Overview of project tags

The ISLE project seeks to develop a sustainable model of effective FE/HE collaboration, to improve the education experience and to considerably reduce current problems in widening access such as retention and progression. The project proposes to move the concept of PDP forward through the integration of various blended learning tools (e.g. VLEs, ePortfolios, and diagnostic assessment tools) and by developing an individualised, self-reflective learning environment for students. The emphasis is on how to get the necessary pedagogical transformations so that learners benefit through the deployment of technology to support the learning process, not on technological solutions. A range of eLearning tools currently utilised by members of the consortium, or under evaluation as part of strategic developments, will be capitalised upon with an emphasis on pedagogical transformation. Project start date: 2005-03-16. Project end date: 2007-03-31. (Excerpt from this source)

This work will investigate metadata application profile requirements for learning materials in relation to digital repositories. This follows the development of an ePrints application profile undertaken within the JISC Digital Repositories Programme and led by Andy Powell (Eduserv Foundation) and Julie Allinson (RRT UKOLN) on behalf of JISC. Application profiles for images, time based media and Geospatial are also being developed. As 'learning materials" encompass a much wider range of resource types than these other activities, and as there is a range of related specifications (e.g. Content Packaging, Learning Design, QTI) to be taken into consideration, it follows that this particular scoping study may require a different approach to that taken by the ePrints profile. It is proposed that the learning materials application profiles scoping study should synthesize and analyse the advice that is currently available to managers of repositories of educational materials who need to define a metadata element set to describing the resources in their collections. A typical collection of learning materials is likely to include a wide range of resource types (e.g. images, web pages, digital media, assessment items) all of which require description. In addition there are other factors such as accessibility and preservation that may need to be considered when describing resources. Most domains and resource types have developed their own specialised metadata and have their own perception of the minimum effort required for best practice. Project start date: 2007-12-01. Project end date: 2008-06-30. (Excerpt from this source)

The Placement Learning and Assessment Toolkit project acknowledges that practice-based learning and the mentoring process would be improved with tools which allowed on-the-spot entry of results of assessments, such that feedback was given and follow-up actions were decided immediately. The project aims to provide a mobile learning toolkit to support practice-based learning, mentoring, and assessment, and to add mobile assessment tools to the e-framework. The project will develop a 'back office' infrastructure to support the deployment of the proposed toolkit and two selected tools. Phase 1 development comprises toolkit analysis, design, and implementation, followed by pilot and evaluation within a simulated environment based in the School of Nursing and Midwifery. Phases 2 and 3 involve the application and implementation of the toolkit within real clinical contexts associated with the University of Southampton Foundation Degree in Health and Social Care located within the Health Care Innovation Unit, Thames Valley University, and Bournemouth and Poole College. Phase 3 is funded entirely by the partner institutions, following the first two years which are partially JISC-funded. Project start date: 2006-09-01. Project end date: 2009-08-01. (Excerpt from this source)

myExperiment is an open source Web 2.0 repository solution for the born-digital items arising in contemporary research practice. Carefully tailored to the needs of researchers, myExperiment makes it really easy to discover, use, store, share and curate items, to build communities and to form relationships. The myExperiment Repository Enhancement Project is building on this success to deliver an enhanced repository which is coupled seamlessly with EPrints at University of Southampton and the eScholar institutional repository at The University of Manchester (a customised version of Fedora). During the enhancement project we are evolving Packs into more sophisticated "Research Objects" which support replayable, repeatable, reproducible, reusable, repurposable and reliable research. We believe that in the future the sharing of such Research Objects will enhance and ultimately replace the sharing of academic publications in research practice. Project start date: 2009-04-01. Project end date: 2011-03-01. (Excerpt from this source)

The project will develop a pilot service which provides subject resource discovery across a series of repositories of interest to the engineering learning and research communities. This pilot will be used as a test-bed to explore the practical issues that would be encountered when considering the possibility of full scale subject resource discovery services. Issues to be investigated include: the range and availability of actual and potential digital repository sources; exploration of cultural barriers to the use of repositories in the subject community, functionality of software tools; advocacy to encourage participation of repository providers; maintenance issues; interactions with infrastructural shared services; enhancing metadata quality; embedding and reuse of resource discovery services; improving search and browse results presentation; service profiling for particular audiences. Project start date: 2005-06-01. Project end date: 2007-05-31. (Excerpt from this source)

This project will address the area of interactions between repositories of primary research data, the laboratory environment in which they operate and repositories of research publications into which they ultimately feed (through documented interpretation and analysis of the results and in explicit linking and citation of the data sets). It will develop prototype services and tools to address the issues of working with, disseminating and reporting on experimental data. In collaboration with scientific equipment manufacturers the project will develop methods to make raw experimental data available and richly annotated with metadata, as it is generated in the laboratory. The possibilities for aggregating heterogeneous raw experimental data from different sources and experiments, via effective management of the repository for the laboratory, will also be explored and prototype tools developed to enable, manipulate and derive reports for publication purposes. It will also engage in discussions with publishers and societies to determine anticipated requirements. Project start date: 2005-06-01. Project end date: 2007-05-31. (Excerpt from this source)

The core technical deliverable of the project will be the RIOJA tool, which will support automated interactions between journals and public repositories. The tool will be implemented for the arXiv1 subject repository. A demonstrator journal in Astrophysics and Cosmology, using Cornell University's open source DPubS software 2 , interfacing with and overlaid on the arXiv subject repository, will be constructed. The content of the demonstrator journal will be test papers, submitted to and housed on the arXiv server, and the demonstrator will illustrate the use of the RIOJA tool to facilitate the overlay of peer review onto repository content. RIOJA will also explore social and economic aspects of building certification onto repositories in support of the creation of overlay journals. To accompany the demonstration work, the project will carry out a survey of researchers from the field of Astrophysics and Cosmology. It will aim, as part of its exit strategy, to deliver a continuation plan for the demonstrator journal. This will be founded on a cost-recovery business model tested on the Astrophysics and Cosmology community for acceptibility. The continuation plan will include costed recommendations on digital preservation, incorporating learning from the joint UCL-British Library, JISC-funded LIFE project. Project start date: 2007-02-01. Project end date: 2008-06-30. (Excerpt from this source)

The Stargate project, based at the Centre for Digital Library Research at the University of Strathclyde, will explore the use of static repositories as a means of exposing publisher metadata to OAI-based disclosure, discovery and alerting services within the JISC IE and beyond. Static repositories were developed as an alternative to fully fledged OAI-compliant repositories and have been implemented successfully within the Open Language Archives Community as a means of widening participation in OAI-based systems and services. The project builds on the successful use of static repositories by HaIRST project in JISC's FAIR programme. It also builds on the technical architecture developed by Heriot Watt University in their PALS I project OAI-compliant metadata repository for a specialist publisher of e-journals. The project's primary aim will be to lower the technical barriers to the implementation of OAI-compliant repositories, thereby enabling small publishers of electronic resources to participate more readily in OAI-based disclosure and delivery services within the JISC IE and beyond. Specifically, it will implement a series of static repositories of publisher metadata, demonstrate the interoperability of the exposed metadata through harvesting and cross-searching via a static repository gateway, and conduct a critical evaluation of the static repository approach with publishers and service providers. The project has two key objectives to: build an interoperability demonstrator based around the static repository gateway developed in the HaIRST project and dovetailing with the OAI-based architecture developed in PALS I; develop tools and guidelines that will facilitate the implementation of static repositories by small publishers that wish to expose their metadata to OAI-based services. Project start date: 2005-10-01. Project end date: 2006-05-31. (Excerpt from this source)

The contemporary experience of users on the Web has undergone marked transformations owing to trends such as Web 2.0, Cloud Computing and the associated user-centered propensities. These transformations have had significant impacts on user experience (UX) and the expectation of how digital libraries should be facilitated. This project (UX2.0) addresses the requirement of repositories to fully engage the end users who have become less tolerant of badly design system and expect Web 2.0 experience as norms. Project start date: 2009-04-01. Project end date: 2011-03-01. (Excerpt from this source)