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IESR Phase I Completion Report

Date of report: 20 Feb 2004

Period covered by report: 1 Nov 2002 - 31 Dec 2003

Author: Amanda Hill

Project Overview

1. Background

JISC funded the pilot IESR project as part of its Shared Services Programme, to investigate the feasibility of providing a machine-readable directory of quality assured electronic resources within the Information Environment. There was a perceived need to improve awareness of existing resources and to promote their use. The aim of the Service Registry is to enable portals, virtual learning environments and other services to automatically obtain information about available electronic resources and, where possible, to access those resources directly through machine-to-machine transactions.

The pilot project has now been funded for a further year, to build upon the achievements of the first phase and to expand the contents of the prototype registry.

2. Aims and Objectives

The IESR was funded by the JISC as a 14-month pilot project between November 2002 and December 2003. The project partners were the Cheshire Development Team at the University of Liverpool, MIMAS at the University of Manchester and UKOLN at the University of Bath. The project team was tasked with achieving the following aims:

  • Design a metadata format for information to be held in the Service Registry
  • Develop a prototype registry, capable of describing resources and the ways in which they can be accessed
  • Populate the registry with sample data from JISC service providers
  • Liaise with stakeholders and potential users of the registry
  • Disseminate information about the project
  • Make recommendations for further developments

These objectives have been achieved and are being carried forward in a project which will bring the IESR into a production-quality service.

3. Overall Approach

The design of the metadata for the Service Registry, and the specification of static templates (XML or Excel format) to enable early data supply, took longer than originally anticipated, with the final version being released in July 2003. This meant that some of the planned development activities in the original project plan were not undertaken. These included the development of OAI-PMH (Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting) and SRW interfaces to the service registry, and the development of a web interface for the creation of new descriptions. These tasks will now be taken forward in the second phase of the project.

4. Project Outputs

All project reports have been submitted to the JISC as planned.

5. Project Outcomes

  • Metadata formats for Collection, Service and Agent descriptions published
  • Static templates for data supply (XML and Excel) produced
  • Cheshire II software extended to enable support for SRW
  • Prototype Service Registry developed
  • Stakeholders surveyed and interviewed
  • Stakeholder report published
  • Data Creation Guidelines devised and published
  • Stakeholder meeting held
  • Web interface designed
  • Z39.50 interface developed
  • Service Registry populated with XML records supplied by Edina and UK Mirror Service

It is too early to estimate any impacts, as the prototype Service Registry has only recently been populated with 'real' data. An important part of the next phase of the project will involve promoting the use of the registry among portals and other services within the JISC's Information Environment and beyond.

6. Stakeholders

The Information Environment Service Registry will be of most use to providers of portals, be they institutional or subject-based. At the moment, each of these services have to maintain their own information about available resources, causing a great deal of duplication of effort. A centralised service registry with all the necessary information about electronic resources maintained within it would save the same work being repeated many times within the community. Comments from the stakeholders show that they would need to be confident that this information is up-to-date, accurate and easy to maintain. The requirements report is available online at http://www.mimas.ac.uk/iesr/interimreqs.html, while the initial analysis of stakeholders can be found at http://www.mimas.ac.uk/iesr/stakeholdrep.html.

7. Intellectual Property Rights

All descriptions within the IESR are covered by a Creative Commons licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/1.0/) which allows others to re-use the information so long as the source of the information is identified and the information is not used for commercial purposes.

Project Resources

8. Project Partners

The IESR project is a collaboration between MIMAS, UKOLN and the University of Liverpool. The particular skills of each of the members of the team have been of great benefit to the project as a whole.

9. Project Management

  • MIMAS
    • Amanda Hill
    • Ann Apps : Ann attended the Euroweb conference and the Semantic Ontologies workshop
    • Leigh Morris : Leigh has attended courses on Quality Assurance, Dewey Decimal Classification and Library of Congress Subject Headings as part of the IESR project
  • UKOLN
    • Rachel Heery
    • Amanda Closier
    • Pete Johnston
    • Andy Powell
  • University of Liverpool
    • Paul Watry
    • Rob Sanderson

10. Programme Support

The programme manager has been very supportive and has been a great help in providing background information about the JISC's priorities and plans. She has attended all of the project team's meetings and provided excellent support in preparing the proposal for a new phase of the project. Helen also helped to organise a course on Web Services, which proved very useful for the IESR team and other Shared Services project members.

Detailed Project Planning

11. Evaluation Plan

One of UKOLN's roles in this project was to evaluate and report on the achievements of the pilot. This report was completed in Feburary 2004 and is available from the IESR website. The report records the progress that was made by the project in relation to the requirements identified by its stakeholders. The overall conclusion was that the project achieved many of its original aims, and that there are a number of areas which will require further analysis during the next phase of the IESR.

12. Quality Assurance Plan

The IESR website complies with the SENDA legislation and current best practice in website design. Each of the pages on the website validates as XHTML 1.0 Transitional.

The metadata for the IESR is based upon existing standards and is checked for quality and well-formedness by the project's Liaison Officer.

13. Dissemination Plan

'Introducing the Information Environment Service Registry': 'In Brief' article by Amanda Hill in D-Lib Magazine, January 2003 (http://www.dlib.org/dlib/january03/01inbrief.html#HILL)

'Developing the JISC Information Environment Service Registry': article by Verity Brack and Amanda Closier in Ariadne, July 2003 (http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue36/jisciesr/)

Presentation by Amanda Hill on the IESR at the Portals and Shared Services Programme Meeting, Warwick, May 2003, available from the JISC website

Stakeholder meeting, 26 June 2003: presentations on:

  • Overview and Scope of the Pilot IESR Project
  • Data Model and Metadata Schema for the IESR
  • IESR Metadata

available from http://www.mimas.ac.uk/iesr/stakeholders/meeting_20030626/.

14. Exit Plan

The IESR is continuing for a further 14 months. The new project will bring the prototype registry up to production quality.

15. Sustainability Plan

During 2004 the IESR will be the subject of a JISC-funded investigation into the sustainability of the service in the future.

Appendix

Summary of Project Achievements

The metadata formats and static data supply templates for the various parts of the Service Registry (collection, service and agent) were published in July 2003 and are available on the IESR website at http://www.mimas.ac.uk/iesr/metadata/. The first records from the pilot project's service providers arrived in the same month. Data creation guidelines for data contributors have been devised and are also available on the IESR website at http://www.mimas.ac.uk/iesr/metadata/guidelines/Data_Creation_Guidelines.html.

The project team has developed a pilot Service Registry using Cheshire II software. The prototype service has web and Z39.50 interfaces. The Z39.50 interface can deliver IESR XML as well as SUTRS, GRS1 and Dublin Core XML. All accesses to the database are logged, and simple monthly usage statistics compiled. The database has been populated with those collection, service and agent descriptions which were created using XML (those from Edina and the UK Mirror Service). Further processing work is required to convert the Excel-formatted records (from the other pilot phase data providers) into XML.

Development work on the Cheshire software has also been funded as part of this project. This has enabled the development of support for SRW (Search and Retrieve Web Service) in Cheshire and any other Z39.50 server, and of an XSLT browser interface to SRW. More information on SRW may be found at http://srw.o-r-g.org/.

Stakeholder liaison has been an important part of the project from its early stages. A Stakeholder Analysis was undertaken in January - March 2003. This has also been published at http://www.mimas.ac.uk/iesr/stakeholdrep.html. This work was followed up by a requirements-gathering exercise, which included a meeting for stakeholders. The report from this area of work is now available at http://www.mimas.ac.uk/iesr/interimreqs.html.

Dissemination activities, including project progress reports, can be found on the website at http://www.mimas.ac.uk/iesr/dissemination.html. Presentations on the IESR were given at a JISC Portals and Shared Services Programme meeting in May and at an event for stakeholders that was held in June.