12. Projects

12.1 Learning and Teaching

Activity in the high profile area of learning and teaching (L&T) continued during 2008/2009. Of particular importance was the Jorum service, in which EDINA and Mimas worked collaboratively with a number of key organisations.

Jorum

Jorum was funded initially as a keep-safe for content created as output by projects and institutions in receipt of JISC investment. The Jorum service provides the JISC community with key benefits, including access to reusable and repurposable resources created by and for the community, and secure data management for institutions wishing to share content.

With the announcement of planned new Jorum services made last year, Jorum spent much of 2008/2009 understanding more about Open Educational Resources (OER) and making practical preparations to support sharing of open content. Jorum has been re-aligning the current service to incorporate the new services that will enable the sharing of both open content and content already deposited in the service that is already being shared under institutional licensing. An appraisal of the software platform resulted in an implementation of DSpace alongside that of intraLibrary to support all the new service options.

Jorum devised three enabling licensing schemes to support the new service options. These are JorumOpen, through which learning materials can be shared for anyone to use under Creative Commons licences; JorumEducationUK where this is a need to restrict availability of materials to members of UK Further and Higher Education Institutions; and JorumPlus for sharing content with more restrictive terms of licence (for example where material is licensed via JISC Collections or from third parties).

The UKOER Programme, a pilot activity for 30 projects representing over 80 universities and colleges, was officially launched by JISC and the Higher Education Academy on 24 June 2009. Jorum provided a tool to accept deposit of materials in advance of the new service options becoming available. The Jorum team, as one of a number of support agencies, provided a Community Bay to provide an area for those with interests in sharing, reusing and repurposing learning resources.

Jorum also worked with other groups and projects to make their learning materials available as 'open content' including JISC Digitisation projects, RePRODUCE projects, and organisations like the RLO-CETL.

At the end of July 2009, 429 UK FE and HE institutions were signed up for Jorum User and 100 signed up for Jorum Contributor. There were 2,361 published resources in the repository and 6,216 users were registered. Training courses were run for the RePRODUCE projects, a Jorum Forum took place in December 2008 and other outreach events were attended, promotion and support materials were developed and updated, and the Jorum website improved.

Inter-working for Learning and Teaching

EDINA continued to work closely with other UK-based groups active in various aspects of L&T, including the following:

• Mimas
• Centre for Educational Technology Interoperability Specifications (CETIS)
• HE Academy and its Subject Centres
• Centres of Excellence in Learning and Teaching (CETLs)
• JISC Regional Support Centres for FE
• Intute
• Netskills

Jorum staff had regular communication with other projects in the wider JISC community through attendance at conferences such as ALT-C and workshops such as those run by the CETLs.

Regarding international collaboration, JISC had key strategic partnerships with the National Science Foundation (NSF) in the USA, the Department of Education, Science and Training (DEST) in Australia, and SURF in the Netherlands. JISC viewed Jorum as a key strategic area in which these partnerships were expressed. The Jorum team maintained contact with the team establishing a national repository services in the Republic of Ireland.

12.2 Projects on Middleware Infrastructure

Shibboleth Development and Support Services: Access Management Expert Group

During 2008/2009 the Access Management Expert Group was active in its collaboration with Internet2 (I2), attending I2 meetings and contributing to and advancing shibboleth technology. The following software was developed by members of the expert group and released into the international Shibboleth community:

• Version 2 Windows-based Quick IdP Installer. Like version 1, version 2 of the IdP installer provides a mechanism to enable inexperienced users to get started quickly but includes more options at installation time – so requiring less manual manipulation of configuration files. Version 2 supports the SAML 2 protocol.
• Discovery Service (next generation WAYF). The Discovery Service is designed to allow the exploitation of the more sophisticated features within the SAML 2 protocol to support discovery. It also includes more intelligent searching for the user to select an IdP – a necessary requirements as federations get larger. Supporting the SAML 2 protocol provides the foundation to allow an SP to embed a WAYF interface within their login page to effectively hide the existence of a separate Discovery Server from their users – an idea originally devised by SWITCH.

The Expert group also worked with a small subgroup of Internet2 to develop a technical architecture to support a practical method of inter-federation working. The work involved the development of an Aggregation Engine to allow the swapping of authorised metadata between federations with the intention that a prototype Aggregation Engine will be developed early in 2010.

The Expert Group also supported the UK Access Management federation by providing strategic advice and guidance to the federation operator JANET(UK), developing tools for use by the SDSS team at EDINA providing technical support to federation members and acting as the final authority for advice on otherwise intractable questions relating to the deployment or use of Shibboleth technology.

12.3 Projects on Infrastructure for Journals and Articles

EDINA has been responsible for a number of projects in the JISC Information Environment (IE) for serials at both title and article level. Those continuing from 2007/2008 included the Scoping Study for a Low Cost OpenURL Resolver for the JISC IE, GetRef and GetCopy. EDINA also continued to be involved in the HILT project, led by the University of Strathclyde.

PEPRS

Piloting an E-journals Preservation Registry Service (PEPRS) is a two year project, which started in August 2008. The objective is to investigate and set-up a pilot service to provide librarians and policy makers with information on provision for continuing access to the total corpus of scholarly work published in e-journals.

Central to PEPRS is access to appropriate data created by the various agencies who have taken responsibility for preserving electronic journals and providing access to them. The agencies involved in PEPRS are: Portico, LOCKSS, CLOCKSS, e-Depot (Koninklijke Bibliotheek – the National Library of the Netherlands) and the British Library.

EDINA's project partner is the International Standard Serial Number International Centre (Paris). The ISSN IC agreed to provide the project with access to the ISSN Register, a database containing details of all journals which have been assigned an ISSN, of which approximately 60,000 are electronic journals. It is the intention to match up records of electronic journals which have been preserved by the agencies mentioned above with the information about those journals held in the Register thereby helping to provide users of the service with comprehensive and accurate information.

The work during 2008/2009 has taken two main approaches. These have been contact with agency staff to ascertain their willingness to become involved in PEPRS and the development of a series of web pages as a basis for a prototype system. All the agencies agreed to participate and accordingly interviews have been held with staff to explore in detail views on the role of PEPRS and specific questions about workflows informing users about modes of access.

It was deemed very important to inform people about the project as early as possible. Accordingly papers on the project were published in two journals, and a presentation was made at a major conference. A paper, based on the presentation, has also been submitted for publication.

Pilot for Ensuring Continuity of access via NESLi2 - PECAN

In order to assist UK HEIs with the procurement of electronic scholarly material, the JISC and JISC Collections support the scheme called NESLi2. The NESLi2 Model Licence contains a post cancellation clause but it is important that methods are devised to support its use, including a central local load facility for e-journal material. The PECAN project, a five month study which started July 2009 is to investigate whether this framework could be extended to provide the basis for more robust post-cancellation access arrangements between publishers and consumers of e-journal material.

The project envisages two facilities: a registry of entitlement (which has reliable information on the journal content that has been subscribed to by libraries via NESLi2) and a secure virtual archive (providing secure and robust access to back journal content). The project firstly aims to investigate the required policy and procedures needed to establish an accurate registry of subscription information and, secondly it aims to investigate and propose a candidate technical infrastructure for a central UK journal archive that would provide appropriate controlled access to licensed material, in a robust and secure manner.

Personalisation

This seven month project which began in February 2009 has been exploring mechanisms to support personalisation across the JISC IE. It follows on from the Developing Personalisation for the Information Environment (DPIE) programme of work, where the final reports from the DPIE1 and DPIE2 projects highlighted tagging and personalised search and recommendation engines as areas for further work. Two 'rapid' demonstrators were designed and built to demonstrate:

• Location-based searching for JISC IE services: by taking location information on resources (and services) and using these to sort and rank the results of searches on the basis of geographic proximity to a user-defined location.
• Management and use of service-content references via a shared middleware service: by investigating use of a reference linking knowledge-base, with a focus on multimedia resources, that could act as middleware for personalisation actions by services into the JISC IE.

Discovery to Delivery at EDINA and Mimas

This one year project which began August 2008 is a collaboration between the two JISC National Data Centres (NDCs) – EDINA and Mimas. It responded to the proposal put forward by JISC, RLUK and the BL which requested projects where discovery services could work together effectively as pieces of the UK e-infrastructure to help provide seamless access and delivery.

The project developed functionality such that users could discover resources on the existing Copac and SUNCAT services and then link from journal titles to Tables of Contents for issues of a journal (using Zetoc) as well as being presented with a series of options which will link to systems and services offering Interlibrary Lending, licensed electronic resources, free resources and pay to view resources. A Scholarly Communications website has been developed as a potential means to gather and present information in this key area.

EM-Loader

EM-Loader (Extracting Metadata to Load for Open Access Deposit), a one year project started in March 2008, was funded as part of the JISC Repositories and Preservation Programme and carried out in partnership with Textensor Limited. It demonstrated middleware that enabled easier deposit of research papers through batch upload of structured bibliographic metadata from existing sources. It also had the potential to enhance metadata deposit through transfers and re-directs to institutional repositories (IRs).

It contributed to the work of the Common Repository Interfaces Group (CRIG) in the provision of shared infrastructure for digital repositories by taking forward into practice ideas put forward for a 'deposit engine'. It used a web services interface based on the SWORD deposit API to demonstrate proof of concept by connecting two existing services: the Depot and PublicationsList.org. The new workflow and sample user interface developed by the project could help researchers maintain their publications list web page (such as that at PublicationsList.org) which would then be sent in batch mode to a repository (such as the Depot) by pressing a 'Deposit' button, bringing the effort required to send all publications to a repository to just a few clicks.

Shared OpenURL data infrastructure investigation

Many UK universities and colleges maintain OpenURL link servers, which direct users to potential sources of scholarly content. These transactions can be logged and then have the potential to be used in various ways. The MESUR project has shown some of the possibilities that aggregations of such data might offer.

The aim of this short project, which started in December 2008 and completed in July 2009 was to scope a UK architecture for the analysis of OpenURL linking data, with the architecture intended to provide a basis for ongoing services.

Scoping Study for a Low Cost OpenURL Resolver for the JISC IE

Building on experience gained from GetCopy, this study, which completed in 2008, reviewed the requirement and means of delivering a low-cost OpenURL resolver service for the JISC IE which would provide means for staff and students at all UK universities and colleges to locate the 'appropriate copy' for a given bibliographic reference. It was envisaged that such a service would also be deployable from subject and other thematic portals in the JISC IE as well as from library portals. The study scoped the feasibility and potential uptake of such a tool, including a gap analysis and requirements analysis. It also explored potential business models with estimated costs to support and sustain such a tool.

GetRef

The Xgrain 5/99 JOIN-UP project developed a broker for cross-searching abstracting and indexing services and electronic tables of contents services within the JISC Information Environment. The University of Stirling has used GetRef as its federated search tool for a number of years. The service was first offered in 2003/2004, and a service review has been undertaken during 2008/2009 to more accurately ascertain the ongoing and future need, and requirements for such a broker.

GetCopy

The ZBLSA JOIN-UP Project developed a linking tool that provided portals with the means to locate services pertaining to journals. The tool developed was used by EDINA under the brand name 'GetCopy'. It connected discovery of a reference to a journal article with services providing the most appropriate full-text copy in printed or electronic form. GetCopy was designed to be lightweight and business-neutral by operating on existing permissions; GetCopy simply determined the location of appropriate copies, and directed the end-user accordingly.

GetCopy provided a default service for users who were directed to the OpenURL Router, but whose institutions did not have a registered OpenURL resolver.

HILT (High-Level Thesaurus)

The HILT project aims were to ensure that users of the JISC Information Environment could find appropriate learning, research and information resources by subject search and browse. In a distributed environment where many service providers use different subject schemes to describe their resources, HILT provided data on individual subject schemes (broader terms, narrower terms, hierarchy information, preferred and non-preferred terms) and interoperability data (usually intellectual or automated mappings between schemes). These data could then be used by the information services to aid users in a variety of ways - for example, improving recall by enriching the set of terms known to a user by providing synonyms and related terms, and by improving precision by providing the best terms for a subject search in a remote service.

Phase Four of this project, led by the Centre for Digital Library Research at the University of Strathclyde, ran from April 2007 – May 2009. An initial entry-level machine-to-machine (M2M) service was built, tested for user requirements and retrieval effectiveness, then refined in line with findings, and extended to permit the use of a range of distributed terminology services for interoperability. The level of need and interest amongst JISC services in respect of an operational service was determined and the cost and specification of a future operational phase of the service was specified.

EDINA provided programming support for development of the SRW client; advice on performance and interface issues; hosted the SRW server; and tested embedding of HILT in a development version of the Depot.

12.4 Multimedia Projects

Visual and Sound Materials (VSM) Portal Project

Started in September 2005 over two phases, with a scoping study followed by the implementation of a portal demonstrator, the project is developing a national UK portal for both time-based media and image collections dedicated to the needs of the Further and Higher Education communities. Post-Phase Two discussion with JISC about future funding and development of the portal continued in 2008. In Feb 2009 JISC funded a Phase Three, to run until autumn 2009. Further JISC funding for the project until 2011 will be available but details are yet to be confirmed.

The portal does not hold any media assets itself but allows users to search for such assets from a growing number of collections and services (currently15) using metadata held locally and "cross-searched"

Phase Three activity has included incorporating the Wellcome Image and British Library Sound archives into the portal; contacting JISC Digitisation Phase 2 projects; seeking legal opinion on inclusion of YouTube content; application for a Flickr API token and incorporating YouTube into the portal. Work is currently underway with an external consultant to develop a new brand identity for the portal.

12.5 Geospatial Development Projects

EuroGeoNames

EuroGeoNames (EGN) was an European e-Contentplus-funded 30-month project (from 1 September 2006). It developed a federated gazetteer infrastructure, local services and a middleware service architecture for pan-European access to official geographical names data. EDINA assumed responsibility for developing the gazetteer data model and the application schema.

The project consortium brought together partners from the public, academic and private sectors, embracing the full 'value chain', from data providers to technology partners to value added service retailers. The project ended in February 2009 and was considered a great success by the European Commission. The project is now being taken forward as a service by Eurogeographics, a body which represents the national mapping agencies of European member states.

GeoDigRef

This project investigated the utility of enhancing existing digitised resources through better indexing of resources. Specifically, it looked at how geographic referencing of resources via automatic tools (the 'GeoParser') might be useful in developing improved geographical search capacities across collections. Searching for resources by place is increasingly common on the web e.g. Google Maps/Earth, Bing, GeoFlickr etc but very few JISC funded services take advantage of this type of searching.

Using three distinct resource collections, and by building two distinct search and browse interfaces, the project showed how a new dimension to search – the 'where' aspect of resources – can be better exploited and may be added to existing collections with relative ease and at little cost. This project provided an exemplar for the broader aim of geo-enablement across the JISC Information Environment, the ultimate aim being to ensure that discovery via geography (the 'where' component of resources which is a cross-cutting constant across the majority of collections e.g. country, place name, postcode, parish name etc) becomes more widely embedded into search paradigms within the JISC IE. The project ran for six months from November 2008.

Geospatial Application Profile (GAP)

Within the Discovery to Delivery area of the JISC Repositories and Preservation Programme the need for domain specific specialist metadata profiles for purposes of search and discovery across institutional repositories was identified. Subsequently work funded by JISC commissioned a series of Application Profiles of which the Geospatial Application Profile (GAP) was one (others being the Scholarly Works Profile, Image Profile and Time Based Media Profile).

Using existing community-adopted open metadata standards, GAP leveraged well-established international standards in describing geospatial resources within a Dublin Core Application Profile.

Each of the other domain Application Profiles have as their focus the description of a particular class or genre of resources. GAP differs slightly in that it is intended to be used in conjunction with other profiles and it focuses on a specific set of characteristics (spatio-temporal) which may be applied to resources of many different types, the distinguishing characteristic being that they have some relationship with "place". This allows a rich meta-metadata model to be used in describing resources, although inter-Application-Profile harmonisation routes are still being explored by JISC.

GAP has direct relevance to the EDINA ShareGeo repository (the follow-on to the earlier GRADE project) and to the Go-Geo! Service but should be of interest to other repository owners. A GAP profile has been developed and peer reviewed. Uptake and embedding work is continuing; however, wider uptake has stalled while JISC makes a decision on whether spatial should be included within other Application Profiles.

'Geo' – Personalisation project

As part of the JISC funded work on Personalisation, EDINA has been developing a middleware location service for third-party services to use to query and set users location preferences. These preferences can then be exploited by other service providers in order to personalise their own services.

The work undertaken for the project was guided by the requirements of a simple use case:

A user is interested in locating libraries that are close to the their current location and that hold a copy of a journal article they have found using a resource discovery tool. For the purposes of the project a demonstrator was written that uses the Scholarly Communications website to identify journal articles and then uses the geolocation middleware, to return a result set geographically sorted based on their proximity to the user.

COMPASS

The Coastal Marine Perception Application for Scientific Scholarship (COMPASS) project was funded by JISC under its Knowledge Organisation and Semantic Services strand of the e-Infrastructure Programme. Led by EDINA, the project brought together a consortium consisting of experts from the Semantic Interoperability Laboratory at Münster University (Germany), the Digital Enterprise Research Institute at National University Ireland, Galway and Allworlds Geothinking. The project ran from December 2007 to June 2009.

COMPASS successfully demonstrated how an ontologically-supported knowledge infrastructure for the coastal marine environment can assist in the enhanced discovery, access and use of scientific resources such as data, journal articles, scientific models and web services. To build the knowledge infrastructure, COMPASS combined technologies and open standards in the areas of metadata, registries, ontologies and digital libraries with a focus on the geospatial domain. The knowledge infrastructure was developed with two goals in mind (i) the ability to discover resources using semantic information and (ii) the ability to interoperate on a syntactic level with other standards-based repositories.

The COMPASS project recommended that JISC endorse the fact that discovery tools underpinned by structured knowledge, in the form of ontologies, offer new and powerful options for resource discovery relative to existing approaches and that more investment should be made in this area.