Together with JISC, the Innovation Support Centre recognises the growing importance of CERIF in the research information management landscape in the UK – our own Rosemary Russell has recently published a study on this.

Brigitte has a very high level of expertise with CERIF and will bring strong information management skills and experience to the Innovation Support Centre. We have already worked with Brigitte a little: in particular, she was a speaker at our recent CERIF Tutorial in Bath.

We look forward to working with her!

(We’ll be posting more about the CERIF Support Project in due course)

Introducing Technical Foundations

The Technical Foundations web site is an important developing strand of ISC activities at UKOLN. It is aimed at those involved in technical innovation in the higher and further education sectors in the UK, and features a growing collection of resources to support the selection and use of information standards and technologies. It is intended to provide an authoritative overview and synthesis of a wide range of technical subjects of interest to the JISC community, principally in the UK HE sector. It seeks to build on cutting-edge developments in information science in the UK HE sector, developing practical information on these areas as they become increasingly mature.

Who is it for?

It aims to serve research managers, researchers, early adopters, developers, and ultimately the whole UK HE sector from a technical perspective: the entire JISC community.

Who is working on it?

The Technical Foundations work will involve an increasing number of people, both within the UKOLN ISC and the JISC and from outside. These will be both contributors and expert reviewers of the content in specialist areas. Our hope is that people across the sector will become involved, so please contact us if you have any suggestions or contributions to make as the site develops.

This work is being co-ordinated by Talat Chaudhri (introduction and staff page here).

What do we do?

In order to make Technical Foundations work, we have recognised that technical information comes from a variety of sources and people working in different roles across the sector have valuable contributions to make. That means that we have to build content for Technical Foundations that is able to evolve as expertise in developing areas matures over time.

As you might expect, the process starts off by collecting and bringing together disparate sources of information from across the Web. In addition to having staff who monitor develops in specific areas, other specific inputs include blogs and the JISC Observatory. We will maintain our own blog to make initial reports on areas of interest to the sector. The next stage is to produce guidance notes about the issues that are being faced, the ways in which people are trying to solve them and the possible approaches that could be used. The form these brief guidance notes may take will vary from topic to topic, and they do not have to be comprehensive. This content will need to be flexible, following the needs of each particular developing area.

Lastly, when a particular topic reaches sufficient maturity for us to develop this content into a more mature synthesis, we will produce topic pages outlining the background and providing an introduction to a topic, the current usage of technologies in that area, and the issues that are being faced, together with solutions and approaches to any problems that are arising. We will include the broadest possible variety of views and perspectives from those who have already engaged with these technologies, especially people who are developing them right now.

We will make sure that this content goes through a robust quality assurance exercise from people who know what is going on in these areas, so that you can trust the information we provide. You will be able to see how up-to-date each topic page is.

It is the mission of Technical Foundations to keep all this information up-to-date and to cover cutting-edge developments, so it is always a relevant and attractive resource, both to experts and to newcomers to the topics that we cover.

How far have we got?

The site is in development: draft content on a number of topics is already available, pending quality assurance by expert reviewers in each specific area – and more will follow soon. There are already some guidance notes for topics in early-stage development. Please contact us if you have any suggestions. We will be carrying out further phases of consultation on the topic-based content and on the usability of the user interface of the site. There are also quite a number of blog posts on the blog, so we would encourage you to subscribe and comment on what we have written.

Natasha has been the event organiser for the IWMW series, including IWMW 2012, as well as several events for DevCSI, including the Dev8D series.

She also co-ordinates the marketing activities including managing the production of a range of publicity materials in electronic and paper-based media.

See also: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ukoln/staff/j.cheal/

His recent work at UKOLN includes the project management of two work-packages for the European FP7 digitisation project – IMPACT – Improving Access to Text, established to improve the quality and speed of the mass digitisation and OCR of historic text. Now available at: www.digitisation.eu

Ed trained and worked as a photographer, before building expertise within Digital imaging and Digitisation but now works mainly as a trainer and producer of Open Educational Resources and e-learning materials.

Rosemary participates in euroCRIS activities and liaises with the euroCRIS board on managing joint meetings. She was previously involved in the UKOLN CERIFy project. Rosemary also has an interest in institutional repository management and the integration of repositories and CRIS.

In addition Mark is working on software that extracts keywords from mailing lists and shows technology and popular trends over time.

Mahendra Mahey works as a Project Manager and Research Officer within the ISC. Mahendra’s main areas of work involves management of the DevCSI project, which is now in its the third year. Mahendra is also a member of the JISC Observatory team.

Recently Mahendra was the project manager for the  JISC-funded CERIFy project.

Talat Chaudhri works as a research officer within the ISC. In this role, Talat’s primary responsibility is to develop the Technical Foundations Web site for the JISC, which provides accessible, cutting-edge, cross-sector synthesis on a range of technical subjects for the JISC community. This work includes technical development on a Drupal platform as well as editorial control over the content of the site. On the content side, this includes writing topic pages, blog posts and other technical synthesis where these fall within his specific expertise, and otherwise commissioning content and assisting contributors. He is currently developing a robust quality assurance process, including feedback and review mechanisms, in order to consult the leading technical experts in particular topic areas and to ensure that the technical content of the site remains up-to-date.

Talat has a background in institutional repositories and metadata, as a former repository manager in Aberystwyth University, and has experience of repository strategy, policy, copyright issues and licencing. He has developed his interest in Current Research Information Systems (CRIS) and Research Information Management (RIM) further since he joined UKOLN in 2008, particularly in 2010-11 when he worked on the CERIFy project.

At present, Talat is part of the Researcher IDs Task and Finish Group, along with Brian Kelly, on which the UKOLN ISC provides support to the JISC. The group is due to report in early 2012 on a UK-wide strategy for unique researcher identifiers; it currently includes representatives of the JISC, the UKOLN ISC, the UK Research Councils and HESA, and is also in dialogue with HEFCE and the Wellcome Trust. This role has links with Talat’s role in developing the Technical Foundations Web site and his wider experience in Research Information Management and institutional repositories.

From 2008 to 2010, Talat worked on the Application Profiles Support Project. He is co-moderator of the Dublin Core Scholarly Communications community with Rosemary Russell, and is on the Dublin Core Advisory Board. He is also a member of the JISC Observatory team.

Over the course of 2011 he has been particularly involved in the work on the re-development of Ariadne, working alongside Thom Bunting to ensure readers and authors alike benefit from the improvements that the new platform is capable of delivering.

Additionally, Richard is responsible for the scheduling and editing of UKOLN’s news output over a variety of channels, including the composition of regular news features. Moreover, he offers editorial support to UKOLN colleagues towards the creation and and QA of certain major documents.

Educated initially as a linguist, Richard is keen to ensure that all authors of material are supported to achieve the best from their writing, whether their mother tongue is English or not.

Her current work is focussed on:

• Metadata and its practical application in the HE workplace
• Emerging trends in library technologies
• Repository synthesis within HEIs

Stephanie is also a member of the JISC Observatory team.

Her recent areas of work include:

• The Metadata Forum, an initiative managed by UKOLN and funded by JISC. This Forum aims to build a community around metadata, for all practitioners who use metadata in their work, at whatever level of knowledge.
• CERIFy, a JISC-funded project that aims to help UK Higher Education institutions engage with the CERIF standard for Research Information Management and Current Research Information Systems (CRISs).

Stephanie also runs workshops and speaks at conferences in the these areas. Most recently, this has included:

• Running a ‘Beginners Guide to Dublin Core’ at the DCMI 2011 conference in The Hague.
• Giving a joint paper on the CERIF standard at the Repository Fringe 2011 conference.

Thom’s current interests include:

• content management technologies supporting consumption and production of dynamic data sets
• automated generation of metadata from large collections of content
• sharing of content and data across systems
• visualisation tools capable of producing interactive, data-rich infographics

These interests build on Thom’s previous experience with leading-edge Web, digital TV, and mobile technology developments, within commercial and academic contexts.

As part of a recent development project Thom has created a new platform for the UKOLN online magazine Ariadne, which makes it easier to find connections and track trends across more than 1,600 articles published from 1996 to date. Based on Drupal, and featuring Highcharts JS functionality, this new version of Ariadne includes a tagging system to generate rich sets of metadata and highlight emerging trends across a broad range of content.

Brian is chair of the programme committee for the ISC’s Institutional Web Management Workshop 2012 (IWMW 2012) , an event that he launched in 1997 and that continues to support the development of the institutional Web management community of practice.

Brian has long-standing interests in the preservation of Web resources and is continuing work in this area, which will include the preservation of content and services hosted on Cloud services.

During 2010/11 Brian ran the Evidence, Impact, Metrics activity, which developed approaches for the systematic quantitative evidence-gathering approaches that could help identify and shape the impact of online services. Brian will continue to be involved in such evidence-gathering approaches, in particular as part of the joint UKOLN/CETIS JISC Observatory work.  This work aims to identify early technology trends in order to ensure that JISC and the JISC Community can make appropriate plans for managing the implications of technological developments.

Brian will continue his UK Web Focus blog, which will provide personal observations on technological developments and invite discussions on such developments. In addition, he will provide more factual contributions to the ISC blog and Web site.