JISC

JISC theme(s): Information environment

Following the governments’ comprehensive spending review in 1999, funds were allocated to the JISC to improve the applicability of its collections and resources for learning and teaching. JISC had been successful in developing a portfolio of online digital information and data resources that were considered an important component of the JISC Distributed National Electronic Resource (DNER). This data was primarily used for research purposes and was not being fully exploited to support learning and teaching.

The 5/99 Learning and Teaching programme and 5/99 Infrastructure programme arose from a need to integrate learning environments with the wider information landscape aimed at increasing the use of online electronic resources. The 5/99 programmes stemmed from the vision of the DNER, which was to provide a managed learning environment providing access to quality assured information resources on the Internet, and which are available from many sources. These resources include scholarly journals, monographs, textbooks, abstracts, manuscripts, maps, music scores, still images, geospatial images and other kinds of vector and numeric data, as well as moving picture and sound collections.

The projects funded under the Learning and Teaching programme have been clustered according to themes (images; moving image and sound; access to museum resources) or aim of project (enhancing JISC-funded data services, infrastructure and virtual environments, and access to learning and teaching resources), as well as a couple of miscellaneous projects in the e-books and pricing strategy areas.

The programme was labelled as 5/99 due to the original call for funding appearing in JISC Circular 5/99. A few of the projects in the Learning and Teaching programme were originally funded under the Infrastructure programme; these projects are:

• Geo-Crosswalk Gazetteer: Phase 2 
• Go-Geo! Geo-data Portal: Phase 2 

A significant formative evaluation was also funded as part of the L&T and Infrastructure programmes, named EDNER