Survive or Thrive: Making the most of your digital content (JISC Conference 8th & 9th June)

SORT took place over 2 days - presentations all related in some way to the conference background paper which addresses how the LIS community can make the most of the huge amounts of digital content now available on the web. Subjects were very wide ranging but some key ideas I took away were:

• Reduce redundant effort by using shared services and use savings to fund new services
• Make your data freely available and reusable - can add value
• Sharing content can help engage users

Owen Stephens liveblogged the day and has given a much more in depth and accurate write up of the days than I could manage. So rather than repeating what's already been written below are the main points I took from  sessions I attended.

RSP Preservation Day

27 May 2010

The day focused on the higher level workings of digital preservation, engaging the right stakeholders, creating a high level preservation policy and getting preservation on the agenda at University level. It also showcased a number of toolkits and audit checklists to help organisations with preservation.

Summon increasing usage

Marshall Breeding reports on a study by Michigan’s Grand Valley State University which shows how intoducing Summon has increased usage of their resources. Full article here which has a range of impressive stats including:

Summon is enabling students to go directly to full-text, boosting the use of a variety of databases. For example, Academic Search Premier saw a usage increase of 92% and ABI/INFORM rose 354%.

NoWAL Sustaining Digitisation Projects

I attended this event at Liverpool University on 27/05/10.

The main themes for the day were engaging with stakeholders, creating and maintaining policies, advocacy, staffing, and preservation.

Converis Demo

Matt Bowell (Research and Graduate College) organised a demo of Converis, a Research Information System. The Research Information System will potentially replace SEEK and help to integrate University functions more effectively, including HR, SIS, Finance and of course USIR.

Lynne and I have written some notes which can be found on the V:Drive at:
V:\ILS\aCustomerServices\UniResearch\Projects\Research Management Systems\Converis Notes.doc

Demo slides are also availale from the same location, document is titled Converis Demo Slides.