Shared Academic Knowledge Base: Context and Landscape

Editor's Notes

• #3: Presentations and notes will be made available via slideshare and the JISC blog The presentations will also be recorded and made publicly availableAll attendees and those who asked to have access to the presentations will be emailed all the relevant links
• #5: The purpose of today isn’t to give you a lot of background to the genesis of this work, rather I want to start by giving you some of the context to the work that Liam will shortly be telling you all about, and then to give you an overview of what the electronic resource management landscape currently looks like and how it relates to the project. In a sense I hope to be able to carve out a coherent picture from the diverse and fragmented landscape: I am the Capability Brown of the ERM landscape.
• #6: Mention the collaboration with SCONUL – and the exemplar of collaboration and engagement that seems to have created.Note, this was a hard slog – dead ends, financial crisis, difficult requirements gathering, liasing with HEFCE, getting our prefered managing agent etc.
• #7: I actually think talking in terms of there being an ERM or subscription management ecosystem is very useful – it might be argued that the current ecosystem is failing (has failed) and is subject to the implications of monocultures and reduced diversity that natural ecosystems are.So what does this ecosystem look like at the moment...?
• #8: Please don’t assume this is exhaustive – I have just tried to capture a snap shot of what the environment looks like currently. I haven’t included all the open and community developments and initiatives, nor all the commercial developments and vendors within this area. Rather, I hope this demonstrates the various different classifications of projects and initiatives that will and are influencing the project and that comprise the current ERM landscape. I have essentially tried to bring a little order to the diverse things that are currently taking place out there around subscription resources.
• #10: This is a little disingenuous, because of course potentially it will all impact on the KB+. I cannot stand here and claim that the open KB’s or other projects/initiatives wont have a significant impact, but at present there are some clear and emerging relationships that at the heart of the initial stages of the KB+.Indeed the types of relationships between these initiatives and projects and the shared KB+ will be very different, some such as TERMs and KBART will be a lot less about critical to the success of the project than say the commercial KB’s and the JISC projects that will form part of the final service. But, that’s not to say they’re not going to be, or are currently important.
• #11: These are the components (if you want) of the shared knowledge base – and often represent its functionality that can exploit the data that will populate the KB+.
• #12: Some of these projects that relate directly to the KB+ project are of a data type or a functionality type, i.e., they may be contributing to the underlying KB data, or wrapping around it to provide enhanced tools that benefit from this rich and timely data. The community initiatives are here, especially those that are librarians working together (often informally) to share the burden of updating the A-Z lists for certain publishers, or whatever it might be. Being able to harness these SMEs will be very important for the project.OLE is not represented on this development tree – however it is an important development within the landscape and one that the project will potentially be collaborating on, with some Mellon funding. But, this work will not start until near the end of our project, so the focus is for the moment very much on the KB+, but it is worth noting that there is this larger project that we think we can help feed into and where much of our work (such as the data model) could be of real use for them going forward.At the bottom, with the large arrow going into the KB+ is the commercial data providers; I am not really talking too much about their role today, but it is important to acknowledge how central they will be to the project. We’re having a meeting next week with all the main players in this area – which are all represented at the meeting – to let them know what we’re planning to do. The response so far has been very good, and we think we have a plan that means they are able to benefit from the work nearly as much as the sector will be able to.
• #14: But of course, the KB+ will have an impact on the current information management landscape. This is especially true when it is thought of in relation to those aspects of JISC’s library and information infrastructure programme that sit alongside it – mirroring the SCONUL domains.