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The purpose of this paper is to give an overview of the Jisc and Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA) Library Data Labs project and its outputs. This collaboration involved bringing together cross-institutional library teams to produce proof of concept data-visualised dashboards using library analytics data that could be made available to others via the Heidi Plus service.

The teams used an agile approach, which adapted the agile methodology for non-technical and disparate team members. The key agile elements were followed, including the Scrum approach, whereby teams had a product owner, several development team members, a data wrangler and a scrum master. Many of the dashboards took inspiration from some of the earlier Jisc work on library analytics.

A wide variety of proof of concept dashboards were created addressing a range of library issues. These fell into two main categories for the cross-institutional teams, namely, comparing the Society of College, National and University Libraries (SCONUL) annual statistics results against the National Student Survey (NSS) data and collection management and analysis.

Some of the HESA data were potentially sensitive. In effect, this created a walled garden as some of the data were not designed for sharing. Furthermore, the data that the Jisc team used were restricted by publisher agreements, meaning that specific institutions’ usage could not be identified to others.

The paper provides insight into the Library Data Labs project and discusses a number of implications from the outcomes of the project. These are now being investigated by HESA, Jisc and individual institutions.

The Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) is an advisory body to the higher and further education funding councils for England, Scotland and Wales, and the Department of Education of Northern Ireland in matters related to the use of information and communications technology in education and research. In the world of committees, it has been offering remarkably practical digital information products and services for colleges and universities (www.jisc.ac.uk/aboutus/whoweare/valueimpact.aspx) for a variety of very large‐scale projects. One of the services helps librarians in comparing and selecting digital information resources for licensing. The JISC Academic Database Assessment Tool (JISC ADAT) – created for JISC by DataSalon – is offered free of charge under a Creative Commons license agreement so it is available to any type of library (and any user) anywhere in the world, not just for JISC members in the UK. This paper aims to address these issues.

The paper reviews the major features, advantages and shortcomings of the promising initiatives of JISC ADAT, and recommends some essential content enhancements to increase its utility for the perennial and daunting task in academic, public, special and school libraries of selecting databases based on their source coverage and essential features of their software platform. Here only the journal coverage aspects are discussed.

JISC ADAT is a promising idea, and indeed JISC is the organisation in the UK that can handle it. However, it still would not suffice, as users would need to learn about the depth of coverage of each journal by the databases, not just about the time span of coverage, and in particular the gaps which may have very different implications. It should show the number of records taken from the journals in the specific database. For nearly 100,000 journals, it seems to be impossible to do, but it could be limited to the active journals, and the process could be automated by a series of macros launching federated searching using the existing journal names and/or ISSNs, and visualising the hit counts in tiny sparkline graphs in a very compact way to make the differences in the real coverage of journals by various databases really stand out.

The paper offers insights into the JISC ADAT, outlining its virtues and vices.

The purpose of this paper is to give a working librarian's view of the role of the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), and make some suggestions about how effective it is from the perspective of practice with a view to justifying its role in terms of recent policies introduced by national government in the UK.

The author sketches some of the broader government initiatives that affect this area and combines this sketch with commentary from the arena of information practice, in order to sum up the case for and against the value of JISC.

In balance, this paper finds the evidence for the beneficial impact of JISC's work to be quite compelling, but also argues that there is a lack of awareness of how strong this case is at practitioner level. At a time when all public services are under strong financially led scrutiny, this lack of appreciation at practitioner level is of some concern.

This is a brief and selective account of one particular sphere of JISC's workings. In order to make the case more effectively, a broader investigation could be carried out, but with the requirement that the findings should be focussed on practical outcomes and benefits that are well understood by information professionals working in everyday library and information environments.

This account tries to make clear in straightforward and practical terms what the larger specific benefits of introducing federated access into the UK university community have been.

This paper gives a double viewpoint on its topic, combining a high‐level view of national information management issues from the government perspective, with a practice‐led view of the same issues.

This paper reports findings from the first annual cycle of a three‐year research project on the provision and use of electronic information systems (EIS) within higher education in the UK. The project, JISC User Surveys: Trends in Electronic Information Services (JUSTEIS), was funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) and undertaken at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth (UWA). Students, academics and library staff in 25 universities were surveyed using critical incident and critical success factors methodologies to ascertain the range and nature of EIS use. Provision of these systems by higher education institutions was also investigated via an analysis of their library websites. The findings reported in this paper focus on student use and the purposes for which EIS are employed, and reveal the limited array of EIS used and the ad hoc nature of search strategies adopted across undergraduate and postgraduate bodies within a range of disciplines. There appears to be little or no variation in the pattern of EIS use by the various student groups studied – the effect of the Internet on information seeking by students is hugely significant and the more formal resources, such as JISC‐negotiated resources are little used. There is little evidence of coherent search strategies used by students. Recommendations for both the JISC and higher education are offered.

Seeks to introduce the special issue devoted to JISC's Learning and Teaching and Infrastructure Programme, sometimes known as 5/99.

Explains that 54 projects were funded between 2000 and 2003 which developed the Distributed National Electronic Resource (DNER) concept.

Reveals that part of the purpose of the programme was to develop the infrastructure to support seamless access to quality assured resources. Another focus was resources for learning and teaching. A third strand was evaluation.

Presents a useful introduction to the JISC Learning and Teaching and Infrastructure Programme.

To discuss the issues and challenges of digital preservation facing institutional repositories and to illustrate the Joint Information Systems Committee's (JISC) view on institutional repositories and its key initiatives in helping UK institutions address these issues.

A combination of published work and JISC documents (public facing or internal) were used as reference material.

Digital preservation is a complex process and there are still many unsolved issues which make it a challenging task for institutional repositories. However, the wide deployment of institutional repositories also provides new opportunities for digital preservation. Much could be done to consider digital preservation from the outset, to involve the authors and to embed digital preservation into repository workflow, which will ease the later preservation tasks.

A number of ongoing JISC‐funded projects are briefly reported which explore different models for the provision of digital preservation services for institutional repositories. These models may be a way forward to tackle collectively the issue of long‐term preservation within the setting of institutional repositories. Depending on the outcomes of the projects, further investigation and implementation could be undertaken to test the models.

This paper will help the reader to gain a better understanding of the issues related to digital preservation in general and how JISC's work has helped to tackle these issues.

This paper clearly states JISC's view on, and future plan for, digital repositories. This is of value to the UK educational community as JISC works on its behalf and responds to its needs.

This paper traces the development of JISC strategy for, and provision of, networked information services through the 1990s. The account has been structured in “eras”, and although each lasted only a few years it was arguably equivalent to a long period of history in such a fast moving field. The early era of the Computer Board and the Information Systems Committee (precursors of JISC) was characterised by experimentation, risk‐taking, and learning by doing. With the establishment of JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee) in 1993 we entered a second era, of consolidation of policy, expansion of service provision through new datasets and databases, and increasing take‐up by users. The third era benefited from the wider context set by the Follett Report and, from 1995, saw a flowering of related projects and developments creating the “electronic library”. JISC’s new five‐year strategy launched late in 1996 heralded a fourth era, to be led by the Committee for Electronic Information (CEI) which has now set about widening the scope of nationally provided electronic collections even further, and has begun to tackle a wide range of management and policy issues relating to a much more mature range of services. The paper concludes with some consideration of the issues to be faced in the next phase of provision.

Proposes investigating the work of the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) QA Focus advisory service.

Outlines the work of JISC's QA Focus advisory service, which has been developing a quality assurance methodology and support service that aims to ensure that project deliverables will be interoperable.

The JISC vision for the Information Environment seeks to provide users with seamless access to quality resources which are distributed across a range of providers, including JISC services, the institutions themselves and commercial vendors. The vision is based on use of open standards, which will allow developers and end user institutions freedom of choice in the application they use to develop and provide access to resources. This approach is reliant on use of open standards to ensure interoperability.

This paper is useful for those who plan to use the JISC's QA Focus advisory service.

The Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) information environment aims to offer seamless and integrated access to a wide range of digital collections and resources through a common interface. Portals are a primary means through which such resources will be delivered to users, facilitating the discovery of information. Portals can deliver their functionality by embedding distinct portal services in Web environments familiar to the user, such as an institutional portal or virtual learning environment. Initial work on such embedding has started, though this promises to be a major area for future development.

This JISC funded UK National E‐Books Observatory study is a benchmarking survey of e‐book usage and perceptions in more than 120 participating universities. The paper aims to present the results that investigated: use of e‐books in general (methods of obtaining e‐books, reasons for using, viewing/reading behaviour in connection with e‐books); use of e‐books provided by the library; use of JISC collection texts (use and awareness); use of the library and print material in general.

The study is based on an online survey which was conducted between 18 January and 1 March 2008, over which period 22,437 full or partial responses were received.

The study shows that e‐book penetration is very strong (61.8 per cent of all students are already using them in connection with their scholarly work, as teachers or students), so the e‐book revolution has already happened but clearly it has some way to go.

The paper presents the results of the biggest survey of its kind ever conducted, which represents a huge advance in one's knowledge of e‐book use on a national scale.