JUSP the Thing

Attending a session with the word JISC in the title is probably cheating a bit for me, but the JISC Usage Statistics Portal is something I have wanted to learn more about for a while as we think about making better use of authentication statistics for the UK federation.

Ross MacIntyre has been thinking about usage statistics since 2000. The same questions are still be asked: 'what is usage?', 'what do you want information on?', 'what is your holy grail?' - although the underlying standards have moved forward significantly with the development of COUNTER and SUSHI.

The Usage Statistics Portal is looking to provide aggregated usage statistics for Nesli2 journal deals - representing over 6000 journal titles. It is currently very tedious for librarians to gather these statistics from the various providers involved in Nesli2, despite good coverage of COUNTER provision. The Portal aims to solve this problem.

The Portal aims to provide the following to libraries:

• Single point of access to own usage statistics;
• Monthly figures presented in both academic and calendar years;
• Adition where relevant of gateway / aggregator statistics;
• Usage of current collections with backfiles removed;
• Assistance with SCONUL statistical returm;
• Trend analysis, high usage titles, publisher summaries etc.

An important factor to note is that a '0' usage title is not regarded by participants in the pilot as a 'worthless' title, but one where the potential of the resource has not been realised. This may demonstrate a requirement for more internal communication with departments, for example.

The Portal also allows institutions to benchmark journal usage against other institutional responses. A big question around this is the issue of whether this data should be anonymised and whether publishers would be unhappy about non-anonymised data being shown. This will be dictated by confidentiality clauses in current licences.

Some of the outstanding issues to be dealt with beyond the pilot are the need for widespread adoption of COUNTER R3 compliance, the need for machine readable sources for publisher price lists, and the need for better subject categorisation of journals.

Finally, the code is being made available open source so it is hoped that this will be available to lots of other institutions and consortia - something I am sure many of my federation colleagues in other countries will be interested in!

When HEFCE underspends: a £22 million JISC digitisation project

In 2004, a £10 million HEFCE underspend [crikey Moses!] resulted in a windfall for JISC: Jean Sykes recounts being told to "spend this in 2-3 years on large scale digitisation projects, please."

JISC reviewed a list of extant proposals for content digitisation, but considered it important to consult the community and bring new bids to the table. 6 major projects were selected for Phase 1 - the largest digitisation activity in Europe - ranging from 18th century British parliamentary papers to British Library archival sound recordings. [Was it these chaps who had Charlotte Green in stitches last week?] The latter group set up a user panel to help decide which of the masses of recordings in the archive should be prioritised for digitisation.

Standards had to be agreed across all projects, and multimedia in particular presented a variety of obstacles. But from this, a JISC digitisation strategy is emerging. Lessons were learned:

• user consultation (do it - and get some experts in)
• procurement (technical and commercial issues)
• metadata (metadata, metadata - importance cannot be overstated - build it in from the outset)
• quality assurance and evaluation throughout the project
• impact assessment (an increasingly big deal - projects now need to build in licences and metrics from the start)
  
• project management - and capturing of lessons learned
  
• interface accessibility
• promotion of the finished service.

Phase 2 covers another 16 projects with a further £12m funding from JISC (big up those crazy HEFCE underspends!). Seven thousand reel to reels! Four thousand hours of recordings! Fifteen thousand Giles cartoons! Three thousand high quality Pre-Raphaelite images! Fifteen thousand theatrical objects! Half a million pages of Cabinet Papers! Over one million pages from national, regional and local newspapers! Five thousand university theses! Great War poetry and contextual archive material! [Apologies for all that terribly unliterary exclamation, but really, the breadth and scale of this stuff is staggering - did I already say Three cheers for HEFCE underspends?] Phase 1 and 2 projects will be free at the point of use to UK HE and FE, and some to schools and public libraries.

And now they're already preparing for Phase 3 (and here was I thinking Phase 3s are merely the product of an over-optimistic imagination). Work is underway to assess impact/usage of Phase 1 projects, which unfortunately did not have statistics built in from the outset so some qualitative indicators will need to be used. A gap analysis will be conducted to assess the community's needs, and the development of thematic portals will be investigated to make resources more comparable and usable (these could be extended to cover JISC collections, too). Future sustainability remains a big challenge - keeping digitised content accessible; migrating it to future formats and platforms; updating collections with new content. Ultimately, librarians may need to be prepared to subscribe to this content to ensure its preservation.

Federated Access Management in the UK

This morning I attended the UKSG workshop on "Federated Access Management in the UK" presented by Nicole Harris of the JISC.

Harris described how federated access management is a key part of the JISC overall strategy and is currently a high priority. The session therefore served to raise awareness of the project outlining some of the benefits; the current state of play; and some of the options available to both institutions and service providers.

In a federated system authentication is devolved to the institution who is responsible for identifying all users entitled to access their resources. Access control is then negotiated by sharing metadata about the user between the authenticating institution and the service provider.

The architecture (Shibboleth) that the JISC have adopted was described as "technology neutral" but must be SAML compliant. Harris explained that there was "international convergence" on Shibboleth and SAML for federated authentication and that this wide support would not only secure the future development of the system, but would also create a wider market for suppliers.

At present institutions can choose to deploy open source software to implement federated authentication, or instead license commercial software. Institutions may also outsource the authentication to an "identity provider" much as most institutions already do with the Athens service.

Athens itself is not going away. Institutions will be able to continue to use Athens but will ultimately be charged a fee in order to do so; JISC funding for the Athens service will shortly cease. "Gateways" that bridge between the older Athens service and the newer federated authentication options provide an upgrade path for institutions as well as interoperability between the different services.

Harris stressed that there will be considerable institutional investment (in both time and resources) in order to implement federated authentication and suggested that institutions begin including this in their IT strategy.

The return on this investment will be reaped in several ways. Users will be able to benefit from "single sign-on" across multiple services, not only from external providers but also internal to the institutions. This should address repeated problems with users gaining access to resources as well as the need to manage many different accounts. Ultimately a federated system may also allow institutions to provide collaborative resource sharing, licensing users from other institutions to access internal systems.

The expectation is that by November 2008 around one third of UK institutions will have implemented federated access management, with the majority completed by November 2009. It seems likely that the Athens service will continue to run, as a paid for service, until at least 2011.

Readers interested to learn more about federated access management should visit ukfederation.org.uk.