IAP Community Acceptance Plan
From DigiRepWiki
Contents |
Background
This is a plan for Community Acceptance of the Images Application Profile. It includes a summary of the dissemination work been carried out to date (August 2008), a set of Profile maintenance recommendations, and a set of recommendations for future community engagement and IAP deployment.
Also, in terms of Community Acceptance, JISC is funding a one-year post to help take the profile out to the community and engage with relevant stakeholders. This plan could form a basic outline of which areas this post will develop further, and can be fleshed out in more detail when the Community Acceptance post holder begins work in Autumn 2008.
Scope
The remit for community acceptance at this development stage has been to engage with a Working Group made up from relevant stakeholders in the community and to begin the process of dissemination. While some work dissemination work has been undertaken in terms of papers presentations and meetings, a major drawback of the IAP's development has been that it has yet to be tested by Institutional Repository software developers. It therefore lacks practical iterative testing. Much of the future deployment of the Profile will therefore centre around this area. Simultaneously, dissemination is still required amongst other key stakeholders. See the Use Case and Functional Requirements sections for more information on these stakeholders, their needs from the Profile and the project scope in general.
Community Engagement
October 2007 - July 2008
- A Working Group was assembled on October 2007 to work on the profile. - An email list was set up (Images-APP@Jiscmail.ac.uk) to facilitate discussion amongst the group - The JISC Digital Repositories Wiki was used as an information source throughout development, and project documentation and IAP Drafts were made available through it - Dissemination of the profile has happened wherever possible, including ad-hoc meetings and an article in the April 08 edition of Ariadne.
Recommendations for future Community Engagement (non-technical)
Further engagement with the community could involve the following activity:
- Setting up of a wider discussion group, inviting national and international participation from various stakeholders - Targeting future email announcements to stakeholder email lists eliciting feedback - Participation at relevant events and conferences - Further engagement with the JISC and the other Profiles in development - A workshop / community engagement event
Recommendations for future Community Engagement (Software Development)
As noted above, a major gap in IAP development has been a lack of engagement with Repository Software developers and other Search Services such as the Intute Repository Search Project. It became clear at an early stage in the project that this was not going to be possible as:
(a) Repositories themselves remained largely data stores for Text based resources and were not generally storing and describing images.
(b) The Repositories Search Project had begun as providing cross searching of Text documents, and at the time of project start up were moving into the area of learning resources - engagement with images was still some way off.
As things stand repositories are now beginning to engage with images to a greater extent, although this remains in its infancy. In particular future IAP developments could consider engaging with the following JISC funded Repository Start up projects that are dealing with images:
- KULTUR a collaboration between University of Southampton, University Collge for the Creative Arts and University of the Arts London (EPrints Software) - SAFIR University of York (Fedora Software) - Future development should also continue to engage with the Repositories Search Project to ensure the IAP is assessed when work begins with images
Large scale implementation of the profile is dependent of take up by Repository Software vendors. JISC and the other Profiles in development are considering a joined up single approach to this end - as apposed to each Application Profile having to be adopted individually. This work is likely to continue through 2008/2009. For a summary of the software providers and their responses to engagement with Application Profiles, see the SWAP Deployment Plan
Current Status
The current instantiation of the Images Application Profile was complete at end of July 2008. This work has been coordinated by Polly Christie and Mick Eadie at VADS.
Future maintenance of the IAP will depend on the JISC's plans for long term management of all the Application Profile devlopment work that it has funded recently.
Future activity depends largely on how the IAP moves forward in line with Community Acceptance, Implementation Posts and Repositories software development.
