Collection Description Focus, Briefing Day 1UKOLN

Collected Wisdom

managing resources and enhancing access
through collection-level description

Monday 22 October 2001
British Library, St. Pancras, London


Programme Details

Ronald Milne :
Collection Description : Mapping the Distributed National Collection

Ronald Milne has been Director of the Research Support Libraries Programme since October 1998. Responsible for an initiative which promotes collaborative, cross-sectoral, work, he has had an appreciation of what can be achieved by library co-operation since the earliest stages of his career. He was previously Assistant Director of Library Services at King’s College London and has also held posts at Trinity College Library, Cambridge, Glasgow University Library and on the staff of the University of London Library Resources Co-ordinating Committee. He trained at Cambridge University Library. Ronald was a member of the British Library/Higher Education Task Force and has been active nationally and regionally in the University, College and Research Group of the Library Association. He contributes to professional publications and is a Fellow of the Library Association.

Ronald will talk about the background to collection description, its importance for RSLP projects, and its place in mapping the Distributed National Collection (DNC). He will also give a brief account of recent developments.

Catherine Grout :
Collection Description in the JISC/DNER Information Environment

Catherine Grout is Assistant Director for Development for the JISC/DNER. Her role centres on developing a national information environment for use by staff and students in further and higher education, and she is responsible for directing current and future development programmes in this area. She has also worked for the JISC as Collections Manager for Multimedia which involved negotiating access for the educational community to high quality multimedia collections. As part of this role she also developed a framework for delivering and managing access to digital images for education, JDIS (JISC Distributed Image Service). She has considerable experience in the provision of digital resources in the visual arts and worked as manager of the Visual Arts Data Service between 1997 and 2000. Her academic background is in history and art history.

Catherine will briefly outline the role and value of collection descriptions in providing enhanced access to learning and research resources for higher and further education in the UK. She will briefly outline current and future activities intended to develop this area.

Helen Cordell:
Mapping Asia, collection description in an RSLP project : Lessons learned from implementation

Helen Cordell is currently Special Projects Director at the Library of SOAS (School of Oriental and African Studies) working chiefly on RSLP projects. She has previously been Deputy Librarian, Sub-Librarian Public Services, and South East Asia Studies Librarian at SOAS. She has had practical experience of developing Asian studies collections, assisting researchers from all over the world to use them, and endeavouring to collaborate to ensure better coverage of Asian material in British Libraries.

Luis Carrasqueiro:
The Researcher's Guide Online at the British Universities Film & Video Council

Luis Carrasqueiro is the Network Content Manager for the British Universities Film & Video Council. He is responsible for ensuring the interoperability of BUFVC's services. He joined the BUFVC in December 1999 when he also moved to Great Britain. Previously he was the Head of Public Programmes at the Oporto planetarium/science centre in Portugal. In 1995 he spent 6 months at Techniquest in Cardiff as a planetarium manager. He is currently enrolled as a part-time student in the evening MBA programme at City University

Dr Alicia Wise :
Who and what might collection descriptions be for?

Dr Alicia Wise is Assistant DNER Director for the Joint Information Systems Committee of the UK Further and Higher Education Funding Councils. In this role she is responsible for acquiring, creating, and managing collections of electronic information for the UK's Distributed National Electronic Resource (DNER). Her background is in computer applications in the humanities, digital preservation, electronic collection development and management, and the archaeology of late prehistoric Scotland.

Sarah Mitchell:
Collection Description in the NOF-digitise programme

Sarah has been the Programme Manager responsible for the New Opportunities Fund Digitisation of Learning Materials initiative since October 1999. She has a background in development, marketing and communications and has worked extensively in the voluntary and public sectors, including higher education.

Susi Woodhouse:
Collection Description in the NOF-digitise programme

Susi Woodhouse is one of the Senior Network Advisers within the Learning and Information Society Team (LIST) of Resource. She is primarily responsible for leading on the People's Network. ICT training of library staff and nof.digitise. programmes.

Susi Woodhouse formerly joined the Library and Information Commission from EARL: the Consortium for Public Library Networking where she worked as Development Manager helping to raise awareness in the public library community of the new ways of working that the People's Network will bring. She began her career at the British Library, creating UKMARC records and gaining a thorough grounding in the basic tools of the trade. In 1984 she moved to the London Borough of Ealing as Music Librarian, leaving in 1992 to be Project Officer for the Music Library & Information Plan. She joined the Library Clientside Team at Westminster City Council in 1994 contributing to the development of the Quality Assurance programme.

David Dawson:
Collection Description in the NOF-digitise programme

David Dawson is one of the Senior Network Advisers within the Learning and Information Society Team (LIST) of Resource.

David studied Archaeology at Durham University, and completed the Museum Studies Course at Leicester in 1985, before becoming an Associate of the Museums Association in 1988. He worked in a range of museums before joining the Museum Documentation Association (www.mda.org.uk/) in 1992, as Business Manager of mda Services, before becoming Outreach Manager (ICT), giving advice and training to museums in documenting their collections, with a focus on helping small museums as well as working with a number of museums in the UK and abroad. Whilst at mda, he was closely involved in the development of the Aquarelle Project (aquarelle.inria.fr/aquarelle/welcome.html).

In 1998 David joined the Museums & Galleries Commission (www.museums.gov.uk/) as New Technology Adviser, before becoming Senior ICT Adviser for Resource. He works particularly on ICT in museums, managing the DCMS/Resource IT Challenge Fund, acting as an expert adviser to the New Opportunities Fund, and working on a range of other projects and strategic developments, such as Culture Online (www.cultureonline.gov.uk/). David is currently a member of the Office of the e–Envoy Broadband Research group and is the nominated UK Representative on the EU activity to Coordinate National Digitisation Policies.

Dr Marilyn Deegan:
Creating electronic resources for the study of forced migration - A researcher's perspective"

Marilyn Deegan has a PhD in medieval studies: her specialism is Anglo-Saxon medical texts and herbals and she has published and lectured widely in medieval studies, digital library research, and humanities computing. She is currently Digital Resources Director of the Refugee Studies Centre at Oxford University, and runs the Forced Migration Online project, a major digital library and portal for materials concerned with all aspects of refugee studies. She is Editor-in-Chief of Literary and Linguistic Computing, the Journal of the Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing, and Director of Publications for the Office for Humanities Communication based at King’s College London. Dr Deegan has just completed a book Digital Futures: Strategies for the Information Age with Simon Tanner. This will be published at the end of 2001.

Paul Miller:
Interoperability Focus

Paul holds the post of Interoperability Focus at UKOLN. This post is jointly funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) of the United Kingdom's Further and Higher Education Funding Councils, and by Resource, the Government agency responsible for libraries, museums and archives.

Paul's background is in archaeology, where his PhD research examined the use of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) in mapping deposits buried beneath modern cities, concentrating specifically upon the archaeologically rich and varied city of York.

In his current work, Paul is responsible for encouraging and facilitating the development of interoperable solutions across a range of domains, principally museums, libraries, archives, and government. Paul sits on a wide range of committees and working groups related to this area, both internationally (for example, the executive committees of the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI) and the CIMI Consortium (CIMI) and within the UK.

Previously, Paul worked for the Archaeology Data Service (ADS), a service provider of the UK Arts & Humanities Data Service. Here, he was responsible for designing and establishing the catalogue, which now contains content from local and national archaeological agencies across the UK.

Bridget Robinson & Pete Johnston:

Bridget Robinson, Research Officer, joined UKOLN in January 2000 to work on the Agora project. Agora was one of the five elib hybrid Library projects which began in January 1998. It formed part of Phase 3 of the elib programme investigating issues of digital library implementation and integration.

Collection Level Descriptions were used within the Agora interface as a way of matching users to resources. Agora used the collection schema drafted by the national working group and edited by UKOLN. Bridget has worked in both Public and HE libraries and with a range of Commercial Information Providers.

Bridget is now working as part of the Collection Description Focus.

Pete Johnston joined UKOLN in January 2001 as Interoperability Research Officer to support the work of the Interoperability Focus.

From 1997 to 2000, he was a member of a digital records management project based at Glasgow University Archive Services. During this period, he also developed tools and provided guidance to support the EAD-based collection-level description work which was carried out by the archivists at Glasgow as data providers to the HE Archives Hub.

Pete has experience in the area of mark-up technologies, and since joining UKOLN, he has sought to develop his understanding of metadata-related technologies, particularly the application of RDF. He has worked on the registration of metadata schemas for educational resources and contributed to the evaluation of a Microsoft Access implementation of the RSLP CLD schema.

Pete's role has now been extended to incorporate the work of the Collection Description Focus.

Dr Liz Lyon

Dr Liz Lyon has been the Director of UKOLN based at the University of Bath, since October 2000. Previously, she was Head of Research & Learning Support Systems in Information Services at the University of Surrey, where she was founding Director of the Centre for Learning Developments and was also responsible for Library IT systems, audio-visual services and administration.

She has led the piloting and implementation of a virtual learning environment at Surrey, the completion of a campus-wide skills development project and has directed research projects in diverse areas such as multimedia digital libraries (PATRON Performing Arts Teaching Resources ONline), devolved budgeting, smart cards, and distance learning support.

One of her personal interests is human resources and staff development, and she has successfully introduced, developed and promoted comprehensive Human Resource Frameworks over the last four years.

Although Dr Lyon has worked in various University libraries in the UK, her background was originally in Biological Sciences and she has a doctorate in cellular biochemistry.

 

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