This final session of the day is to launch this ‘Resource Discovery Vision’ which was developed by a Taskforce (of which I was a part – so I may be biased). David Baker (Deputy Chair, JISC) is introducing the work of the taskforce and the resulting vision.

Terms of Reference were:

• Define the requirements for the provision of a shared UK resource discovery infrastucture for libraries, archives, museums and related resources to support education and research
• Focus on metadata that can assist in access to resources, with special reference to serials, books, archives/special collections, museum collections

The reasons for developing this vision:

• to enable UK HE to implement a fit for purpose infrastructure to underpin the consumption of resources … for the purpose of research and learning
• To address the key challenge of providing end users wit flexible and tailored resource discovery and delivery tools
• …

The vision:

UK students and research will have easy, flexible access to content and services through a collaborative, aggregated and integrated resource discovery and delivery framework which is comprehensive, open and sustainable.

The aim is to realise the vision sooner rather than later – by 2012:

• Integrated and seamless access to collections in libraries, museums and archives in UK HEIs
• Creation of through and open aggregated layer – designed to work with all major search engines
• Provision of a divers range of innovative and personalised resource discovery services
• Avoidance of duplication of effort
• Existing resource discovery services encouraged to develop and innovate
• Data will be available to commercial organisations to develop services
• Data and functionality will need to be diffused to other software

David stresses that focus initially on UK HE – but this is focus for first phase and doesn’t rule out wider consideration later.

What now?

• Programme of Work
• Ongoing dialogue
• Buy-in
• Partnerships
• Quick Wins

Now Rachel Bruce to give more detail:

What does the vision address? Looking at The (Digital) Library Environment: Ten Years After by Lorcan Dempsey – http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue46/dempsey – two points specifically:

• “Aggregation of supply and demand”
• “Making our data work hard, egagement and co-creation”

What is an aggregation? Need to look at how we work with national and international aggregations – e.g.:

• COPAC
• Archives Hub
• Repositories K
• Digital New Zealand
• Europeana
• Culture24

Rachel showing linked data diagram – not to say ‘linked data’ is the way forward, but that the vision is linked to this idea of linked datasets.

What are we doing? Implementation plan in draft at http://rdtf.jiscinvolve.org/wp/implementation-plan/

Rachel mentions some work I’m going to be involved with around a resource relating to Open Bibliographic Data (working with Sero Consulting and Paul Miller from Cloud of Data)

Now Mike Mertens from RLUK talking about their involvement and view. Resource Discovery highlighted in RLUK Strategic Plan (2008-2011)

RLUK is able to deploy an aggregation of some 16 million items, and has a strong belief in open data and public good. RLUK current sells metadata – so making this available openly and freely this has an impact on their income – means change in meaning, relevance, business operations, scope and purpose. [really glad RLUK is tackling this head on – great to hear this recognition of the real impact and the willingness to deal with this]

Comments and Q & A

Q: (Linda somone?) How does this relate to other initiatives – e.g. we are already putting data in Europeana

A: (Rachel) Need to build partnerships – still work to be done

Q: (Gurdish Sandhu) Many libraries implement ‘new generation’ discovery tools – is this still a valid thing to do in the context of this vision

A: Obviously something that needs to be addressed. Have programme of work about how these tools work and how to surface this type of information on the web.

Q: (Gurdish Sandhu) If this service is only about metadata – won’t it put off users who are used to retrieving full-text via Google

A: (Mike) There is a risk – but finding out about something is still important. Better to try to bolster content to be produced which could link to things later. This is a vision – a firm push in the right direction

Q: (Peter Burnhill) [apologies if I’ve mangled this q] There is a difference between the digital and the physical – and discovery to delivery works differently. Should the focus be on one or the other?

A: (Rachel) Yes, there is a difference – some work on this already underway

Comment: (Paul Ayris) Putting vision in European context – especially Europeana – build a Pan European aggregator to feed metadata into Europeana. Would prefer to work with National level aggregators – which isn’t currently possible in the UK – but this vision might enable it.