DISCOVERY TO DELIVERY

• Aims and objectives
• Project methodology
• Implications
• Deliverables
• Stakeholders
• Project team

About the project

The JISC Services Review ( CLAX Report 2006) of the core JISC funded resource discovery services (Archives Hub, Copac, SUNCAT, Zetoc) provided the following recommendations:

• More explicit links between the services should be created
• More machine-to-machine interfaces should be implemented.

• A November 2006 RIN report highlighted the difficulties which researchers face in moving between discovery and delivery, and in accessing the full versions of all the content whose existence they can discover.
• A subsequent RIN seminar, bringing together a wide range of stakeholders, brought out the need for:
  • Moving from discovery to delivery
  • Building on Copac and SUNCAT
  • Sustaining and developing UK-focused services.

The JISC, in partnership with RLUK and the British Library, wish to see how these discovery services could work together effectively as pieces of the UK e-infrastructure to help to provide seamless access and delivery.

The primary purpose of the proposed project is to develop and demonstrate how end-to-end discovery and delivery of journals and research papers can be provided at a national level. There may be other content types, such as monographs, added to the scope as the project planning develops. It will be important for the project and will need to take due cognisance of the evolving scholarly communication in the UK academic sector and to seek to offer integrated search and disclosure as far as possible. The project will be built on team work across the JISC services, BL and RLUK. There will need to be consultation and evaluation so the results can be fully understood.

The JISC Information Environment architecture and strategy seeks to offer as open and seamless access and delivery of academic content as possible. JISC has supported work within the British Library, EDINA, Mimas and RLUK to move this area forward already, for example, the Join-Up projects and Copac-Clumps interoperability project. After the above-mentioned review and discussions between partners it appears that there is a new emphasis to work to solve these issues that this project will capture to drive forward working models demonstrating how a discovery to delivery mechanism will work across and utilising the current services referenced above.