Evaluation and Review

We have worked alongside partners to contribute to a number of evaluation, review and synthesis projects.  Usually, our role has been to to provide an independent 'technical' perspective to the exercise.  Consultancy projects falling into this catergory undertaken by k-int include:

• A strategic review of JISC's core resource discovery services (2006)

We worked as part of a team led by Nicky Ferguson to review JISC's Resource Discovery Services (COPAC, ZETOC, SUNCAT and Archives Hub). Partners included Seb Schmoller and Eric Lease Morgan. 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.

• Sharing eLearning Content - a synthesis and commentary (2007)

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.

• Feasibility study for JISC into approaches to improve the consistency with which repositories share material (2008)

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.