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 .

A & I: RIP? Presentations online

Speakers' presentations from last week's event are now available at:
http://www.jibs.ac.uk/events/workshops/airip/programme.htm

Thanks to all who participated.

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

New NESLi2 SMP brochure is now available

Download the new brochure which contains information on the 2010 NESLi2 SMP offers.

JSTOR launches Arts & Sciences VIII Collection

JSTOR’s Arts & Sciences VIII Collection will include a minimum of one hundred forty (140) titles when it is completed at the end of 2011. This collection extends JSTOR's coverage in disciplines across the social sciences and humanities, with new and expanded focus on art & art history, classical studies, philosophy, language & literature, and music.

More than thirty rare 19th and early 20th century American Art periodicals form part of this collection, including 291, created in 1915 by Alfred Stieglitz and Bradley, His Book from the private press founded by William H. Bradley. Eleven of these periodicals are immediately available in the collection, with the remaining titles available by the second quarter of 2010. JSTOR has prepared a short video (5 minutes) has to give institutions a glimpse into these periodicals.

Read the full announcement

RIP for A&I Services?

JIBS Workshop and debate on the future of abstracting and indexing services was held in Manchester. In the present mood (HE budget cuts) indexing services with little added value could be vulnerable. Overlapping services need rationalising. Indexing needs to be high quality, and abstracts need seamless linking to quality assured fulltext.

Excellent speakers and a frank debate of the issues made the event well worth the trip. Which services have one foot in the grave?

Can clever algorithms meet the differing needs of student essay-writers and doctoral researchers?

Would we prefer our A&I services to carry advertising, as google and facebook do?

Can EndNote with PubMed meet all the needs of a biomedical faculty?

Shibboleth report

Earlier this year the JIBS committee on behalf of the JIBS User Group recently conducted a survey about the implementation of Shibboleth across UK HE/FE & Research sectors. The results of this survey have now been published as a report on the JIBS website.

Thanks to June Hedges (JIBS treasurer) for all her work compiling this report.

_Mimas powering knowledge

You can see the new MIMAS logo on the website:

_Mimas Fact Sheet

JISC Collections to acquire Content Complete Ltd

JISC Collections, the organisation which manages the acquisition and provision of digital resources for universities and colleges in the UK, has reached an agreement to acquire Content Complete Ltd, the Oxfordshire-based licensing and negotiations company.

Content Complete was established in 2003 by Albert Prior and Paul Harwood with the aim of supporting organisations involved in licensing scholarly online content. The Company provides an outsourced service, representing clients in direct negotiations with publishers on pricing and licensing issues. Content Complete employs seven staff and has a range of clients in the academic, health and corporate sectors.

Read the full press release.

Business model trials for e-textbooks - eight leading textbook publishers participating

A range of business models for e-textbooks will be evaluated through four different trials at 13 higher education institutions. The trials will involve the participation of eight major textbook publishers and three e-book aggregators, and the overall objective is to identify realistic and sustainable business models.

The trials start this month and, in order to reflect the real live environment as far as possible, they will run until the end of the 2009/10 academic year.


Find out more