New discovery project for EDINA and Mimas

Discovery to Delivery at EDINA and Mimas is a collaborative project between the two JISC National Data Centres to improve the quality of the user experience for UK researchers and students in their attempts to search for and access academic content.

For service users, direct access to scholarly content will be much simpler, aided by a consistency in approach to authentication and presentation of licensing restrictions across the services. The first steps aim to integrate Shibboleth into the Copac and Zetoc services.

The project will also investigate the development of personalisation and aggregation tools. Initially, the project team will investigate how Shibboleth authentication might be a mechanism for delivering lightweight adaptive personalisation of services (e.g. localised views on content).

Mimas and EDINA will also consult with personalisation project teams, within JISC and beyond, to determine the best practice approach to data-sharing in a Web 2.0 context.

For aggregation, Mimas will be working with colleagues at EDINA to scope a 'Scholarly Communications Portal'. This work will investigate user requirements for a single point of access to a range of JISC bibliographic services.

Colleagues at both data centres will examine issues such as integration into existing environments (e.g. institutional library websites, other portals) as well as the requirements for personalisation and Web 2.0 features.

Further details are available on the EDINA and JISC project websites: