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

2
Summary

• 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

3
The 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)

4
What 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

5
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)

6
Current 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
7
IE what the user is doing
Content (local and remote)
End-user
MLE/VLE
8
The 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
9
Technical 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
10
How? 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

11
How? 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)

12
What 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?)

13
Whats 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

14
Challenge 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?

15
Facilitating 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

16
Facilitating 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

17
Facilitating 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

18
Challenge 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
19
Problems 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

20
Problems 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!
21
The 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.
22
Integrating 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
23
Alternate 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
24
A 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?)
25
RE-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
26
Very 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??

27
Challenge 3 taking advantage of a welcome
convergence
28
The 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

29
The 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

30
Why 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!

31
The 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