Tuesday, December 07, 2010

Slides from December 2010 JIBS event

Thanks to all who attended our workshop:

Working together in difficult times: strategies for e-resource budgeting, negotiation and collection review

Thanks especially to our speakers, all of whom bravely battled the elements to be there and gave very interesting presentations. Slides from the event can now be found on the JIBS website.

Friday, October 15, 2010

Next JIBS event: "Working together in difficult times: strategies for e-resource budgeting, negotiation and collection review" (York, 2nd Dec)

Our next JIBS event will be looking at the highly topical area of how academic libraries respond to dramatic funding cuts in the "Age of Austerity".

How can we negotiate better deals from publishers? Is there a role for greater collaboration?

The workshop will be held at the King's Manor in York, on Thursday 2nd December 2010.

Speakers include: Sally Curry (Research Information Network); Jill Taylor-Roe (NESLi2); Tony Kidd (SHEDL) and Martin Gill (University of Leeds).

The JIBS AGM will take place at lunchtime and this year we are pleased to welcome the winner of the JIBS student prize 2010: Nicky Ransom, who will give a short presentation based on her dissertation.

For more details about this event or to book a place:
http://www.jibs.ac.uk/events/workshops/work2gether/programme.htm

Tuesday, June 29, 2010

"Where now for resource licensing"? summary

Catherine Parker (University of Huddersfield / JIBS committee member) has written a summary of the JIBS/EduServ workshop "Where now for resource licensing"? held earlier this month:
http://www.jibs.ac.uk/events/workshops/licensing/licensingsummaryparker.pdf

Thursday, June 17, 2010

Eduserv-JIBS licensing event 16 June - summary

Thank you to everyone at JIBS and Eduserv who helped organise yesterday's event. And a big thank you to all of the excellent speakers. It was a well-attended and interesting event. The slides and a more detailed summary will apppear via this blog and the JIBS website in the next week.

Owens Stephens's entertaining keynote set out some of the challenges we face in making e-resources available - especially with regard to the changing expectations of our users, which mean licences need to be flexible. He asked - is walk-in access no longer the key issue it once was? Louise Cole of Kingston University reinforced this by giving a very useful and comprehensive overview of the types of user groups we encounter (including some in a submarine!). Josephine Burt of the Open University described the particular issues faced by the OU in providing resources for users who are all off-site, and the increasing number of collaborative courses where the boundaries for licensing become very fuzzy. Jenny Carroll of Eduserv then gave us summary results from a survey of Eduserv data contacts, which gathered information about the types and levels of partnership arrangements out there. Jenny also asked participants at the event to feedback on their priorities for extending licences to external groups.

After lunch (where the buzz of discussion was very lively), Matt Durant explained Bath Spa University's decision to use Open Athens rather than Shibboleth, and included a useful demonstration of the technicalities. Mark Bide of EDItEUR gave a very enlightening presentation about machine readable licences, particularly ONIX-PL, and stressed the need for librarians and others to specify ONIX-PL compliance from providers. Ed Dee of EDINA also encouraged us to demand SAML compliance from service providers, with a useful technical illustration of why this is not currently the norm, which means granularity of usage data cannot be achieved. Finally, Martyn Jansen of Eduserv summed up the issues, and reported on a detailed analysis which Eduserv have carried out of providers' licence terms. Eduserv plan to refine their licence terms to make them relevant to today's users and make them more future-proof, but are still open to suggestions from the library community.

Wednesday, June 09, 2010

Ebsco Enhancement Meeting - June 29th

There will be an Ebsco Enhancement meeting on June 29th in Birmingham. Could you please send any questions you would like me to put to Ebsco staff by June 22nd

Regards

Maureen

Maureen Richardson
Electronic Resources Manager
Edge Hill University

richardm@edgehill.ac.uk


Friday, April 30, 2010

Where next for resource licensing? (JIBS / Eduserv workshop 16/06/10)

Where next for resource licensing?

Joint JIBS User Group and Eduserv event
Wednesday 16 June, 10.30am - 4pm
Khalili Lecture Theatre, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London

Do you know what your staff and students are allowed to do with the journals, databases or e-books your library provides for them?

Are you are an e-resources manager, already grappling with the thorny issues surrounding licence agreements?

This joint JIBS and Eduserv event will explore the issues around licences including :-
· the expanding customer base and distributed sites of most libraries
· the issues raised by cross institution arrangements, collaboration, affiliation and franchising
· our users’ expectations in a digital environment
· varying authentication systems and the management data they provide
· developments in machine-readable licences

Come along to this event to hear from some of the key players, and to put forward and discuss your problems and ideas.

See the programme at: http://www.jibs.ac.uk/events/workshops/licensing/programme.htm

Booking form is at http://www.jibs.ac.uk/events/workshops/licensing/bookform.htm

We plan to report the event in a live blog. For anyone tweeting, blogging or sharing other material about the event, the event tag is ‘wn4rl’ (‘#wn4RL’ on Twitter).

For enquiries about the event, please contact Sue Cumberpatch (sc17@york.ac.uk) or Fiona Bowtell (f.bowtell@open.ac.uk).

If you are interested in joining or learning more about JIBS please go to the JIBS User Group website at http://www.jibs.ac.uk/, or if you would like to know more about Eduserv, please visit: http://www.eduserv.org.uk/

Thursday, April 29, 2010

Survey of Digitisation of Core Readings in UK Higher Education

The final report of a survey carried out independently by Jane Secker (LSE) and June Hedges (UCL) in March/April 2009 is now available. The survey looked primarily at current activities relating to the scanning of core readings to support taught courses, but also touched on wider issues such as copyright in HE institutions, e-learning support and collection development.

Carried out following the introduction of the Copyright Licensing Agency's new Comprehensive Licence (which allows copying from digital originals) in August 2008, the survey posed questions about the impact of this and of the previous Trial Scanning Licence on services provided by libraries across the sector.

The report is available at the project website: http://clt.lse.ac.uk/Projects/Digitisation_survey.php

Thursday, April 01, 2010

JIBS student prize

- - Updated October 2010 - -

THIS CONTEST HAS NOW CLOSED - the winner will be announced shortly

A student award is being offered by JIBS User Group for a research-based project in JIBS area of concern. The JIBS Student Prize will be awarded to a Postgraduate dissertation or a final year Undergraduate project which focuses on the area of library information systems, bibliographic databases or other resource discovery technologies and how such resources or technologies are being developed or exploited. Practical projects that exploit such technologies will also be considered if they have been accepted as Postgraduate dissertation or final year Undergraduate project. Each type will be given appropriate consideration. Each School of Library and Information Studies is invited to nominate one of their students' projects for the award.

Tuesday, March 30, 2010

British Standards Enhancement Group March 2010 Meeting

JIB BSOL Enhancement group Meeting 15 March 2010
Brief overview

BSI now has a training team who will be developing training materials which can be used or customised for use within VLE's etc. They are also prepared to travel to deliver on site training to staff or students.

Standards Development web site

Staff from BSI gave the group an overview of standards development web site:- http://standardsdevelopment.bsigroup.com/
This gives links to the new proposals web site that allows members of the public to view and comment on new proposals, search proposals by name, subject matter or committee and suggest new ideas for standards. There is also a link to the Draft Review system to read and comment on draft standards available for public comment and to find out which trade associations and professional bodies are represented on BSI committees and discover which standards they are currently working on.
BSI staff indicated that they were keen to get more academic staff on to BSI committees.

Subscriptions
BSI confirmed their previous statement on the withdrawal of the Info4Education link.
Negotiations with JISC on the next deal had not yet started. They also understood that in the present climate 5 year deals without a get out clause would be difficult for many institutions.
They are also looking again at terms and conditions and we pressed them about walk in users and use of standards in VLEs
BSI expressed some concern about the "blunt instrument" nature of JISC banded deals. They are keen top spread the use of BSI amongst HIM and FE institutions and were concerned that institutions with low numbers of Science and technology students but high numbers of humanities and social sciences found it difficult to subscribe.

Software Development
BSI indicated, as they did at the last meeting, that they had a lot of work to do on the fundamental back architecture of their database and web site. They were reluctant to give any firm timescale and when we can expect to see further software development that would be visible to users, development of the advanced search etc. They acknowledged that the group's previous advice on software development was valuable and would be followed up. The group asked BSI for a list of developments so we could comment on priorities. Software development would be discussed at our next meeting, and BSI suggested November as a date. So I think we can assume that we are not going to see any major development before 2011.

Authentication
BSI are committed to Shibboleth compliance, again they could not give a time scale. Imperial College had worked with them on improving authentication for off campus users not using ezProxy but using blind log ins from a secure intranet page. We have asked BSI to produce information the various authentication methods they can offer at the moment.

E-books
There was brief discussion on BSI e-books and BSI was pressed to consider sales via an aggregator who would mount items rather than sell PDF copies.

Future Resource Discovery Systems

BSI were asked to consider working with the new resource discover systems that are coming on to the market .