Great strides for Intute - one year on

The UK's Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), composed of senior managers, academics and technology experts working in UK further and higher education, recently released a press release celebrating the first anniversary of Intute, a free online service providing access to the "very best Web resources for education and research." Intute is funded by JISC. (Thanks to Charles Bailey's Digital Koans)

Intute, the free national online service funded by JISC, celebrates its first birthday today by renewing its commitment to enable lecturers, researchers and students to discover and access high quality Internet resources.

Over the last year, Intute has seen a rapid rise in usage and the launch of new features and services. It now looks forward to a future of continuing to take innovative approaches to delivering the best of the web for education and research within this ever changing Internet environment.

Intute offers a range of tools and services, responding to the need for quality assured Internet information and Internet research "Intute offers what search engines don’t - a commitment to quality - by using subject specialists in universities and colleges to hand-pick Web resources that will support education and research.” skills for the academic community. "Intute offers what search engines don’t”, says Stephen Hoare in The Guardian; “commitment to quality – by using subject specialists in universities and colleges to hand-pick Web resources that will support education and research.”

What this means in practice is a searchable database, across all subject areas, of over 115,000 Internet resources and websites, complemented by over 60 revised and updated Virtual Training Suite tutorials, Blogs, MyIntute, and much more.

“I’m delighted with the success of the service so far and the opportunities we have had to engage with the community and take on other exciting developments, for example the Intute Repository Search project” says Caroline Williams, Executive Director of Intute. “We have established a unique collective expertise through our partner institutions and contributors which I believe will enable us to go from strength to strength.”

The success of Intute over the last year has been unquestionable, with over a quarter of a million hits on the website every day and over 3,000 registered users of the MyIntute personalisation service. In addition, since the successful launch of the new Informs, the interactive tool for creating online tutorials, the number of subscribers has doubled. In response, JISC has made a commitment to funding Intute for a further five years.

As Intute looks to the future, the needs of its users are at the forefront of its drive to be a service developed for the community by the community. As Stephen Downes of the Canadian National Research Council observes, "What Intute represents is a turning point in the sharing of academic resources.”

Intute is freely available at: The best of the web.