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Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) support United Kingdom post-16 and higher education and research by providing leadership in the use of ICT (Information and Communications Technology) in support of learning, teaching, research and administration. (Excerpt from Wikipedia article: JISC)

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Why should universities care about identifiers?

17 August 2012 - 3:19pm — Talat Chaudhri

Why do identifiers matter for research?

Imagine that you are a senior manager in an institution within the UK Higher Education sector with responsibilities for research: you have read some basic details about unique researcher identifiers and perhaps institutional identifiers. However, it may not be immediately apparent just how important these issues are, which may seem on the face of it to be a relatively superficial and/or trivial organisational matter. Clearly, any such strategic decision-maker will long have been aware of the demands of the Research Excellence Framework (REF) and its predecessor the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE), in which successful reporting of the best research outputs of university departments is crucial to the on-going funding of the institution. This is particularly central to the work of research-led universities, which is an increasingly competitive sector: even universities that formerly focussed more on teaching than research are increasingly aware of the need to drive up standards of quality research in order to secure additional funding.

The business of unique identification

23 February 2012 - 11:58pm — Talat Chaudhri

What need is there for unique identifiers?

Put in relatively non-technical language, there is an increasing concern in information science in general to uniquely identify different things, organisations or people that could otherwise be confused, whether on the Internet or in the physical world. In technical terms, these are all referred to as resources (even if people might find it vaguely demeaning in normal language to be considered as such).

Researcher ID Task and Finish Group

20 June 2011 - 3:42pm — Talat Chaudhri

The first meeting of the Researcher Identifiers Task and Finish Group was highly successful and productive because it kept a tight focus on developing an achievable, clearly articulated body of work and developing a process and timescale for the series of meetings that will inform this process and the commissioning and delivery of the reports that the discussions will continue to inform, round until January 2012.

Practical metadata solutions using application profiles

8 June 2011 - 1:46pm — Talat Chaudhri

Until now, a number of application profiles have been developed by various metadata experts, with the support of the JISC, with the intention of addressing the needs of practitioners and service providers (and thus ultimately their users) across the higher education sector in the UK. The most significant of these have been aimed at particular resource types that have an impact across the sector.

JiscEXPO Quarterly Executive Newsletter

1 December 2010 - 11:51am — Adrian Stevenson

A key aim of this JISC programme newsletter is to highlight some of the outputs and emerging themes from across the ten projects that make up the ‘JiscEXPO‘ programme funded by the 2/10 grant funding call, and, if possible, use these to identify any themes that cut across other ongoing JISC programmes.

JiscEXPO Programme Synthesis

30 September 2010 - 10:46am — Adrian Stevenson

Earlier this year, JISC issued the 2/1o Grant Funding Call for ‘Deposit of research outputs and Exposing digital content for education and research’, JiscDEPO and JiscEXPO for short.

Aggregation and the Resource Discovery Taskforce vision

19 August 2010 - 12:43pm — Paul Walk

On Tuesday of this week, UKOLN convened a group of invited experts to discuss aggregation in the context of the Resource Discovery Taskforce's vision. The Resource Discovery Taskforce (RDTF), a joint JISC / RLUK venture, has summed up its vision:

Technical Standards for the JISC IE (part 2)

27 April 2010 - 9:05am — Paul Walk

Which standards are relevant to the JISC IE today? The JISC IE Technical Standards document has not been updated for some years. If this sort of document is considered to be useful still, then it needs to be brought up to date. The rest of this post will consider the standards indicated in the original document and give suggestions for what might be added, changed or deprecated from this list. Comments are very welcome on this.

Technical Standards for the JISC IE (part 1)

27 April 2010 - 8:46am — Paul Walk

One of the key conclusions emerging from our ongoing consultation with some of those who have been involved with the JISC Information Environment (JISC IE) since its early days is that the emphasis on interoperability through open standards was one of the key drivers which gave the programme direction and momentum. Giving focus to this emphasis on open standards was a web document, JISC Information Environment Technical Standards, which introduced itself thus:

Provision, fusion, presentation and shared infrastructure

1 December 2009 - 10:56am — Paul Walk

Dr. Radut