This article is from the December 2003 issue of Update.
Two projects funded by Jisc are demonstrating the potential of bringing a vast array of online resources together in a common information environment, reports Philip Pothen. But is there the political will to make a CIE happen?
No one would dispute the fact that organisations such as Jisc and, say, the NeLH (National Electronic Library for Health) and the British Library should primarily serve their respective constituencies, the specific sectoral audiences whose needs they are there to meet. But in an age of specific and far-reaching commitments to lifelong learning, to e-government, to the central place of ICT in our educational and cultural lives, it makes less and less sense to see these audiences as distinct and separate, and our individual activities in isolation.
I often get asked this straightforward question: ‘When will the electronic content that Jisc procures and creates for the further and higher education communities, as well as its services, be available to other sectors?’ The answer usually involves two parts.
The first is that some services’ content is already freely available beyond the education sector, through, for example, the Arts and Humanities Data Service and the Resource Discovery Network, while a number of Jisc-funded or partly-funded services have a specifically cross-sectoral remit, like Ukoln and Netskills.
The second part of the answer is always more tricky and usually involves emphasising in a slightly vague way the important areas of collaboration that there are between Jisc and other organisations. While these areas of collaboration continue to grow, this is possibly an answer to a different question.
Underlying both question and answer is, I suspect, a general anxiety — that all the significant investment being made both in and by our respective organisations might be even better repaid by our organisations working together more closely, by more visible attempts to remove the barriers that exist between different sectors, barriers which will continue to inspire the slight incredulity behind this question until concerted action is taken to remove them.
Technology provides the opportunity and the spur for rethinking a great number of traditional paradigms. As methods of delivery and means of access change, so the cultural, educational and economic models which have governed our activities need to evolve too. In addition, the democratisation that the web represents, albeit never straightforwardly, allows us — or perhaps requires us — to re-evaluate our own commitment to wider goals and longer-term objectives. In such an environment the question of quality becomes paramount — how can we differentiate between quality-assured materials and the unfiltered ‘stuff’ that proliferates on the web and which the web indeed, perhaps, encourages?
In May, Update reported on a landmark in the continued evolution of some of these crucial developments. The item concerned a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) between Jisc, the e-Science Core programme, NeLH, Resource and the British Library, with the support of Ukoln, to put in place a ‘collaborative, cross-sectoral partnership to build a common online information environment’. Such an environment will build on the work already done in this area, the MoU states, but go significantly further, by setting up a range of mechanisms for making available and sharing content which has so far been ‘hidden’ behind technical, sectoral and organisational barriers.
The MoU, as a high-level and enabling document, understandably shies away from specifics. But it does establish certain key principles which will govern this area of work: first, it acknowledges that networked resources, offering great opportunities for both formal and informal learning, should be made available to wider audiences; and, second, that a managed environment is needed to enable the full potential of these resources, as well as the investment made in them, to be realised.
Political commitment
It is the managed nature of this environment that calls for investment, action, but also, crucially, political commitment. While all parties signed up to the initiative are developing or have developed or procured a range of high-quality resources, this area of activity has not been co-ordinated across the organisations. Neither has the possibility of joint procurement or cross-sectoral licensing of content yet been seriously investigated. And while a great deal of work has been done by all parties to establish common standards and technical protocols which will allow interoperability, this has not been formalised.
A managed or common information environment would also require a range of ‘shared services’, which would enable profiling, authentication, security and other procedures. This would lead to an environment that could both deliver a range of online content, and tailor the resources on offer to the needs of individual users.
But none of the organisations concerned are funded to deliver such an ambitious, far-reaching and potentially costly programme. Neither are they funded to overcome the immense challenges of such a programme. What is needed, then, at this stage, is to persuade senior policy-makers and key politicians to take these challenges seriously enough to invest political capital (and public money) into bringing down the unnecessary barriers that prevent open and universal access to all content — especially that which is publicly funded — and into financing the mechanisms that will bring about this managed environment.
The Digital Preservation Coalition perhaps provides a prototype of this high-level lobbying function. By bringing some 20 public sector and other organisations together for a particular purpose, the DPC has succeeded in putting a specific set of objectives on the political agenda. The organisations that make up the Common Information Environment Group believe that the vision that has inspired them to begin to work together in this area also deserve political support.
To this end the group has commissioned two demonstrators to show how a ‘common information environment’ (CIE) might operate in particular subject areas — what it might look like and, significantly, what some of the specific challenges might be. The subjects have been chosen for their centrality to the information needs of both formal and informal learners, and therefore to their contribution to wider national lifelong learning objectives.
The Health demonstrator
The first, Health, brings together information from seven separate sources, each one an authoritative source in its own right. These sources include Omni, the Cochrane Library, the Wellcome Library, Bristol BioMed Image Archive, as well as NeLH. The material, consisting of some 30,000 documents and images in all, including photographs, web resources and full-text articles, currently exists as discrete resources serving different communities, all much used, but as yet unable to be searched or accessed together.
In this demonstrator, the different resources can be searched through one common index using a single tool. Furthermore, using a faceted classification and retrieval tool, the search mechanism is interactive, adapting itself continuously to exclude entries that are irrelevant to the user’s search.
The demonstrator, put together by Bristol-based Adiuri Systems Ltd, shows how rich the possibilities are of bringing this enormous range of high-quality resources together and allowing them to be searched and accessed together. It gives a very real indication of the immense potential of combining these sources in imaginative ways.
The Place demonstrator
The second demonstrator — Place — is being developed by the Archaeology Data Service (ADS) based at the University of York. Again it draws on a great deal of existing expertise — including that gained from Edina’s geoXwalk project and the Royal Commission for the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland. It gives access to maps, images, geographic data, text, monument records, statistics and archive materials, drawn from archaeological, heritage, history, academic and local authority organisations from around the country. Content can be searched for by geographical location and also presented in terms of distribution on a map.
Both demonstrators show us the comparative ineffectiveness of ordinary search engines which provide an incomplete picture of what’s available, and return too many poor and irrelevant resources. Given their focus on the user’s interests, both projects vividly demonstrate the possibilities for serendipity, surely a key factor in engaging wider audiences with the kind of high-quality resources which will be accessible through the CIE. The possibilities for the creative discovery of content as well as the imaginative use of that content in all forms of learning are evident, and hint at the rich promise that the CIE offers in other subject areas.
Invisible to users
But there’s a lot still to be done. Information about health and about our heritage and historic environment ought to be among the country’s principal data assets, and yet the demonstrators show that too much of it remains invisible to users, under-used, hidden behind technical barriers, system-dependent, and subject to sectoral and administrative constraints. Of course, the investment and rights of publishers and rights-holders will need to be protected. However, at a time when publishing and economic models are evolving in far-reaching ways, much better collaborative and creative licensing arrangements are possible, which would benefit ever-wider audiences. There are also considerable technical barriers that will need to be addressed, as the demonstrators indicate, and overcoming them will demand investment and political will.
The demonstrators point, then, not only to the immense possibilities of a common information environment and its consonance with wider political, educational and cultural objectives, but also to the specific challenges that need to be overcome.
What are the next steps? The Common Information Environment Group is currently recruiting a Director in order to take this programme of activity forward and to initiate the process of lobbying, which will begin in earnest later this year. There is, of course, a great deal of expertise in this area within the groups concerned, but the demonstrators will be crucial, both as exemplars of the undeniable benefits of a CIE, and indicators that the investment being made in the creation of high-quality online content is not yet being fully realised, that there is still work to be done.
The price of the common information environment remaining merely a well-meaning vision is a high one. As our educational and cultural landscape evolves, so do our information needs. And as the technical possibilities of our online environment grow, so we need to do all we can to make what we do matter to all citizens of this country. The CIE is an ambitious vision, but the first steps show that it is an achievable one.
Philip Pothen is Communications Manager at the Joint Information Systems Committee Executive (p.pothen@jisc.ac.uk).