JISC Digital Infrastructure programme call

JISC currently has a call, 16/11: JISC Digital infrastructure programme, open for project proposals in a number of "strands"/areas, including the following:

• Resource Discovery: "This programme area supports the implementation of the resource discovery taskforce vision by funding higher education libraries archives and museums to make open metadata about their collections available in a sustainable way. The aim of this programme area is to develop more flexible, efficient and effective ways to support resource discovery and to make essential resources more visible and usable for research and learning."

This strand advances the work of the UK Discovery initiative, and is similar to the "Infrastructure for Resource Discovery" strand of the JISC 15/10 call under which the SALDA project (in which I worked with the University of Sussex Library on the Mass Observation Archive data) was funded. There is funding for up to ten projects of between £25,000 and £75,000 per project in this strand

First, I should say this is a great opportunity to explore this area of work and I think we're fortunate that JISC is able to fund this sort of activity. A few particular things I noticed about the current call:

• a priority for "tools and techniques that can be used by other institutions"
• a focus on unique resources/collections not duplicated elsewhere
• should build on lessons of earlier projects, but must avoid duplication/reinvention
• a particular mention of "exploring the value of integrating structured data into webpages using microformats, microdata, RDFa and similar technologies" as an area in scope
• an emphasis on sharing the experience/lessons learned: "The lessons learned by projects funded under this call are expected to be as important as the open metadata produced. All projects should build sharing of lessons into their plans. All project reporting will be managed by a project blog. Bidders should commit to sharing the lessons they learn via a blog"

Re that last point, as I've said before, one of the things I most enjoyed about the SALDA and LOCAH projects was the sense that we were interested in sharing the ideas as well as getting the data out there.

I'm conscious the clock is ticking towards the submission deadline, and I should have posted this earlier, but if anyone reading is considering a proposal and thinks that I could make a useful contribution, I'd be interested to hear from you. My particular areas of experience/interest are around Linked Data, and are probably best reflected by the posts I made on the LOCAH and SALDA blogs, i.e. data modelling, URI pattern design, identification/selection of useful RDF vocabularies, identification of potential relationships with things described in other datasets, construction of queries using SPARQL, etc. I do have some familiarity with RDFa, rather less with microdata and microformats. I'm not a software developer, but I can do a little bit of XSLT (and maybe enough PHP to be dangerous hack together rather flakey basic demonstrators). And I'm not a technical architect, but I did get some experience of working with triple stores in those recent projects.

My recent work has been mainly with archival metadata, and I'd be particularly interested in further work which complements that. I'm conscious of the constraint in the call of not repeating earlier work, so I don't think "reapplying" the sort of EAD to RDF work I did with LOCAH and SALDA would fit the bill. (I'd love to do something around the event/narrative/storytelling angle that I wrote about recently here, for example.) Having said that, I certainly don't mean to limit myself to archival data. Anyway, if you think I might be able to help, please do get in touch ([email protected]).