Those who attended the Manchester town meeting on the JISC/NSF programme
will be aware there remained a certain amount of confusion about the
importance of the collection.
JISC circular 15/98 says in para 9: "Research supported under this
programme is expected to:
* identify a collection of information which is not accessible or usable
because of technical barriers, distance, size, system fragmentation or
other limits;
* using this as a test-bed, create the understanding and new technology to
make it possible for such information to be found, delivered to and/or
exploited by a distributed set of users; and
* evaluate the effect of this new technology and its international
benefits."
There were questions about whether the identified collection had to be
new, whether it could be commercially available, and whether it could be
in some sense ephemeral (eg harvested from the web).
These clauses arise from concerns that there should be some lasting
product from these kind of initiatives which is of benefit beyond the
institutions and the life of the project. It is not necessary for the
collection (or collections) to be made available free, and they could
indeed be commercial collections. However, the accessibility of the
collections to the community at large is likely to be one of the issues
addressed by the referees. So a very expensive collection, which rules out
all but the richest, is less likely to win than a collection which seeks
to recover basic costs only.
We would not expect there to be significant funds in these projects for
collection creation, ie we expect you to identify a collection which
exists in a more or less readily available state and requires only some
further work to make available, or a collection which is assembled from
other elements.
In the case of ephemeral collections, we see no problem provided the
technology created in the project is of sufficient value, and that in some
key sense the harvesting process is repeatable, so that others can
similarly create these ephemeral collections.
This is a difficult area but we hope to adopt a flexible approach. The
bottom line: make sure there is something useful available for the
community at the end of your project.
--
Chris Rusbridge
Programme Director, Electronic Libraries Programme
The Library, University of Warwick, Coventry CV4 7AL, UK
Phone 01203 524979 Fax 01203 524981
Email [log in to unmask]
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