With 12 UK-based organisations having reportedly signed up to a new set of open metadata principles, the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) is inviting all publicly funded organisations to make the same commitment. These include universities, colleges, libraries, museums and archives.
Unlocking the descriptive information or metadata about digital content, articles, books and research is the key to making it more useful, according to the JISC-funded resource discovery taskforce as it embarks on the new programme. If all UK metadata was made openly accessible, the taskforce says, then the resources themselves would be more visible and it would be easier to build innovative new ways for researchers, teachers and students to explore the resources.
Signing up means that organisations are committed to supporting the principles and looking for opportunities to carry them out in whatever they do - whether this is building new ways to present unique collections or in contributing to national shared services for managing collections.
The organisations that have already signed up are: British Library, BUFVC, Collections Trust, Digital Curation Centre, Edina, JISC, Mimas, National Library of Scotland, National Library of Wales, Owen Stephens Consultancy, RIN, RLUK, Royal Holloway University of London, SCONUL, the National Archives, UKOLN, University College London, and University of Southampton.
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