The Resource Discovery Taskforce, organised by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) and Research Libraries UK (RLU), announced its vision at a recent JISC event called 'Survive or Thrive'.
According to the taskforce, new plans to open up library, archive and museum collections will make it easier for researchers and students to access resources. At the moment it can be difficult for researchers to access books and information held in different places because the data is incompatible with the web services they use to search the collections, it adds.
Under the new initiative, to be led by JISC and RLU, individual universities, libraries, archives and museums will share information about their collections, or so-called 'metadata'. Making this metadata available openly on the web will permit anyone to build innovative new services that use the information. This is expected to allow researchers and students to explore the data in new ways - by subject or type. Libraries will also be able to manage their own collections using the data.
The taskforce, with members from across the library and university worlds, has worked for over a year to produce the vision for UK libraries and archives. JISC will be supporting it by providing a technical framework to help alleviate legal and organisational issues, and providing guidance to universities, libraries and museums on how to supply and open their data.
Although the first step is to work with all UK higher education resources, the work is seen to fit in with other moves to open up data from libraries around Europe as well as from cultural organisations. It is expected that eventually researchers and students will be able to access all kinds of collections from around the world. This is because service providers will be able to build services that use data from different countries and different sectors. As a result, resources held in university archives, libraries and museums will be more visible and universities will be able to be more responsive to the needs of students, teachers and researchers, it is predicted.
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