The Vision and the transformation going forward

Jisc’s vision is to transform our library support services by developing a more effective, efficient and cohesive set of library services.

Our aim is to develop a modular approach to our library support services, presenting services that more clearly support library activities, for example acquisition, evaluation or preservation. Instead of developing one all-encompassing library support service, we will continue to provide services separately, for example JUSP and KB+, but moving between our services for a particular library activity will become a more seamless and intuitive experience. This will allow libraries the flexibility to use our services to best suit their individual needs and in conjunction with their own third party services.

Plan in more detail

In order to achieve our vision, we will carry out a programme of work, of which the main activities are:

Developing a National Bibliographic Knowledgebase (NBK)
Orchestrating the data used by each of the library support services, standardising data sources between services and eliminating unnecessary duplication of effort
Working on a more detailed understanding of how our library support services support librarians’ activities – for example, from acquisition and licensing through to usage gathering and perpetual access. This will enable us to present Jisc services to librarians in a clear, consistent way through improvements to service interfaces
Consolidating maintenance systems/web and making more effective use of cloud infrastructure. API development will support and deliver on the data orchestration activity
We will take an iterative approach to developments, both enhancing and integrating existing services and taking the initiative with new opportunities and challenges for the library sector.

Affected services & impact on you

A number of services will be impacted from this development work, including primarily:

Jisc Collections
JUSP
KB+
SUNCAT
The Keepers Registry

However, the impact is intended to be minimal on user’s experience as much of the work is about the underlying technology and data and centralising and standardising these key service elements. What impact there will be, is when improvements are made to interfaces, but it is expected that these will be entirely positive and beneficial to users of all these services.

Timeframes

Activity	Detailed activity: Deliverables/Outputs	Due date
Developing a National Bibliographic Knowledgebase (NBK)	Selection of preferred supplier and contract placed Library catalogue data available in NBK and beta service available	October 2016 July 2018
Data Orchestration & Standards	Authority data sources identified for services Plan produced for proposed data changes	July 2017
Workflow mapping and user interface design	User consultation and testing of wireframes with community agreement on workflow approach	July 2017
Consolidation of maintenance systems/web and API development	Exploit cloud environment Develop APIs for centralised data sources	July 2017
Access management – develop a single sign-on to support working across services	Consolidate service account details	July 2017