**Please circulate widely to interested parties**
_______________________________________
*JISC Call for Proposals Pre-announcement*
*Focus on Access to Institutional Resources Programme
(FAIR)*
A Call for Proposals will be issued in early
January 2002 with expected closing date in late February
2002. This pre-announcement alerts the HE/FE community to
the call and allows institutions to explore possible
partnerships or consortium proposals in advance of the call
being issued.
The JISC is establishing a new programme in which a number
of projects will be funded to disclose and deposit digital
assets held within the higher education and further
education community. The programme will also allow
intelligence to be gathered about the technical,
organisational and cultural challenges of these processes.
It is intended that this programme *Focus on Access to
Institutional Resources* will contribute to developing the
mechanisms and supporting services to allow the submission
and sharing of content generated by the HE/FE community.
An important source of inspiration for this programme is
the vision of the Open Archives Initiative that digital
resources can be shared between organisations based on a
simple mechanism which allows metadata about those
resources to be harvested into services. For example in the
e-prints community this is realised through data providers
who mount the e-prints and then disclose their metadata to
service providers who are able to organise and present this
information for users. (
http://www.openarchives.org)
The FAIR Programme is interested in proposals for projects
in the following areas:
* Support the disclosure of institutional assets, including
institutional eprint archives and other types of digital
collections, and to explore the use of emerging protocols
in this area, particularly the OAI (the Open Archives
Initiative protocol)
*Explore the usability of metadata disclosed and issues of
harvesting institutional assets into subject-based and
other services for example the Resource Discovery Network
and the Arts and Humanities Data Service
* Through deposit or disclosure of relevant resources, to
augment existing collections which have proven learning,
teaching or research value
* Experiment with the embedding of JISC collections and
services in local institutional portals and how well they
can be presented in conjunction with institutionally
managed assets
*Investigate the collections management, technical,
organisational and cultural challenges of institutional
asset disclosure and deposit, including issues relating to
the establishment and administration of institutionally
provided services for digital collections
It is hoped that all this work will lead to a much better
understanding of the efficiency with which research and
learning resources can be made more accessible and their
visibility increased, and to explore the support and
resources needed at a national and local level to allow
this to take place as a core activity in the longer term.
Higher and further education institutions funded via the
UK funding bodies will be eligible to submit proposals.
Proposals both from single institutions and
consortia of institutions will be welcomed. As guidance,
proposals for projects of from 1 to 3 years duration and
with budgets ranging from £10,000 to £300,000 will be
considered.
The programme will commence in April/May 2002,
though project start dates can be staggered and projects
starting after July 31st 2002 will also be considered.
This programme is part of the JISC Information Environment
Development see
http://www.jisc.ac.uk/dner/development/IEstrategy.html
----------------------
Catherine Grout
Assistant Director, Development
JISC/DNER Office
Strand Bridge House
138-142 Strand
London WC2R 1HH
UK
voicemail: (0044) 0207 848 2493
fax: (0044) 0207 848 2939
e-mail: catherine.grout_at_kcl.ac.uk
--- End Forwarded Message ---
----------------------
Catherine Grout
Assistant Director, Development
JISC/DNER Office
Strand Bridge House
138-142 Strand
London WC2R 1HH
UK
voicemail: (0044) 0207 848 2493
fax: (0044) 0207 848 2939
e-mail: catherine.grout_at_kcl.ac.uk
Received on Fri Dec 21 2001 - 13:26:18 GMT