The SafeNet project has been officially underway for around 9 months. As SafeNet begins to take shape so too has Project Manager Adam Rusbridge’s son who emerged into the world three weeks ago. The first project baby but, with another 15 months to go, there’s no guarantee he’ll be the last. Congratulations to you all, the gauntlet has been thrown down to the rest of the team.
The team have been productive in other ways since our last post on project activity. In January the SafeNet project group met at the Jisc offices in London for a face-to-face meeting that included colleagues from Jisc and EDINA as well as contributors to the project from RLUK and Stanford University.
The group converged to discuss work carried out and planning for the future. The team reviewed project activity that included, at that stage, consultations with publishers and the beginning of consultations with libraries around the pain points of post cancellation access. Consideration was also given to access triggers, content scope, community development and the eventual negotiations with publishers regarding the intended local load agreement.
Aims for the six month period following the meeting up to our next face to face in July 2015 included drafting and testing a publisher participation agreement for the service, planning the service infrastructure, and developing community engagement. These elements would be addressed in tandem with the practicalities of building a service platform.
The publisher participation agreement is in the final stages of revision and should be ready by July 2015 as planned.  Setting up the service infrastructure is progressing and we are investigating options for hosting and co-location. In terms of community outreach the first meeting of the advisory group took place in York and we aim to take advantage of the input the group have to offer to ensure the resulting service meets the needs of the community.
Development of the Entitlement Registry has progressed. The Entitlement Registry now has a user interface which will be tested and refined over the coming months. Publisher and library test data has been kindly supplied for testing and Magaly Bascones of the KB+ service has been very helpful, providing insights into data held for NESLi2 deals. This data will form the basis for initial testing.
Finally SafeNet has attracted international attention and resulted in conversations with both German and Italian colleagues who are also exploring the national hosting problem space. More information on these and similar initiatives will feature in a future post.