Following the news of our succesful bid, its down to work – putting the administration in place, preparing the communication channels – such as this blog page, the sharepoint site and the project website. The Project Plan and the text for the JISC Project website will be delivered to our JISC Programme Manager – Chris Brown – by the end of the week .
I am very pleased to have been given the role of Project Manager for this project and looking forward to working with colleagues in the Library on delivering our goals. ARK is a relatively short six-month project but we are fortunate in that many of the Project Team have already worked on the pilot project and bring very welcome experience to the project.
The UKC Project website will be up and running very soon, giving a summary of the aims and goals of the project and links to project plan and progress reports as they become available. Here is a paragraph from the website giving a summary of what the project is about.
The JISC-funded ARK project will analyse the impact of, and look at the potential gains from the University’s implementation of the Raptor toolkit. Raptor is a software suite for the accounting of authentication information, primarily designed to assist organisations account for e-resource usage. Raptor reports will improve our understanding of the demand for, and use of electronic resources, such as journals and databases by the staff and students of the University. Raptor reports will allow us to assess the usage of each Academic school and use this data to explore how we can improve internal charging models.Other work to be done in these early days of the project includes setting up the Steering and Implementation groups and agreeing a schedule of meetings for the duration of the project.
So, in summary, not much to report yet but the project team are very enthusiastic about what ARK can deliver. Prior to the implementation of Raptor the University had been unable to monitor the use of e-resources with the level of detail needed to inform strategic planning. There is little doubt that the impact of the ARK project will be useful, not jsut to Kent but to the wider HE/FE community.