The JOIN-UP Programme

The JOIN-UP Programme is funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (the JISC) of the higher and further education funding councils.

The JOIN-UP Programme consists of four separate projects.

The three lead partners in the JOIN-UP Programme are EDINA; Docusend (led by King's College, London, in partnership with the LAMDA electronic document delivery service); and the British Library.

In JISC Circular 5/99, a call for proposals to develop the Distributed National Electronic Resource (DNER) for Learning and Teaching was issued to Higher Education Institutions in the UK. Projects funded under the call have been grouped into programme clusters, according to their major themes. One such cluster focuses on the article infrastructure needed to support services relating to journal articles and similar information objects. This has been given the name JOIN-UP.

The JOIN-UP Programme addresses the linkage between references found in discovery databases (such as Abstracting and Indexing (A & I) databases and Table of Contents databases) and the services that provide the full-text material (typically journal articles), in printed or electronic form. Four individual projects have been combined in the JOIN-UP Programme, with a view to each contributing separate but compatible, and inter-operable, component parts to the four-part DNER structure of Discover/Locate/Request/Access.

The main challenge for JOIN-UP is to realise the full potential of bibliographic services, many of them sponsored by the JISC, by connecting users of those services to third-party services on the information objects of interest to them. Users discover references, are provided with information to locate services on the material, and are also provided with the means to connect automatically, where appropriate, to request and delivery mechanisms.