WHELF Reps meeting summary October 2016
The WHELF Representatives met at Gregynog Hall on Thursday 28th October-Friday 29th October 2016. These are some of the topics that were addressed at the meeting.
For the first session of the meeting we welcomed Einir Young, Director of Sustainability at Bangor University. Einir delivered an engaging and informative presentation on the Wellbeing of Future Generations (Wales) Act and WHELF Reps took the opportunity to consider the ways we are working that are in support of the Act and ways we can articulate this better. Steve Williams provided feedback to WHELF Reps from the HEFCW consultation meeting he had attended on Draft Higher Education Strategy for Wales. The draft strategy has been prepared to align with the principles of the Wellbeing of Future Generations (Wales) Act.
Gregynog Colloquium: The Colloquium will be held from Monday 12th – Friday 16th June 2017 and will be organized by the University of Wales Trinity Saint David and Swansea University. WHELF Reps discussed whether we can develop the Wednesday sessions to be more collaborative in scope between WHELF and HEWIT. Suggestions from WHELF Reps will be passed to the Colloquium planning group meeting which will be held in November.
WHELF Action Plan: WHELF has prepared its Action Plan for 2016-17. The Actions are aligned to the WHELF Strategy for 2016-18 following the Strategic themes of Collaboration, Collections and Research and Engagement. The Action Plan can be accessed from http://whelf.ac.uk/about/action-plan-2/
WHELF Shared LMS: Following implementation WHELF has identified 3 key collaboration opportunities, namely: shared catalogue and cataloguing, reciprocal borrowing and analytics. WHELF Reps discussed papers prepared by Gareth Owen (WHELF Shared LMS Programme Manager) on these three opportunities and supported the recommendations of the LMS Management Board that they each be formalised as a project with project board and remit.
Benefits study: A second workshop had been run by Cambridge Econometrics during which they presented their data template for collecting quantitative data. Feedback from the workshop identified the need to refine the template and accompanying guidance further. Institutional case studies provided by Cardiff University, University of Wales Trinity Saint David and the National Library of Wales will provide qualitative data to accompany the study. It is anticipated that the draft report will be circulated by the end of January 2017. The Benefits Working Group will then consider ways to disseminate the findings and how they can inform future work.
Digital repositories for heritage collections: The National Library of Wales have been working with ARCW (Archives and Records Council Wales) to address the requirements for the preservation and management of digital records. They have tested several solutions including Archivematica, Preservica and Fedora. WHELF would like to explore further the options for a digital repository in Wales and it was agreed that WHELF seeks funding to support a feasibility study that will map current practice and systems and identify a set of requirements.
