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 .

British Standards Enhancement Group -November 2009 meeting

There was general agreement that the latest upgrade to the BSOL site was a great improvement. Members of the committee had received very positive feedback from users about enhancements to the site. Especially highlighted were separated keyword and number search that My Downloads now works for academic users. There was general agreement that the new design makes far better use of space on the screen and that the information presented is easier to read. Feedback from CLAUD (Librarians in Higher Education networking to improve library access for disabled users in the South and South-West of England) who act as advisors to JIBS on accessibility issues had also been very positive and their suggestions for further enhancements have been passed to BSI for consideration.
The committee were less happy with the upgrade process. It was felt that communication about the upgrade had been less than clear and messages on the main BSI site had been rather different to information on Twitter. BSI has learned from the experience and, in future, will announce target dates well in advance, even if they come with a “health warning” that they may change. The committee also reported on the problems some users had face with redirection of links and EZproxy that had given some access problems during the first few days of the upgrades operation. This was especially frustrating as both Sheffield Hallam and the Open University had offered free consultancy advice on EZproxy prior to the switchover; this offer had not been taken up. BSI promised in future to take up the offer of advice on authentication issues.
The next phase of development for BSOL will separate the product from the Group website and eShop at a more fundamental architectural level. BSI will also work on search enhancements and create the ability to identify users individually (regardless of their authentication method); this will help in implementation of personalisation features for academic users. There is at the moment no firm timescale for future upgrades and that includes Shibboleth compliance. BSI had decided to change its outsourcing development partner and some concern was expressed by the group that this would further delay any enhancements. However BSI had enhanced its in-house team and they felt that this would lead to significant improvements to the preservation of internal knowledge about the architecture and technology.

BSI has come to an agreement with IHS whereby they will no longer act as a sales agent for BSOL. IHS will still sell BSI content through their web products, but they will no longer act as a sales agent for BSOL.BSI were asked about the Info4Education deal – specifically whether discounts will be maintained. BSI confirmed that the pricing for BSOL will remain the same for the remainder of the deal lifetime (summer 2011) and JISC will be invoiced by BSI accordingly. The BSOL link from within the Info4Education page will be removed (effective 1st January 2010) and subscribers that currently access BSOL in this way will need to create a direct link. BSI Customer Support is on hand to help, where necessary. This has been communicated to JISC and BSI will make sure that messaging from JISC is complete

British Standards Online

The JIBS BSOL enhancement group met with BSI in June. At that meeting BSI indicated that it was working with a new software company to develop and enhance BSOL and that it hoped that from September it would be able to start a series of releases to enhance the service, especially in the usability area. It was hoped that the enhancements suggested by the JIBS group and others would gradually be rolled out in an iterative manner, with users seeing frequent smaller releases rather than fewer larger releases.
Unfortunately a review of the fundamental architecture of the current database suggests that it may be more difficult than was envisaged to make frequent changes to the system without risking service interruptions. BSI is now reviewing technical options for the delivery of a series of regular releases and in particular is looking at ways that the enhancements to usability can be made.

BSI has promised to keep the group informed of development and consult with us. We are planning to have another formal meeting in January 2009, when we hope there will have been some progress, and we will have a clearer idea of the way that the database interface can be improved.

British Standards On line User Group news

The Jibs British Standards On line enhancement group has met again with BSI. BSI have been doing further work with their suppliers on the new search engine and interface. Many of the suggestions made at the previous meeting have been adopted and more Will be adopted in future releases. There will be a full Boolean search alternative in the new interface and the layout of the screens has been considerably improved. BSI are hoping to go live with the new service over the weekend of the 4 November for the University sector. They are aware that this is mid term but this should be such a massive improvement and is worth the pain of a mid term change. There should be screenshots and a demo of the new software available from the old site before the change over and the URL of the new site will also be made available before the switch. The migration to the new system will be a "hard" migration and the interface s will not run in parallel.

Roger Hines

British Standards Group News

The JIBS BSOl group had a productive meeting with BSI on the 13 June. Members of the group had been given access to the first draft of the new version of BSOL and had already sent some comments. Members of the group had been impressed with the test site and agreed that searches on it are far more effective than on the present site. However they highlighted several issues relating to faults, the use of Boolean logic in searches and on the design and layout of the new site.


BSI were very receptive to the comments and suggestions made by the group and were aware of many of the faults. They are in dialogue with the company working on the product. Implementation would not go ahead till bugs had been fixed and some design changes made. Implementation for larger users , like Universities, would be unlikely to go ahead until mid to late September at the earliest. BSI recognised that the University sector preferred changes to software to be in the summer and not in term time but they were determined not to implement software until it met the standards required by their users.

Roger Hines