The total cost of the project is £23,642.
£12,238 of the budget is allocated to staff time – mostly Alex and Nick. £500 is being allocated to travel, accommodation and other misc. expenses. There are £10,904 of indirect costs associated with the project. JISC are contributing £14,185 (60%) to the project and the University of Lincoln are contributing £9457 (40%) .
| WORKPACKAGES | February | March | April | May |
| 1. Project Initiation | X | |||
| 2. Technical ‘blue sky’ consultation | X | |||
| 3. Visual representation of proposed model | X | X | ||
| 4. Data Modelling | X | X | ||
| 5. Wide ranging Consultations | X |
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| 6. Prototyping | X |
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| 7. Case studies | X | |||
| 8. Documentation | X | X | X | X |
| 9. Evaluation and Project Closure | X |
Methodology
A collaborative, cross-departmental approach will be taken by the Corporate Web Team and University Online Services Team. Key stakeholders will be identified, ‘needs assessed’ and requirements drawn up. Mapping these requirements to a visual representation will drive policy creation and underpin the technical development.
The decisions around the construction of our identifiers will be informed by best practice and existing guidance from the community.i.e. http://www.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/media/301253/puiblic_sector_uri.pdf and http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/jisc-ie/blog/identifiers/identifiers-quick-reference/
Linking You is a four month project involving the Web Team in Marketing and Communications, the Online Services Team in the ICT department, and the Centre for Educational Research and Development.
Chris Goddard (Website Manager) has worked at the university for 10 years and is responsible for the management of the University’s corporate website and online communications. He’ll assist in engaging university Stakeholders and ensure that the outcomes of the project are embedded in university web policy and integrated in the forthcoming review of our web sites.
Alex Bilbie (Developer) works in the ICT Online Services Team and currently works on the Total ReCal and Jerome projects. Previously, he worked on the JISCPress project and developed WordPress plugins for OpenCalais and the Talis Platform. Alex is also a Computing student, working for the University during a year out.
Nick Jackson (Developer) also works in the ICT Online Services Team and currently works on the Total ReCal and Jerome projects. Together with Alex, Nick runs the Online Services Team’s Labs environment. Nick has recently graduated from the university with a degree in Computing and, like Alex, is valued for his fresh and student-centred perspective on the University’s online services.
Tim Simmonds (Online Service Manager) has worked for the university for over 20 years and is in charge of all online services managed by the ICT department. He’ll bring this experience to the project and represent ICT Services as a Stakeholder.
Joss Winn (Technology Officer) works in the Centre for Educational Research and Development (CERD). He’s currently Project Manager of Total ReCal and was Project Manager on the JISCPress and ChemistryFM projects, as well as Project Officer on the JISC-funded LIROLEM project. CERD led the Learning Landscapes project and Joss will ensure that the work of this proposed project is understood within the wider context of its benefits to research, teaching and learning. He will manage the project and co-ordinate the work of Alex and Nick.
Engagement with the Community
Alex, Nick and Joss regularly attend JISC workshops and conferences and look forward to discussing their experience on this project and other related work they have done. As with previous JISC-funded projects, we will make heavy use of the project blog and Twitter to post ongoing reflections, solicit feedback and disseminate the project deliverables.
Our comparative case studies will provide an opportunity to formally discuss our work with at least one other HEI and the visual representation (poster) of the proposed data model will allow non-technical users, internal and external to the university, to understand the context of our work and its relevance to them.
The prototype will also allow users both inside and outside the university to test our work and offer feedback via the project blog. As with other recent services, we encourage the re-use of our data.
It’s quite simple: All documentation, including anonymised summaries of consultations, the data model, visual representations and blog posts, will be licensed under a CC-BY license. We’ll consult with OSSWatch to ensure an appropriate license is used for the prototyping data. The public benefits of this project are likely to be the incremental research outputs published on this blog.
Aaah! The risk analysis. When writing the bid for the project, we quickly totted up the number of sub-domains we have at the university and it came to 600. I couldn’t believe it. It became quite clear that the long-term risks of not undertaking this project far outweigh any risks internal to the project. We have sufficient skills and experience among team members to undertake each of the deliverables, although we know that the consultation processes may introduce unanticipated risks to the project. As always, there is a minor risk that team members may be absent during the project due to illness, but this will be mitigated by close collaboration on work packages and sharing of responsibilities. The project has support from the most senior level of university management.
Our original proposal was born out of lessons learned from the Learning Landscape project and also out of necessity. We are committed to developing and improving our virtual research, teaching and learning environment and see our work on identifiers as fundamental and integral to this commitment. The project is also timely and will feed into a wider review of our websites and services.
In terms of how we intend to ensure that the project will be a success, we’ll engage in a number of ways to communicate with stakeholders throughout the project (blog, Twitter, conferences, poster, case studies) so as to ensure that our work is widely known, understood and supported. We’ll also demonstrate the value of identifiers to all stakeholders, in terms of how they express our virtual learning landscape, improve the effectiveness of communication across the university and contribute to a more efficient use (and re-use) of data.