Here is our summary of discussions at the latest meeting of the Jisc Collection Management Community Advisory Board, held on February 8th 2018.
- The Board reviewed Terms of Reference for 2018, adding an oversight of NBK activity, specifically in relation to collection management, to our role and purpose.
Service Updates:
- It was agreed that The University of Sydney’s use of CCM Tools to investigate collection overlap within their Asia/Pacific collections was of great interest. The possibility of further analysis, potential partnerships or collaborations should be investigated.
- CCM Tools has launched some enhancements enabling retention and management of search history for users. Further enhancements are on hold while we work on experimenting with NBK access so that we can start testing with NBK data. The Jisc team will be consulting with the community on forthcoming collection management developments in year 2 of the NBK.
- The Copac team are continuing to enhance Copac by loading new data. New NBK contributors will also be loaded onto Copac where this can be done smoothly and quickly, but this will not be possible for all NBK contributors. At some point over this year the team will stop new Copac loads to enable full focus on NBK developments.
- The team have developed a new administrative tool to manage the vastly increased flow of data to the NBK. Data inflow is increasingly complex, incorporating a range of routes, formats and sources. A system model for the flow of data is under development which will need to reflect this complexity.
- Copac has reached the milestone of 100 contributors recently and it is planned to celebrate this and link to a review of the first year of the NBK project. The acceleration of data flow and processing as part of this work has helped us reach some significant milestones. The NBK builds on the success of Copac.
- Organisation of a Collection Management @ Edinburgh event is underway with a date in June to be announced shortly.
- The Jisc team are engaging with a variety of conferences and events over the next few months and are keen to develop further outreach activity, welcoming further suggestions or invitations.
National Bibliographic Knowledgebase
- NBK Progress: the 60th dataset has been sent to OCLC and launch of a Beta interface for contributing libraries to check their data is imminent (this took place after the meeting). 108 institutions have agreed to contribute to the NBK and are at different stages in the data workflow. Although the project has not quite achieved the ambitious Year 1 data loading target it was agreed by the Jisc Library Services Advisory Group (LSAG) and the CMCAB that sufficient progress was being made. Members were reassured that there were no systemic problems and that existing targets for Year 2 were maintained. Jisc are positive about moving into Year 2 of the project.
- Key points looking forward to Year 2 are data ownership and data quality. Board members felt it is valuable that the NBK is shining a light on the concept of data ownership and discussing the issue with data suppliers.
- In response to issues around data quality highlighted by the NBK (and building on the work of the White Rose Consortium) Jisc will fund some Community Data Groups to investigate and propose solutions or ways forward. This initiative will kick off in February, with groups concluding their initial work by the end of July. The Board stressed that the outputs of the groups need to be scalable, so that the whole community will benefit. It was agreed that the CMCAB will provide oversight for the initiative and that the groups will report via this CCM Tools blog.
- As we move into Year 2 and look to extend engagement with the NBK to institutions not previously involved, it will be important to ensure the benefits to different institutions and to non-library decision makers are clearly conveyed.
More information about the NBK can be found on the project blog.
The next meeting will be held on Thursday 21st June 2018.
