Library awarded HEFCE funding

The Library has been awarded a total of £300k from HEFCE for three projects under their Shared Services Programme. Jean Sykes, Librarian and Director of IT Services said “HEFCE has chosen to fund 29 projects throughout England under this scheme, and the Library and IT Services are delighted to have got three of them”

All three projects are feasibility studies for shared services in the HE sector in England:

• UKRDS (UK Research Data Service) will investigate the feasibility of a UK-wide shared service for the management of research data. Currently, individual researchers, academic departments, and whole institutions are suffering from the “data deluge” and it is set to get worse. A national framework could help to ensure that important data could be safely maintained, accessed and re-used as appropriate by other researchers, and re-purposed where possible for new uses. Harnessing data created in the research process and making it available and re-usable has the potential to add to the sum of top-quality research for which the UK is already known.

• MAGIC (Maintaining Access to Government Information Collaboratively), with the British Library and Oxford Social Science Library, will investigate solutions to the problem of government documents being published only on the web. Previously, printed documents would have been deposited at the British Library and purchased by academic libraries and kept in perpetuity; now their appearance may be transitory, with information lost for students and researchers in the future. The project will investigate the feasibility of a shared service to provide archiving and access to web-only UK government documents to support learning and research.

• WAM25 (Walk-in Access to e-resources in the M25 Consortium) will investigate the provision of reciprocal walk-in access to electronic resources in academic libraries across Greater London and the South East. Although publisher licences often permit walk-in access to staff and students from other universities, technical and operational difficulties often mean such access is not provided by libraries. A feasibility study will be carried out into the viability of an initial pilot amongst six partners, with the ultimate aim of a full reciprocal service across the 58 members of the M25 Consortium of Academic Libraries.

 
Further details of the outcomes of the feasibility studies will be available in due course. For more information visit the Project pages on the Library website.

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