British Education Index (BEI)

"The British Education Index (BEI) is designed to aid the identification of appropriate literature by people investigating aspects of education or training."

About BEI

"The Index provides details about the contents of various literature sources: over 300 education and training journals published in the British Isles, similar report and conference literature, and texts in the Education-line collection."

"...description of the subject content of literature [is] by use of a consistent vocabulary (the British Education Thesaurus) designed specifically for this purpose. This attention to detail distinguishes the Index from similar discovery tools."

I understand BEI may hold an event for stakeholders in the autumn, considering the delivery of BEI to the HE/FE sectors and addressing whether there is a model of the BEI as a "public good".

BEI homepage

mailto: bei at leeds ac uk

Libraries Unleashed

"The Guardian" has a feature, Tuesday 22nd April "Libraries Unleashed", "Colleges, universities and the digital challenge".

http://education.guardian.co.uk/librariesunleashed/

http://www.guardian.co.uk

http://education.guardian.co.uk/librariesunleashed/story/0,,2274788,00.html

http://education.guardian.co.uk/librariesunleashed/story/0,,2274796,00.html

Personalisation for the Information Environment

There's a basic webpage at the
JISC website

JISC is considering ways by which services could be "personalised" to meet the needs of individual users.

This could be by means of:
* customisation - where a user can explicitly choose some behaviour of the service they are using
* adaptive personalisation -whereby the service tailors its output without user input. This can be either:
- based On Data held elsewhere - for example by the user's institution (APOD)
- by observing User Activity (APUA)

there are questions about if and how personalisation should be realised, and whether it is better handled by the data services, or by (for example) a portal at a user's institution.

* is there a demand for personalised services? What good examples already exist?

What further use-cases are there?
* to what degree institutions have personalised their internal services?
* how would institutions feel about supporting a personalisation infrastructure which may require transfer of personal information outside an institution?

This project is being carried out for JISC by

Max Hammond
___________________________________

Curtis+Cartwright Consulting Ltd.
Main Office:
Surrey Technology Centre
Surrey Research Park
Guildford
Surrey GU2 7YG

Enabling Innovation

To view the draft conference programme and to book your place, please visit the JISC Conference 2008 website at: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/events/2008/04/jiscconference08.aspx

DataSalon's Database tool for JISC

If you need to know which ebook platform is searchable by Dewey, or whether any ebook platforms are authenticated by Native Shibboleth this tool gives you, straight from the horse's mouth, the supplier's view of their product, viz

EBL - Ebook Library(EBL)
MyiLibrary
NetLibrary (OCLC)
dawsonERA(Dawsons)
ebrary


the JISC ADAT system is now live
at: Academic Database Assessment Tool

"Free database comparison tool aims to make it easier for university librarians to make informed decisions when subscribing to online resources "

"JISC Collections in partnership with DataSalon Ltd have launched a free online database comparison tool "

Bibliographic databases:
BIOSIS Previews (1969 - present)
British Education Index
British Humanities Index (BHI)
Compendex
EconLit
EMBASE
GEOBASE
Inspec
International Bibliography of the Social Sciences (IBSS)
ISI Web of Science
MLA International Bibliography
Scopus
Sociological Abstracts

Full Text Databases:
ABI/INFORM
Business Source Premier

Online Film and Sound Working Group meeting report

I went to a meeting of the Online Film and Sound Working Group on 30th April.

The following items were discussed:

1) Film and Sound Online
JISC have agreed to fund this for free for another 2 years. Over the past year, there has been a doubling of content, and new subscribers are still coming on board. The metadata is also now available to Google and other search engines. Google-based queries will be monitored in order to see if this leads to an increase in usage.

2) BBC Motion Gallery
It is hoped that students will be able to use the clips from BBC Motion Gallery in showreels which can be used in CVs and non-University work, meaning that this resource can be made available on open networks. There would also be unlimited concurrency. The licence will also hopefully allow material to be put into JORUM.

3) Newsfilm Online
The content of this will be from the early 19th C to the near present, and includes ITN and Reuters content that has been rights-cleared. It will be able to be used in either Media Player or Quick Time at 710 kilobitz per sec. There will also be downloadable thumbnails of stills for a storyboard. This material can also be kept and reused. It is hoped that there will be something to see by October.

Lisa