Focus on access to institutional resources: a synthesis of the JISC fair programme

The JISC-funded Focus of Access to Institutional Resources (FAIR) Programme ran from 2002-2005. The 14 projects within this programme investigated the cultural, organisational, legal and technical factors involved in providing places where institutional digital content, of which there is an increasing amount, could be stored and subsequently shared with others in the Higher and Further Education communities where appropriate. The primary technology to enable such sharing is the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH), a lightweight protocol based on sharing metadata about the digital content available. The technical issues were at times overshadowed by the cultural, organisational and legal issues that had to be addressed. The experience of the Programme as a whole provides a valuable insight to the issues at hand in sharing content and a good starting point for other institutions wishing to investigate this capability. A Synthesis of the Programme was commissioned in late 2004 to capture this experience, and all tangible outputs where produced. A website was produced providing a comprehensive listing of all project outputs and a printed brochure was published in late 2005 as an introduction to the Programme and its findings. This article summarises the findings of the FAIR Synthesis and provides a range of pointers to further information for subsequent investigation