The Institute for Learning and Research Technology (ILRT) will be working with the University of Manchester to embed new technologies into a variety of authentic research settings, including health sciences research, university portals and Intute (a national online information service for UK universities).

Nikki Rogers, the Principal Investigator at Bristol, explains: ‘Conferences and events can play a key role in the research process as they enable research to be shared and valuable networking to occur. However, the communication, resources and networks that they generate are often short-lived or lost. This project aims to create lasting online resources from research events, not only for the benefit of those who attended the event, but also for those who were unable to attend.’

The project, entitled ‘Collaborative research events pilot for national and institutional VREs' will link Access Grid recordings with both formal research resources such as peer-reviewed papers, and informal online research resources such as blogs, to allow seamless search and browse, via a semantically enhanced user interface developed at ILRT.

The two-year project will integrate technologies from two previous VRE projects from JISC: the Iugo and Memetic projects. It will also include non-technical work to assess the social, legal and ethical perspectives associated with capturing and sharing scholarly communication on the internet.