Good practice in sharing resources in law

UKCLE funded project

Project leader: Ann Priestley, UKCLE (e-mail: ukcle@warwick.ac.uk)
Project summary: development of guidelines of good practice for sharing resources in law
Completion date: August 2006
Funding: £15,000 by the JISC Distributed e-Learning Programme

The sharing, reuse and repurposing of resources in higher education, in particular in digital repositories, is a topic of current concern. Several research programmes are examining the issues, including a suite of projects funded via the JISC Digital Repositories programme and the second phase of the JISC Distributed e-Learning Programme.

It is however recognised that there are significant barriers to the widespread take-up of resource sharing throughout subject communities, and not just of a technical nature. These barriers require further investigation in order to determine the scope of the challenge involved in promoting the sharing of resources more widely.

This project aimed to explore the landscape for sharing resources within law and to develop guidelines for good practice, with case study examples highlighting cultural and discipline specific issues.

A review was undertaken of projects seeking to share electronic resources (particularly but not exclusively in law) and evidence on current attitudes to sharing electronic resources was collected via a questionnaire and focus group. A set of guidelines for good practice in sharing resources in law, consisting of five key themes with some pointers to effective practice, were extracted from these two areas of work.

The findings of this project will be used to inform UKCLE’s future information strategy, in particular the development of leGATE, our database of learning and teaching resources, and our support services aimed at helping the legal education community to explore more informal modes of publishing.

Outcomes

• Review of projects seeking to share electronic resources (RTF file, 14 pages, 2.04 MB) – details of projects within law aimed at sharing resources, together with a mapping of digital repositories and metadata collections with actual or potential law participation
• Engaging the legal education community (RTF file, 26 pages, 2.77 MB) – review of attitudes to the sharing of resources within the legal education community, based around a survey and focus group
• Guidelines for good practice in sharing resources in law – draws together ‘themes’ from the above documents and considers the good practice elements of these themes
• Building the legal education gateway – article on the project in the Autumn 2006 issue of Directions

Last Modified: 6 July 2010