ROADS Progress Report - for ROADS Executive Meeting, Bristol, Nov 1997

ROADS Progress Report - UKOLN

For ROADS Executive Meeting, Bristol, November 1997.

UKOLN The UK Office for Library and Information Networking.

Work on ROADS at UKOLN has been in the following areas:

Staff:

Ian Peacock is doing some technical work on ROADS, in particular looking at enhancing the ZEXI work and possibly interfacing it to ORACLE (for access to NewsAgent content store).

We shortly hope to appoint a software developer who will also do some work on ROADS.

We have agreed in principle with a group of sponsoring commercial companies the funding of a development post which will look at issues of source description, and will possibly look at the generation of centroids from large bibliographic databases.

Technical Development:

We are in discussion with a group of public librarians about the use for ROADS for a subject gateway in an area of public library interest.

AP and IP have installed ROADS version 2 (alpha).

AP and IP will be working on ROADS/ZEXI/NewsAgent in the following main areas:

improving ZEXI to allow structured records to be returned
Using the ROADS WHOIS++ daemon as front end to the NewsAgent Oracle database.

Cataloguing Rules:

MD is in process of producing some generic cataloguing guidelines for ROADS. A draft should be available soon for comment. <URLhttp://www.ukoln.ac.uk/roads/cataloguing/>

A ROADS Cataloguing Rules meeting was held on the 17th September in Bath which was attended by 16 people from ROADS and the eLib ANR services.

Presentations:

AP delivered a paper entitled "Metadata" (which mentioned ROADS) at an internal staff presentation at the Swiss National Library, Bern and as part of the series of Library Science Talks at CERN, Geneva on the 12 September 1997. <URLhttp://www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/presentations/cern/>

AP and LD attended the 5th Dublin Core Metadata Workshop at the National Library of Finland, Helsinki on 6-8 October 1997.

MD delivered a paper entitled: "ROADS - metadata for resource discovery and interoperability" at the workshop: MetaData: Qualifying Web Objects held in Osnabrueck, Germany, 12-15 October 1997. This will shortly be written up and published on the workshop Web page. <URLhttp://www.mathematik.uni-osnabrueck.de/projects/workshop97/

Publications:

Heery, R., Powell, A., and Day, M., Metadata. Library & Information Briefings, Issue 75. London: South Bank University, Library Information Technology Centre, September 1997.

Day, M., Metadata Corner: Working Meeting on Electronic Records Research. Ariadne, 10, July 1997. <URLhttp://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue10/metadata/>

Heery, R. Metadata Corner: Naming names: metadata registries. Ariadne, 11, September 1997. <URLhttp:URL:http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue11/metadata/>

Maintained by: Michael Day.
11-Dec-1997