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I have been an enthusiastic supporter of the JISC Journal Archives (JJA) ever since JISC Collections aired their intentions of developing a single platform for all the archives purchased on behalf of the community at the 2011 UKSG Conference in Harrogate. I particularly liked the idea that the JISC eCollections service would be a community endeavour and was delighted to take on the role of chair of the JJA Advisory Board.

The first meeting was held in December 2011 where we discussed the Objectives and role of the group

Objectives

v  To ensure that the JJA interface, functionality, content and licensing supports use by teachers, learners and researchers in UK education

v  To ensure that future developments and content additions to JJA are driven by community demand  that will further enhance use and are prioritized correctly to provide best ROI to the community

v  To ensure that JJA adopts current and emerging industry standards/technologies for interoperability, discoverability, accessibility, statistics, metadata and content.

v  To ensure that JJA supports the vision and aims of JISC eCollections and collection development across the user community, and develops in line with its sister services, JHB and JMH.

Role

v  To represent the UK education community

v  To guide and develop the JJA technology and content strategy

v  To hold open, frank and constructive discussions on future developments

v  To provide advice and guidance to JISC Collections and Mimas

v  To be an advocate for JJA and harness the knowledge and expertise of the community in future developments

v  To provide a conduit for communication between the community and JISC Collections

v  To feed information back to the Board of development in the digital journal archives scholarly environment

The group currently consists of HE members, however, we decided to include FE colleagues too in order to better represent the community that will be using JJA – particularly as FE use of the archive may be very different to HE use and the design of the site needs to reflect this.

We had a lot of discussion about the remit of the group and JJA itself. The main aim of JISC Collections is to load the content from the publishers that have signed up to licence their archives in perpetuity (Taylor and Francis and Cambridge University Press are the latest additions). However, discussion soon turned to the future and the role that the group (and the wider community) would play in the addition of new content. Although budgets are limited, it was thought that the community could contribute to a wishlist of archive content that could be added.

While representing the community, the Advisory Board will also be acting as a critical friend to JISC Collections – a number of concerns and suggestions were take forward and a number of these have already been acted upon.

Looking forward JJA has some great potential both as a way of guaranteeing access to archival content licensed by JISC Collections, but also as a way to make digitised content from smaller publishers available to the community.

The next meeting of the Advisory Board will be in March 2012. We welcome new members – if you are interested, please email the JISC Collections helpdesk.