Catherine Grout

1
Collection Description a step on the road to
cultural change through technology? ____________

• Catherine Grout
• Assistant Director for Development, JISC/DNER
• catherine.grout_at_kcl.ac.uk

2
Why should we invest in Collection Description?

• 1. Importance to technical interoperability
  within an Information Environment building a
  common environment in the UK and looking beyond
• Building block for interoperability in a diverse
  environment
• JISC wishes to build this with a range of others
• 2. Importance to people and institutions
• Signifying and bringing about cultural change
• Way of leveraging the community resource
• 3. Other relevant work ongoing

3
Collection Description is important to the
development of the JISC/DNER

• JISC is building an Information Environment in
  the UK fit to serve the needs of FE and HE
• Wouldnt it be great if we all described things
  in the same way then everyone would know where
  and what they were?
• This is not a new problem

4
What 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)

5
Current service environment
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
6
Searching in the Future
Content
Web
Web
Web
Web
Authentication
Broker or Aggregator
Authorisation
Collection Description
End-user is automatically presented with
relevant resources through relevant channels
Portal
Service Desc.
Thesauri
User Profiles
End-user
7
How will Collection Description help?

• We are aiming to build a source of high quality
  collection descriptions accessible for searching
  by machines and people (Shared Services
  Programme)
• Consistent description will mean that all on-line
  services, portal providers, content providers,
  and also end users will have consistent metadata
  about available collections
• This is an important step on the way to making
  seamless searching by a user actually work

8
The human factors..

• Electronic environments enshrine the idea of
  sharing and enhanced access
• The availability of more CLDs will mean that
  user awareness of available collections will be
  significantly increased
• In the future increased interoperability will
  mean that users will be able to access these from
  all kinds of formal and informal learning
  contexts

9
More human factors..

• Collection descriptions will come from a variety
  of contexts and will so contribute to a very rich
  and significant resourcefor learning and
  research
• Communities and institutions have rich assets we
  need to make the hidden visible
• This idea of adding and making community assets
  more visible is dear to the heart of many
  significant national initiatives, JISC/DNER,
  Culture Online, UFI and UK online centres
• Focus is vital to support human factors as well
  as technology

10
Ongoing relevant work

• Short study is just underway lead by MIMAS to
  scope a collection description service for FE and
  HE and potentially others
• Starting with RSLP and Archive Hub descriptions
• Examining idea of extending it to all kind of
  electronic collections
• Does collection description need to be coupled
  with service description?

11
Ongoing relevant work

• The JISC has a commitment to providing collection
  descriptions as part of a service environment in
  the future
• Would welcome wider partnerships to achieve this
  and to build the range of collections available
  within it
• Interest within e-Europe in building a
  pan-European directory of relevant digitisation
  projects highly relevant in this context

12
Why its worth it..

• There are a lot of complicated issues in making
  this work effectively definition of scope of
  activity, implementation and use of schema,
  intellectual challenges
• Its worth it because
• Its about more than technology and improving
  searching
• It can clearly be a cross-sectoral,
  cross-boundary activity
• Its about cultural change and harnessing the
  best aspects of what the electronic environment
  has to offer