JISC announces major funding programme

15 March, 2006

Over 600 delegates gathered on 14 March in Birmingham for JISC's annual conference to hear Professor Sir Ron Cooke, Chairman of JISC, announce details of JISC's plans for the coming year, including plans for the investment of some £80M in capital spending over the coming two years to support UK education and research.

The funds, awarded by HEFCE, will significantly enhance the UK's digital infrastructure and bring a wide range of benefits to the higher education and research sectors.

The conference also marks the launch of the new JISC publication on Learning Spaces, which offers advice to senior managers in colleges and universities on new thinking in the design of technology-rich learning spaces, as well as the start of the period of transition to the next-generation access management system based on Shibboleth technology which has been endorsed by JISC.

Plans for the capital programme, however, formed the centrepiece of Sir Ron's speech. He announced that a call for proposals will be issued in April calling on institutions to bid for projects worth nearly £10M in the first tranche of funds under the capital programme.

Among the plans for the next two years are:

Repositories - a £14M programme to establish a network of digital repositories; national structures to develop the Information Environment supporting repositories, including cross-searching facilities across federated repositories; matching funding to support institutions in developing a critical mass of content; establishment of a national support service for the development of repositories.

Network - almost £28M of extra funding to support the transition to the next-generation SuperJANET5 network.

Digitisation - a further £6M investment in the digitisation of important scholarly resources.

e-Learning - an £11.5M programme to support, with the Higher Education Academy, the implementation of national e-learning strategies, including the establishing of a national e-learning advisory centre.

e-Infrastructure - a further £10M to continue development of the national e-infrastructure in support of the research community and of the DTI's 'Science and Innovation Investment Framework 2004-2014'.

User Environments - a £6.75M investment in the development of User Environments to support researchers in globally distributed research teams in all disciplines; the integration of personal environments, social software, and mobile and wireless technologies to provide a more coherent and personalised information environment; the exploration of new and emerging technologies to ease the administrative and management burdens of those engaged in teaching and research.