For the next two days I’m at the JISC Innovation Forum at Keele University. The event brings together many JISC projects and services and hopefully will be a stimulating event. There is an official blog at http://jif08.jiscinvolve.org
The first day is starting with an introduction from Sarah Porter (Head of Innovation Group, JISC), who is starting by outlining what JISC means by ‘innovation’ – introducing new and useful things/services/ideas.
The participants for this forum come from across 100+ organisations, including colleges, universities, funding bodies, JISC services, other support organisations, government, representing library, IT and many other aspects of the community JISC is engaged with.
Sarah is describing how they hope the event will be about conversations, exchange of ideas, building links etc. That is, not just us being talked at. Is it just me, or do JISC seem to be trying to find ways to enable this type of discussions via meetings in perhaps a more explicit way than they have in the past?
Sarah now asking – why do we need ‘innovation’?
* improve practices and quality
* respond to changing needs of users
* respond to new opportunities
* respond to changing external environment
These needs chime with me particularly at the moment, as this is something I’m very much engaged in at Imperial – and how we best engender and support innovation within a library service, and what structures and practices best support this.
Sarah now describing some of the ways that JISC Services and programmes deliver JISC aims – highlighting SuperJanet and Digital Libraries (since early 1990s and 1996 respectively). Noting how some of this takes time to deliver and filter through to the community.
Highlighting the current digitization programme – 19th Century newspapers; parliamentary papers; medical journals.
E-learning programme – XCRI (software to exchange course related information); learner experience work – lead to print and video publications; e-portfolios – e.g. ‘Simple’ project
Research – MyExperiment Virtual Research Environment; Virtual Environments for Research in Archaeology – increased publication speed after dig season (average dropped from 1 year to just a few months)
Repositories and Information Environment – SWORD (technical development to enable deposit in repositories via a standard technical interface); JORUM; Start Up and Enhancement repository projects (around 45 projects funded here).
Sarah is dotting through a lot of JISC funded work, and many of the things she is highlighting are good pieces of work, but I think it needs mentioning that there is a view that the approach JISC takes to funding projects etc. is not as productive as it should be – concerns are expressed about funding a large number of projects with small amounts of funding. I’ve also had conversations with people who feel that the projects don’t really go anywhere.
I personally probably sit somewhere in the middle. I sometimes feel frustrated by the JISC approach (as I see it), but I also buy in to the ‘thousand flowers bloom’ type approach, and where we see the outputs pushing into practice then we see the value of this.
On the back of this, there is now a question from the audience about ‘evaluation’ – how do we evaluate the work, and adjust our approach to funding future work?
Sarah saying that evaluation is very important, as is assessing impact – and we need to do this at both micro, but perhaps more importantly, macro, level. This is something that JISC is looking at very carefully.
Another question (from Brian Kelly) – in Sarah’s talk she said ‘revolutionary change’ – but many in the sector are conservative – how do we reconcile this? Sarah feels it is about language and communication – don’t need to phrase it as ‘revolution’ but sell the benefits.