1967 and All That

The 1967 & All That project marks the 40th anniversary of the 1967 Sexual Offences Act which partially decriminalised homosexuality. LSE Archives, which holds the Hall-Carpenter Archives of lesbian and gay activism, and its project partner, the Lesbian and Gay Newsmedia Archive (LAGNA) at Middlesex University, are collaborating on a project to conserve and promote collections significant to the Act. Funder: Heritage Lottery Fund.
Start date: January 2007. Completion December 2007

19th Century Pamphlets Online

The project will provide researchers, learners and teachers with online access to the most significant collections of 19th century pamphlets held in UK research libraries across sectors. Sponsored by CURL and led by the University of Southampton, the project is funded under the JISC's £3.8 million Digitisation Programme. As one of seven partners LSE Library is contributing 6,500 of its 19th century pamphlets for digitisation. Start date: January 2007. Completion date: December 2008

British Library/LSE collaborative collection development

A collaborative project to map western European government publications held at the British Library, LSE, and Oxford University Social Science Library. Selected countries are audited and the libraries’ websites indicate which location a researcher should go to for a particular series, historical or current. Researchers will benefit from improved access, detailed holdings information in one place and preservation of the collections. The collaboration has widened from the initial concentration on collections to include staff development and other joint projects.
Project led by Maureen Wade, LSE, Jude England, BL and Margaret Robb, Oxford University Library. Start date: 2002. Project ongoing

David Steel and Richard Wainwright Project

2006 saw the start of a new project that will see the completion of the cataloguing of two collections regarding the history of the Liberal Party. External funding has provided LSE Archives with the opportunity to make available the papers of Richard Wainwright, (Liberal MP for Colne Valley 1966-1970 and 1974-1987) and David Steel (Liberal MP for Roxburgh, Selkirk and Peebles 1965-1983; MP for Tweedale, Ettrick and Lauderdale 1983-1997; Leader of the Liberal Party 1976-1988). The project, will open up previously unseen collections charting the role of two central Liberal MPs from the Party's revival in popularity during the 1960s and 1970s, through to their amalgamation with the Social Democrats in 1988, and beyond.
Start date: 2006. Completion: 2007

DISC-UK DataShare

The DataShare project is based on a distributed model in which each participating partner is responsible for the work on incorporating research data into their own repositories, yet experience, support and knowledge are shared in order to increase levels of success. This builds on the existing informal collaboration of DISC-UK members (Data Information Specialists Committee) for improving their data libraries and models of data support at four institutions: Edinburgh, London School of Economics, Oxford, and Southampton. It will also bring academic data libraries in closer contact with e-prints repository managers and develop new forms of cooperation between these distinct groups of information professionals within academic environments. The advantage for the broader community is to provide exemplars for a range of approaches and policies in which to embed the deposit and stewardship of datasets in institutional repositories. Indeed, among the partners there will be exemplars for the three main repository solutions: EPrints, DSpace and Fedora. Project management is based at EDINA.

FLAME (Federated Local Access Management Environment)

The project will install production-scale services for institutional Devolved Authority Management and Attribute Release Policy control, and a facility for ad-hoc Virtual Organisation Management. These services will be supported by an Enterprise Directory (being implemented by LSE independently of this project) and be integrated with a number of key target applications (including VLE and Institutional Repository). These services will be made available to the entire end user population of LSE, and in parallel the project will mount an institution-wide awareness campaign to inform users about Access & Identity Management issues and personal Attribute Release Policy. It will conduct an in-depth study of User Attitudes and Behaviour (across the LSE user population) involved in interacting with online services and Identity & Access Management. The Library, various IT provider services, and the Information Systems and Innovation Group in the LSE Department of Management will participate in delivering the project. Funder: JISC. Start date: November 2007. Completion date: March 2009

Foyle Foundation Project

This project endeavours to widen access to a wealth of previously unseen social and political heritage. The three year project will produce detailed catalogues of 7 political archives which will bring 20th century social and political history to life. The Project will open up over 500 boxes of previously unseen material. That material covers a wide range of topics including the development of UK local government after World War II, UK administration of World War II, UK's involvement and entry into Europe, Conservative Party policy and 'One Nation' conservatism, advocacy of disability rights. Funder: sponsored by The Foyle Foundation. Start 2005. Completion 2008

IBSS (The International Bibliography of the Social Sciences)

The International Bibliography of the Social Sciences (IBSS) is a leading online resource for social sciences and interdisciplinary research which is produced by the Library of the London School of Economics and Political Science. IBSS focuses on the four core social science subjects of anthropology, economics, politics and sociology and also includes complementary material in related subjects, such as development studies, environmental studies, and media and communication. IBSS includes over 2.5 million bibliographic references to articles, reviews, books and selected chapters dating back to 1951. Over 2,800 social science journals are regularly indexed and some 7,000 books included each year. IBSS is unique in its broad coverage of international material with over 50 per cent of journals covered published outside the US or UK. Abstracts are included for over 75% of current journals and links can be set up to the full text of journal articles subscribed to by individual institutions. Start date: July 1998. Completion date: ongoing

M25 Consortium of Academic Libraries

The Library is a member of the M25 Consortium of Academic Libraries and has been actively involved in it since formation in 1993. LSE Library staff are involved in many of the activities undertaken by the Consortium such as disaster preparedness, widening access, staff training (through the Consortium's training arm, CPD25) and resource discovery. The Secretary of the Consortium is the Deputy Librarian and the Library hosts appropriate M25 administrative support.

M25 Systems Team

The M25 Systems Team provide the online services (collectively called InforM25) for the M25 Consortium of Academic Libraries. The team also oversees the various M25 websites and server hardware based in the Library of the London School of Economics. In addition to supporting the Consortium, the team have been involved in a number of resource discovery related projects including CC-interop, The Bath Profile and What's in London's Libraries

MAGIC (Maintaining Access to Government Information Collaboratively)

The project 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. Led by LSE, together with the British Library and Oxford Social Science Library. Funder: HEFCE. Start date: February 2008. End date: July 2008

Nereus

LSE is a founder member of the Nereus Consortium of European economics research libraries, which now has 19 members from 10 European countries and Australia. Nereus aims to provide high quality open access information resources to economists. Economists Online, a pilot service to showcase the research output of leading economics researchers via a search service and open access full text where available, was launched in 2005. The consortium has been chaired by Jean Sykes, Librarian and Director of IT Services, LSE since its inception in 2003. Nereus will focus its activities on the related NEEO Project during 2007-2010. Start date: April 2003. Project ongoing.

NEEO (Network of European Economists Online)

The NEEO Project, led by Tilburg University, aims to improve integration of academic economics content across Europe and to promote global visibility of European research. The project will harvest high-quality open access research papers from the institutional repositories of 16 partners from 8 European countries, make it available from a central online portal, and offer additional services to authors and readers. The Library will invite economists to participate in this project by depositing their research papers and datasets in LSE Research Online. Full text documents will form the majority of the content. A smaller number of open access datasets will also be added and linked to the related publications. LSE is leading two work packages in this eContentPlus project: User requirements and Assessment and Evaluation. Funder: European Commission. Start date: September 2007. Completion date: February 2010

PERSEUS (Portal-Enabled Resources via Shibbolized End-User Security)

The original project to address the key challenge of Shibboleth-based access management to information resources via an institutional portal has now finished. JISC has granted the project a two-year extension to support the Access Management Transition Programme. The Programme's aim is to support institutions in the transition from the current Athens access management service to federated access management. For more information go to www.jisc.ac.uk/federation. To find out about other related projects see the Angel project. Funder: JISC. Start date: July 2004 Completion date: January 2009

SHERPA-LEAP

LSE is one of 13 libraries in this University of London partnership, led by UCL. SHERPA-LEAP aims to create institutional repositories of open access research material, to promote the use of institutional repositories to academic researchers, and to support individual institutions in the development of their repositories. LSE academic staff are invited to deposit their research in LSE Research Online. Related projects include: ShibboLEAP. Start date: 2004. Project ongoing

UKRDS (UK Research Data Service)

The project 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.
Funder: HEFCE.  Start date: March 2008.  End date January 2009

VERSIONS

An 18 month project to address the issues and uncertainties relating to versions of academic papers held in digital repositories. Different versions of the same paper frequently co-exist in publicly available electronic form, alongside traditionally published versions. VERSIONS aims to investigate researcher needs and current practice before producing a toolkit of guidelines for stakeholders. The toolkit will offer practical guidance about retention of author copies, standardised description of versions, and related advice about the deposit of papers in open access repositories. In addition, the project will deliver a set of recommendations concerning standards for versions of eprints to JISC.
VERSIONS is being led by LSE, with the Nereus consortium of European research libraries in economics as associate partners. The VERSIONS project team is currently finalising reports for publication in late 2007. Funder: JISC. Start date: July 2005.

Version Identification Framework

A 10 month project working towards creating a framework for the identification of versions of objects in digital repositories. The project will provide a common infrastructure for the naming and understanding of issues relating to versions of scholarly works. The project will build on the work of the LSE-based VERSIONS project and the RIVER Scoping study, and is funded by JISC under its Repositories and Preservation Programme, concluding with the dissemination of the Version Identification Framework to the JISC and wider digital repository communities. The project team comprises of expertise from within LSE and from partner institutions University of Leeds, Erasmus University Rotterdam Science and the Science and Technologies Facilities Council. Start date: July 2007. Completion date: May 2008

WAM25 (Walk-in Access to e-resources in the M25 Consortium)

A project on behalf of the M25 Consortium of Academic Libraries 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. Funder: HEFCE. Start date: February 2008. End date: June 2008