JISC
We have been involved in a number of JISC projects where our main input was consultancy, rather than software, These include:
Working with Seb Schmoller and Nicky Ferguson, we won a competitive tender to do a study of personalisation technologies for use in the JISC Information Environment. Neil Smith led on this project for K-Int, contributing the literature review and providing the main technical input to the study. We completed this work in July 2004. The HTML version of the study is available from Nicky Ferguson's website. Since then we have re-visited this work, running a workshop for JISC to provide input to policy development around new funding programmes.
- Resource Discovery Review (2006)
We worked as part of a team led by Nicky Derguson to review JISC's Resource Discovery Services (COPAC, ZETOC, SUNCAT and Archives Hub). Partners included Seb & Nicky (again) plus Eric Lease Morgan, and others. Neil Smith of k-int worked closely with Eric and Nicky on the advisory phase of the project which made 56 general and specific recommendations, both for the services and also for the key national players such as JISC, The British Library, the RIN etc.
This project, led by Nicky Feguson, involved an examination of over 30 JISC-funded/identified projects and on over 70 papers and outputs from these projects. Our main role was to review technical findings and recommendations.
Once again led by Nicky Ferguson, this project looked at the case for consistent and structured metadata from the point of view of resource discovery. The study concluded that, in many cases, a minimum set of metadata might be enough to start with: (e.g.) title, creator, link to object and rights statement. In order to express consistent collection policies, repositories need to have those policies clear, and that human-crafted, structured metadata is only worthwhile in specific, fairly well-defined circumstances (eg, non-text items). It also made a strong case for more work in the area of automatic metadata creation.