Writing in Schools, Higher Education and Employment Settings' (WISHEES) project is funded by JISC, and aims to help raise aspiration and attainment in schools and universities.
Working in collaboration with local schools and employers, Teresa McConlogue and Debra Hills of the Thinking Writing team have developed an online collection of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) writing texts and podcasts. The site features examples of real student texts, with tutor commentaries on those texts and interactive tutorials to help students think about quality in STEM writing.
The team hope school teachers and academics will find the website useful when designing STEM writing tasks that better prepare students for the demands of university and employment.
Sally Mitchell, Thinking Writing Co-ordinator at Queen Mary, commented: "This resource provides fascinating insights into what teachers and lecturers value in their students’ writing. It’s a great addition to the Thinking Writing website which supports academics to develop their thinking and practice in relation to writing."
Resources like WISHEES help to celebrate the good work that goes on in schools and universities around writing, and help students explore the trajectory of student writing from school to employment.
Academics from Quinnipiac University in Connecticut, USA and employers such as Transport for London and Astrium Ltd (space transportation and satellite systems) have also contributed to the WISHEES collection.
Osman Bawa from Astrium Ltd commented: “Technical writing is an essential skill on which industry and business as a whole depend. To our thousands of engineers and managers it is their main means of communication. Students and young engineers need to actively develop and practice their technical writing, not only to speed up the process or reduce the time it takes, but to guarantee a project's success.
“Astrium is pleased to be a part of the STEM WISHEES project as it is an excellent way of helping students and academics to understand just what industry expects.”
JISC Digitisation Programme Manager Paola Marchionni added: "This resource is an excellent example of how the higher education sector, schools and employers can work in partnership to tackle the need for innovative resources which are engaging and at the same time develop students' digital literacy skills to prepare them for the demands of tertiary education as well as for the job market."
This project is funded by the JISC eContent programme 2011.
Click here to find out more about the project and view the resources or contact Teresa McConlogue (WISHEES Project Director).
For more information, please contact:
Siân Halkyard
Communications Manager
Queen Mary, University of London
020 7882 7454
07970 096 175
s.halkyard@qmul.ac.uk
via Jisc news
Analysing 600 years of music, drilling down into population databases, understanding social unrest through digitised newspapers – these are just some of the new lines of research that the winners of the second Digging into Data Challenge will now undertake.
Their research is part of an international competition that promotes innovative humanities and social science research using large-scale data analysis.
Funded by eight international research organisations from four countries – including JISC, the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and the arts and humanities research council (AHRC) from the UK - the successful 14 teams are mixed groups of researchers from the United Kingdom, Canada, the Netherlands and the United States.
They will receive grants of over £3m in total to investigate how computational techniques typically applied to the sciences can also be applied to change humanities and social sciences research.
Alastair Dunning, digitisation programme manager at JISC, said, "Digitised data offers researchers radically new opportunities for understanding old questions and formulating new ones. The range of projects demonstrate some of these opportunities."
1. Cascades Islands or Streams? (Indiana, Wolverhampton and Montreal universities) will measure the impact of humanities and social science research on traditional scholarly sources but also across social networks, blogs and other informal modes of communication.
2. ChartEx (Washington, Leiden, York, Toronto, Brighton and Columbia universities) will develop new ways of exploring medieval charters in their full text versions
3. Digging into Connected Repositories (The European Library Office, Open university) will analyse the effects of open access publishing on research
4. Digging by debating (universities of Indiana, East London, Dundee and London) will develop and implement a workbench called InterDebate, with the goal of digging into data provided by millions of expert books and articles
5. Digging into Metadata (Universities of Drexel, Manchester and Glamorgan) will create new metadata tags to help researchers discover information across multiple repositories
6. Electronic Locator of Vertical Interval Successions (ELVIS) (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, universities of Aberdeen, McGill and Yale) will study changes in Western musical style from 1300 to 1900, using the digitized collections of several large music repositories
7. Imagery Lenses for Visualizing Text Corpora (Universities of Utah and Oxford) will explore whether data visualization can help researchers make new observations and generate new hypotheses about literature and linguistics
8. Integrated Social History Environment for Research (ISHER)-Digging into Social Unrest (Manchester, Illinois and Tilburg universities and International Institute of Social History) will develop an integrated tool to help social history researchers use sophisticated text mining
9. Integrating Data Mining and Data Management Technologies for Scholarly Inquiry (University of California, Berkeley; University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; University of Liverpool; the Internet Archive and JSTOR) will integrate large-scale collections into a stored and managed preservation space
10. Mining Microdata (Minnesota, Leicester, Guelph, Alberta, Montreal and Essex universities) will make use of make use of data-mining technology to exploit one of the largest population databases in the world originally digitized for genealogical research
11. Trading Consequences (Universities of Edinburgh, York and St Andrews) will examine the economic and environmental consequences of commodity trading during the nineteenth century using information extraction techniques to study large corpora of digitized documents
Total programme funding is approximately £3,075,000
Find out more about the competition and why JISC is involvedvia Jisc news
This year has seen approximately half a million people visit the JISC website – who have looked at over 2.3 million pages in 2011 taking advantage of our resources and guidance across teaching, learning and research.
Nearly 800 of you took time to visit the JISC website on Christmas Day 2010 with the most popular searched story on the day being the Great War Archive rolled out in Germany.
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Funding, online resources and JISC Collections were the three most searched-for terms on JISC’s website in 2011, with the top topics you wanted to know about shown below:
Top five news stories as viewed by you in 2011:
Over 25,700 of you watched us online.
The top five YouTube videos you visited were:
Top five podcasts:
Top five reports:
Follow us on Twitter @JISC
Sign up for our monthly email strategic alerts or email us to receive our termly digital magazine JISC Inform
Keep abreast of our latest funding opportunities and strategic developments through JISC Announce by sending us an email to jiscmail@jiscmail.ac.uk containing the line: join jisc-announce yourfirstname yourlastname
View the JISC Annual review 2010/2011 here
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Isaac Newton’s own annotated copies of his works, notebooks and manuscripts are being made available online by Cambridge University Library and the University of Sussex with JISC funding.
Digitised title page from
Newton’s own copy
of Principia
Researchers, students and the public can now zoom in to each page to explore texts like Principia Mathematica in incredible detail and make use of transcriptions to understand Newton’s mind – and handwriting.
Alastair Dunning, programme manager at JISC, said: “The end results of Newton’s work are world famous but his notebooks and annotations give a rather different insight into the process that he went through to get there. JISC looks to share insights like those with as wide an audience of possible and digitising this collection means that researchers and students now have online access wherever they are.”
However, while the two universities have received JISC funding to help expose Newton’s papers to the eyes of the world, a closer look at some of the pages from the newly digitised archive reveals that not all his peers thought his output should be shared so openly.
Several of the manuscripts in the collection contain the handwritten line ‘not fit to be printed’, scrawled by Thomas Pellet, a Fellow of the Royal Society, who went through Newton’s papers after his death to decide which ones should be published.
Project manager Rob Iliffe, Professor of Intellectual History and History of Science at the University of Sussex, said: “The publication of these foundational texts, thanks to funding from JISC, represents the result of a great deal of hard work put in by both the Cambridge and Sussex teams over the past year. It is a significant milestone in the work of the Newton Project, and with access to nearly five million words of Newton's personal, scientific and religious writings, readers can now look at Newton's creativity in its broadest contexts.
Cambridge University librarian Anne Jarvis said: “With great collections comes a responsibility to make these as accessible as we can. Now, through the use of new technologies and with vital support from the Polonsky Foundation and bodies such as the JISC, we are able to open up our collections in ways that would have been inconceivable a few years ago. Wherever possible we will seek to enhance our digital collections by aligning them with scholarly research.
“Our initial collection, the Newton Papers, is a good example. Through our collaboration with the Newton Project at the University of Sussex, we’ve been able to provide superb transcriptions alongside the images of many of Newton's manuscripts.”
Launching the website with more than 4,000 pages of its most important Newton material, Cambridge University Library will upload thousands of further pages over the next few months until almost all of its Newton collection is available to view and download anywhere in the world.
via Jisc news
Researchers have today unveiled a new interactive map that reveals London’s social history in unprecedented detail, enabling users to explore everything from the world’s first gay scene to eighteenth century riots.
Alastair Dunning, programme manager at JISC, said: “Researchers in the humanities and social sciences are turning increasingly to geographical analysis as a way of bringing the facts and figures to life. What’s exciting about this resource is that the existing data you can explore today is just the start – the interface could be expanded to include new data sets and new maps, making it potentially useful to scholars in dozens of different disciplines. JISC’s commitment to funding open source projects means that other universities are already looking at how they might reuse the programmes that the Sheffield team has developed.”
Trial accounts from the Old Bailey, tax and population data, and even archaeological records can all be uploaded onto John Rocque’s famous 1746 map of London, now fully referenced to modern geographical coordinates by Museum of London Archaeology (MOLA).
Locating London’s Past is the result of a collaborative project between the University of Sheffield, the University of Hertfordshire, and the University of London.
Using the new website, people are now able to explore fully geo-referenced detail using Google maps technology to reveal the distribution of crimes, wealth and poverty, mortality, archaeological finds, voting records and much more.
Professor Tim Hitchcock from the University of Hertfordshire commented: “This project has allowed us to add a new, third dimension to our understanding of the first ‘World City’. Text on the page can now be reconfigured around place and space to create a new historical landscape to reveal pockets of crime and poverty, wealth, and illness. It allows us to know the past in a new way.”
18th Century riot trials
Professor Robert Shoemaker from the University of Sheffield’s Department of History commented: “Locating London’s Past makes it possible for the first time to map a wide variety of data from London’s past onto fully geo-referenced historical maps of the metropolis. For me, the most exciting findings concern the spread of crime locations from Old Bailey trials. Rather than simply reflecting the distribution of poverty (or wealth), criminal prosecutions took place in mixed areas, where social tensions were highest. These and other discoveries will transform our understanding of the historical development of Europe’s first modern city.”
Dr Matthew Davies, Director of the Centre for Metropolitan History at the University of London’s Institute of Historical Research, School of Advanced Study, commented: “The project’s website provides a new tool for understanding the relationships between the people and places of pre-modern London. It will enable the visualisation through maps of important characteristics of the metropolis during a time of rapid growth, from everyday patterns of family, home and work, to the interactions between inhabitants and institutions such as the parishes, hospitals and city companies.”
Explore a world of JISC content
via Jisc news
A study of 2.4 million Twitter messages from the time of the riots has found that politicians and other commentators were wrong to claim the website played an important role in inciting and organising the disturbances.
It is published today (8 December) in the Guardian newspaper as part of its Reading the Riots investigation.
Professor Procter, who is based at The University’s Manchester e-Research Centre, said: "In August this year, social unrest spilled over onto the streets of English cities and the summer riots were the largest public disorder events in recent history.
"Politicians and commentators were quick to claim that social media played an important role in inciting and organising riots, calling for sites such as Twitter to be closed should events of this nature happen again.
"But our analysis found no evidence of significance in the data we have analysed that would justify such a course action in respect to Twitter.
"In contrast, we do find strong evidence that Twitter was a valuable tool for mobilising support for the post-riot clean up and for organising specific clean up activities."
Also according to the research team, rumours 'break' quickly in Twitter and the mainstream media lag behind citizen reports.
Examples include rumours the London Eye had been set on fire and animals had been released from the London Zoo – which both turned out to be untrue.
Other stories turned out to be true such as the burning down of a Miss Selfridge shop in Manchester.
Professor Procter added: "Only after a period of time does the influence of mainstream media organisations become critical for determining a rumour's credibility.
"But we do find the mainstream media is perfectly capable of picking up and publishing unverified information from social media without adhering to the usual standard of fact checking.
"Consequently, some stories of this nature, though never verified, go unchallenged."
The research team of the Universities of Manchester, Leicester, St Andrews, Wolverhampton and UCL, draws on the expertise of a wide range of disciplines within the social sciences and computer science.
Dr Torsten Reimer, JISC programme manager, said: "The influence of social media on society is growing rapidly so we need a much better understanding of their impact on people's lives.
"In the case of Twitter this means analysing gigantic amounts of data, constantly created by millions of people, - a task that requires new tools and methods, supported by a broader digital infrastructure for research.
"We are pleased that we had the chance to support the project team working in collaboration with the Guardian to demonstrate how this infrastructure can be used to understand what happened during the riots in August."
The analysis of messages exchanged on Twitter during the riots was undertaken through a larger, JISC funded project called NeISS: National e-Infrastructure for Social Science Simulation.
The NeISS project aims to introduce social scientists to new ways of thinking about social problems.
Find out more about the NeISS project
via Jisc news
Clinical images, videos and other recordings are vital to good teaching and learning within the health care professions. Increasingly these are originated outside the institution that wishes to use them. This raises a number of legal, ethical and other issues relating to their re-use.
Debra Hiom, the project’s manager at the Institute for Learning and Research Technology (ILRT) at the University of Bristol, added: “Students and teachers increasingly use pre-existing patient images from the web without adequately considering copyright or how they have been consented. The new materials will help individuals be clear how resources can or can not be reused.”
Listen to Debra (Duration 6:02) explaining the issues that professionals face when using recordings and how the new guidance can help:
JISC EMBEDDED OBJECT
The materials aim to help users of clinical healthcare recordings to:
The guidance is aimed primarily at students, teachers or doctors who wish to use a patient recording for learning and teaching. It will also be of interest and use to other clinical and healthcare workers as well as to university staff where patient recordings are being made available for learning and teaching.
Dr Jane Williams, Director of e-Learning in the Centre for Medical Education at the University of Bristol, said: “There is already a wealth of advice and guidance but it is currently overwhelming. The new advice and guidance attempts to provide an easy navigable route through a very sensitive area of professional practice.”
Stuart Dempster, Director of the Strategic Content Alliance at JISC, said: “I am delighted to see that the significant advances being made in medical recordings, networks and other technological innovation within the education, research and health are being matched with clarity in the advance and guidance being offered to clinical and non-clinical staff alike through this project. This work builds on from earlier JISC investments in improving the skills required in the digital age.”
The materials have been created by a collaboration of cross-sector organisations and individuals, including the General Medical Council (GMC), Wellcome Trust, Institute for Medical Illustrators, University of Bristol and Newcastle University.
The project has been funded through JISC’s Strategic and Content Alliance and will be hosted by JISC Digital Media.
Read the advice and guidance
http://jiscdigitalmedia.ac.uk/clinical-recordings/
via Jisc news
JISC EMBEDDED OBJECT Fascinating records from the Church Courts of York are now available on-line at the Borthwick Institute for Archives at the University of York, allowing historians new insights into a huge variety of topics over many centuries.
From arguments about church taxes on liquorice, roses and pigeon dung, to families disputing wills and inheritance, the records paint a vivid picture of the social, economic, political, religious and emotional world of people living in a period from the 14th to 19th centuries.
Alastair Dunning, programme manager at JISC, said: "Digitisation of this resource opens up the records to a far greater range of research and teaching uses. To date use has been limited by the physical format and the conservation needs of the documents. These new digital images can be shuffled around, enlarged, re-ordered and compared in ways that are not possible with the physical items themselves."
Digitisation of the York Cause Papers, which record the proceedings of the ecclesiastical courts of York from 1300 to 1858, has been funded through a grant from JISC. The development means the papers are set to become one of the most widely-used historical records in the UK.
Borthwick Institute Keeper of Archives Chris Webb said: "Until 1858 the church courts, under the authority of bishops, had jurisdiction over a wide variety of crimes which we would now consider secular and the business of the state.
"They oversaw cases concerning marriage and separation, and disputes over wills and inheritance. They also dealt with cases involving personal reputation and defamation, the maintenance of the Church, the orthodoxy of its services, and the regulation of the moral and professional conduct of the clergy, schoolmasters, physicians and midwives.
"The Church of England was supported by a system of taxation known as tithes and the records also show exactly how this taxation was calculated and how people tried to evade it."
Professor Mark Ormrod, from the University’s Department of History, added: "The digitisation of the Cause Papers brings to completion a comprehensive project designed specifically to allow the widest possible public access to this vitally important historical resource.
"The resource is of tremendous importance to specialists in social, economic, religious and legal history and in the history of gender, sexuality, marriage and domesticity, as well as to a wide range of users with interests in family and local history. The York Cause Papers are now set to become one of the most widely-used historical resources in the United Kingdom."
The digitisation project adds to original work funded by the Andrew W Mellon Foundation which provided an on-line catalogue. A range of detailed searches are now available which are suitable for building up a list of sources for thematic research and enable searches by personal name and place, adding to the resources available to family and local historians.
The Humanities Research Institute (HRI) at the University of Sheffield provided crucial technical support in enabling this project to link the images of the York Cause Papers with the Borthwick’s searchable database of the Cause Papers. The searchable database had been created by the Borthwick and the HRI during a previous project, funded by the Andrew W Mellon Foundation.
Search the York Cause Papers and find page images
via Jisc news
The Living Books About Life series is written and produced by humanities scholars from universities across the world – from the UK and America to Poland and Australia – and has re-packaged and re-presented science-related research material to make it more accessible to a humanities audience.
Funded by JISC and published by the Open Humanities Press (OHP), the books address a number of scientific topics whose unifying theme is life, including air, agriculture, bioethics, cosmetic surgery, energy, neurology and human cloning.
Alastair Dunning, programme manager at JISC, said: "By drawing only on Open Access material to create these ‘Living Books about Life’, the team is helping define a new era of scholarly communication – and thereby exploiting JISC’s vision to make the results of publicly funded research available to all."
The books present recent research on these subjects in a palatable way using interactive maps, podcasts and audio-visual materials. The result, which can be shared freely amongst both academic and non-academic individuals alike, is an engaging and diverse resource for researching and teaching relevant science issues across the humanities.
As well as bridging the divide between the humanities and sciences, the three partner institutions working on the project – led by Coventry University and including the University of Kent and Goldsmiths, University of London – have ‘rethought’ the conventional book by developing a new, low-cost and sustainable model for creating, publishing and sharing content.
By embracing the age of open information and the increasing prominence of crowdsourcing, the project leaders ensured each volume in the Living Books About Life series is a ‘living’ medium itself, able to be updated by readers through ongoing collaborative processes of writing, editing, remixing and commenting.
Gary Hall, Professor of Media and Performing Arts at Coventry University, said: "The ‘Living Books About Life’ series doesn’t just represent a new, exciting and more easily digestible way for people without a background in science to learn about important scientific issues – it also has the potential to refashion the process of book publishing itself. It’s a pioneering example of a sustainable, low-cost, low-tech approach to publishing high-quality books that can be shared easily and freely on an open access basis with anyone who has an interest."
Nicholas Mirzoeff, Professor of Media, Culture and Communication at New York University, said: "This remarkable series transforms the humble reader into a living form, while breaking down the conceptual barrier between the humanities and the sciences in a time when scholars and activists of all kinds have taken the understanding of life to be central. Brilliant in its simplicity and concept, this series is a leap towards an exciting new future."
Read more about the initiative
Image creative commons licensed by Halfrain
via Jisc news
Tracking the UK’s research outputs will become easier in the future thanks to JISC and Research Councils UK (RCUK) working together to utilise their expertise.
Over the coming months a piece of work called the RIO Extension project will take place, to scope the issues and requirements from universities, funders and researchers in managing the information about research outputs. The aim of the work is to provide the UK education and research sector with clear, practical guidance on recording and sharing information about its research outputs, so that it can be reused for a variety of purposes, including by the systems used by the Research Councils.
Neil Jacobs, JISC’s digital infrastructure programme director, says, “The UK research community punches well above its weight in terms of the quality and quantity of research outputs. However, these are not systematically recorded, so it can be hard to demonstrate that impact. Researchers, universities and funders have a common interest in ensuring that the outputs from UK research are visible, and that this is achieved without putting undue burden on the sector.
“This can be done using both institutional repositories and more sophisticated research information systems but, in either case, it is important that these interoperate effectively with the systems operated by research funders and others. The RIO Extension project will describe a roadmap for the sector to achieve that.”
Four of the Research Councils are shortly to launch the Research Outcomes System, which will be the primary means by which these Research Councils will collect this kind of information. JISC is supporting the creation of this service by ensuring that it works effectively and efficiently with institutional systems, including the UK repository infrastructure. This flexible and community-owned infrastructure is well suited to meet the demands of the 21st century research community.
Dr Sue Smart, Chair of the RCUK Research Outcomes Project, comments, “With this clear and practical guidance agreed for the research community and Research Councils to use, we can work together to significantly lessen the burden on institutions and organisations wanting to collect this data.”
The RIO Extension project is also part of a larger programme of work scoping and delivering shared repository and curation infrastructure services at a national and international level. This work supports the strategic requirements of universities, colleges, JISC and the Research Councils to build a robust repository infrastructure for the future. It also contributes to the aspirations of the UK Open Access Implementation Group’s 2012 strategy.
Explore JISC’s repository infokit and find out how it could help your organisation
via Jisc news
The University for the Creative Arts (UCA) has been awarded funding from JISC to digitise the archive of celebrated British designer Zandra Rhodes CBE.
Zandra Rhodes, who was made UCA’s first Chancellor in 2010, has played a significant role in the development of British fashion, helping establish its reputation on the world stage. Her diverse client base has included Diana, Princess of Wales; Jackie Onassis, Freddie Mercury; Kylie Minogue and Sarah Jessica Parker.
A digital images of Zandra Rhodes’ innovative work produced as part of this project will be stored in a digital database. This will be publically accessible, providing an important new global resource for fashion students, designers and researchers world wide. An Open Education Resource will embed a selection of images of her garments within the wider cultural context and support learning and teaching in the field.
Zandra said, “I am thrilled that this project is happening and students will be able to appreciate my work.”
“I am thrilled that this project is happening and students will be able to appreciate my work.”
Professor Kerstin Mey, Director of Research and Enterprise at UCA, said, “We are delighted to be working with Zandra on this exciting project. This digital archive will track a vital dimension of the evolution of British fashion and capture some of its landmark moments.
“It will provide inspiration and learning for new and emerging generations of professional fashion designers, but will also complement research on the overarching cultural situation and zeitgeist of the later 20th Century and early 21st Century.”
This project is funded by JISC as part of its Content programme 2011-2013, Paola Marchionni JISC’s digitisation manager says, “JISC is pleased to support collaboration between the higher education sector and private archives such as Zandra Rhodes’ fashion collection. These partnerships are vital to open up access to resources which wouldn’t otherwise be available, not only for the benefit of students and researchers in the UK but for the enjoyment and use of the public at large as Open Educational Resources.”
via Jisc news
In this podcast JISC's Rebecca O'Brien chats to Kevin Ashley, director of the DCC, about the event and what delegates can hope to gain by taking part.
Listen to the podcast (Duration 6:58)
JISC EMBEDDED OBJECT
via Jisc news
JISC is supporting universities and colleges to create a business case for an integrated IT strategy to help them make better investment decisions.
The business benefit of strategic ICT is to be explored in a JISC webinar on 7 December for information service managers and practitioners, as well as senior leaders looking for a joined-up approach to technology.
The webinar will discuss how to conduct an audit of where your IT provision is now, establish your investment priorities and make decisions, using a new JISC toolkit.
The toolkit that the webinar will explore includes a range of checklists, case studies and good practice guidelines to help senior managers identify, analyse, assess and develop their current maturity level in IT.
Register for the webinar on Wednesday 7 December at 2pm – 3pm GMT
via Jisc news
David Puttnam, Lord Puttnam of Queensgate, will consider the potential impact of a major, positive disruption to the way the world approaches learning and teaching at the JISC online e-learning conference on 22-25 November 2011.
Lord Puttnam, who is a renowned speaker and chairman of FutureLab, following a highly acclaimed career in the film industry, will share with participants his view on how pedagogy is going digital, in what is likely to be a controversial and challenging keynote.
Find out more in our special podcast about the conference, JISC on Air
Lord Puttnam is joined at the sixth annual JISC e-learning online conference by other expert speakers including:
Participants at the conference will be able to pose questions to the speakers and join in discussions from the comfort of their own workplace, using the Blackboard Collaborate platform followed by asynchronous discussions.
Sarah Knight, e-learning programme manager at JISC and event organiser said, “Taking part in an online conference is just as important as if you were attending in person. There will be ample opportunity to join in stimulating discussions and to share practice.
“This year the themes of ‘learning landscapes’ and ‘navigating pathways’ in the digital age, will be discussed focusing on the opportunities created by technology-enhanced assessment and feedback, digital literacy, open educational resources, lifelong learning and students as agents of change,” adds Sarah.
In order to help participants make full use of the networking and discussion opportunities, participants will be able to prepare for the event ahead of time in a pre-conference activity week.
Sarah concludes, “This year’s conference is one of the best yet, offering a big conference experience in the most cost-effective way. At £50 per delegate, it represents significant value for money for organisations and education departments feeling the constraints of a tight budget.”
Register now to explore through live presentations and debate some of the latest thinking about enhancing learning and teaching with technology.
Follow the conference on Twitter @jiscel2011 and online #jiscel11
via Jisc news
Safe cloud storage to help avoid the risks of lost or stolen data is now on offer to help three UK final year undergraduate and master's students run their research projects.
The cloud computing facilities are the winning prize in a competition that aims to highlight new projects demonstrate the potential of cloud computing.
The competition is run by Janet Brokerage, the UK’s only independent broker for academic cloud services, and Eduserv, the not-for-profit IT services organisation.
Andy Powell, Head of Research at Eduserv, said: "Research students and staff have an understandable tendency to keep data close to their chest on laptops or university servers. However, lost and stolen laptops or local server failures can put research projects back by months. By storing data in a secure facility tailored to the needs of the education community, with ample capacity and processing power, academics can rest assured that their data is secure and accessible."
The winners will benefit from a package including a VMware vCloud virtual data centre which can support up to around 18 virtual machines.
They will have access to 100GB storage, enough to store the equivalent of about 125 doctoral theses, and one public IP address. They will also have a direct connection to the JANET network, with no additional transit fees.
The winners will have use of Eduserv's Education Cloud from January 2012 to January 2013.
The first forty bids will be able to enter the competition from 18 November 2011. Bidding closes at midday on Friday 2 December, or once forty bids have been received, whichever is the sooner.
Find out more about how cloud computing could benefit your organisation.
For more information about Janet Brokerage call 01225 822337, and to find out more about the services Eduserv offer visit their website or call 01235 474300.
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Martyn Harrow, Director of Information Services at Cardiff University, has been appointed as Head of JISC for a fixed term of 9-18 months from 1 February 2012.
Martyn will succeed Dr Malcolm Read who retires as Head of JISC in January 2012 after 18 years in post.
Martyn will see the organisation through its transition into a 'new look' JISC, following the recommendations of the Wilson Review (February 2011).
Heather Fry, Director Education and Participation at HEFCE, which funds JISC together with other UK education funding bodies JISC, said: 'At this critical time in JISC's transition I am delighted that we have appointed Martyn Harrow who brings a wealth of technology and leadership experience from higher education and the commercial sector. Martyn will be leading JISC as it re-shapes to remain world class in a changing environment.'
Tim O'Shea, Principal of the University of Edinburgh and Chair of JISC, said: 'JISC is embarking on an exciting period as it rises to the challenges of the Wilson report and renews its focus on supporting education and research across the UK. Martyn is ideally placed to lead JISC through this stage of its development, being able to draw on invaluable experience from across the education, public and private sectors.'
Martyn Harrow said: 'It is an honour to follow Malcolm Read and be invited to lead JISC through this very important and complex transition. We have the opportunity and the challenge now of building on from his amazing legacy to create a "new JISC for new times". Our driver will be to ensure that "new JISC" fosters, facilitates and enables modern approaches and sustainable strategic advantage for higher and further education in the coming years.'
Dr Malcolm Read OBE has led JISC since its inception and taken it to the world-class reputation it enjoys today, enabling it to make a real difference to ICT usage in further and higher education. He is looking forward to his planned retirement and more time to pursue his many interests and ambitions.
Martyn Harrow joined Cardiff University in 2003 with extensive experience in both the public and private sectors. His early career centred in local government where he became Senior Principal Management Services Officer at Avon County Council. Subsequently his career majored on global roles as Chief Information Officer for several international operating companies within Unilever. At various times he was responsible for IT across the USA, Europe, Africa, the Middle East and Asia. Before joining Cardiff University, Martyn was Vice-President, IT, for a global food and fragrance company within ICI. Martyn is a member of the JISC Board and a Director of JISC Collections and JISC Advance.
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The UK is to participate in a global experiment, based on the social media technology behind Twitter and Facebook, to find out how the social activity around online educational content can be captured and fed back to users, creators and publishers.
Working with the Learning Registry, a project funded by the US Department of Education and the US Department of Defence, JISC and the HE Academy are calling for institutions and developers to work with them on a new 10 month project. This project will lay the foundations of an infrastructure that will improve the way people choose educational information online.
Amber Thomas, JISC programme manager says, “This international collaboration will see us contributing the UK’s expertise to the Learning Registry. We are working with Mimas and JISC CETIS to support the Registry’s vision of gathering together the conversations, ratings, recommendations and usage data around digital content.
“We know that users and providers want access to more information about how educational content is used by others and this is an innovative approach to meeting that need.”
It is commonplace to read reviews of books, music and items before your choose to buy or use them. This experiment will look to assess how we can create the technical capabilities to reveal a rich picture of what people are doing with educational content.
Steve Midgley, Deputy Director, Office of Education Technology at the US Department of Education says, “I am greatly encouraged by the collaboration and opportunity presented by our work with JISC on the Learning Registry.”
This builds on JISC’s work in discovery, activity data, Jorum and open educational resources supporting the discovery, use and analytics of digital resources for teaching, learning and research. The experiment will give, JISC a much clearer view of the potential of this approach, and there will be a rich dataset of content available to future services.
Read more on the Learning Registry.
Find out about the JISC, Mimas and JISC CETIS project the Learning Registry Node Experiment.
#learningreg
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During JISC's transition period to move the organisation towards a new legal entity, a Shadow Board has been formed to help manage the process.
Professor Sir Timothy O'Shea, Principal and Vice Chancellor, University of Edinburgh; Chair of JISC and Chair of the Shadow Board says: "We are very pleased to be able to announce the appointment of JISC's Shadow Board and welcome their insight and expertise in taking a reshaped JISC into the future.
Meet the members of JISC’s Shadow Board through their short video introductions and hear why they are looking forward to working with JISC during the next one to two years.
Heather Macdonald, Chief Executive and Principal of Sheffield College, is also a member of the JISC shadow board, video to follow.
Read more about JISC’s transition
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An online training course to help disseminate good practice in research data management developed at the University of Edinburgh is now free to use by PhD students, early career researchers and digital data users at all UK universities. Are you ready to release your resources openly? Find out in our new resource.
The non-credit, free online course has interactive units focused on key concepts of data management including video clips of senior academics talking about data management challenges.
There are also practical exercises in handling data in four software packages widely used by researchers in different fields, which learners can download and work through at their own pace.
Simon Hodson, programme manager at JISC, the technology consortium for UK further and higher education, said: "When we listened to the delegates at our recent conference on data management, it was obvious that many universities feel the need to embed good practice much earlier in the careers of their researchers than they do currently. The fact that this course is available through an open license for repurposing and rebranding will help other universities benefit from the good work that Edinburgh has already done."
The Data Library team at EDINA, a JISC-funded UK national academic data centre based at the University of Edinburgh, produced the materials over the course of the past year as part of the JISC Managing Research Data programme.
The team chose to deliver the course online so that learners could engage with it in their own time. This means it has the potential to reach a wider community, by releasing it as an open educational resource.
Use the Open Access week hashtag to search for more updates on open
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Robin Rice, data librarian at the University of Edinburgh and EDINA, said: "The online course supports statements about good practice in research data management with real life stories and scenarios. It is designed to be fun, relevant, useful, interactive and timely (FRUIT!) for those pursuing a research project. The accompanying software modules for data handling skills give a deeper grounding within particular analysis environments."
They worked with the University of Edinburgh’s School of Social and Political Studies, the School of GeoSciences and the Doctorate in Clinical Psychology to target the resources towards their doctoral training programmes.
Access the course and tweak it to your requirements
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The academic monograph is under threat. Increased costs and lower print runs are impacting on the principle means by which researchers share their knowledge and disseminate their findings. The gold standard for academic excellence in many disciplines, the effective dissemination of the monograph has major implications for the UK’s research base and its international standing.
Palgrave Macmillan, Taylor & Francis, Berg Publishers, Liverpool University Press and University Wales Press are also project partners. Each has submitted pairs of similar monographs for the project pilot. With one title in each pair randomly assigned to either the experimental group (available through open access) or the control group (available through the publishers’ standard routes to market) the pilot will, over the next three years, gather and compare sales and usage data for each group. The resulting data will provide an invaluable evidence base for the use of monographs under contrasting modes of access.
Further activities – such as annual benchmarking surveys, focus groups, interviews and surveys with research funders, authors, publishers, libraries and researchers - will allow investigation into whether an open access model for scholarly monographs could take hold in the minds of humanities and social sciences scholars, what funding policies and technical processes would need be developed to support an open access model and what the impacts of an open access model would be on key stakeholders.
David House, Chair of JISC Collections and the OAPEN-UK Steering Group, said: “It’s in all our interests to have a vibrant and innovative humanities and social science research environment. But for this we need to have scholarly communications models that match the rapidly-changing demands of the twenty-first century. This project is taking some bold and imaginative steps to look over the horizon and to explore a new publishing model. We hope OAPEN-UK will be a stepping stone towards informed decision making by a wide range of stakeholders.”
See OAPEN-UK for further information or contact Caren Milloy, Head of Projects.
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Open access week 2011 is full of inspiration on the benefits of free immediate access to the results of scholarly research. Now more than 30 compelling stories have been collected together from across Europe showcasing the transformative effects of open access.
They come from over 11 countries and are told by a wide variety of stakeholders, from individual researchers and journal editors to publishers and companies, and cover a multitude of disciplines.
Dr Malcolm Read, executive secretary at JISC, said: “It’s interesting to see that even though these stories represent a diverse range of initiatives, some recent, some historical, they all share a common thread. That thread is that they have all been collaborative exercises – with people looking to share the benefits of their work beyond their own institutions.”
One example is First Monday, a 15-year-old open access journal about the internet.. It was launched in May 1996 and is now one of the longest established, most respected peer reviewed journals of the internet. By August 2011 it had published 1,133 papers in 181 issues, written by 1,469 different authors representing institutions in over 30 different countries. It is read in 180 different countries.
Another story tells of how a repository can successfully build relationships with publishers. Pedocs is a German educational science archive that uses an innovative cooperation model with German publishing houses to make available freely and openly a wealth of high quality pedagogic literature. Set up in 2008, in the last three years it has developed cooperative relationships with more than 25 small and medium-sized German educational literature publishing houses.
The stories can be found on a dedicated, easy-to-use website and are open for comments and ready to share. They are not only free for all to read and refer to, but they are also licensed under a creative commons licence. To allow for easier re-use the stories will be available for download and use in other publications and websites.
The Knowledge Exchange consists of :
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Read more about the Knowledge Exchange
Be inspired by Open Access success stories
Find out how JISC is supporting open access week 2011
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Learners, educators and citizen scientists will benefit from an 18 month digitisation programme launching today which will bring back to life scientific medical archives, historical records and health reports.
JISC will be investing £5.6 million in 23 projects across 30 universities and cultural heritage organisations to bring selected archives out of the vaults and onto computer screens, specifically with the aim of creating resources for wide educational use. These archives will be publicly accessible too which means citizens scientists, school pupils and the general public will benefit as well as historians, medics and biologists in this growing UK collection of digital resources for research, teaching and learning.
Alastair Dunning JISC’s programme manager explains why this work is taking place and the reasons for continuing to unearth national archives to make them accessible for everyone.
“JISC believes that publicly-funded archives and collections should whenever possible be made openly available for people to be able to see, reuse and access.
“These new collections vary greatly. King’s College London are leading a project to digitise the entire 86 volume corpus of the Survey of English Place-Name, while the University of Bradford are running ‘Digitised Diseases’ which seeks to bridge the gap between modern clinical medicine and the use of historic medical collections by digitising pathological skeletal specimens from world renowned archaeological collections in Bradford and London. The new collections to be digitised also include over 150 years worth of annual reports summarising the health of Greater London’s population, held by the Wellcome Library.”
This programme of work supports the findings of the Seizing the opportunity for online learning for UK higher education report which recommended, the use of online learning to enhance student choice and meet learners’ expectations; realignment of training and development to support academics to play a leading role in online provision; and the development and sharing of open educational resources to enhance efficiency and quality.
To find out more about this latest phase of digitisation projects visit: http://bit.ly/sMFWnJ and to view existing online content already available visit: http://bit.ly/to2sds
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