Janet is a high-speed network for the UK research and education community provided by Jisc, a not-for-profit company set up to provide computing support for education. It serves 18 million users and is the busiest National Research and Education Network in Europe by volume of data carried. Previously, Janet was a private, UK-government funded organisation, which provided the JANET computer network and related collaborative services to UK research and education.
Formerly known as The United Kingdom Office for Library and Information Networking, UKOLN was a centre of expertise in digital information management, providing advice and services to the library, information, education and cultural heritage communities. UKOLN was based at the University of Bath and was funded through a mixture of core and project grants. Latterly it received its core funding solely from JISC, but had received core grants previously from the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council and the British Library.
The National Learning Network (NLN) was a UK national partnership programme designed to increase the uptake of Information Learning Technology (ILT) across the learning and skills sector in England. Supported by the Learning and Skills Council and other sector bodies, the NLN provided network infrastructure and a wide-ranging programme of support, information and training, as well as the NLN Materials − a substantial range of e-learning content. The initiative began in 1999 with the aim of helping to transform post-16 education. The Government's total investment in the NLN totalled £156 million over a five-year period.
Copac was a union catalogue which provided free access to the merged online catalogues of many major research libraries and specialist libraries in the United Kingdom and Ireland, plus the British Library, the National Library of Scotland and the National Library of Wales. It had over 40 million records from around 90 libraries as of 2019, representing a wide range of materials across all subject areas. Copac was freely available to all, and was widely used, with users mainly coming from Higher Education institutions in the United Kingdom, but also worldwide. Copac was valued by users as a research tool.
Open educational resources (OER) are teaching, learning, and research materials intentionally created and licensed to be free for the end user to own, share, and in most cases, modify. The term "OER" describes publicly accessible materials and resources for any user to use, re-mix, improve, and redistribute under some licenses. These are designed to reduce accessibility barriers by implementing best practices in teaching and to be adapted for local unique contexts.
Jisc is a United Kingdom not-for-profit organisation that provides network and IT services and digital resources in support of further and higher education and research, as well as the public sector. Its head office is based in Bristol with offices in London, Manchester, and Oxford. Its current CEO is Heidi Fraser-Krauss, who joined in September 2021 from the University of York.
The Technical Advisory Service for Images (TASI) provided advice to the United Kingdom's Further Education (FE) and Higher Education (HE) communities in the creation and use of digital images. Its services included a Web site, helpdesk, training programme, and mailing list. TASI was funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (Jisc) and based within the Institute for Learning and Research Technology (ILRT) of the University of Bristol. It later became known as JISC Digital Media but the service was retired on 31 July 2016.
Chris Cobb is a British computer scientist and Pro Vice-Chancellor, Chief Operating Officer at the University of London. He has been Pro Vice-Chancellor at University of Roehampton, London, England and prior to that was at London School of Economics. In 2020, he was appointed as Chief Executive of the Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music, despite not having any professional background in music.
The Digital Curation Centre (DCC) was established to help solve the extensive challenges of digital preservation and digital curation and to lead research, development, advice, and support services for higher education institutions in the United Kingdom.
Intute was a free Web service aimed at students, teachers, and researchers in UK further education and higher education. Intute provided access to online resources, via a large database of resources. Each resource was reviewed by an academic specialist in the subject, who wrote a short review of between 100 and 200 words, and described via various metadata fields what type of resource it was, who created it, who its intended audience was, what time-period or geographical area the resource covered, and so on. As of July 2010, Intute provided 123,519 records. Funding was stopped in 2011, and the site closed.
The European University Institute (EUI) is an international postgraduate and post-doctoral research-intensive university and an intergovernmental organisation with juridical personality, established by its founding member states to contribute to cultural and scientific development in the social sciences, in a European perspective. Its main campus is located in the hills above Florence in Fiesole, Italy.
Lorcan Dempsey is a librarian who was a vice president and Chief Strategist of OCLC, where he worked for 21 years between 2001 and 2022. He is currently a professor of practice at the University of Washington Information School.
Internet Archaeology is an academic journal and one of the first fully peer-reviewed electronic journals covering archaeology. It was established in 1996. The journal was part of the eLIb project's electronic journals. The journal is produced and hosted at the Department of Archaeology at the University of York and published by the Council for British Archaeology. The journal has won several awards for its creative exemplars of linked e-publications and archives.
British Library Sounds is a British Library service providing free online access to a diverse range of spoken word, music and environmental sounds from the British Library Sound Archive. Anyone with web access can use the service to search, browse and listen to 50,000 digitised recordings. Playback and download of an additional 22,000 recordings is available to Athens or Shibboleth users in UK higher and further education. The service was originally launched with funding by the Jisc.
Netskills was a training and staff development organisation providing services to help the UK education sector make effective use of technology.
SHERPA is an organisation originally set up in 2002 to run and manage the SHERPA Project.
The Archaeology Data Service (ADS) is an open access digital archive for archaeological research outputs. It is located in The King's Manor, at the University of York. Originally intended to curate digital outputs from archaeological researchers based in the UK's Higher Education sector, the ADS also holds archive material created under the auspices of national and local government as well as in the commercial archaeology sector. The ADS carries out research, most of which focuses on resource discovery, cross-searching and interoperability with other relevant archives in the UK, Europe and the United States of America.
The Faculty Of Science is one of the four faculties which make up the University of Strathclyde, in Glasgow, Scotland. The faculty contains a number of departments offering various undergraduate and postgraduate courses.
The East London Theatre Archive (ELTA) is a digital theatre archive based at the University of East London, in London, England. The ELTA contains 15,000 digitised objects including images, papers, photographs and artefacts. The Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) provided £500,000 funding to support the ELTA digitisation project.
Edinburgh Engineering Virtual Library (EEVL) project was started in August 1995 and the core database went live in September 1996. Its objective was to provide a free guide to specialist engineering resources to UK higher education institutions. It focused primarily on UK based resources. It was part of the Electronic Libraries Programme (eLib) which was funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) The main team was based at Heriot Watt University in Edinburgh, with additional input from staff at the University of Edinburgh, Imperial College, Cambridge University, Nottingham Trent University, Sheffield University, Cranfield University and the IEE.
