We have now launched a new version of the Equipment Data service which jisc has run to support the academic community since 2014. The service was developed in response to the need to improve the visibility and utilisation of UK research equipment.
What is Equipment Data?
Equipment Data harvests and aggregates a range of university and research facility equipment catalogues. The service enables searching across all published UK research equipment databases through one aggregation portal allowing greater accessibility with the aim to improve efficiency and stimulate greater collaboration in the sector.
Equipment data is part of a broader agenda to optimise the UK’s research estate and as part of this we want encourage institutions in supplying quality metadata to allow for enhanced discovery and support future functionality development.
The platform supports UKRI’s Terms and Conditions of grant, which requires “all new equipment purchased over £138,000 to be registered on the equipment.data national database”.
As well as supporting institutions with meeting funder mandates, our longer term ambition is to enable institutions to publish and share their research infrastructure assets more broadly (below the UKRI threshold) to support greater transparency and sharing of these resources.
With this upgrade we are encouraging the research community to engage with the service to discover equipment and facilities in the UK with the goal of maximising public and economic benefit and supporting impactful outcomes.
We welcome user feedback on the upgrade as this will help us enhance the service and support future roadmap planning.
What have we improved?
We have improved the user interface, search functionality and the underlying database to help improve the discovery of UK research equipment. We are currently documenting the API to allow data to be easily queried by machines and will be releasing this shortly.
My institution already contributes data, do I need to change anything?
For most institutions no change is necessary, Jisc will continue to harvest your data from the url you provided. If you change the location of your data or the url you will need to update us by contacting our helpdesk at help@jisc.ac.uk. You can also review your data harvested by the service on the institutions page on the website.
Some institutions may need to adapt data formats. We will be contacting institutions who need to make this change to discuss this with them.
How can my institution contribute?
Currently there are 56 organisations in the database and 13,722 pieces of equipment. Sharing the information about your institution’s equipment and facilities is very easy to do. Read how to do this on our FAQ page or get in touch with us at help@jisc.ac.uk with “Equipment Data” in the subject heading and we can assist you accordingly.