Virtual research environment programme : JISC

<http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/vre.aspx>

With delight I digested an article (unfortunately in German) sent to me by
a colleague who is Librarian. The topic are so called "Virtual research
environments - VREs" see also
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_research_environment

This topic suits very well to the first phase of our project addressing
"everything that helps young researchers". In part the issue is addressed
by the platform for information retrieval and management
www.recherchieren-im-internet.ch to be translated in Russian soon. Note
however also the strong focus of VREs on collaboration and coordination
using Web 2.0 tools (Blogs, Wikis, Project Management platforms like
Teamlab/ Zoho/ Basecamp etc). So exactly the tools we looked at in the
last weeks.

Related to information retrieval for resachers note also the trend towards
"discovery tools" like eg http://konstanz.summon.serialssolutions.com/en/
You put your topic in the the "search slot" and get most of existing
scientific articles, books out. Although this discovery tools are
mushrooming a fundamental problem remains - as user you usually have no
clue which databases etc the tools themselves use. Also you have no clue
which algorithm is used for ranking the results. However, it could also be
argued that this is not really a problem - meanwhile it seems impossible
to track all of the literature published even on a very small area of
research. Maybe we have to say goodbye to the idea that we manage to deal
with "all" literature even if we focus only on a small research topic ...

Christian