JISC Capital Circular 4/06 outcomes

Today has been an exciting day. Projects that I am potentially involved in which have so far been announced as funded under the last round of JISC bids from November last year are as follows:

SWORD - Repository Deposit API development work in association with Aberystwyth, Southampton, Hull, Cambridge, Birkbeck (University of London), National Library of Wales, and Intralect, as a DSpace advisor and developer

EThOSnet - A major e-theses project following on from the great work of the recently completed EThOS project. Imperial is pleased to be leading this project, with partners from the following institutions: Leicester, Warwick, the British Library, Nottingham, Hull, Glasgow, Birmingham, National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh, Southampton, Cranfield, Robert Gordon University, Aberystwyth, Cardiff, Loughborough, National Library of Wales, and Exeter. What a team, and what a great looking project. My role is yet to be formalised, but hopefully somewhere in the area of the software development ;)

The future for repositories at Imperial looks bright. Today we completed our first UAT for our upcoming IR service "Spir@l", and we are due, over the course of this year to go live with that service, our own internal e-theses management system, and now the outcomes of these two projects will no doubt play a role in shaping our repository environment, which I hope will rapidly become one to be pround of.