This session consists of two presentations on Scholarly Communication. The first is by Paul Ayris from UCL. Interestingly he has said that UCL is now asserting the IPR of work produced at UCL belongs to the Academic and student authors. I find this suprising, as I would have thought UCL would want to assert the rights of the institution (as employer) to the IPR on work produced. This may not apply to student authors (the status of students with UK Universities is often unclear in terms ’employment’ or ‘belonging’). However, for staff, I would have thought it was clear they do research under the auspicies of the employer – which is the University.

Some interesting comments from Ian Gibson, who chaired the Parliamentary committee in the UK which looked at scholarly communication. His feeling was that the outcomes of the committee meetings included recommendations that funding bodies should mandate the deposit of research in Open Access repositories, and also that their should be more clarity on ‘quality’ standards – with the possibility of some ‘kitemarking’ to indicate quality (the kitemark is a British Standards logo which indicates that a product meets certain quality standards)

Paul is now talking about the outcomes of a UK based project looking at the use of DigiTool. The most pertinent part of this project was the UCL E-Theses trial. This unfortunately only looked at DigiTool 2.4, which is a very different system to DigiTool v3.x

A separate JISC funded project on digital curation based around a partnership between UCL, the British Library and Ex Libris is due to report in 2006 (http://www.ucl.ac.uk/ls/lifeproject/index.shtml)

Paul is now talking about the outcome of a survey of taught students in 2000, where the key thing that they thought would improve library services was more core texts available. Paul has highlighted that no-one asked for more e-resources or mentioned e-learning. However, I’m not convinced that this is very meaningful – you would always see taught students asking for more texts – this is very much (in my view) based around what they are told to read. If they are told to use e-resources or e-learning by their tutors, this will become a key issue for them.

Paul is moving onto ‘Course Reading’ approaches – highlighting the lack of provision from Ex Libris in this key area, and the fact that several UK universities are using the open source software from University of Loughborough.

Paul has now put up an interesting diagram done by Margaret Flett from UCL describing information systems and access at UCL. Hopefully this will be made avaialable online, as I would like to compare it to the RHUL picture. There are some things I would question (e.g. the labelling of MetaLib as an ‘optional’ gateway), but a very interesting picture. One important point is the way that the ‘VLE’ has become a key way for students to access information at UCL.

Paul is now talking about how Ex Libris s/w interacts with Open Source software and Open Access content. Paul is questioning the fact that MetaIndex – the Ex Libris add-on to MetaLib to harvest and search OAI compliant repositories. However, I disagree that this is a problem (although I won’t object if we get it free!) – if the product needs developing and supporting, why should it be ‘free’. I’m not even sure what Paul is suggesting here – that Ex Libris should develop this s/w and give it away? This seems redundant – there is already free software for OAI harvesting – what is the benefit to Ex L to develop this again and give it away?

However, I do agree that Ex Libris could contribute our understanding of what we need to provide here. I’m not sure we quite understand what our users need in terms of access to information stored in OAI environments. Perhaps the point is that Ex Libris need to come up with a more compelling offering in this area, which then is worth paying for. An example might be thinking about how Ex Libris s/w might help users navigate the different versions of a paper, perhaps having discovered the Open Access pre-print, and wanting to see the published version. I think many of the building blocks are in place already (MetaLib, SFX, DigiTool) but we need to see how these work together deliver the correct user experience – and of course, we need to know what the desired user experience is!