Skip to content

Latest Additions

You are here: Home > Publications > Executive Summary of IESR Evaluation Report

Executive Summary of IESR Evaluation Report

The Information Environment Service Registry (IESR) Project Evaluation was a five-month project commissioned by the IESR Project Management Team and undertaken by the Centre for Research in Library and Information Management (CERLIM) at the Manchester Metropolitan University.

The CERLIM IESR Evaluation website is at http://www.cerlim.ac.uk/projects/iesr/.

Executive Summary

  1. CERLIM carried out an external formative evaluation of the IESR project, between September 2005 and January 2006. This involved the analysis of a range of formal and informal documents, and interviews with over forty stakeholders.
  2. The evidence suggests that the MIMAS team has been broadly successful in its aim to demonstrate the concept of the Information Environment Service Registry. The IESR is now at a pilot service stage, and we would encourage the JISC to continue its investment. We recommend that MIMAS be funded to build a robust, user-facing demonstrator service based upon current functionality.
  3. At present there is relatively little knowledge of the IESR beyond technical staff and systems developers. We recommend the creation and wide dissemination of use cases, scenarios and working examples to demonstrate the potential advantages of the approach to the broader professional community. We have noted a current lack of understanding of m2m services among non-technical potential users, which may hinder uptake and use of the service registry.
  4. The underpinning data model is appropriate to the current scope and level of development and robust for current purposes. Stakeholders have suggested new properties which might be added in the future, and we note the IESR team's willingness to consider such input.
  5. It appears that a combination of actual subject descriptions used within the records currently populating the registry and the query mechanisms being used are not producing the expected search results. This may indicate a need for mapping of underpinning vocabularies, possibly by using external mapping services. It should be made clear to contributors that subject-based retrieval will be constrained until this is achieved.
  6. Issues such as maintenance and quality assurance would need to be monitored; for example there is as yet no experience of independent service providers populating entries themselves online, and no procedures are in place for the regular updating of service records. This will require dedicated administrative support.
  7. There is no doubt that the future lies in distributed or federated repositories rather than the centralised model. It follows that there should be discussions with the JISC to agree the exact scope of the IESR's remit within the JISC Information Environment.
  8. We are confident that the IESR team can resolve these issues, and we consider that the IESR could become a most useful component of the JISC Information Environment.

January 2006