I’m at the ‘startup’ meeting for JISC ‘Resource Discovery Infrastructure’ projects funded under the JISC 15/10 call

Quick descriptions of project follow, starting with …

Project at the University of Lincoln funded by JISC (Paul Stainthorp presenting)

Jerome is a project to ‘liberate data’ – in essence to build a ‘quick and dirty’ index of data that can be made available openly from the University of Lincoln library. Feel confident can release catalogue records as overall volumes small, and have traditionally invested in local cataloguing.

Where full record can’t be released, can still release fact that something belongs to collection, and can then enhance with data from elsewhere that is open.

Then including repository data and archives data, and where possible e-journal holdings from KnowledgeBase (again, use ISSN to draw in descriptive data from open sources due to issues around releasing descriptive metadata from KnowledgeBase).

Technical architecture is a ‘NoSQL’ index – very very fast. First and foremost point of access for the data is an API. Any services created by the University of Lincoln will use this API (‘eat our own dog food’)

Aiming for ‘radical personalisation’ – what do we know about users – their past activity, their location, the weather(!) etc. – use that to deliver relevant services.

Going for ‘incredibly fast’ – “if we can measure it, it is too slow” – literally looking for response times that they can’t measure

Example service – allow users to produce their own library discovery tools.

Presentation available at http://paulstainthorp.com/2011/03/01/jisc-rdtf-meeting-birmingham-jerome/