JISC Conference 2011 – Financial Challenges – Digital Opportunities (14 -15 March)

Conference overview

The JISC 2011 conference focused on the opportunities that digital technologies can provide and most importantly the opportunities they can provide in the current economic climate.

The programme consisted of a variety of sessions, workshops and demonstrations and to extend the reach and audience for the conference JISC utilised the web and social media technologies. This enabled non-attendees to view information about each conference session and it also enabled them to take part in questions and answer sessions.

Programme

The conference consisted of a welcome, introduction and keynotes from the following key JISC staff:

Malcolm Read, Executive Secretary, JISC
Professor David Baker, Deputy Chair, JISC
Professor Eric Thomas, Vice Chancellor, University of Bristol
And then the following main sessions:

Sustaining digital resources today
Using digital media to improve teaching and learning
The benefits of more effective research data management in UK universities
Local developers: their value in innovating in difficult times
Increasing research efficiency through the NGS
Open educational resources – expensive extra or core commitment?
Cloud solutions – risk or reward?
Students as agents of change
Pushing the frontiers of ‘open education and research’ – how to exploit the new opportunities with appropriate licencing and risk management techniques
Effective assessment in a digital age – how technology can enhance assessment and feedback for learners and practitioners
Innovation, collaboration and engagement with external partners
The A-B-C-D of open scholarship (access, bibliography, citation and data)
Better research management – strategies and tools
The benefits of open standards
Can you afford your data centre?
How innovation helps to support an agile and efficient university
Making the most of open content – stories from the frontier
Preparing for a digital future – digital literacy for students, researchers and teaching staff
Amplified events, seminars, conferences – what? why? how?
What is the business administrative case for linked data?
Outsourcing, cloud computing and the law – not as cloudy as you think
JISC supporting your institution – flexibility, agility and the responsive business
Value, efficiency and the benefit of shared services
Rethinking libraries – innovation in a time of limited resources
And the following mini interactive workshops:

Tools for effective online collaboration with Business and Community Partners
Enhancing the user experience – innovative solutions for real library services
Co-genT: an interactive staff development tool
What’s in it for me? A business case for a Research Information Management standard
The Design Studio: supporting innovation in curriculum design and delivery
Opening Access to Film and Sound
DIGIPEDIA: online guide to the digital life cycle
Sessions attended
From the choice of sessions I attended the following:

The benefits of more effective research data management in UK universities
Enhancing the user experience – innovative solutions for real library services
Better research management – strategies and tools
Making the most of open content – stories from the frontier
Reasons for attending

My reasons for attending the JISC conference were as follows:

To find out more about JISC and gain more knowledge of the types of projects they are involved in
To gain more detailed information on recent and current JISC projects
To gain more information on the types of institutions that are involved in JISC projects
Enhancing the user experience – innovative solutions for real library services

This mini workshop offered up a wealth of information on many JISC projects connected with JISCLMS (projects for enhancing library management systems) that includes the following aspects:

Trials and implementations
Personalisation
VLE integration
Mobile platforms
The actual range of projects and their specific titles include the following:

Covprimo (Coventry primo implementation project)
Swwhepsrch (Virtual Academic Library Shared Discovery Platform – Case Study)
Summon4hn (Simplifying resource discovery and access in academic libraries: implementing and evaluating Summon at Huddersfield and Northumbria Universities)
CReDAUL (Combining Resource Discovery Across University Libraries)

Written by Paul Rudd Information Specialist at the Fire Service College in Moreton-in-Marsh (Capita)