In 2015, a team led by Sero HE undertook a business analysis of Jisc’s Library Support Services portfolio. The analysis covered:
- How could the existing service portfolio be best integrated to provide the greatest benefits to library users and consumers of Jisc services?
- How could other services be most appropriately integrated into the service portfolio?
- What added functionality could Jisc provide based on existing services and data?
- What would be the optimal data and service architectures for these Jisc services?
The Sero HE team included colleagues from Cottage Labs, Ithaka S+R, Knowledge-Integration and Max Hammond.
The review was undertaken in collaboration with SCONUL and RLUK as well as individual academic libraries and resulted in a report which is published on the Jisc website. The report made a number of recommendations which are now being implemented in 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.
- Consolidating maintenance systems/web and making more effective use of cloud infrastructure. API development will support and deliver on the data orchestration activity
Sero HE was subsequently involved with specifying and supporting procurement of the national bibliographic knowledgebase (NBK) and also asked to provide consultancy to support initial data orchestration activity including helping to develop a data orchestration project plan.