Planet Semantico

I am on my way home from an interesting day at JISC Digital Content Taskforce meeting in London.  You are probably thinking what I did when I got the invitation – who are the Digital Content Taskforce, and what do they do?

From what I understand from the day, their role is to facilitate, lobby, encourage, promote, fund, [insert you favourite word here] the continued and increased investment in the digitisation of resources.  The consensus of the attendees, and the steer from those that were running the day, was pragmatic.  We are in an economic climate where more is expected for less.

The presentations during the day highlighted successes of digitisation projects and some excellent resources now available on line such as the Old Bailey Online and the Great War Archive.  These presentations, which to me felt a little like preaching to the already converted, set the context for a couple of breakout group sessions, trying to address questions such as: the arguments for, and challenges in achieving, continued digitisation work; and what are the most viable business models to support such work.

Towards the end of the day, it became very business model focused, with several being suggested such as: Centralised Investment/Loans; Private Sector investment; Crowd sourcing; Internal resource redeployment; or Consortial action.  From my group the answer was [dependant on the resource being digitised and the potential audience for it] all of the above.  One group suggested a wait and see approach, building your plan and proposals ready for when the sugar-plum money fairy returned.  I’m not sure how sure of their own suggestion they were, as they did join in the consensus that if we did nothing to promote further digitisation, nothing would happen.

So the taskforce facilitators seem certain of their goal – To move:

FROM the current situation where only a small percentage of the resources in UK cultural and research collections are digitised

TO one where these resources can be at the heart of every citizens online experience.

They are less sure about the how, the who, and the impact of the current economic climate and government drive to reduce public expenditure.

Rereading what I have just written, you may get the impression that today was a waste of time.  Far from it.  It served a useful purpose in sharing problems, issues, and understanding, but the next move needs to be far more concrete about a way forward to support the increasing digitisation of UK assets for the benefit of all despite the external pressures.  To pick out a quote from the start of the day “let’s not waste a good crisis” 

English, JISC

At a conference I attended in the States a couple of years ago, I was repeatedly struck by the high esteem in which JISC is held internationally. Here in the UK, we may gaze across the Atlantic with envy at the resourcing of individual institutions (or at least we used to before the downturn), but we shouldn’t underestimate the value of a structure such as JISC that operates at a sectoral level in terms of the infrastructural and collaborative benefits that such an approach affords, and the economies of scale that can potentially be delivered.

Talis was a sponsor of last week’s JISC Conference 2010, and during the same week, I received an invitation to a forthcoming 45 minute supplier briefing for JISC’s Flexible Services Delivery Programme in London. In considering whether to attend, two related questions in particular started nagging away at me. Firstly, is this supplier briefing a new silo in the making? And secondly, is the project-specific nature of the event also a tad silo-esque?

My feeling is that the challenges facing our higher education sector are so deep, and the need for innovative solutions and supporting infrastructure so great, that JISC needs to transform itself into a collaborative eco-system in which suppliers play their part alongside (not separate from) learning technologists; librarians; academics – in short everyone who can contribute ideas. At the end of the day, we are all working on solutions to the same problems. At the moment, it’s difficult to engage with JISC at any other than a detailed level, usually in the form of an individual project. Yet the JISC Strategy 2010-12 reveals that broad-brush strategic thinking is taking place somewhere in the JISC structure. Doesn’t this need to be opened up to influences right across the sector? Talis is a major UK supplier of library and learning technology, and yet has only a sporadic relationship with JISC. Most suppliers have a longstanding global focus that JISC should arguably be tapping into, as it increasingly collaborates at an international level. A 45 minute briefing for one particular project is unlikely to make much of a difference.

In these straitened times in which JISC is more accountable for sector-wide outcomes than ever before, it makes sense to aggregate the ideas and experiences of all the stakeholders in higher education, doesn’t it? From students to suppliers, aren’t we all relevant? Or do you think that JISC is already engaging sufficiently with stakeholders such as suppliers?

English, Higher Education, JISC

The JISC Information Environment Team have just announced a study to explore the legal and ownership implications of making catalogue records available to others when this involves copying, transferring them into different formats.

The JISC has just commissioned a study to explore some of these issues as they apply to UK university libraries and to provide practical guidance to library managers who may be interested in making their catalogue records available in new ways. Outcomes are expected by the end of 2009.

The specific objectives of the study are to:
•    Establish the provenance of records in the catalogues of a small but representative sample of UK university libraries and in the national Copac and SUNCAT catalogues;
•     Identify any rights or licences applying to the records and assess how these apply to re-use in the Web environment. This work should include clarifying the legal status of MARC records and copies of MARC records, and the legal implications of translating records between different formats such as MARC and MODS XML;
•     Provide practical guidance to UK university libraries about the legal issues to be considered in making catalogue records available for re-use in Web applications such as social networking sites – drawing on the findings from the sample;
•     Make recommendations to the JISC and the UK higher education community about any initiatives which could usefully be undertaken to facilitate the re-use of catalogue records in Web applications in a way which respects legal rights and business interests.

The core nugget of this being clarifying the legal status of MARC records and copies of MARC records.  Without establishing that anything else would be building castles on sand.

One of the many things that was never fully clarified in the OCLC record re-use saga earlier in the year was the legal status of a Marc record – can it, or parts of it, be considered as a creative work and therefore be applicable for copyright and a concept of ownership.

I wish whoever is undertaking the JISC study (the announcement does not indicate any study group members) well as they set foot in to this minefield of assumption, traditional practice, legal interpretation, and commercial interest and bias.  Let’s hope they do a thorough job and carry enough weight from legal, library, and publishing backgrounds to deliver advice and opinion that will clarify these particularly murky waters well beyond the UK University sector.

Copyright, English, JISC, Libraries, Licensing, Open Data