Telstar

TELSTAR – the next phase

The TELSTAR project was originally scheduled to finish at the end of February 2010. However, I’m really pleased to say that with the support of the Open University and JISC, we’ve got agreement to extend the project through to July 2010.

At this point, the project has essentially completed it’s initial objectives, and the deliverables listed in the original project plan (http://www.open.ac.uk/telstar/Deliverables) are more or less complete (with a few exceptions). I’ll post some more structured links to the various deliverables over the next couple of weeks, but many are contained within the ReMIT (Reference Management Integration Toolkit) that I’ve been posting on this site over the last couple of weeks.

At this point, the focus of the project will change somewhat, and project team will be changing as well, so at this point I want to say a huge thank you to Jason, Jes (the developers) and Sarah (our project support officer up to the end of this week) for their hard work over the last 6-12 months. They’ve all been key in getting us to this point, and I can’t quite believe what we’ve been able to achieve – I’m so impressed with what we’ve done. There are too many other people to mention who’ve made it possible for us to get to this point, but I should mention Richard (the Digital Libraries Programme Manager at the Open University library, and my boss) who has provided support and advice throughout.

The next phase of the project will focus on three areas:

• more piloting at the Open University
• working with other Moodle/RefWorks sites to get them up and running with the TELSTAR developments
• running one or more community events around reference management and related topics

I hope to be announcing some dates for one or two events in the near future. If you are interested in making use of the TELSTAR developments, especially if your institution is already using Moodle and RefWorks, get in touch. Also, if you have comments on the work we’ve done so far, such as ReMIT, then let us know, as these pieces of work can continue to develop and be refined between now and July.

Once again, a big thank you to the project team, and everyone else who has contributed to the project over the last 18 months (and longer).