CERIF UK coordination meeting

Brigitte Jörg, the CERIF National Coordinator at UKOLN organised a meeting last week to identify priorities for a UK CERIF roadmap building on current and ongoing activities. Brigitte’s blog includes a very useful slide of the current CERIF UK landscape – outputs from key initiatives were presented and discussed.

There is an ongoing need for alignment: given the requirements of different projects, and that CERIF can be interpreted in different ways, there are inevitable slight variations in mappings eg between CERIF in Action (CIA) and Gateway to Research. The need for collaborative working arose several times – the CIA project has experienced the advantages of institutions, funders and vendors working closely together. Stability is also a key requirement for successful software development (REF was cited as an excellent example of stability, with very few revisions); however research information management has been changing very rapidly recently, with many additional system requirements coming at one time. As ever, the issue of data quality came up, this time in discussion of GtR handling of many layers of data.

There are key UK sustainability issues to address, in the context of Jisc funding for RIM and CERIF coordination and support at UKOLN ending in June/July 2013. euroCRIS and CASRAI are potential homes for outputs, but investment is needed to support ongoing coordination effort.