Overview

Background

Currently digital datasets are owned and stored by the individuals /departments/schools that either bought or created them for particular research projects. In addition there are a range of datasets available within the Library which have limited visibility. Therefore, these datasets are not widely accessible or discoverable by students, staff or academics. Some digital content is owned and managed by the library itself but these items are not made available as a dataset (collection) but rather as individual images/files.

Work from the Institutes and in particular, the development of EFI has identified that there is a need for a place to quickly find and access datasets for a range of work from research to teaching and also Digital Scholarship. This will also contribute to increasing the opportunities for engagement with digital collections in complex and meaningful ways and ensure that University bought and created datasets are more visible for use and reuse.

Analysis is required to inform a strategic approach to developing, describing, providing access to, and encouraging reuse of collections that support computationally-driven research and teaching.

This effort will produce a collections as data framework, use cases and user stories, and high-level requirements that support collections as data infrastructure development

Scope

Based on previous conversations and requests the business areas chosen to be in scope of this analysis are:

College of Art Humanities and Social Science (CAHSS) – enquiries from this college demonstrate a business need that requires further articulation

Edinburgh Futures Institute – with a focus on data fluency and data driven innovation it is anticipated that demand for access to and discovery of digital datasets will be critical to the institute

Library - currently experiencing a demand for both digitised items to be available as collections (digital datasets)

Following analysis in these areas, we may consider initial conversation with other colleges and institutes if the budget allows.

High level business analysis activities will be conducted to describe business needs and goals in relation to digital collections/datasets. This will include an assessment of what datasets currently exist, what are they currently used for and where are they held and by whom.

This work will inform development of use cases to represent each of the chosen areas (spanning a potential of 3 levels of complexity Low, Medium, High)

Objectives & Deliverables

The deliverables are prioritised using the MoSCoW prioritisation method:

M=Must Have; S=Should Have; C=Could Have; W=Want

• (M= has to be satisfied for the final solution to be acceptable in terms of delivery dates, compliance, viability etc.
• S= high-priority requirement that should be included if possible -workarounds may be available
• C= a nice-to-have requirement
• W= want but will not be part of this project)  

Benefits

• Providing more data and research materials to support digital scholarship
• Potential to identify datasets which can be used to support the Citydeal and data driven targets for training by having user friendly datasets
• Supporting research data analysis and representation

• Adding value to existing datasets held by the university in making them more accessible to a wider audience and enabling re-use of datasets
• Ensuring digital resources unique to the University of Edinburgh are available for Digital Scholarship
• Build digital scholarship skills across students, staff and academics
• Build on our reputation and provide leadership in this field

Success Criteria

• A requirements document describing business needs and goals, use case examples, and the key operational and environmental factors that influence what the solution may be and next step recommendations

Project Milestones