Overview of project tags

SWORD Project has developed a lightweight protocol for depositing content from one location to another. It stands for Simple Web-service Offering Repository Deposit and is a profile of the Atom Publishing Protocol (known as APP or ATOMPUB). SWORD has been funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) to develop the SWORD profile and a number of demonstration implementations. The SWORD vision is 'lowering the barriers to deposit', principally for depositing content (any content!) into repositories, but potentially for depositing into any system which wants to receive content from remote sources. (Excerpt from this source)

Total Cost of Ownership is a method of identifying and understanding all of the costs associated with the acquisition, use and support of ICT, with the aim of improving decision-making about future ICT investment and deployment. The first UK-based project that looked at TCO in schools was completed by Becta in August 2002. The TCO model quantifies not only the visible costs but makes an assessment of the hidden staff costs where staff are informally supporting the technology and their peers. In addition to an assessment of the inputs, the model assesses a range of outcomes including user satisfaction, service reliability and appropriateness. The purpose of this project, which is being undertaken by Becta, is to develop the school TCO model for use within the FE sector and help colleges to identify and keep track of the detail of the full range of cost factors involved. It will also enable them to maintain an overview on broader issues such as sustainability and best value. The development of an on-line system to support the use of this model will allow all colleges to follow a structured methodology for identifying costs and inputting this information into an online database. A sub-set of this data will form a comparative benchmark database that will allow any college to benchmark their results externally against other colleges and sustainability models, and internally between departments and user groups. Project start date: 2003-05-01. Project end date: 2004-07-31. (Excerpt from this source)

The aim of the ticTOCs project is to develop a service which will transform journal current awareness by making it easy for academics and researchers to find, display, store, combine and reuse tables of contents from multiple publishers in a personalisable web based environment. JISC is the primary funder of the ticTOCs project, which will run for two years from April 2007. The ticTOCs Project will develop a freely available service which will: - Enable academics and researchers to discover, subscribe to, search within, be alerted to, aggregate, personalise, export and re-use standardised table of contents RSS feeds. - Facilitate the re-use of aggregated journal TOC content on a subject or topic basis. - Enable library and information services, commercial and open access journal publishers, gateways, content aggregators and journal directories to allow their users to embed journal TOC RSS feeds into a web-based interface. - Encourage the production of standardised journal TOC RSS feeds, and thereby facilitate their interoperability and improve the quality of their data. Project start date: 2007-04-01. Project end date: 2009-03-31. (Excerpt from this source)

UK terrestrial broadcast radio and television provides much material of value to further and higher education learning and teaching. Since May 1990, all UK HEIs have been recording programmes legitimately under Section 35 of the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988 and some academic libraries hold thousands of such recordings. There are, however, a significant number of gaps that when combined make tracing and accessing copies of broadcasts more difficult than it should be: radio has generally been ignored; relevant television programmes may have been overlooked; general programme output has not been catalogued and indexed from a learning and teaching perspective; different institutions catalogue according to different rules; and access to catalogues and recorded materials may be restricted. TRILT will address these gaps by providing in-depth data on television and radio broadcasts with the opportunity for relating this to other subject information through the DNER. TRILT will also assist in the integration of moving images and sound in learning and teaching, including providing the foundation for the online delivery of encoded sound and moving images. The specific objectives are to: Install within the DNER a fully searchable index and guide to all major English language radio and television channels receivable in the UK, including regional variations. It will also carry additional content including reviews, bibliographic information, still images and other information. It will be provided five days in advance of transmission and archived with the added data being improved both pre- and post-transmission Offer the opportunity to integrate moving image metadata sources and delivery services available to FE and HE ; Provide a framework which will create opportunities for direct connection to moving image sources to be streamed online or for delivery via physical media where connectivity/traffic issues impede online supply; Provide links to sources of film and/or video copies of programmes post-transmission, including non-theatrical distributors of video and sound recordings and the BUFVC's Off-Air Recording Back-Up Service; Provide links to commercial publishing partners; Indicate related moving image material available in analogue or encoded digital form. Project start date: 2000-08-01. Project end date: 2003-07-31. (Excerpt from this source)

Information Services currently maintain separate ATHENS usernames and passwords for all students by automatically generating bulk upload requests from our user registration database. We had been looking to use the ATHENS devolved authentication mechanism to enable staff and students to use their local (eDirectory) usernames, but are now planning to use Shibboleth for this instead. This would make life easier for our staff and students, as they would not need to keep track of separate usernames and passwords, and decrease the risk of misuse of ATHENS resources. For Information Services, it would remove the need to maintain the hand-crafted code required for bulk uploading at the, hopefully lesser, cost of deploying the Eduserv implementation of Shibboleth Origin, with assistance as required from the Middleware Assisted Takeup Service. It will also give us experience of using Shibboleth, which is seen as an emerging standard for authentication and authorisation. In outline, the plan is to deploy the Eduserv implementation of Shibboleth Origin, with assistance as required from the Middleware Assisted Takeup Service, to provide authentication and authorisation attributes from our eDirectory, with a view to rolling this out for first year students and new staff in September 2005. If successful, we will look at the issues involved in getting staff and students with existing ATHENS usernames to change to using their local ones, and at providing single sign-on to ATHENS resources from our portal. We will document and disseminate our experience in a case study and present it to at least the EMUIT forum. Project start date: 2005-04-01. Project end date: 2006-03-31. (Excerpt from this source)

VDML addresses three problems relating to minority language departments. The first is minority language students' limited exposure to the spoken target language. Secondly, good teaching materials for learners of minority languages are often scarce. Finally, the small size of such departments has consequences for both students and teachers. Students have limited opportunities to work with others and are denied the peer support that students in larger departments can take for granted. Language teachers often have to develop teaching materials in isolation. The overall aim of the project is to develop a framework to support students and teachers of minority languages. It will create new learning materials, adding value to current Internet resources as well as developing new resources. It will also provide students and teachers with a working environment, a 'virtual department', in which to interact. Using Danish as an example, the specific objectives are to: Review the support needs of minority language learners by consulting staff and students; Create new, task-focused resources for Danish language learners using current Internet materials; Develop new teacher-authored material for intermediate and advanced learners of Danish; Create opportunities for students and teachers to communicate informally; Increase opportunities for students and teachers to work collaboratively; Embed the new resources into the day-to-day work of pilot departments; Present the work to the HE community in the form of a framework or model and encourage its adoption by other groups of departments. Project start date: 2000-10-01. Project end date: 2002-09-30. (Excerpt from this source)

Continuing from the work of the VERSIONS project the project will provide a common infrastructure for the naming and understanding of issues relating to versions of scholarly works. The results of an online survey of repository users about current use of digital objects and about the versioning questions that arise will be used to inform a draft framework, to be developed through an expert working group comprising of members from the project partners and other key stakeholders. The Version Identification Framework will be recommended to the JISC and digital repository communities through a community acceptance plan and a dissemination campaign. Aims: To provide a framework for the identification of versions of digital objects in digital repositories; To inform and support the work of other JISC projects and services in this area; To disseminate the framework widely in order to achieve community acceptance. Specific objectives will include: Discovering how researchers, teachers, learners and others are using digital objects and managing their personal digital resources; Gaining community acceptance by convening a working review group; Discovering the range of digital objects being used and the creation, revision, dissemination and storage processes that content creators go through to share and re-use of digital content. Project start date: 2007-07-10. Project end date: 2008-05-09. (Excerpt from this source)

Wikisource is an online library of free content textual sources, operated by the Wikimedia Foundation. Its aims are to harbour all forms of free text, in many languages. It also provides translation efforts to this end. (Excerpt from Wikipedia article: Wikisource)

This project will draw together a small team of academics, teachers and data archivists/disseminators in order to create and pilot new data-driven resources. The small-scale set of online learning objects teaching materials to be developed will be based upon British Election Study data which provide a unique source of information for students wishing to explore a range of contemporary political issues in Britain. The proposal is aimed at first year undergraduate and 'A' level or equivalent FE courses in political science, but could be extended more generically to all introductory social studies courses. The resources will be piloted and evaluated in an HE University course and an FE 'A' level course. By using the British Election Survey as its data base, the Britain and Politics module will also "deliver" a unique learning experience to the student. Project start date: 2003-03-01. Project end date: 2004-04-30. (Excerpt from this source)