JISC has issued a call for proposals for studies in digital rights management, authorization, institutional profiling and other services. This is in line with growing interest in “common services” or what JISC calls shared services. The JISC Shared Services Programme:
To enable portals and other presentation services to make sense of the diverse digital resource, machine-readable information about services, content, rights and users is required. This information must be provided in standard ways. The aim of the Shared Services programme is to develop a common set of infrastructure services that portals and content aggregators and brokers can all �talk� to. These shared services will act as ‘glue’ between presentation services, such as portals, and content repositories. [Shared Services Programme]