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Aims and Objectives

The University of Oxford aims to lead the world in research and education. 1 This is driven by its consumption and production of priceless intellectual assets including publications and data, teaching resources, library resources, archives and museum collections. However, though some collections, resources and expertise are catalogued and listed in great detail, they can be hard to find, take diverse forms and are often not suited to discovery by potential users. And the catalogued collections only represent a part of the overall holdings of the University’s museums and libraries. This means that Oxford researchers and students are not benefiting as fully as they should from the wealth of knowledge that has been collected, created, purchased or licensed on their behalf. Thus the University’s riches are hidden from view, underexposed and underutilized, in a time in which, increasingly, a piece of information that cannot be easily found on the web is assumed not to exist. Even for more persevering hunters, the process takes longer than it could, the risk of missing some piece of vital information is high, and the tools do not adapt well to individual user requirements.

The aim of this project was to scope new approaches to finding information and collections of relevance to research and teaching at Oxford. It has explored new tools and approaches to enable students and researchers at Oxford and abroad to understand the scope of collections held by the University and to find them quickly and efficiently. It has examined recent developments in the semantic web, linked data and data visualization; considered the application of domain …