UK SBS BLOJEU-CR150087NERC Consultation exercise for the redevelopment of the MEDIN metadata discovery portal

Tender description

MEDIN (http://www.oceannet.org/) is a collaborative and open partnership, established in April 2008, working to improve the management of marine data and information, and provide better access to the UK’s marine data resources. Sponsors include government departments, research councils, environmental and conservation agencies, trading funds and commercial organisations. It operates under the auspices of the Marine Science Coordination Committee, and reports to that body. MEDIN has established a coordinated framework for managing marine data and information within the UK marine community and has a metadata discovery portal which acts as a single point of access for users to access and find data and information. The portal first went live in June 2010 and since then has been through one development cycle in 2013/14. Further development work will be undertaken on the portal and this we will do in direct response to user needs. WORK OUTLINE We require external assistance to run a consultation exercise to assess the user requirements for an updated MEDIN portal. There are two work packages under this consultation process: Work package 1: Questionnaire Prepare and distribute an online questionnaire to gather feedback from the general marine community. This should be disseminated alongside an article (to be written by the contractor) for Marine Data News, MEDIN’s quarterly newsletter, about the consultation with the link to the questionnaire. Work package 2: Task group assessment Convene a task group to review the portal and consider what developments should be implemented. The task group should consist of 2-3 representatives from each of MEDIN’s main end user categories: Government Departments/Agencies, Commercial Organisations, Academia/research councils, Charities and Non-Governmental Organisations and the General Public. These representatives should ideally be those who have not been involved with MEDIN before and whose work entails collecting or working with marine data. NB They should not be data managers. Part of the funds available for this invitation to tender will be used to pay for hosting the task group meeting and providing travel costs to participants.