The document summarizes the development of the Research Information Centre (RIC) virtual research environment project by the British Library. It describes the RIC as addressing the entire research lifecycle and "pain points" of research through information management tools. It then outlines the timeline of the RIC's development from initial sprints in 2007-2008 to test versions and community feedback, with the first public source code release in December 2009 and ongoing enhancements since. The RIC development is positioned as a community effort, with an example project described for automated clinical trial metadata extraction and image analysis workflows.

1. Research Information Centre All Hands Meeting, York 2011 Stephen Andrews Products and Services Team Leader Science Technology & Medicine The British Library

2. Our interest in Virtual Research Environments A strategic objective to support research A need to understand researchers and how they work Understanding changes in the research environment Role of libraries in supporting research in 21 st C

3. A VRE covers the entire research lifecycle ‘ Closing the loop’ on the research lifecycle Used this as basic structure of the RIC Addresses the ‘pain points’ of research Information management throughout a research project Research Information Centre – a collaboration with Microsoft Research

4. Timeline – development sprints July 2007 to June 2008 UI wireframes Project repositories Literature search Funding workflow

5. Timeline – development sprints July 2008 – Dec 2009 July-Oct 2008 community feedback Project administration console Dec 2009 v1.0 source code released

6. Timeline – development March 2010 to date v1.0 enhancements v2.0 toolkits for SharePoint 2010 June 2011 v2.0 1st CodePlex release

7. RIC 2.0 Development – A Community Effort

8. Example – the VRE-CI project Collaboration between clinicians & researchers Automated extraction of metadata into SP Links to MRI DICOM image store Segmentation workflows using Trident Image viewer – zoom & annotate