Annual Report 2009–2010 (covering the period 01 August 2009 – 31 July 2010)

1. Mimas mission statement

Our mission is to power world-class research and teaching.

Mimas strategic aims

Mimas worked with the Board of Management and staff to create its strategic aims 2009–2012, and is currently updating them for 2010–2013.

The strategic aims (2009–2010) are:

• Actively pursue sustainability over the next 2–5 years through diversification of funding and activity.
• Make the most of our applied research activity and international academic credibility in order to consolidate, utilise and develop our position as a University of Manchester Centre of Excellence.
• Uphold the quality of our service and project delivery.
• Grow as an agile and flexible organisation, anticipating, leading and responding to change.
• Be innovative in our use of technology and effective in deployment of technical expertise.

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2. Background

Mimas is an organisation of experts. Our role is to support the advancement of knowledge, powering world-class research and teaching.

As a national data centre based at The University of Manchester, we host a significant number of the UK's research information assets – and build applications to help people make the most of this rich resource.

Mimas has a longstanding relationship with JISC, developing services that support teaching, learning and research, and strong connections with research councils, especially the ESRC.

The JISC-funded services and projects undertaken at Mimas are underpinned by a direct funding agreement with HEFCE. The ESRC is also a major stakeholder in service and provides funding for socio-economic data dissemination and support services and related projects.

The diversity of activity that Mimas is engaged in has resulted in a number of projects that are supported via other funding agencies and organisations such as: JSTOR, the Wellcome Trust (via the British Library) and Thomson Reuters.

The Mimas service portfolio currently includes: Web of Knowledge Service for UK Education, the Archives Hub, the British Library Zetoc service, CrossFire, ESDS (Economic and Social Data Service) International, Landmap, Copac, Hairdressing Training, and recent aggregate Census statistics. Mimas also hosts the JSTOR Mirror service, UK PubMed Central and Intute, and is home to the Intute Executive.

In addition, Mimas is involved with a number of research and development projects, including the Names project, ticTOCs, JISC Journal Usage Statistics Portal (JUSP) and the JISC ejournal Archive.

Jorum (a national repository for learning materials run collaboratively with EDINA), and IESR are both 'Services in Development'.

While some services such as the Archives Hub, Jorum, Hairdressing Training, Intute and Copac are open to all, others are subject to authentication (e.g. Zetoc, Landmap).

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3. Director's foreword

As a nationally designated data centre, we host a significant number of the UK's research information assets – and build applications to help people make the most of this rich resource. Our unique blend of skills and expertise, knowledge of the sector, strategic alignment combined with our ability to deploy new technologies enables us to add real value for our communities.

Our organisational capability allows funders such as JISC to commission work quickly by establishing proof-of-concept demonstrators that can be transitioned into full services. A good example is the Journals Usage Statistics Portal (JUSP). Libraries spend millions of pounds each year licensing electronic journals, but it has never been easy to gather statistics about how these resources are used. Mimas is developing JUSP in collaboration with JISC Collections, Evidence Base and Cranfield University. The JUSP portal will provide libraries – and librarians – with a simpler way of analysing the usage and impact of their e-journal subscriptions.

Mimas also participates in project activity that builds capacity and expertise that can be reused to enhance services. A good example is the Mobile Mimas project.

The development of mobile technologies provides new opportunities for the delivery of content to students. Mimas has already established itself as an award-winning mobile technology service provider and is deploying its expertise to deliver innovative mobile search interfaces for Copac and Archives Hub in collaboration with the user community. This will enable users to text themselves holdings information for an item in a library, thus saving valuable time.

Although JISC is the primary funder of Mimas, our participation in non-JISC funded activity enables other funders to achieve their strategic aims and objectives and also help JISC maximise its impact across the sector Two high impact examples include the UKPMC service and the ESRC funded CAIRD project.

Mimas has been pivotal to the establishment of UK PubMed Central (UKPMC) service, which connects researchers to a permanent online archive of peer-reviewed research literature – a vast collection of biomedical, life and health science journals. This has been a major collaborative exercise involving the European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI), the British Library, The University of Manchester's Faculty of Life Sciences, and the National Centre for Text Mining (NaCTeM).

Mimas has been successful in receiving funding from ESRC and the Office for National Statistics (ONS) for the CAIRD project to develop a standards-compliant data feeds method as the primary dissemination method for the aggregate outputs from the forthcoming 2011 Census.

Looking ahead

Mimas is currently in the process of finalising its new 3-year strategy (2010–2013). A key aim is to continue to develop and deliver high-quality, world-class services and projects for our diverse communities in line with the strategic aims and objectives of our funders. This will require us to continually enhance the content services we deliver and also to exploit those new technologies which enable us to respond to changing user needs. In this context, Mimas will continue to engage with key stakeholders and the wider community to identify the information and technology problems that they are facing now and in the future, which Mimas can help solve.

As an agile organisation, Mimas will continue to invest in developing the skills and expertise of staff to ensure that we remain at the forefront of new technology and are aligned with community needs. All of this is against a backdrop of severe funding pressures, which means that Mimas will seek to diversify its funding streams over time to ensure financial sustainability and also to seek operational efficiencies while maintaining service levels and quality standards.

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4. Mimas funding

JISC funds the Archives Hub, Copac, Landmap, Zetoc services, as well as IESR and Jorum and a number of projects (e.g. Names, ticTOCs).

Mimas receives funding from the ESRC for ESDS International and the Census Dissemination Unit (CDU), and from Thomson Reuters (Web of Knowledge), Elsevier (CrossFire) and the Wellcome Trust (UKPMC).

Fig. 1: Mimas Income Outturn by Source 2009/10

New funding

JISC has provided funding for enhancements to existing services:

• Mobile Internet Detective (see article in Ariadne Issue 63)
• ‘Sustainable Methods for Content Expansion’ Project (Archives Hub and Copac)
• Storage tier

And for the period April 2010 to March 2011, JISC has provided enhancement funding for:

• Landmap Metadata
• Zetoc 2
• Mobile Mimas

Following the development of Proof of Concept demonstrators, we have been awarded funding for delivery of three new services to support the work of JISC Collections: the JISC Journal Usage Statistics Portal (JUSP), Historic Books (EEBO/ECCO) and UK Academic Journals Archive (eJournals).

Mimas has also been investigating new funding streams, and has been awarded funding under the EU Leonardo Transfer of Innovation (TOI) programme.

Mimas technical infrastructure

The injection of JISC capital funding over 3 years has enabled Mimas to completely overhaul its JISC service delivery infrastructure to provide a modern, more scalable computer and storage platform that will enable Mimas to be able to meet the current and future needs of JISC and the wider community.

Mimas realises the benefits of this investment in terms of improved performance (e.g. Zetoc search times) as well as a reduced space and power footprint. The migration of services from the old legacy hardware onto the new platform has now been completed.

JISC has also provided funding for an upgrade of the JISC-funded data centre infrastructure at Mimas, which adds an expandable and cost-effective commodity storage tier that will provide more economical storage of large static volumes.

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5. Mimas services and new service development

5.1 Archives Hub

The Archives Hub brings together descriptions of archives for research and education; they now have nearly 200 contributors, representing a variety of institutions, all with archives of immense value to research and education.

New website, software and brand identity

On 01 April 2010, the Archives Hub website changed. The Hub team spent several months planning the new architecture, navigation and content. Most of the content was rewritten and this gave the team a great opportunity to think about a coherent approach where they could be consistent in their tone and terminology.

A section for Archivists provides information on how to create and maintain descriptions for the Archives Hub. Many contributors now use the Encoded Archival Description (EAD) Editor, which not only provides a quick, convenient and practical way to create archival descriptions, but is also an international standard that promotes interoperability and sustainability.

The new 'Features' section takes over from the old ‘Collections of the Month’ idea, bringing the same message about the breadth and depth of Hub content and enabling the service to showcase contributors and wonderful collections.

Fig. 2: New Archives Hub materials on display

‘Sustainable Methods for Content Expansion’ project

The aims of this project were to implement an effective export routine from CALM and AdLib to facilitate contributing to the Archives Hub, and so help reduce duplication of effort by contributing institutions. This project has now been completed and the specifications for export have been provided to CALM and Adlib.

Since the project’s conclusion, the Hub has already noted a marked increase in the amount of descriptions it receives through the export option, and this is now being closely monitored. The team is currently developing online audio training materials for how to use the facility.

The project was well received by the UK archival community, and the Archives Hub has received a number of requests for use of the tool from archives in the USA. For further information see the article in Ariadne Issue 63.

Looking ahead

The team will continue to recruit new and exciting contributors. With the help of the Mimas Marketing team, they have created new marketing materials that not only showcase some of the collections, but also highlight the benefits of the service.
http://www.archiveshub.ac.uk

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5.2 Copac

Copac offers researchers free online access to the catalogues of the UK's major research libraries. In recent years, this coverage has grown significantly, with currently c. 56 UK and Irish contributors. The core of the catalogue is still the UK National Libraries and major academic libraries, but over the past couple of years the range of contributors has become increasingly diverse, including professional associations, government and charity libraries, public libraries and museums. The British Museum Library is an exciting recent addition, with the Royal Society Library in the pipeline.

New contributing libraries 2009–2010:

• University of Bradford Special Collections
• National Trust
• Royal College of Music
• National Railway Museum
• British Museum
• Cambridge College and Department Special Collections

Copac is currently undergoing a complete transformation. A number of new facilities have been already been introduced. Notably:

• many journal records now display the latest available table-of-contents derived live from Zetoc
• a login version of Copac offers personalised options including Search History and My References options
• members of some universities can search their local library catalogue through Copac, getting a result set which includes their local resources alongside Copac records
• Copac re-engineering

A complete re-engineering of the underlying database is underway. New software and a new architecture will provide us with a robust platform for future developments, streamlining processing, but retaining data checking procedures. This work provides the opportunity for introducing a range of new facilities that the team will be exploring with users as they carries out a Copac interface review and redevelopment.

High on the list is the introduction of facets to search results to facilitate better navigation of large result sets. As part of this reengineering Copac is also enhancing the deduplication procedures, reducing the number of duplicate records, as well as investigating the potential of ‘work-level' deduplication, bringing together all the different versions of a particular work.

Market research findings

Initial market research for developing a Mobile Copac (see Looking ahead below) for end users is underway as part of the ‘Mobile Mimas’ enhancements project. This research comprises 10 in-depth interviews with current Copac users.

Copac at Interlend 2010

Interlend is the Annual Conference for the CILIP’s Forum for Interlending and Information Delivery. This year’s theme was ‘Meeting the Challenge: Co-operation & Collaboration’ and was held at the Nottingham Belfry from 28–30 June 2010. The session ‘Copac: your union catalogue today and tomorrow’ aimed to demonstrate some of the forthcoming developments and encourage Inter-library loans (ILL) librarians to share their thoughts about how Copac could help them to do their job. The Copac team came away with a better understanding of how to improve the service for ILL librarians.

Looking ahead

Copac has recently received data from the Imperial War Museum and is in the process of adding this to the catalogue. The website is also in the process of being updated with a refreshed logo design and colour palette, as well as a new interface to improve usability.
http://copac.ac.uk

5.3 Web of Knowledge Service for UK Education

The Web of Knowledge (WoK) Service for UK Education provides a single route of access to Thomson Reuters' products subscribed to by an individual institution.

It includes Web of Science Conference Proceedings, Citation Index, Journal Citation Reports, Current Contents Connect, Derwent Innovations Index and many others. This platform provides a unique way of searching, including the ability to perform an 'All Database' search on the content of multiple searchable products.

WoK remains the most popular of JISC's subscription services, with 141 institutions currently subscribed. In the last year usage has increased and continues to increase:

• May – July 2010 = 13,245,526 sessions
• May – July 2009 = 8,774,294 sessions
• May – July 2008 = 3,334,955 sessions

Furthermore, every month in 2010 has seen usage of over 3 million sessions.

The most recent Web of Science Enhancement Committee (WoSeC) meeting, the 22nd, was held on 04 May 2010.

Thomson Reuters continues to enhance WoK on a quarterly cycle and has provided dual access to the new interface (v5.0). New features include:

• Elimination of 'Stop Words'
• Lemmatisation (e.g. tooth will also find results for teeth)
• Full hit counts
• Left-hand truncation (no need to precede the wildcard with three characters)
• Full author name searching
• Direct export to RefWorks

Looking ahead

JISC Collections has initiated renewal negotiations and is keen for Mimas to continue to provide a dedicated Helpdesk for the community. Also, Thomson Reuters has extended their contract with Mimas for another year.
http://wok.mimas.ac.uk

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5.4 Zetoc

Zetoc provides access to the British Library's Electronic Table of Contents of around 20,000 current journals and around 16,000 conference proceedings published per year. The database covers 1993 to date, and is updated on a daily basis. It includes an email alerting service, to enable you to keep up-to-date with relevant new articles and papers.

Zetoc is free to use for members of JISC-sponsored UK Higher and Further Education institutions and research councils. It is also available to all of NHS England, Scotland and Northern Ireland. A number of other institutions are eligible to subscribe to Zetoc.

Zetoc was successfully transferred to new hardware on 15 June 2010. Response times have been substantially improved: at peak times, the average response time has dropped from 2.49 to 0.19 seconds and the number of responses longer than 5 seconds dropped from 182 to 0.

Zetoc Enhancements 2

This project aims to enhance Zetoc functionality and content through the:

• development of personalisation features within the Zetoc Search interface
• Table of Contents (TOC) services
• aggregation
• expansion of Open Access content

The project will be undertaken in collaboration with Liverpool, Heriott-Watt and Bristol universities. This work is due to commence in August 2010.

Looking ahead

Work is progressing well with the re-engineering work required to move Zetoc to a new database structure and technology (Oracle).
http://zetoc.mimas.ac.uk

5.5 Intute

The announcement of a significant funding reduction for Intute was released in December 2009.  JISC has agreed to provide maintenance funding for the Intute resource catalogue until the end of July 2011, and will support work to ascertain the feasibility of new membership models for Informs and the Virtual Training Suite.

The Intute website and database will be available throughout 2010/2011, and users will be supported through a helpdesk.  No new resources will be added to the catalogue, but existing records will be maintained and broken links fixed.

In order to ensure that the legacy of Intute is not lost, investigations are underway to find new ways of making the catalogue content available to the academic community. Discussions so far have included facilitating a community-generated catalogue of websites and working with other organisations in the sector to find a new home for Intute data.

The Intute team would like to thank all users and contributors for their messages and continued support as the service enters its final year. In order to mark the long history of Intute, and to celebrate the achievements of this established service, two articles have been published in Ariadne and the CILIP Library and Information Update:

• Joyce A, Kerr L, Machin T, Meehan P and Williams C. 2010. Intute Reflections at the End of an Era. Ariadne, Issue 64 (July 2010).
• Charnock L. 2010. Distilling the best of the web – is it up to users now?. Library & Information Update, October 2010. pp. 49–51.

http://www.intute.ac.uk

Informs

Following the withdrawal of funding for Intute, JISC provided funding to investigate new ways of developing and supporting the Informs service outside of grant funding.

A full technical review of the Informs software and a market research assessment are underway to inform future options for the service.  An Informs Advisory Group was convened in September 2010 in order to advise the Informs project team at Mimas and to represent the interests and opinions of the library and information skills community in the development of Informs.
http://www.informs.intute.ac.uk

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5.6 Census Dissemination Unit (CDU)

The Census Dissemination Unit (CDU) at Mimas is funded as part of the ESRC Census of Populations Programme to promote and expand the use of the aggregate outputs from the 1971, 1981, 1991 and 2001 UK censuses within academia. Casweb provides web-based access to the UK aggregate statistics.

CAIRD

The CDU's Census Aggregate Information Resource Demonstrator (CAIRD) Project received an evaluation grade of 'Good' from the ESRC in February 2010.The project demonstrated the feasibility, and some of the potentials of applying open standards data feed methods and technologies to the dissemination of census datasets.

InFuse

InFuse will run in parallel with the CDU’s existing Casweb service, and will become the CDU’s platform for dissemination of outputs from the 2011 Census when they become available. Further development of InFuse will continue to incorporate other census and non-census datasets, and to expand its functionality.

Engagement with 2011 Census preparations

The CDU has played an active and leading role in championing the requirements of the academic community, identified through contact with users of its services in the preparatory processes for the UK 2011 Census – through engagement with the UK census agencies via advisory and working groups such as the Academic Advisory Group (AAG), Outputs Working Group (OWG), Census Web Services Working Group (CWSWG) and Postcode Geography User Group (PGUG); and through attendance and contributions at events such Office for National Statistics (ONS) Census Roadshows.

The CDU's contributions to ensure that account is taken of lessons learned from the 2001 Census have been influential in the development of plans for the 2011 Census by the census agencies, and will help to ensure that outputs from the 2011 Census will meet the requirements of the UK academic community, as well as those of census users.

Casweb 2001 Digital Boundary Data Project

The CDU made 2001 Census digital boundary data available via Casweb in May 2010. This facility uses locally held DBD supplied by UKBORDERS, and will be extended to provide a DBD capability for the forthcoming InFuse service.

GeoConvert

GeoConvert is an online tool with functions providing postcode-related information, matching of a range of current and historical UK geographies, and conversion of data between geographies. It was updated with information derived from the February 2010 version of the National Statistics Postcode Directory (NSPD), produced by the ONS, in July 2010.

Case studies and training workshops

A collection of case studies provide examples of use of CDU services, and information from the 2001 Census in a wide variety of real research applications.

The CDU has collaborated with other units of the Census Programme to provide a programme of training workshops coordinated by Census.ac.uk. The CDU's contribution focused on aggregate statistics and their linkage with other census datasets such as the Samples of Anonymised Records, and digital boundary data for mapping. See the Census.ac.uk website for further details.

Looking ahead

The InFuse Project is applying the research outputs of the CAIRD Project to develop a data feed dissemination service that will be called InFuse. InFuse will undergo beta testing in September 2010 prior to release to the CDU’s users.

Mimas has just received ESRC/ONS funding for the CAIRD2 Project (ESRC grant reference RES-348-25-0023; September 2010 to September 2011). The project receives co-funding from the ONS for collaborative work on developing data feeds as the primary dissemination method for the aggregate outputs from the forthcoming 2011 Census.  This recognises the CDU’s leading role in this field, and will have significant impacts on all users of these outputs.
http://cdu.mimas.ac.uk

5.7 ESDS International

ESDS International offers UK researchers access to, and specialist support for, the databanks of some of the world's most prestigious and influential organisations, such as the Organisation for European Co-operation and Development (OECD), the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank.

Now well established in the UK social science user community, ESDS International continues to enjoy high levels of usage, and this year welcomed its 25,000th user. This is due in large part to the continued work to promote and facilitate increased and more effective use of international datasets in research, learning and teaching.

Over the last year, ESDS International has continued to enhance its data portfolio with the addition of the United Nations Commodity Trade Statistics Database (UN Comtrade). This extensive database, containing over 1.1 billion records, is considered to be the most comprehensive trade database available and a valuable new resource for researchers analysing the changing patterns of global trade and their economic, social and political significance.

As well as adding new data from sources such as the New Europe Barometer, the New Russia Barometer and the New Baltic Barometer; the team has continued to work on improving the presentation of existing databanks.

The past year has been a very busy period for ESDS International ‘on the road’. As well as their usual outreach and training events, the team has been actively involved in a number of high-profile international events and initiatives including the service’s appointment (with Mimas) as the UK node for the Global Project, a major initiative spearheaded by the OECD to foster the development of a set of comprehensive and diverse indicators to measure the progress and well-being of societies.

In addition, ESDS International held their flagship event, the fifth successive annual conference at the Institute of Materials in London on 30 November 2009. With a theme of ‘Real Data – Real World’ the event brought together delegates from both the data user and data provider communities to share experiences and discuss new developments in the international data world. The ESDS International Annual Conference 2010, 'Global issues > Global data > Global thinking', will be held on Monday, 29 November 2010.
http://www.esds.ac.uk/international/

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5.8 Landmap

The Landmap Service provides UK academia with a high-quality spatial data download service, which is enhanced and supported by a range of learning materials.

The Landmap website was redesigned to provide a better user experience and to improve access to resources. The overhaul covered three areas:

• integration of the new download interface Landmap Kaia with the old download facilities
• a new graphic design for the website
• the development of a new Learning Zone

Landmap Kaia is a key feature of the new website as it is to be used as the platform for providing access to the data collections. Kaia will be regularly updated to become the main data visualisation, data discovery and data dissemination platform.

The release of the new Landmap website was also coupled with the launch of the Learning Zone, which includes many newly-sourced training and educational materials. Furthermore, a new licensing framework was developed to move away from restrictive licensing by opening up access to resources utilising a Creative Commons licensing framework. There was also a big push on the creation of new marketing materials.

A detailed Marketing Plan was delivered to JISC in January 2010. This was very well received by JISC and is being used across Mimas as a benchmark for service marketing plans.

Landmap Metadata – Source, Integrate & Enhance

The aim of this project is to greatly enhance data discovery and usage for the Landmap Service by developing a Catalogue Service for the Web (CS-W) that adheres to international standards (which will allow the metadata to be automatically harvested). This work feeds into work recently achieved with the launch of the new Landmap Kaia Download client. The project is in the early stages of collecting and sourcing information on metadata requirements.

Looking ahead

Landmap is making use of Web 2.0, such as Twitter, to engage with the user community. The team also plans to host an event at The University of Manchester in November 2010, which will include guest speakers from the industry. While the service is currently aimed at the postgraduate/researcher audience, Landmap aims to widen their user base by penetrating the undergraduate market, as well as students from various disciplines that traditionally would not have used Landmap resources, but may benefit from them now.
http://landmap.mimas.ac.uk

5.9 CrossFire

CrossFire is a complete chemical information solution, covering over 200 years of primary literature. The service incorporates two databases, Beilstein (organic) and Gmelin (inorganic), which collectively contain data on structures, reactions, facts and citations for more than 13 million organic, inorganic and organometallic compounds. The Beilstein and Gmelin databases are updated quarterly.

The CrossFire service at Mimas ends on 31 December 2010. Elsevier Information Systems' policy is that there will be no access to the CrossFire Beilstein and Gmelin databases via the CrossFire Commander after that date. Users at subscribing institutions already have access to the Beilstein and Gmelin content (plus the Patent Chemistry Database) using Elsevier's web-based chemical information system, Reaxys.

More information about Reaxys is available and CrossFire has also provided some information about moving to Reaxys.

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5.10 Hairdressing Training

Hairdressing Training provides exemplary step-by-step guidance videos, self-evaluation tests, worksheets and guides relating to an expanding collection of hairdressing styles and techniques; the service is also mapped to the NVQ Hairdressing curriculum.

As of August 2010, colleges no longer have to register for access. All content is now openly available. Content is also accessible on mobile devices via Hairdressing Training for Mobiles.

The Open Access content released on the 08 September 2009 proved to be very successful. Through experience, the team found that duplicating the content onto sites where the target audience is likely to be online is a very successful strategy and proved to be more efficient than trying to construct communities. There have been over 100,000 views on the Hairdressing Training YouTube channel so far.

A new website was made available in spring 2010 for user testing and via access from the live website. After receiving feedback from focus groups with staff and students, the design and functionality of the new website was further improved with the Mimas Marketing team assisting with a new design and logo for the service.

From the 10 August 2010, all content on the website will be made Open Access.

Looking ahead

Mimas has been successful in securing European funding under the Leonardo Transfer of Innovation (TOI) programme. The project, Hair.net, led by Mimas, will build on the success of the Hairdressing Training service, adapting and transferring it to accession countries Slovakia, Romania and Bulgaria. A key aim of this project is to enhance employability, young people’s engagement with learning, social equality, business sustainability, workforce mobility and skills shortages.
http://hairdressing.ac.uk

5.11 Ariel

Ariel is the most widely used Inter-library loan (ILL) document transmission system in the academic world. This Windows-based program has been employed internationally for more than a decade for fast, economical, high-quality document transmission over the internet. Users can send scanned images of documents to other Ariel workstations anywhere in the world (using either File Transfer Protocol (FTP) or email) and convert them to PDF files for standardised viewing by recipients.

Mimas is the UK, Ireland and Scandinavia distributor of Infotrieve-owned Ariel software and currently distributing and supporting Ariel 4.1.1.
http://ariel.mimas.ac.uk

5.12 JSTOR

JSTOR is a hugely successful repository of facsimiles of non-current academic journals. The University of Manchester hosts one of the three international JSTOR Data Centres, which provide users worldwide with access to the JSTOR archive of scholarly journals.
http://www.jstor.org

5.13 UK PubMed Central (UKPMC)

In collaboration with The University of Manchester's Faculty of Life Sciences, National Centre for Text Mining (NaCTeM), European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI) and the British Library, UKPMC connects researchers to a permanent online archive of peer-reviewed research literature – a vast collection of biomedical, life and health science journals.

UKPMC has grown from 700,000 articles in 2007 to 1.9 million, occupying 3.5TB in July 2010.

The new UK-specific interface was launched on 23 June 2010.

Development of a fully functional Grant Reporting Information System (GRIST) has commenced, providing two of the funding agencies with full exports of grant data. Direct machine-to-machine connections are being discussed. This will enable the exchange of accurate research grant information directly between funders, from their grant administration systems and UKPMC+, where it can be associated with research outputs (i.e. journal articles) by the recipient principal investigators (PIs) and so be used for consistent reporting and benchmarking.
http://ukpmc.ac.uk

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6. 'Services in Development'

6.1 Jorum

Jorum is a JISC-funded 'Service in Development' in UK Higher and Further Education, to collect and share learning and teaching materials, allowing their reuse and repurposing. This free online repository service forms a key part of the JISC Information Environment, and is intended to become part of the wider landscape of repositories being developed institutionally, locally, regionally or across subject areas.

JorumUK is currently available to UK HE/FE institutions, and is based on an institutionally-registered User and Depositor licensing model. JorumOpen is free to access from any worldwide source – only depositors are required to sign up.

Highlights of work undertaken include:

• Since Jan 2010, over 6,000 resources have been deposited in JorumOpen (JorumOpen was made available 19 Jan 2010).
• Engagement with the community has stepped up, which includes support for the JISC/HE Academy UKOER Programme in its pilot stage.
• The Jorum competition for learning resources has been re-run with results to be announced and presented at the ALT-C conference in September 2010; this year’s judging involved the user community.
• A steer has been given by JISC and supported by the Jorum Steering Group towards using the DSpace platform (hosted at EDINA) for Jorum for both the JorumUK and JorumOpen collections.
• A search tool to cross-search both collections has been released. A beta tool to embed this search in institutional settings is being trialled in support of bringing the search to the users.
• An increased focus on user-centric design has been adopted by the Jorum team; so user requirements gathering has fed into all aspects of the service including the website, repository platform and the Community Bay.
• The three core aims of Share, Find, and Discuss are focusing Jorum’s activity with regard to its support for the user community. A Jorum roadmap has been developed which will be made available to the community in September 2010. It maps out the key priorities and milestones for Jorum over the coming year.
• Activity to prepare for a refreshed look and feel for the Jorum website and brand is nearing completion. The new visual identity will be launched at the ALT-C conference in September 2010.

Community engagement

The Jorum team continues to actively engage with the community through a series of workshops, key events, and online training. International presentations were given at OCWC in Hanoi and at OR10 (Madrid). Closer to home, an event entitled Championing OER: Finding, creating, sharing was run at the RSC NI and Jorum was represented through presentations or stands or attendance at SOLSTICE, HEA Conference, LabSpace (online), JISC OER International Symposium and the RLO-CET-organised OER10.

Looking ahead

Jorum is due to undergo a light-touch review in autumn 2010 in preparation for its move to a JISC-funded service. The Jorum programme manager is currently commissioning this work. The terms of reference for the review have been shared with the team, and the intention is that this will be an interactive review, with all team members asked to engage.

Jorum is currently funded until July 2011 and continues to act as a change agent for JISC and the Academy, having influence within and beyond the UK. It is hoped that this will be recognised in this period of review.
http://www.jorum.ac.uk

6.2 IESR

IESR provides a gateway to information about significant research collections in the UK. Researchers can discover new resources by searching or browsing, by using the search plug-ins within their own site or by using the machine interfaces to exploit IESR content within their own applications. Subject coverage includes: arts and humanities, social sciences, health and medicine, science and technology.

Autonomy IDOL has recently been deployed within the IESR service to replace legacy Cheshire II technology. This has resulted in a very impressive increase in functionality, allowing dynamic browsing and auto-suggestion of resource results. Further funding has been obtained from JISC to cover January 2010 to February 2011 for content development.

Looking ahead

IESR has complementary objectives that support the Resource Discovery Taskforce vision of 'a collaborative, aggregated and integrated resource discovery and delivery framework'. Current and future IESR work will involve activities that help support delivery of this ambitious vision. Work to enhance IESR sustainability involves looking at methods of automating metadata generation and providing further incentives for content contributors. The role and value of registries within the UK resource discovery landscape is also a key area of investigation for IESR during the current funding period. This will be assisted through wide community engagement.
http://iesr.ac.uk

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7. Research and development

7.1 Names

The Names Project began in July 2007. Mimas and the British Library were funded by the JISC to investigate requirements for a name authority service for UK repositories of research outputs.

Unique, unambiguous identification of researchers and their institutions has been identified as a requirement in a range of different contexts, including resource discovery, tracking of works produced as a result of particular grants and in the assessment of academics' work.

After a requirements-gathering phase in 2007–2008 and the development of a prototype in 2009, the focus of the Names Project in the past year has been on evolving the prototype into a pilot system with more comprehensive data. In parallel with this work, feedback from the stakeholder community and from the project's Expert Panel was sought during July 2010, with a view to determining the priorities for future development of the pilot.
http://names.mimas.ac.uk

7.2 ticTOCs

The ticTOCs project has developed a service that makes it easy for academics and researchers to find, display, store, combine and reuse tables of contents (RSS feeds) from multiple publishers in a personalisable web-based environment. Mimas provides the helpdesk (tictocs@mimas.ac.uk) and hosts the application, which was developed by Herriot-Watt and Liverpool universities.
http://www.tictocs.ac.uk

7.3 PIRUS2

Building upon the completed Publisher & Institutional Repository Usage Statistics (PIRUS) project, which produced a report concerning the extension of COUNTER to cover individual articles held within institutional repositories and elsewhere, Mimas is leading a successor project to develop the software and identify business models required to support such a mechanism. Partners on PIRUS2 are: Cranfield, Oxford, Southampton, COUNTER, CrossRef and Oxford University Press (OUP). The project runs to the end of 2010.
http://www.cranfieldlibrary.cranfield.ac.uk/pirus2/tiki-index.php

7.4 Linked Open Copac and Archives Hub (LOCAH)

Mimas and UKOLN have recently been successful in a proposal to the Information Environment 2011 programme: Deposit of Research Outputs and Exposing Digital Content for Education and Research. We are working with UKOLN (project lead) to make Archives Hub and Copac data available as structured Linked Data, for the benefit of education and research.

We are also working in partnership with Eduserv, Talis and OCLC, leading experts within their fields. Our vision is to put archival and bibliographic data at the heart of the Linked Data Web, enabling new links to be made between diverse content sources and enabling the free and flexible exploration of data so that researchers can make new connections between subjects, people, organisations and places to reveal more about our history and society.
http://blogs.ukoln.ac.uk/locah/.

7.5 Journal Usage Statistics Portal (JUSP)

JISC approved the development of JUSP in March 2010 and development work started in early April. The portal will contain institutional usage data relating to the journals licensed under JISC's (Nesli2) negotiated deals. The service is being developed by Mimas (lead), Evidence Base from Birmingham City University, Cranfield University and JISC Collections, who are part funding the first-year setup costs. JISC has requested that the service be full operational by the end of 2011.

At the end of July 2010, 11 institutions were participating (Birmingham, Cranfield, Glasgow, Liverpool, Westminster, Kent, King's College London, Portsmouth, Warwick, Imperial College and Northumbria). Publishers include Elsevier, Oxford University Press (OUP) and Springer, though a further three have been approached.

A production environment has been established at Mimas, data processing code implemented and the user interface redesigned. Cranfield have continued with development of open source SUSHI harvesting code – though not many publishers are able to support this method in a scalable fashion.

A lot of interest has been shown in this development and talks have been given at UKSG, NASIG and ICOLC conferences.
http://jusp.mimas.ac.uk

7.6 JISC eJournal Archive

A business case has been developed to take forward the prototype service that brings together the journal archives from Oxford University Press (OUP), Institute of Civil Engineers (ICE), Institute of Physics (IOP), Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) in a single interface. Some additional archive data have been included, which now amount to some 4 million articles. Discussions are ongoing with JSTOR regarding mutual cross-searching.

JISC has approved funding to make this into a mainstream service and we are currently ingesting, indexing and displaying more than 4 million scientific articles within a fully-scalable aggregation and discovery platform.

7.7 Historic Books Platform

JISC has funded two significant digital collections: EEBO (Early English Books Online) and ECCO (Eighteenth Century Collections Online). In addition, the British Library has digitised 65,000 19th Century books and is prepared to make these freely available to the UK academic community.

Mimas has developed an easy-to-use single platform providing cross-searchable access to all digitised books from the 15th to 19th Centuries and potentially to any published material (pamphlets and newspapers) across the centuries. Feedback from user testing of the demonstrator with subject librarians and research and teaching scholars remains consistent in that it provides a much more modern and intuitive interface for end users. A business case to take forward the pilot into service has been developed in conjunction with JISC Collections and this has now been approved.

Currently, we are ingesting in excess of 5TB of historical data and have implemented quality assurance processes to ensure validity and provenance of this valuable resource. The British Library has provided 65,000 digitised books to add to this new consolidated platform. This provides consumers with contextualised and relevant information in ways that could not be offered before.

7.8 UK Institutional Repository Search (IRS)

The UK Institutional Repository Search is a Mimas project, which was commissioned by JISC in partnership with UKOLN and SHERPA. The project was completed in July 2009, but the service has been running continuously since then.

Content stored in institutional and academic repositories is growing and we recognise that there are limited ways to access this information. This project has taken cross-search and aggregation to the next level, creating a visionary platform that pulls together disparate content, making it easier to search and discover in ways that meet personal or contextual needs.
http://irs.mimas.ac.uk

7.9 Mobile Mimas

This project will deliver mobile search interfaces for Copac and the Archives Hub using proven mobile technologies. We will develop additional functionality for Copac that will enable users to text themselves holdings information for an item in a library. Academics researching 'on the road' will not only be able to store record information, but they will also easily find the location, access and contact details of a specific archive or special collection. They will then be able to get in touch with an institution to arrange a visit at the touch of a button.

These mobile interfaces will be developed in collaboration with the user community, firstly by working with them to prioritise and better understand requirements, and secondly through user testing. These activities have the potential to set the foundations for similar development work on Zetoc and other JISC services.

Looking ahead

The user requirements gathering has been completed for the Copac service and a full user requirements report is available. User requirements gathering for Zetoc and the Archives Hub has started. The team is in the process of producing case studies from the user data. Technical development is ready to proceed.

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8. Mimas communications, marketing and outreach

Mimas rebrand

Following the successful launch and implementation of a new brand identity, this period saw a new direction and focus for Mimas marketing, communication, events and outreach. Working with True North, a Manchester-based agency, we developed a new brand to communicate Mimas as an organisation of experts doing quality work that is of measurable value to the wider academic community and beyond.

Key to the new identity is the new Mimas website, which is being used to communicate our outputs, successes and innovations. And central to this has been the development of a new editorial style and the regular publication of feature stories highlighting the benefits, impact and value of our work within the academic community and beyond. More information on the new Mimas brand can be found in the December 2009 news story entitled Making fresh tracks – the new Mimas.

Documentation and news

With initial advice from True North, the Mimas Marketing team created a suite of new marketing materials for promotional use at conferences and exhibitions, including a new Mimas brochure.

In addition, the team advised and assisted with the production of materials for Mimas services, specifically a range of materials to promote the use of the Archives Hub and Landmap.

Paper documentation has been used to increase recognition of services, rather than to explain how to use a service (i.e. user guides). Advice on how to use a service has been integrated into the user interface, and effort is now being directed into reworking service websites to make them more usable.

News stories and press releases are highlighted on the Mimas website, and act as the primary source of information to highlight success stories, event news, staff news and service developments and enhancements. In 2009, we took the decision to cease publication of our quarterly newsletter, Focus on Mimas, in order to concentrate on developing the Mimas website as our primary news outlet. Although we no longer publish a regular newsletter, we continue to disseminate information to the community via various JISCmail lists.

Mimas also communicates news, information and announcements via networking tools such as Twitter. Two Mimas Twitter feeds (@MimasNews and @MimasSupport) provide followers with instant updates relating to Mimas and its services as well as links to relevant topics of interest to our community and other audiences. We also maintain a Delicious feed, with links to interesting articles, topical news stories and publications found online.

Training courses

Mimas provides training courses on the Mimas bibliographic services (Archives Hub, Copac, Web of Knowledge, Zetoc), as well as training for individual services. The courses have a major practical component. Institutions can request to host a particular Mimas course by contacting the Mimas Helpdesk.

Front-line support and Mimas Helpdesk

The Mimas Helpdesk is available for users to submit queries about any aspect of the Mimas service.

The CrossFire, Census, Copac, ESDS International, Hairdressing Training, Zetoc, Archives Hub, Web of Knowledge and Intute services at Mimas have their own dedicated helpdesks and can be contacted by email directly or via the Mimas Helpdesk.

The Mimas Helpdesk is staffed Monday to Friday from 09:00–17:00. Outside these times, messages can be left on an answering machine.
http://support.mimas.ac.uk

'Learning & Teaching Stories'

The past year has seen significant activities for the ‘Mimas Learning & Teaching Stories’ project outputs (the project began in June 2009). Presentations have been given on this work at Educause’s ELI2010, CNI’s Spring meeting (invited presentation), JISC/CNI conference 2010 (invited presentation), IASSIST 2010, EDULEARN2010 the ESRC’s Research Methods Festival (panel session) and a paper is due to be given at ALT-C 2010.

There is significant interest in the sector on how data can be used to enhance student skills to support addressing the quantitative skills deficit as identified by the ESRC (through the appointment of a strategic advisor to investigate this) and the government’s skills agenda (as referred to through the Strategically Important Subjects agenda and the Ambition 2020: World Class Skills and Jobs for the UK report).

The case study approach to gathering evidence from teachers about their use of data services in support of learning and teaching has proved tremendously beneficial to Mimas. A paper on this approach was accepted for the EDULEARN10 conference proceedings. The lessons learned are being incorporated into the services in different ways. For example, ESDS International are developing a Teaching Tools section to the service website aimed at new lecturers; a case study in the use of data in learning and teaching is also being developed for the ESDS International website. Other services are benefiting from the user requirements gathered from this project – for example, to provide more usable interfaces to data.

Feedback from these presentations has been favourable, with audiences commenting on the usefulness of being able to provide evidence of how:

• data use enhances the learning experience
• finding out what other lecturers are doing in their research-led teaching supports new lecturers as well as students
• students who use data in their dissertations find this assists with employability

Mimas events – conferences and exhibitions

Launching the new Mimas brand

The new brand identity was officially revealed on Thursday, 15 October 2009 at the Internet Librarian International conference in London. The visual identity was realised through new exhibition materials, and delegates were invited to celebrate the new Mimas with us through special colour-coordinated cupcakes. The launch was the culmination of months of hard work and was a big success, with our exhibition staff answering delegates’ questions and discussing our plans for the future.

As Caroline Williams, Deputy Director of Mimas, observed:

"At ILI 2009, there was a real energy and vibrancy around the new stand. It was as if people who already knew Mimas stood back and took a fresh look, and many others approached us for the first time."

For a detailed summary and photos of this event see the December 2009 news story.

Mimas at national and international events

A key part of Mimas’ work requires in-depth engagement and the sharing of expertise with our colleagues overseas. Mimas staff have presented papers and workshops at a range of key international events this year, including the Global Registries Initiative in Australia, the European Conference on Digital Libraries in Greece, the European Library Automation Group Conference in Finland, the 3rd OECD World Forum in South Korea and IASSIST in the USA.

The current economic climate means that we are looking more carefully at the costs behind international travel; however, we strongly believe that if we are to continue to adapt for the future, then engaging with international colleagues remains critical. For more information, see the news item Talking globally – Mimas at international events.

Mimas participated in several large national conferences this period, such as the JISC Conference in April 2010 and the UKSG Annual Conference and Exhibition. These are some of the key conferences and events that we attended:

• Royal Geographical Society Conference, (August 2009). Exhibition
• Society of American Archivists Annual Conference, (August 2009). Presentation
• RSPSoc Annual Conference, (September 2009). Presentation
• European Digital Libraries, (September 2009), Mimas panel presentation
• ALT-C, (September 2009). Exhibition and presentations, Jorum learning and teaching competition
• Internet Librarian International, (October 2009). Exhibition and presentations, Mimas brand launch
• ESDS International Annual Conference, (November 2009), ESDS International presentations and exhibitions
• Online, (December 2009). Exhibition
• Educause, (January 2010). Poster presentation
• Open Educational Resources, (OER10), (March 2010). Presentation and exhibition
• LILAC 2009, (March 2010). Exhibition, poster and presentation
• JISC Conference, (April 2010). Exhibition
• UKSG Annual Conference, (April 2010). Exhibition and presentation
• CNI Spring 2010 Membership Meeting ,(April 2010). Presentation
• European Conference on Digital Archiving (ECA 2010), (April 2010). Presentation
• IASSIST 2010, (June 2010). Presentations and panel session
• ELAG 2010, (June 2010). Presentation
• 2010 Semantic Technology Conference, (June 2010). Presentation
• Higher Education Academy Conference, (June 2010). Presentations and poster
• JISC/CNI Meeting: Managing Data in Difficult Times, (July 2010). Presentation
• Research Methods Festival, (July 2010). Presentation and panel session
• EDULEARN10, (July 2010). Presentation
• JISC Innovation Forum 2010 (JIF10), (July 2010). Exhibition and presentation

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9. Management and staffing

Mimas Board of Management

The role of the Mimas Board of Management is to support and advise the management of Mimas, and to oversee its strategic direction and operation.

The Mimas Board of Management was chaired by Professor Sheila Corrall, University of Sheffield until April 2010. Deborah Shorley, Director of Library Services, Imperial College London took over duties from April.

Members include:

• Dr Liz Lyon, Director of UKOLN
• David Utting, Director of Service Relationships, JISC
• Norman Wiseman, Head of Outreach and Institutional Support, JISC
• Lesly Huxley, Director of ILRT, Bristol University
• Adrian Smith, Faculty Team Librarian, University of Leeds (retired end of February 2010)
• Val Stevenson, Academic Liaison, Liverpool John Moores University
• Professor Peter Halfpenny, University of Manchester
• Keith Cole, Director of Mimas
• Caroline Williams, Deputy Director of Mimas & Executive Director of Intute
• Rachel Bruce, JISC Innovations
• David De Roure, University of Southampton
• Peter Halls, University of York
• James Caudwell, Cambridge University Library

Service advisory boards

The strategic lead for Mimas services comes from the an awareness of the priorities of its stakeholders: JISC, the ESRC and The University of Manchester, the Board of Management, service steering groups, and our users.

User needs are represented by enhancement committees (e.g. for Web of Knowledge, Zetoc and the Archives Hub), the JIBS User Group, and direct feedback from users and support staff.

Mimas staff

Mimas managers

• Keith Cole, Director of Mimas and Service Manager for Landmap
  • Amanda Gray is PA to the Director of Mimas
• Caroline Williams, Deputy Director of Mimas and Executive Director Intute
• Dr Jackie Carter, Socio-economic services ESDS International and Census Dissemination Unit; and Learning and Teaching: Hairdressing Training and Jorum
• Sean Dunne, CrossFire, JSTOR, Ariel (retired July 2010)
• Vic Lyte, Technical Infrastructure Services and Projects, and IESR
• Ross MacIntyre, Web of Knowledge, Zetoc, UK PubMed Central
• Anne McCombe, Outreach and Cross-service Development
• Dr Joy Palmer, Library and Archival Services (Archives Hub and Copac)

Mimas staff 2009/2010

• Amer Alroichdi (to June 2010)
• Susan Anderton
• Shiraz Anwar
• Kenny Baird (to May 2010)
• Mark Cannon
• Dr David Chaplin
• Lisa Charnock
• Neil Chetham
• Nerija Chvainickene
• Paddy Collis (to August 2010)
• Dr Shirley Cousins
• James Dilcock (to October 2009)
• Rob Dymond-Green
• Louise Egan
• Claire Evans
• Bharti Gupta
• Justin Hayes
• Mustapha Heddi
• Lisa Jeskins
• Hilary Jones
• Dr Laura Kaagan
• Jyothi Katuri (to April 2010)
• Joseph Kandeh
• Dr Kamie Kitmitto
• Jo Lampard
• Jo Lambert
• Linda Mason
• Diana Massam
• Jennifer Matthews
• Paul Meehan
• Gail Millin-Chalabi
• Leigh Morris
• Paul Murphy
• Dan Needham
• Susan Noble
• Antonio Perkins
• Andrew Priest
• Matt Ramirez
• David Rawnsley
• Anne Reed
• Janine Rigby
• Jane Ronson
• Bethan Ruddock
• Dr Celia Russell
• Ashley Sanders
• Jim Schumm
• Peiyao Shao
• Laura Shaw
• Nicola Siminson
• Jane Stevenson
• Nicholas Syrotiuk
• Steve Tattersall
• Yin Min Tun
• Kendra Watson (to December 2009)
• Andrew Weeks (to April 2010)
• Norma Williams
• Suzanne Williams
• Richard Wiseman
• Colin Worden

Staff are responsible for the development and maintenance of the Mimas services and the provision of user support. A number of staff have multiple service roles. Other functions are provided by IT Services at The University of Manchester, for example, operations, networking and systems support. Mimas also participates in development projects and research.

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Further information

If you have any questions or comments about this annual report or Mimas reporting in general, please contact us.

Last updated on 22 October 2010

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