About UKOLN
UKOLN is funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) of the Higher and Further Education Funding Councils, as well as by project funding from the JISC and the European Union. UKOLN also receives support from the University of Bath where it is based. More details on UKOLN activities can be found on at: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/activities/. UKOLN aims to inform practice and influence policy in the areas of: digital libraries, metadata and resource discovery, distributed library and information systems, bibliographic management, and web technologies. It provides network information services, including the Ariadne magazine, and runs workshops and conferences.
UKOLN staff are organised into four teams: Community & Outreach (including Events Management), Research and Development, Software and Systems, and Resources and Administration although there is considerable cross group working. A small number of staff currently work remotely and UKOLN supports flexible and home working where appropriate.
Community & Outreach
The Community & Outreach team has an outwards-facing remit. Team members seek to disseminate advice and support to our user communities on best practices in the development and use of digital library services. The areas addressed within the team include cross-domain and semantic interoperability issues, the development and deployment of social networks and ICT service frameworks and access technologies.
Research & Development
Our chief funders in this area of activity are the JISC and the European Community. Current projects include:
- Digital Curation Centre - to lead research and development into key areas of data curation and preservation and to pilot the development of generic support services for maintaining digital data and research results over their entire life-cycle for current and future users. The project partners are the University of Edinburgh (Informatics, Law, Information Services and leading research institutes), University of Glasgow (HATII and Information Services) and The Council for the Central Laboratory of the Research Councils (CCLRC).
- IMPACT is a European project that aims to speed up the process and enhance the quality of mass digitisation in Europe. The IMPACT research programme will significantly improve digital access to historical printed text through the development and use of innovative Optical Character Recognition software and linguistic technologies.
- The JISC-funded SWORD initiative (Simple Web-service Offering Repository Deposit) is a lightweight protocol for deposit intended to 'low the barriers to deposit', principally deposit into repositories, but potentially deposit into any system which wants to receive content from remote sources.
Software Development & Systems
The Software & Systems Team supports UKOLN activities by building innovative systems and services based on emerging technologies as well as ensuring high quality technical support to all members of UKOLN staff. Innovative systems and services inform the policy and advice that UKOLN gives to the community and grounds our more theoretical research and development activities in practical implementations.
UKOLN provides advisory services to the JISC concerning the development of the e-Framework and the JISC Information Environment, the latter focusing on the relationships between the technologies specified in the technical architecture and emerging Web services, mechanisms to support the deposit of material into the information environment, and the integration of the information environment with managed learning environments.
Resources & Administration
This team oversees all finance, human resources and operational activities for UKOLN.