The main focus of the Pathfinder Project at Keele is detailed in a separate post - the plan summary. This gives a good picture of where we started from in the early part of the year and have been revised to reflect discussions at the first Pathfinder event held in York during May.
The principal challenges in the early part of the project have been associated with the processes required to make new staff appointments and to purchase strategic software from 'sole suppliers'. We would recommend that future projects of this kind leave sufficient time between the awarding of funds and the notional start of a time limited activity to accomodate the institutional procedures to be completed before substantive activity can begin.
Now some ten weeks from the beginning of the project in May 2007, we have completed the purchase of the Intralibrary software and identified the hardware and 'infrastructure' support needed to implement the repository system which lies at the heart of our 'pathfinding'. The software will be commissioned and configured in the next two weeks.
The appointment of a new member of staff with responsibility for supporting work on metadata tagging, document scanning and copyright matters has now been accomplished and the new post holder will be in place from the end of August 2007. in the short term work will start with immediate effect harvesting and scanning those materials for the repository that will be managed under the CLA Digital materials licence.
Day to day Pathfinder activities and the management and monitoring of the project is achieved through a small core team drawn from staff involved in elearning support, staff training, technical support and the library. This group reports to an established steering committee associated with the Learning Development Unit (LDU) which in turn reports to the University Learning and Teaching Committee.
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