Title: Catherine Grout Programme Director
1 A common Information Environment New
challenges for the UK education community We
are drowning in information and starved for
knowledge.(anon)
- Catherine GroutProgramme Director
- JISC Development Group
2Summary
- What is the JISC Information Environment vision
- What has been achieved, 1996 2001
- What are the new challenges, 2002
- Changing institutional environment
- Converging national environments
3The JISC
- The JISC is an agency of the further and higher
education funding councils - It has 54 staff and employs more than 500 staff
on services and projects - It has an annual budget of about 65 million
- This is composed of top sliced money allocated to
the JISC by the FE and HE funding councils - Today I am not going to talk about
- The academic network (Super Janet)
- Collections Policies and Priorities
- Digital Preservation
- Institutional Information Strategies
- JISC Services (resource delivery, discovery,
advice, support and advocacy)
4What is the Information Environment?
- Key aspect of JISC 5 Year Strategyto build an
on-line information environment providing secure
and convenient access to a comprehensive
collection of scholarly and educational
material". - How does the IE relate to JISC content and
services? - We have a rich distributed network of diverse
educational digital content - The Information Environment is needed to enable
students and staff to access and use those
resources in ways meaningful to them and to take
away barriers - This is articulated in the Information
Environment Strategyhttp//www.jisc.ac.uk/dner/d
evelopment/IEstrategy.html
5What 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)
6Current information architecture
Content (local and remote)
Web
Web
Web
Web
Authentication
Authorisation
End-user needs to join services together manually
- as well as learning multiple user interfaces
End-user
7IE what the user is doing
Content (local and remote)
End-user
MLE/VLE
8The future
Content
Authentication
Authorisation
Collection Description
End-user is automatically presented with
relevant resources through relevant channels
Portals
Service Desc.
Thesauri
User Profiles
End-user
9Technical Model of the Information Environment
New ways of getting communitycontent in out
lots of diverse content here
New ways of getting communitycontent in out
Modest experience here
Modest experience here
lots of diverse views provided of content here
10How? IE Development Programmes, FACTS and FIGURES
- 10 programme areas (currently overseen by group)
- Approximately 150-170 projects and other
activities - Some are CFPs, some work is commissioned, some
work augments existing services - About 8 to 10 mill per year of public investment
- Significant changes within 5 years, fundamental
changes within 10 years - Predecessors - Elib Programme, JTAP
- This is to build an environment not
experimentation orientated
11How? 2001-2005 IE Development Programmes
- There are 5 main new programme areas to
actively build the Information Environment
while still doing research - 1. Content Submission/Disclosure Programme (FAIR
and X4L) - 2. Portals and Fusion Programme
- 3. Shared Services Programme
- 4. Presentation Programme
- 5. Service Provider Development Programme
- More work to develop the technical architecture
underway in collaboration with UKOLN to underpin
this - There are 3 existing programme areas (DNER
Development) - Infrastructure (feeds into 2,3,5,)
- Learning and Teaching (feeds into 1,4,5)
- NSF/DLI (new NSF, DL and Classroom)
12What was established 1996 - 2001
- Standards based interoperability has to be a good
thing - Experiments in searching across distributed
content were largely successful - People want relevant and mediated services, hence
portals - Learning and research behaviour does not keep
pace with technological advancement and
opportunity - A large scale centrally funded programme(s) is
needed to really advance the idea of a seamless
environment - Any time, any place, any where is a mantra (any
channel?)
13Whats new 2002 ?
- Meeting the challenge of the changing
institutional agenda and environment - Accommodating the likely pace of change of
learning and research behaviour - really coping with a diversity of audience
needs - Taking advantage of the convergence between
different public initiatives
14Challenge 1 the role of the institutional asset
and repository
- What should be national and what local, what can
be shared and exchanged? - What are the place of local assets in national
provision and vice versa? - What is the best place for this activity to take
place and be maintained? - National libraries?
- National archives?
- Institutional libraries?
- Other institutional structures?
15Facilitating the disclosure of institutional
assets
- Facilitating the role of the University or
College as publisher and custodian of scholarly
assets (FAIR and X4L) - About 3 million initial outlay (2002-2005)
- To see how well sharing of assets works
- To understand the challenges and see if its
sustainable - Support for development of e-print archives,
e-theses, better access to museum and archival
collections, re-usable learning objects
16Facilitating the disclosure of institutional
assets (FAIR)
- 13 projects looking at deposit of institutional
resources and disclosure of metadata - Developing OAI repositories and services
- Looking at how you manage institutional
collections with JISC collections in a portal - Looking at how sustainable a voluntary deposit
mechansism is for growing collections - Understanding the balance between local and
national management and archiving of resources - Making the hidden more visible
17Facilitating the re-purposing and exchange of
learning objects (X4L)
- 20 projects looking at how to re-purpose
publically funded learning and research
collections for learning and teaching (JISC,
TLTP, FDTL, NLN, LT Scotland, LTSN etc.) - Looking at how to integrate these in a VLE
- How to identify sustainable re-usable learning
objects, developing the underpinning pedagogical
models - Settting in place a development bay to test out
sharing results with the wider community - Migrating suitable outcomes available in a
national learning materials repository - Providing support for standards compliance and
toolkits to support this process
18Challenge 2 the changing institutional digital
environment
- Keeping quality resources at the centre of the
student experience - Providing national tools that are fit for local
integration - We cannot necessarily expect students to leave
the library or local portal, or VLE when
searching
Local environment
OPAC
JISC
OTHER
19Problems with terminology locally as well as
nationally
- Institutions are developing
- Digital library systems
- Digital repositories
- Enterprise portals
- VLEs
- MLEs
- Some are cross institution, some may belong to a
particular group, faculty, admin unit etc. - Functionality is not consistent between these
terms - Terms are not consistently applied
20Problems with terminology locally as well as
nationally a hypothesis
Enterprise portal
Digital Library
VLE
MLE
Web resources
Local management systems
Local digital resources
Local learning systems
The challenge is to understand what is going on
locally and help consistency to emerge. Things
were much easier when institutions just had
WEBSITES!
21The new environments in FE and HE
My Pocklington College
My course materials
My Web
My Library
They may not even see much of this in future when
they approach resources
Embedded in here, could be access to JISC portals
and other services, resources provided by
publishers etc.
22Integrating new environments in FE and HE
Institutional portal or VLE
On-line Information Environment
The challenge is to understand and enable
information flow between these entities to
support learning and research
23Alternate view of the same problem
Web resources
JISC content services
VLE
Portals Presentation Services
Authentication Authorisation
The challenge is to understand and enable
information flow between these entities to
support learning and research
24A national tool kit for portals and VLEs
VLE toolkit
VLE setup area
Registry of course materials
Search on curriculum area
Institutional portal or VLE
Information Environment
M
Include collection or service
Add relevant learning content
M
M
Include tutors help
Add help pages
M
The challenge is to provide good enough metadata
in the IE to make this possible
locally (Curriculum tag, subject tag, level tag,
resource type tag?)
25RE-examining the action verbs
IE (national)
VLE (local)
DISCOVER
Identity learning aim
DISCOVER
LOCATE
Identity research aim
LOCATE
REQUEST
ACCESS
REQUEST
USE
ACCESS
Digital Repository
DISCLOSE
ARCHIVE
26Very new programmes advancing understanding
about integration
- JISC/NSF Digital Libraries and the Classroom
(proposals to be assessed on Friday) - VLEs and Digital Libraries (pre-announcement
issued) - Real change must be shared by institutions,
otherwise national leverage will have limited
effect - Are we at the put up or shut up phase??
27Challenge 3 taking advantage of a welcome
convergence
28The bigger picture the common Information
Environment
- The concept of the IE is a vision of interest to
a number of communities - Health Service, National Libraries, Museums and
Archives, Research Community and others (cross
govt. department) - Collaboration is ongoing to define a common IE in
the UK for access to digital resources for life
long learning - Small group has been taking forward some trial
work - (JISC, BL, Resource, NHS, Research Grid)
- Practical things
- Demonstrators (My neigbourhood, genealogy,
astronomy, health) - Working out how real services content can
integrate - Using common standards.. feeding in detail to the
e-GIF
29The Common IE
- Strategic things
- Manifesto for a Common Information Environment
- Contributing to a National Information/Content
Policy? - An approach to testing out the viability/utility
of this joined up approach - This is not exclusive to this group and we
recognise that there are many other players - e.g. recognises the UK context and the e-GIF
framework - recognises the EU context
- recognises the International importance of this
area of work
30Why its worth it
- Networked spaces offer us the opportunity to be
more joined up - We can add value to our resources by
cross-sectoral contextualisation - We can start to address the issues of under use,
getting users to the door (or portal) is
important - Users dont need to know where it has come from
- We can develop economies of scale in service
provision/infrastructure - We can create our content so that it is
interoperable to underpin the idea of life long
learning (standards!) - Collectively we can influence commercially
provided systems/software so that they are
standards based and interoperable - Good for Information providers, (one route or
method in, many out) - We cannot fail to NOT do these things (apologies
for double negative!) - No-one agency, govt. or otherwise can ever
colonise the information space, however good your
acronym is!
31The Information Environment
-
- You are a product of your environment. So choose
the environment that will best develop you toward
your objective. Analyse your life in terms of its
environment. Are the things around you helping
you toward success - or are they holding you
back? (Clement Stone) - catherine.grout_at_kcl.ac.uk