Newsline from EDINA
March 2004: Volume 9, Issue 1

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Profile and Conditions

EDINA has been carrying out a short study for the JISC into two possible shared services for the JISC Information Environment: one on Institutional Profiling and the other on Terms and Conditions.

These service components have been proposed as possible shared services within the JISC Information Environment (IE), providing part of the infrastructure upon which other services may be built. In broad terms, the services provide:

• an Institutional Profiling service which resolvers will inspect to discover information on institutional services, and preferences for OpenURL resolution;
• a Terms and Conditions service which provides machine-readable information about rights held in resources in the JISC IE.

The project seeks to help solve the appropriate copy problem for electronic resources: many information objects (such as journal articles) are available from more than one vendor, each governed by different access policy and conditions of use.

Conventional URL links are static and do not reflect the different rights enjoyed by users according to their institutional affiliation. Third-party services which provide links to information resources require knowledge of institutional rights in order to direct users towards the appropriate service in each case.

The study will attempt:

• to define the functionality required;
• to explore how such services could be implemented;
• to discuss how they might operate and interact with portals and other Information Environment services.

The study will take into consideration the various users, institutional practice and operational issues.

See the web site for more information about this study, or contact Sandy Shaw, Project Manager, sandy.shaw@ed.ac.uk.