Monthly NewsTogether with Sarah Ormes from UKOLN, Alice Grant, David Dawson and Susi Woodhouse from Resource, and staff from the New Opportunities Fund, I travelled the country this month speaking at five workshops organised for projects submitting bids to the second stage of NOF's £50,000,000 digitisation programme. The workshops were in Cardiff, London, Belfast, Glasgow, and Manchester.
I attended a meeting of the Cabinet Office's Metadata Group. The guidance document from this group, parts of which will be mandatory for public sector agencies across the UK, is currently due to be released in draft form during October. It basically mandates use of the Dublin Core. The group also considered the Pan-Government Thesaurus, being prepared under the auspices of the Lord Chancellor's Department. This thesaurus, parts of which will be incorporated within the new Knowledge Network for MPs during October, is intended to provide terms for most areas of core government activity, using language intelligible to the Citizen.
A second meeting of the Metadata for Education Group (MEG) was held in Manchester, again attended by representatives from BECTa, DfEE, UfI, the Scottish Executive, and the like. The meeting was again productive, and minutes should appear soon at http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/education/. The meeting also got a positive write-up in the latest e-Government Bulletin.
I have joined a working group convened by MAPIT, SOCITM, and the I&DeA. This group is producing a guide on the importance of information management across the public sector; emphasising that it is NOT an IT issue, but that it underpins all areas of local government activity. I am contributing text on metadata, interoperability, and the like. The guide is due to be published early next year.
I attended a meeting of BSI's Metadata and Identifiers working group.
At the end of the month, I travelled to St. John's in Canada for a meeting on the Bath Profile. There was valuable input into the process from a number of vendors, and recommendations for some minor changes to the Profile will be forthcoming in the light of this meeting.
I attended an Advisory Committee meeting for the Archaeology Data Service. Of great interest, especially given the meeting in St. John's, was a preview of some interesting work being done for them by the University of Kent at Canterbury; a target and web client for the ADS' Z39.50 service, compliant with Functional Area C of the Bath Profile. The target will hopefully be rolled out to SCRAN and the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland (RCAHMS), and others, later this year, for formal launch of the new 'gateway' early in 2001.
The special issue of D-Lib magazine focussed on collections was published this month. I've got a small introductory piece in it, but most of the work was of course done by the other authors, who have assembled a nice set of papers.
Alice Grant and I wrote a piece on CIMI and their relevance to JISC for the latest issue of Ariadne.
The 'Joining the DNER' paper Alicia and I started a while ago is now finished, and en route for the JISC web site.