16 April 2002
Beyond the DNER - An announcement by the Joint Information Systems Committee
The JISC's vision of online provision for the educational community, in which high-quality resources would be accessible from any location, easily navigated and cross-searchable by subject or data type, inspired the original Distributed National Electronic Resource (DNER) plans. Although the establishing of a distributed national electronic resource is still a key part of the JISC 5-year strategy, and it is still being developed in line with the DNER Vision Statement at http://www.jisc.ac.uk/pub99/dner_vision.html, there are, however, new factors that suggest it is time to move beyond "the DNER" as the name for this vision and for the JISC to find more appropriate ways to communicate its activities and its underlying objectives.
For the first time the JISC has articulated formally how some of the key development activities fit into its overall scheme with the publication of its Information Environment Strategy (http://www.jisc.ac.uk/dner/development/IEstrategy.html). Through its various strands, the strategy provides a framework for implementing and enhancing the original DNER vision, as well as plans to add services and mechanisms for discovery, navigation, retrieval and access to digital information. This strategy links up with a number of other ongoing development activities, previously discreet from the DNER, providing a more integrated framework for JISC's development activities as a whole.
The JISC has also recently been reorganised. The JISC Executive now has four teams: Policy and Support; Development; Services Management; and Outreach and Institutional Support. The DNER as an administrative entity therefore no longer exists, but has been superseded by the need to give coherence to the full range of JISC's activities. A redesigned database-driven JISC web site (www.jisc.ac.uk), will be launched in May and will symbolise this new integrated approach.
Development of JISC collections and resources will continue, but these resources will, from September 2002, be made available in more user-focused ways, through subject-based portfolios. These portfolios will give subject views not only of the available collections and resources, but also of the support and advisory services that the JISC funds. Subject portfolios will be promoted through Resource Guides in seven subject or faculty-based areas, while Resource Guide Advisers will promote their use through training and outreach activities. Feedback and evaluation showed that the "DNER", as a name and an acronym, did not register or resonate with our user communities; portfolios will allow the JISC's communications activities to be more user-oriented, more focused on the ways in which users wish to access electronic resources.
So the DNER vision lives on, but in another form and with other names: as subject-based portfolios which describe and contain nationally-funded collections and resources, and by the further development of the technical infrastructure which will underpin these resources and which will allow for their full exploitation by the UK further and higher education communities.
Dr. Philip Pothen (JISC Communications Manager)
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