Information Takes Over

The JISC are asking for someone to conduct a Strategic Review of JISC Resource Discovery Services.

(Paul Miller : Panlibus)I wonder about the extent to which end users continue to find the distinction between the types of resources offered by these services [Miller mentions Archives Hub, COPAC, SUNCAT Zetoc, OpenURL Router, GetRef] and those from something like the Resource Discovery Network (RDN) sensible? Is it time to go further than ’simply’ seeking “convergence and economies of scale” across such similar services as these? Indeed, before I opened the Word document, I’d assumed that the ITT probably was for (yet another) review of the RDN…

As someone who has worked in an academic environment, and in an art college too, I can vouch for the fact that students as end users invariably do NOT know which resource to turn to. And even as a Librarian, the choice is sometimes mind boggleingly huge.

What will the report report? Off the top of my head, here are my own reccomendations:

1. Open up currently closed services so that the resources can be discovered by anyone, using a variety of methods, both native site interfaces, and web services of varying flavours.
2. Get each individual service to publish its terms of availability (access requirements, available protocols, etc) in the form of a machine readable document. This could then alow a ‘mash-up’ in a web app that used other directory services (perhaps Talis’s Silkworm, or holdings information, SFX/OpenURL resolvers, and the like) to query the databases against a user’s defined needs.
3. Allow the community – students, researchers, academics, interested public – to add their own information, and to moderate the information that is already their. Reviews and pointers to other information sources are always useful.
4. Mix in some Allert capabilities using RSS technologies that can be shared by human and machine.
5. I’ll leave any recommendations of cost savings to the report, but we should be wary of diluting specialist knowledge areas, while perhaps refocussing or repurposing existing services.

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