Factfile: JISC and the Information Environment

JISC and the
Information
Environment
F A C T F I L E
Be part of the future today
In the not too distant future
Alice is a student at a college in Wales. From her
desk at home she ‘logs on’ to the student area
of her college website. She checks the timetable
for a new course, her department’s notice board,
a message from her tutor and then sends a few
emails to friends. She then begins to search
for information about poverty for a social work
assignment. Her search results return several
possibilities including links to: a course reading
list; books held in the college library; a digitised
Victorian pamphlet about ‘the poor’; a list of
websites for international charities concerned with
poverty; articles in electronic journals; abstracts
from a database; and e-prints in repositories at
UK public sector institutions.
Alice then sets about exploring and selecting
the information she has retrieved from content
providers around the globe through a single
search from her college website.
Today
If Alice wanted to find information for her
assignment today, her experience would be
rather different. The information is ‘out there’, but
searching requires time and perseverance with no
guarantee of finding what she needs. Why? Most
online resources and services have traditionally
been developed in isolation. Each has its own name,
its own interface, features and search facilities.
Users cannot possibly come to grips with them all,
nor have the time to search each individually.
As a result, the considerable public and
commercial investment into resource creation is
not being realised.
JISC is working to address this by developing tools
and mechanisms to foster an online Information
Environment (IE) that will allow online services
to ‘work together’ (called interoperability) in a
secure way for the benefit of its user community.
The vision also includes enabling institutions to
create, adapt and share content and incorporate
it into their own services such as Virtual Learning
Environments (VLEs).
Making it happen
JISC makes a significant investment in technical
development activities to realise this vision
for its community. This involves cutting edge
experimental work often considered ‘unviable’
in the commercial sector. Without JISC and
its national and international partners it is
doubtful whether this work would be undertaken.
Collaboration with other organisations and
agencies, UK and worldwide, also ensures that
JISC’s IE work is an integral part of the national
and global networked environment.
To make the IE actually ‘work’, commonly agreed
technical standards and protocols must be
implemented. The JISC IE Architecture specifies
a set of standards and protocols designed to
realise the vision of delivering digital resources
and services to users like Alice in an integrated
way. This focuses on the use of open standards,
which are widely accepted, designed to promote

F A C T F I L E JISC and the Information Environment
interoperability and owned by vendor-independent
standards bodies. Such standards are available
for use by anyone. By adopting the standards
and protocols, you will help make the vision of a
secure integrated user experience a reality and be
at the forefront of providing content in a way that
users want.
Why bother?
Adopting the standards and protocols will make
your ‘wares’ available to users through a variety
of routes, so that students like Alice can find the
information for their assignments with ease. You
can still control access to your content and maintain
your branding, which means increased uptake
without loosing your identity. Ever-increasing user
expectations are driving developments in this field.
Becoming part of the IE may give you a competitive
edge in the academic market.
You could increase awareness and uptake of your
content by using the standards specified in the
JISC IE Architecture to:
■ Make descriptive data for your content available
for searching by users through other providers’
services (eg college website)
■ Provide appropriate links to your content in
search results from other services
■ Make your content useable by everyone who is
entitled to access it
■ Provide news and alerting services that meet
user needs and expectations
■ Provide institutions with user statistics that can
influence purchase and renewal decisions
■ Adopt JISC-supported authentication standards
to allow institutional content management
References and further
information
You can find out more about each of these
opportunities and associated standards
through the other cards in our JISC IE
Architecture Standards Fact Card series.
Where to find out more about the JISC IE
Investing in the Future: Developing an
Online Information Environment
www.jisc.ac.uk/ie_home.html
5-step Guide to Becoming a Content
Provider in the JISC Information
Environment
www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue33/
info-environment
JISC IE Architecture Standards
www.ukoln.ac.uk/distributed-systems/
jisc-ie/arch/standards
This card is one from a series for content providers.
Further information about JISC online resources:
Web: www.jisc.ac.uk/collections Email: collections@jisc.ac.uk Version 1.1, March 2005