In 2024, the equipment data service undertook several initiatives to enhance data quality, improve transparency, and increase efficiency. We explored ways to expand the service beyond its initial policy compliance use case. Our discovery work involved identifying potential use cases for the dataset and commissioning Research Consulting to review institutional systems and data workflows related to equipment. We uncovered issues with data quality, currency, data governance, diverse systems, lack of integration, and manual processes. By addressing these, we identified new use cases for the data and made recommendations for future activities to optimise the service and workflows.
Development activities for 2024/5
- Assigning persistent identifiers: Becoming the first service in the UK to assign DOIs to equipment records.
- Data model improvements: Adding information to better discover and track equipment over time, such as dates.
- Building a data management area: Helping institutions improve data submission quality and maintenance.
- PURE integration development: Integrating with the PURE equipment module and exploring the feasibility of other current research management system (CRIS) platform integrations.
- Optimising service integrations: Enhancing integrations with services like konfer and InfraPortal for better discovery.
- Planning adjacent service discoveries: Exploring support for procurement of equipment management systems, procurement processes, and audit and assurance activities.
Benefits from service upgrade
- Linking resources to outputs: Embedding identifiers will enable resource linking to outputs, allowing evaluation of investment impact and supporting research reproducibility.
- Tracking equipment lifecycles: Allowing examination of the equipment lifecycle from grant application to decommissioning, highlighting potential efficiencies and opportunities.
- Informing procurement processes: Using data to inform procurement decisions, highlight joint procurement opportunities, and minimise delays between grant approval and project start.
- Supporting institutions with data management: Our data management area will help institutions with automation, interoperability, merging data from multiple sources, improving member experience, and increasing data quality.
- Promoting CRISs as sources of truth: Reducing data entry efforts, supporting linking and contextualisation with research outputs, and improving interoperability with other services like ORCID.
Service metadata schema (data model) update
We have completed an initial mapping of the service schema, Uniquip, with PIDinst and DataCite, incorporating stakeholder input to ensure alignment with international standards and new use cases. This update will impact the data you provide. For example, institutions will need to supply an internal ID for records and comply with DataCite mandatory fields for the service to mint DOIs for equipment. To streamline the process, you will be able to manage this data on the data management platform.
You can review the draft mapping and provide feedback on our MIRO board by the 11th February 2025. The password for the MIRO board is “utesting25”. We will use this Miro board throughout the development to share the data model, ideas, and designs with the community.
Call for participants
We will be reaching out to community members for user testing. One of our first integrations will be with the PURE equipment module followed by users who want to do CSV export. If you are interested in participating, please contact us at help@jisc.ac.uk.