There is a lot of work occuring that is relevant to the topics that the Resource Discovery Taskforce was formed to explore, this work is influencing the direction the taskforce is taking.

Here are some of the most relevant pieces of work:

JISC work

• The The Discovery to Delivery project at EDINA and Mimas – a collaborative project between Mimas and Edina to improve Suncat and Copac and investigate personalisation features and cross searching.
• Towards Implementation of Library 2.0 and the e-Framework (TILE) – a project that investigated developments in Library 2.0 services, within the context of developing a library domain model for the international e-Framework.
• MOSAIC – is investigating the technical feasibility, service value and issues around exploiting user activity data, primarily to assist resource discovery and evaluation in Higher Education. The project ran a competition to see how user activity data could be used, the entries were very interesting and are summarised on the IE demonstrator blog.
• LMS study – a study that surveyed the library mnanagement systems landscape in UK HE.
• Online catalogue and repository interoperability study – a report which investigated how repositories and library catalogues are linked in instituitions.
• Intute repository search – a project that aggregated the resources stored in UK repositories
• Sharing and re-use of library catalogue records: guidance on legal issues in the Web environment – A project to investigate the ownership issues of the records held in some example library catalogues.
• JISC is exploring the issue of personalisation on websites in a number of projects. (DPIE, DPIE1 as well as the D2D project listed above). More projects in this area are being developed.
• The JISC report on Student’s use of research content in research and learning  highlighted a range of ways in which students found it difficult to navigate the research landscape to discover, access and use research outputs such as journal papers

Other work

• Creating catalogues: bibliographic records in a networked world – Report by RIN which looks at the entire process of bibliographic record production for printed and electronic books, and for scholarly journals and journal articles. The report makes recommendations on ways that library catalogues could be made more useful.
• The SCONUL shared services work has the potential to have a huge impact in this area. It is investigating the fgesibility of taking a shared services approach to library management systems.
• The Open Library Environment project has produced a design document intended to influence the design of open source and commercial library management systems. The project puts search and catalogues outside of the library system seeing them as services that are better if they are shared.
• Sites like biblios.net and librarything amongst others have implications for the way that libraries currently operate.
• Community based projects that enrich resources by involving people interested in the subjects via a website indicate interesting new ways of approaching resource management. Good examples of these projects are Galaxy Zoo which allows people interested in astronomy to help classify galaxies and the Library of Congress publishing photos on Flickr and using that site to elicit metadata about the images from anyone able to identify some information about them.
• There are interesting developments in paid for cataloguing services as well. An example is SkyRiver a new service aimed at offering a low cost cooperative cataloguing service.
• The Library of Congress has carried out some very relevant investigations into the future of bibliographic records.