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 .
