It has been another year of change and development. We have seen the research funding activity of the British Library Research and Innovation Centre shift to the Library and Information Commission, and we await the formation of the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council with high expectations. We have been actively involved as the New Library and JISC's Distributed National Electronic Resource move from policy to implementation. We have integrated new areas of work, notably the administration of the Resource Discovery Network and the Interoperability Focus. We are about to start on a new range of research and development activity with several new international projects coming on stream. At the same time we have expanded our links into the museums and archival communites, have made connections with the National Grid for Learning, University for Industry, the National Electronic Library for Health, and other national initiatives, and have built on our international collaborations. The informational landscape of research, learning and cultural engagement is being profoundly touched by new approaches and opportunity, and our experience and advice has never been in higher demand.
This success is due to the commitment and hard work of a dedicated staff and what success we have is due to their ongoing enthusiasm and efforts. I am happy to record my thanks to them, as we look forward to a 1999 crowded with activity.
I would also like to thank our Management Committee for their advice and support. In particular I would like to thank Richard Heseltine, University of Hull, the outgoing Chair, for his practical and intellectual contribution over the last few years. We welcome Ray Lester, of the Natural History Museum, as the new chair and will benefit from his wide perspective. Sue Howley, of the Library and Information Commission, has assumed responsibility for our interaction with LIC, and we look forward to working closely with her as new frameworks emerge. We would like to thank Sue and Alice Colban, who took over as our main JISC contact during the year, for continuing advice and support. We would also like to thank Adrienne Muir and Dave Cook, our respective BLRIC and JISC contacts earlier in the year. We continue to be grateful to the University of Bath and its officers for providing us with a home and supporting services. In particular, we are grateful to Professor George Lunt, Deputy Vice Chancellor, Professor James Davenport, University Director of IT, and Howard Nicholson, University Librarian, for continued interest and support. We are lucky to be based in the 24-hour Library and Learning Centre, and we value our interaction with the library and other University staff.
Lorcan Dempsey
Director, UKOLN
August 1999
UKOLN is a national centre for network information management. It provides policy, awareness, research and networked information services to the library, information and cultural heritage communities. Its goals are to:
This has been a year of significant initiatives which recognise the centrality of network information to learning, cultural and research agendas. Initiatives which have been launched or which have entered significant design or development phases include, in no particular order: the Distributed National Electronic Resource, New Library, the National Grid for Learning, University for Industry, the HE Mall, the National Electronic Library for Health, a Netful of Jewels, and Access to Archives. Readers will be familiar with others.
The enabling promise of emerging cultural, educational and civic networks is too compelling to ignore. Amongst the developing offerings are support for life-long learning and civic participation, ready online access to national cultural and educational opportunities, and rapidly growing business and trading resources.
As these initiatives develop in the shared space the networks provide, there is growing realisation that network information management is not easy, that there are shared problems, that we have to architect, build and maintain complex new systems if the real promise is to be delivered. This is driving an interested in the structure and content of data, in the 'plumbing' that will glue it all together, in new services that will engage interest, and in policy and cultural questions.
UKOLN has been working to explore some of these issues and promote working solutions. It has been working to bring together various of the stakeholders so as to avoid redundancy of effort and cost-effective investment. It has been working to influence policy and inform practice in support of viable services and resources.
This report covers the last year, 1 August 1998 to 31 July 1999. It covers our work in the following areas:
Advice and awareness services
Applied research and development
Network information service development
Events management and web-based current awareness services
We look forward to further developing this body of work next year, to consolidating our position as a central cross-sectoral and cross-domain resource, and to continue to develop working relationships with partners and the University of Bath.
UKOLN and its antecedent organisations have been based at the University of Bath for over 21 years. UKOLN is a multi-disciplinary research and development unit with well-developed information and promotional services and a focus in the area of networked information management. It receives funding from the Committee on Electronic Information (a sub committee of the JISC), the Library and Information Commission (which during this year took over the research funding role of the British Library Research and Innovation Centre) and the European Union. It also receives support from the University of Bath. UKOLN currently has a staff of 20.
Some historical highlights are noted here.
Centre for Catalogue Research established.
The establishment of this office, funded by the British Library R&D Department, was preceded by several projects looking at catalogues and bibliographic data, including the Bath University Programme of Catalogue Research (1977-79). This work was initiated by Maurice Line, sometime University Librarian at Bath, and Philip Bryant, technical services librarian. Philip Bryant became Director of the CCR. People who worked with the Centre in this period included Alan Seal, Janet Kinsella, Gill Venner, Steve Prowse, Jo Lye and Carolyn Hall.
Centre for Bibliographic Management established.
The change of name recognised the wider role the Centre was playing in the UK library world. Lorcan Dempsey and Ann Chapman became research officers at CBM during this period, and Thay Gordon joined as secretary. Ali Cook began doing support work, before becoming Financial Administrator.
UK Office for Library Networking established after a grant is made by the British Library Research and Development Department (BLRDD). UKOLN was set up to work alongside CBM. John Smith became the National Project Officer for UKOLN and its only full-time member of staff.
CBM and UKOLN merge to form UKOLN: The Office for Library and Information Networking. UKOLN is jointly funded by the ISC (now the JISC) and BLR&DD. Derek Law is the Chair of the Management Committee.
Philip Bryant retires as director of UKOLN
Lorcan Dempsey appointed as director of UKOLN (November 1994).
Current name established: UKOLN: The UK Office for Library and Information Networking. UKOLN recruit several new research and information staff, including Rosemary Russell, Rachel Heery, Sarah Ormes, and John Kirriemuir. Hazel Gott joins as Promotions Officer to manage a growing range of workshops and events. Ruth Burt joins as Office Administrator. Professor Mel Collier becomes Chair of the Management Committee.
UKOLN begins its work within an eLib framework. We initiate the ROADS project and begin planning for the Ariadne magazine as well as taking on the task of providing eLib web pages.
As the library is refurbished, UKOLN moves into new offices on Level 4. Several more new staff are recruited, including Andy Powell, Glen Monks, Michael Day, Isobel Stark and Penny Rogers. Brian Kelly joins UKOLN as UK Web Focus.
UKOLN gets its first experience of working on EU-funded projects as DESIRE and BIBLINK begin. UKOLN also begins work on NewsAgent. Dr. Richard Heseltine becomes Chair of the Management Committee.
Sally Criddle is appointed to the newly created post of Resource Co-ordinator. Birgit Kongialis joins to work with Hazel Gott on promotions, as we expand our work in this area.
UKOLN is reviewed by its funding bodies and is congratulated on "becoming recognised as a centre for excellence at international levels in the areas of networking and associated new technology and standards development."
UKOLN consolidates its group structure around several groups with co-ordinators.
Preparatory work begins on EU projects PRIDE and Exploit; BLRIC funded projects Webwatch, CIRCE and Stories from the Web; and on JISC funded AGORA.
Ian Peacock joins UKOLN to work on the BLRIC funded WebWatch project. Eddie Young and Philip Hunter join as Network Systems Officer and Information Officer respectively.
Work commences on the JISC funded Agora project and the EU funded EXPLOIT project. The BLRIC and the JISC agree to jointly fund the post of Interoperability Focus. UKOLN contributes to CEDARS, an eLib programme project. Susan Stidolph, Manjula Patel and Tracy Gardner join the staff, in part-time capacity, and Bernadette Daly is appointed as Information Officer.
Over 200 delegates attend Information landscapes for a Learning Society: the third UKOLN conference in the series Networking and the Future of Libraries, held at the end of June.
Having completed a valuable role in the development of UKOLN to this stage, the Advisory Committee, chaired by Sheila Corrall, ceases to operate.
Paul Miller joins UKOLN as Interoperability Focus, an initiative jointly funded by the LIC and the JISC. Tracy Gardner takes up her technical development and research post on a full-time basis. Hazel Gott, UKOLN's Events Manager retires and Joy Fraser is appointed to continue work in this area. Lou Daly is recruited to provide technical development and research.
UKOLN's bid to host the Centre for the Resource Discovery Network, a JISC funded initiative, in partnership with the Arts and Humanities Data Service (at Kings College London) and the University of Hull is successful.
A special edition of the Journal of Documentation devoted to aspects of UKOLN's work was published in January. The issue, edited by Lorcan Dempsey, focuses on the digital libraries and web technologies areas. The first issues of EXPLOIT Interactive, a pan-European web magazine, designed to promote awareness, disseminate and exploit results from EU funded projects are produced by the Information Services Group.
In April the research funding function of the British Library was transferred to the Library and Information Commission. Dr Ray Lester becomes chair of the Management Committee.
The Reynard and Schemas initiatives, funded by the EU begin, as does the Imesh Toolkit Project, funded by the NSF and JISC.
Hazel Gott retired as Events Manager in April. In the four years that she was at UKOLN Hazel developed a wide network of contacts across the globe and organised events on behalf of UKOLN's funders - the JISC and the British Library, as well as in support of UKOLN's own work. Joy Fraser has been recruited to continue developing the events management service UKOLN provides to the library and information communities.
Ian Peacock left UKOLN during the year to pursue his career in web development with a commercial networking consultancy. We have continued to increase our technical development capacity with the appointment of Lou Daly and Tracy Gardner, who began working on a full-time basis during the year. A Bath University PhD student also provides technical development for the Information Services Group on a casual basis.
This year we have begun collaborating with the University of Bath's Maths Department. We now have several final year MSc students being supervised by UKOLN staff working on projects of mutual benefit to us.
Over the last year the Management Committee has been broadened to include representatives from a wider cross section of the library and information community and three new members were appointed to the Committee. Frances Hendrix, is the Director of LASER (London and South East Library Region), and a member of the board of UfI. Dr Ray Lester manages information technology, library, archive and publishing operations at the Natural History Museum and Peter Brophy is Professor of Information Management and Director of the Centre for Research in Library and Information Management at Manchester Metropolitan University. As well as these additions to the committee there have been a number of changes of representatives. Following the transfer of the BLRIC role to the LIC, Sue Howley replaced Adrienne Muir as the LIC representative. Alice Colban has succeeded Dave Cook as the JISC's representative and Professor James Davenport is now representing the University of Bath, in place of Professor George Lunt.
Dr Richard Heseltine has recently stepped down as chair of the committee and Dr Ray Lester will succeed him. We are very grateful to Dave, Adrienne, Professor Lunt, and Dr Heseltine for the support they have given us over the last few years.
The membership of the Management Committee at 31 July 1999 is given below.
| Dr Ray Lester (Chair) | Head of Library & Information Services, The Natural History Museum |
| Professor Peter Brophy | Director and Chair in Information Management, CERLIM, Manchester Metropolitan University |
| Ms Alice Colban | JISC Secretariat |
| Professor James Davenport | Director of IT, University of Bath |
| Mr John Dolan | Head of Central Library, Birmingham |
| Ms Frances Hendrix | Director, LASER |
| Ms Sue Howley | Deputy Chief Executive and Head of Research, Library and Information Commission |
| Mr Howard Nicholson | Librarian, University of Bath |
We present our work in the following areas:
Advice and awareness services
Applied research and development
Network Information service development
Web-based information and events management services
Significant impacts in this period are reported below.
Interoperability Focus is a national post, funded by the JISC and the LIC. The post was established in January of 1999, and is initially funded for a period of three years. Interoperability Focus is housed within Academic Services at the University of Hull, and acknowledges additional support from that institution.
A rationale for placing this activity at UKOLN was that it could lever complementary activities, thereby forming a more effective resource for the community. The Focus has worked together with our existing MODELS activity to create a range of activities which promote and support interoperability. This activity has had considerable impact over the last year - in standards activity, in bringing together different communities of interest, and in supporting consensus making activity in a complex area.
Interoperability Focus
The scope of Interoperability Focus is broad, encompassing a range of issues related to the creation and use of interoperable services across a range of domains, including the cultural heritage sector, archives, and libraries. A strong cross-community Advisory Committee, chaired by Dr. Ray Lester of the Natural History Museum, serves to guide the work of Interoperability Focus, as well as providing an important channel for dissemination of information.
Interoperability Focus is active in a variety of standardisation and test bed activities, including being a member of the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative's Executive and Advisory Committees, Chair of the Dublin Core working groups on Coverage and the Data Model, a member of the National Geospatial Data Framework's metadata working group, a member of the mda Board, and a member of the ongoing Dublin Core test bed of the Consortium for the Computer Interchange of Museum Information (CIMI).
Interoperability Focus has quickly become established internationally, representing a range of UK interests in various fora around the world. This work is proving successful, with one particular area of activity resulting in funding from JISC for an international meeting to finalise an interoperability profile for the Z39.50 standard, addressing a requirement expressed by many projects in the UK and abroad. This work is described below.
Dissemination and awareness raising are important aspects of the work of Interoperability Focus. Time has therefore been invested in visiting many of the major stakeholders in order to understand their needs. A number of presentations have been given during the last seven months, including papers at the Library Association and Museums & the Web conferences. Interoperability Focus is active on a wide range of electronic mailing lists and a list has recently been set up on the UK's Mailbase service to allow focussed discussion of the wide-ranging issues affecting interoperability between existing and planned systems
Z39.50 profile work
Z39.50 is fairly widely used in large libraries around the world, and is also proving important in parts of the cultural heritage and geospatial sectors both in the United Kingdom and beyond. A continuing problem in linking diverse Z39.50 servers together - as the proposed Distributed National Electronic Resource (DNER) in the UK might seek to do - is both the complexity and occasional ambiguity of the existing standard. Various initiatives are underway within the Z39.50 community to address some of these concerns, and UKOLN aims to provide input to these wherever possible.
One of these efforts, being co-ordinated by the National Library of Canada, is work to define an Interoperability Profile which is simple enough to be readily understood and prescriptive enough that current problems where software packages interpret the standard in different ways are minimised. Current discussions in this group are based around the so-called Texas Profile. A meeting at the beginning of August in Bath has led to the development of a new international profile, based on this work, and we expect it to form the basis of international agreement and improved interworking. The 'Bath profile' will be adopted within the JISC Distributed National Electronic Resource.
MODELS
MODELS (MOving to Distributed Environments for Library Services) is a UKOLN initiative with additional support from the Electronic Libraries Programme and the British Library, to develop a common approach to the management of autonomous, heterogeneous network resources and services. It has progressed through a series of workshops, background research and technical consultancies and has initiated several studies and influenced policy and emerging services in the UK.
An outcome of this project has been the development the MODELS Information Architecture (MIA). MIA investigates the functional components of viable digital information environments and arranges them in a logical architecture.
The eighth MODELS workshop was held at the end of January, addressing the integration of learning and information environments. This represented a area for MODELS and involved a wider range of participants, from both information and learning backgrounds; academic and public libraries were represented. The aims included identifying points of contact and comparison between emerging network information environments and network learning environments, as well as identifying shared architectural and systems concerns, and areas where interoperability is important.
The programme reviewed UK national learning initiatives such as the National Grid for Learning, in addition to initiatives in academic institutions which are building links between library and learning environments. The IMS (Instructional Management Systems) Project and the MODELS Information Architecture provided a focus for discussion throughout the workshop, in exploring ways in which the two worlds can interoperate within a common infrastructure. The overall goal of IMS is to enable an open architecture for online learning; this includes the development of open specifications for locating and using educational content, tracking user progress and exchanging student records. Since it emerged that most communities are not yet aware of the potential of IMS, the UK IMS Centre will be producing a non-technical briefing document to meet this need. UKOLN will also be working with the UK IMS Centre to investigate further how MIA and IMS components might interface. Other joint outcomes were an eLib concertation meeting on IMS, which was held in May and at a policy level, appropriate issues will be raised with JTAP, CEI, UCISA and SCONUL.
As a further development of MIA UKOLN is undertaking a requirements analysis for hybrid information environments. The requirements for a MIA-like hybrid information environment will be developed together with a set of interoperability requirements for such systems. MIA logical architecture will be developed further to provide the high-level framework within which these requirements must be met. MIA architecture has already proved to be a useful tool for understanding the behaviour of hybrid information systems. A set of 'scenarios' will also be developed to capture the basic functionality of hybrid information systems. Having developed a set of generic scenarios, a number of providers or potential providers of hybrid information services will be approached in order to elicit requirements for particular environments. An early version of this study was presented at a consultation meeting in July where a number of service providers and potential service providers discussed MIA and provided feedback and input. A revised version of the study will be presented at the MODELS workshop in the autumn.
Web Focus
UK Web Focus is a national JISC-funded post for the UK Higher Education community whose aim is to advises the HE community on World Wide Web developments. Activities includes monitoring web developments, informing the community through articles in refereed and other publications (both print and online), giving presentations, organising workshops and other events and co-ordination activities.
In September 1998 Web Focus organised a workshop for institutional web managers. This was the second in a series of national workshops aimed at this community and followed on from a two-day event held in July 1997. The second workshop was organised jointly with Netskills and was based at the Netskills training suite at the University of Newcastle. Approximately 100 people took part in the workshop. The feedback on the event was very positive, and its success and the enthusiasm of the delegates made it clear that this event should be repeated. The next workshop, Institutional Web Management: The Next Steps will be held at Goldsmiths College. London in September 1999.
As well as organising national events a wide range of presentations have been given this year, including talks at a number of international conferences.
A joint paper with UKOLN's Interoperability Focus, Will it all fit together? The need for standards and the technical challenges, was presented at the Library Association's conference in July. This joint activity is likely to be followed by more collaborative events which make use of the complementing areas covered by the UK Web Focus and Interoperability Focus posts.
UK Web Focus attended the Eighth International World Wide Web Conference, held in Toronto in May 1999. In addition to attending a number of sessions (which were reported on an Ariadne article) a poster presentation was given. This short paper (which was jointly authored by Roddy MacLeod, EEVL) was also published in the Poster Proceedings of the Conference.
Following the WWW 8 conference, Web Focus attended the first day of a Web Accessibility Initiative meeting. At the meeting a short presentation was given entitled Accessibility, automation and metadata, in which the potential for metadata for improving the accessibility of web resources was outlined.
As well as participation in events, articles have been published in a range of publications, including two articles (The evolution of web protocols and How is my web community doing? Monitoring trends in web service provision) in the January 1999 UKOLN edition of the Journal of Documentation. Regular Web Focus articles are also published in the Ariadne and Exploit Interactive web magazines. Coordination activities of UK Web Focus include membership of JISC's Standards Working group, JISC Mirroring Working Group, the DISinHE Steering Group and the HE Mall Steering Group.
WebWatch
The WebWatch project was funded by British Library Research and Innovation Centre for 12 months from August 1997. The project involved the development and use of robot software to analyse web sites within a number of UK communities, including universities and public libraries. Although the project officially finished in August 1998 a limited amount of work was carried out after this date.
In December 1998 a trawl of UK University entry points was carried out. This was the third such trawl and some interesting trends were noted on comparison with previous trawls. It was observed that both the Apache and Microsoft server software had increased in popularity, at the expense of the NCSA and CERN and other more specialist server software. An increasing number of sites are using metadata on their main entry point, although, perhaps surprisingly, only about 50% of sites provide resource discovery metadata.
Reports on the WebWatch surveys have been published in a number of publications, including a occasional WebWatch column in the Ariadne web magazine. This column has continued, providing summaries of snapshots of a number of features of community web sites. Ariadne issue 20 included a report on a survey of university 404 error messages. The survey showed that a significant number of university web sites use the default or only slightly modified server error message. A small number of web sites were found which contained valuable features which can help to improve the effectiveness of error pages, such as links to key areas and embedded searching facilities.
The final WebWatch report to the British Library Res|earch and Innovation Centre is available on the UKOLN web site.
New Library
In November 1998 the Library and Information Commission published Building the New Library - in many respects the follow up report to the visionary New Library: the People's Network. This report provided advice to the New Opportunities Lottery Fund on how to distribute the £70 million of lottery money put aside by the government for public libraries. This lottery money will be divided into two funds with £20 million for training public librarians in the use of ICT and the remaining £50 million to be spent on digital content creation. Sarah Ormes was involved in the taskgroup which developed the proposed guidelines for the content funding. At the time of writing the final guidelines for applying for this lottery money are still waiting to be published.
Public Library Projects
UKOLN's involvement with the LIC funded projects Stories from the Web, CIRCE and People Flows continued over this year. Stories from the Web has now launched a successful web site, which has been very well received. We hope to build on this work, and develop it with partners in several directions. CIRCE has now finished and the final report for the project is available on the Gloucestershire County Council web site. People Flows has also finished and the final report should be available later this year.
Policy briefing papers
The Networked Services Policy Taskgroup is a partnership between EARL, the Library Association and UKOLN. The taskgroup has been producing a series of issue papers which provide public library managers with impartial information about networked services policy issues. Three paper have now been published and have all been well received. The first paper in the series was written by Sarah Ormes and explored the issues surrounding the use of filtering software in public libraries. This paper has lead to Sarah being invited to speak on this topic at a number of conferences. The second paper in the series was entitled Collecting Internet Resources: the issues for UK public librarians and was written by Robert Harden, developer of EARLWeb. The third paper explored the issues surrounding charging for networked services and was written by Ian Everall, chair of the group and Public Library Services Manger for Walsall. In parallel to the issue papers the taskgroup has run a number of discussion forums exploring the same issues as the papers - all of these forums have been oversubscribed and feedback from them was extremely positive. Further issue papers and discussion forums will be produced in 1999/2000.
Litgate
UKOLN has been working with the West Midlands Regional Library Service (WMRLS) in developing a ROADS-based gateway for literature resources in community languages. The gateway has been named Litgate and is now in the early stages of being populated with content. A training day for Litgate cataloguers was funded by West Midlands Arts and took place early in 1999 at the University of Warwick. West Midlands Arts is now funding a part time post which will provide some dedicated effort to develop the gateway.
UKOLN and EARL
UKOLN worked with EARL over the year to provide a series of content creation workshops. These workshops were aimed at encouraging participants to begin to identify the kind of content led services which they could start to provide in the age of the New Library. UKOLN's contribution was a workshop exploring how public libraries could use their web sites to promote and develop their literature services. The workshop uses break-out groups, examples, discussion and question and answer sessions to encourage attendees to begin to view their web sites not as static information pages but as the gateway to a 24 hour library. Although initially attendees are asked to focus on literature services the ideas developed and issues raised are soon applied to other service areas as well.
Local library, global community
In May 1999 Sarah Ormes was an assistant director of a British Council seminar entitled Local Library, Global Community: the public library in the age of the Internet. This event was co-organised with John Dolan, OBE, Head of Birmingham Central Library. The event was attended by librarians from 15 different countries and took place in Aston Business School. Highlights of the week included a reception with Birmingham's Lord Major, a very heated debate about the use of filtering in public libraries and a keynote speech at the conference dinner by Clare Rayner.
The public librarians' guide to the Internet
Currently Sarah Ormes and Sally Criddle are in the process of co-authoring The Public Librarian's Guide to the Internet with Alison McNab and Ian Winship. This book is expected to be published late in 1999.
Network services
Work is underway on a public library search engine and on a directory for public library email addresses. UKOLN's informational public library pages continue to be a valuable resource.
The currency of BNBMARC records on the British Library BLAISE database
UKOLN continues to monitor the availability of bibliographic records in the BNB files on the British Library Database as it has done since January 1980. The surveys cover items with publication dates of 1974 or later, with a UK publisher or distributor, which are within the coverage of the British National Bibliography. Each month results are tabulated and analysed and a conflated hit rate produced for the previous twelve months. The hit rate is the percentage of items for which records were found. A second search of the database six months after the original search identifies records subsequently added to the database. The results of this produce the recheck hit rate. The results are available from the UKOLN web site and are regularly published in the British Library newsletter Select and in the Library Association Record.
Multi-source Currency Survey
Since September 1996, UKOLN has been investigating the availability of bibliographic records, at the time required by the user, from a number of bibliographic databases, using the sample collected for the on-going monitoring of the BNB files of the British Library. The additional databases are the library and book trade services of Bibliographic Data Services, Book Data and J. Whitaker and Sons, databases of the library management systems of BLCMP and SLS (Information Systems) Ltd, the inter-lending facilitation services of LASER and Unity, and the large bibliographic databases of CURL and OCLC.
With the completion of the first year of the survey, sufficient data was available to produce statistically valid figures and a report was produced presenting the results of the survey for the period September 1996 to August 1997. UKOLN continued to monitor the availability of records on the various databases for another two years. One service was dropped from the survey in the third year due to unforeseen circumstances. The Unity database had been maintained by Libris Computing Ltd, which went into liquidation with the result that the database was not updated after the summer of 1998. UKOLN continued to monitor the database for the next six months to investigate the effect of not updating on the availability of records. Results from this show a difference between the academic and public samples, with the public samples hit rate dropping almost straight away and with a large drop, with the academic sample hit rate showing a slower and smaller drop.
Apart from Unity, results for the second and third years of the survey have only provided confirmation of the results in the first year with the hit rates remaining very stable. After consultation with the participant sources, the decision has been taken to stop continuous monitoring of the databases with effect from August 1999. The intention is to carry out a comparison survey in two to three years' time, and the current participants have indicated that they would like to participate again.
Trend Analysis of Acquisitions in University and Public Libraries in the UK
An extensive amount of data, from 1980 to the present, is held in the currency surveys database compiled for the surveys. The sample collected is, by its parameters, a record of the acquisitions of academic and public libraries in the UK over the last 20 years. While most of the analysis carried out on the sample concerns the availability and timeliness of bibliographic records, in 1995 UKOLN carried out some initial analyses into dates of acquisition and publication and the spread of subjects in the sample. This area has been further explored this year in a joint project with the Library and Information Statistics Unit (LISU) at Loughborough University. The project was funded by the BNB Research Fund and took place between January and July 1999.
The project set out to explore the following areas: Date Tracking over time book acquisition dates in relation to publication dates. Format Quantifying over time the acquisition of paperbacks in relation to hardbacks. Subject Quantifying over time changes in the acquisition of materials on different subjects, using second level BIC subject codes. Price Quantifying over time changes in the average prices of materials acquired and relating these to average prices of books published over the same period. Stock retention For selected libraries, monitoring the proportions of the original stock samples retained in stock
A copy of the currency surveys database was sent to LISU but did not contain data on format or price as this had not been collected for the currency survey and only contained subject data from 1996 onwards. Additional data in these areas was acquired with the cooperation of Book Data and J. Whitaker & Sons and merged with the original database. The statistical analyses were then carried out LISU statistical staff. A report on the study is currently in preparation.
Full Disclosure
Between 1994 and 1996, Philip Bryant carried out studies into the need for retrospective catalogue conversion in libraries in the UK. Following this, a Pathfinding Group was set up to explore the way forward. The group consisted of members representing the British Library, the Library and Information Commission, the Library and Information Co-operation Council (LINC), the Consortium of University Research Libraries (CURL), the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF), the National Council on Archives and the Research Support Libraries Programme (RSLP). The group commissioned UKOLN and the National Council on Archives to carry out a study to develop a strategy for retrospective catalogue conversion in libraries and archives in the UK. The study took place between January and May 1999.
The study comprised a number of strands of activity and looked at both the library and archive areas. The current situation on retrospective conversion was reviewed by collecting information on retrospective conversion projects undertaken since 1997. The views of the library and archive communities were sought in a series of telephone interview consultations and a set of three regional workshops. The approaches used in large-scale conversion projects both in the UK and abroad were reviewed. Information gained through these strands was then used to develop a draft strategy. This was then presented at a national conference held in May, attended by more than 140 delegates, and gained substantial support for the initiative. Suggestions made at the conference were incorporated into a revised strategy, presented in a final report to the Pathfinding Group.
The Pathfinding Group accepted the proposed strategy and committed themselves to taking the initiative forward. To do this they have revised their membership and have a new name, the Full Disclosure Implementation Group.
The report is available on the LIC web site and a hard copy version is due for publication in the late August 1999.
Other work
UKOLN is continuing to monitor the records contributed to the BNB files through the Copyright Libraries Shared Cataloguing Programme (CLSCP). This is now undertaken as an annual snapshot and the results are reported to the British Library and the CLSCP Steering Committee. Ann Chapman is a member of the BIC Bibliographic Standards Technical Sub-Group which is currently acting as a consultant body on the ongoing UK/US MARC harmonisation programme. She is also a member of| the LASER Working Party on ILL for Non-Book Materials which is currently focusing on inter-lending issues for recorded music and videos.
Lorcan Dempsey worked with a focus group to develop the framework for a research agenda across libraries, archival institutions, museums for DGXIII of the European Commission. This will be published shortly, and is currently circulating in draft.
A list of committee memberships is given below. UKOLN staff are actively involved across a range of initiatives in supporting development, advising on best practice, and brokering contact and collaboration. Apart from our direct involvement in New Library and the DNER we have advised the National Electronic Library for Health, the HE Mall, and are in discussion with the National Grid for Learning, University for Industry, and others about taking forward joint work and discussion.
Paul Miller, Rosemary Russell and Tracy Gardner have worked together on interoperability issues. Rosemary Russell is the project manager for MODELS. Tracy Gardner provides technical development and research work. Paul Miller is Interoperability Focus. Brian Kelly is the web focus. Ian Peacock worked with Brian on WebWatch. Sarah Ormes is UKOLN's Public Library Networking Focus, and Sally Criddle works with her on public library issues. Ann Chapman co-ordinates the bibliographic management work. During the year, Susan Stidolph assisted her in the survey work, on a part-time basis. Eddie Young provides technical support.
UKOLN provides well-regarded and heavily used web-based informational and current awareness resources in the form of Ariadne and Exploit-interactive, as well as several sets of informational web pages. This year saw a new development as we move towards providing production information services. We are overseeing the Resource Discovery Network as it develops as a distributed service. As part of this we need to provide central brokering services which present a consistent view of the collective resource of the RDN resources.
The Resource Discovery Network (RDN) is a significant new activity for UKOLN. Its service focus complements our advice and awareness work, and our R&D work. The RDN was established by JISC to enrich learning, research, and cultural engagement by facilitating access to high-quality Internet resources through a range of subject-based gateways. Its work focuses in two complementary directions. Firstly, on describing high-quality Internet resources of academic value and making descriptions and links to the Internet resources available through web-accessible databases. Secondly, on developing subject-based 'portals' to a wider range of data resources and associated services that are being made available by the JISC and others for use within the higher education community.
The RDN inherits several subject gateways launched under the JISC's electronic libraries programme Together, they already receive some 1,000,000 user access per month and cover areas in the social sciences, business education, engineering, medical studies, and art and design. It seeks to extend existing service provision| through selective use of public funding, through strategic partnership with common purpose not-for-profit organisations, and selected commercial activities.
To achieve its aims, the RDN has developed a network organisation comprising a Network Centre (RDNC) and a set of faculty-level hubs. The RDNC is responsible for the RDN's business development and for the common standards, legal, and other frameworks that will ensure maximum consistency and integration across the service. The Hubs are responsible for developing subject gateways in the following broad faculty areas including
The RDNC was established in January 1999 and located jointly at King's College London (the AHDS) and the University of Bath (UKOLN). Five hubs have been established and funded from 1 August 1999 in Humanities (led by Oxford University); Biological and Medical Sciences (led by Nottingham University); Creative Arts and Industries (still pending); Engineering, Computing and Mathematics (led by Heriot-Watt University); Physical Sciences (to be led by the Consortium of Academic Libraries in Manchester), and Social Sciences, Business, and Law (led by the University of Bristol).
Lorcan Dempsey is co-Director of the RDNC , alongside Daniel Greenstein (KCL) and Richard Heseltine (Univ. Hull). Andy Powell is transitioning from current responsibilities to take over responsibility for UKOLN's RDNC services. Additional staff will be recruited as the service develops.
UKOLN participates in a range of influential projects. This work provides valuable expertise, contacts and results. Of interest, for example, is the work we have done on Dublin Core supported through project participation.
eLib funding for the ROADS project came to an end in July this year. However this does not mean the end of ROADS development and support. Maintenance and development of the software will continue under the Open Source model with software being written and co-ordinated by committed technical users. The Resource Discovery Network Centre has funding to support its member gateways for the time being, and the ILRT at the University of Bristol will offer support to other users on a consultancy basis.
During the past year UKOLN involvement in the ROADS project has focused on demonstrating the capabilities of the software and on developing guidelines which will assist services to interoperate. We have set up demonstrations of the cross searching facilities offered by the Whois++ and CIP (Common Indexing Protocol) support in ROADS version 2. There are currently three demonstrators available: cross-searching of seven subject services and searching across the engineering based services EEVL and EELS.
UKOLN has been closely involved in the Dublin Core (DC) activity, with UKOLN representation on the Dublin Core Advisory Committee. A growing interest in the compatibility of ROADS and Dublin Core led us to investigate use of Dublin Core within ROADS. This has resulted in agreement on a draft version of the ROADS Dublin Core template which can be viewed in the ROADS registry on the UKOLN web site. The Dublin Core template has been put to use in a sample ROADS database of descriptions of Ariadne articles using this template. DC elements can be used to search this database and results are displayed using the DC metadata set.
ROADS can be put to use on organisational web sites to assist with metadata management. An increasing number of web site administrators and individual authors are interested in creating metadata for their web pages. A flexible and effective method for embedding DC metadata into web documents is to use a server-side include script. UKOLN are demonstrating this method of generating metadata on their web site where a ROADS database of Dublin Core templates is being used as the basis for embedding DC metadata into the eLib documents that can be retrieved from the eLib pages hosted by UKOLN.
Recently UKOLN have made available a review of products designed to enable resource discovery. This review places ROADS in the context of other available software, and considers some criteria for evaluation. The product comparison is influenced by the requirements of information gateways such as the eLib Subject Gateways. We hope to expand and update this review with details of additional products as they come to our attention.
We would like to mark the end of the ROADS project by noting its success in producing software tools that are now in widespread use for resource discovery. Uptake of ROADS has spread outside the UK subject gateways (a number of whom continue to use ROADS) to other parts of UK HE and beyond in Scandinavia, the Netherlands, Australia and the USA. The benefits of the ROADS project go further than the software itself. The ROADS project has funded much of UKOLN's participation in standards-making activity such as the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative and Resource Description Framework (RDF) model and syntax development. ROADS has also been significant in supporting UKOLN's dissemination activity regarding the importance of metadata in building a viable infrastructure for the web.
DESIRE II, a European Union Telematics for Research project, commenced in August 1998. This project follows on from the successful DESIRE I project, and has the advantages of a more focused list of deliverables and a smaller number of participants. This is a two year project in which UKOLN will participate in a number of activities some of which involve development of demonstrators, others relate to promotion of good practice.
The original DESIRE project provided two categories of demonstrator: subject based services founded on selected high quality Internet resource and regional exhaustive services founded on metadata generated by web robots.
DESIRE II will enhance these services and work towards a technical and organisational framework in which they can operate more effectively. It will deliver software tools for the development of search services; demonstrate integrated services for locating a variety of resource types accessed by different retrieval protocols including LDAP-based directories, FTP archives, and newsgroups as well as HTML documents on the web; provide facilities for support of caches of frequently used material and offer a programme of workshops to encourage the development of these services.
As the technologies that underpin such activity continue to develop, the DESIRE II partners will take part in the relevant standards making processes. These include membership of the World Wide Web Consortium, RDF working groups, participation in the Dublin Core Technical Advisory Committee and other Dublin Core working groups, and involvement with initiation of the IETF Web Replication and Caching (WREC) Group.
UKOLN together with ILRT at the University of Bristol, have produced the first deliverable of the project, which takes the form of recommendations on the implementation of quality ratings in an RDF (Resource Description Framework) environment. This work builds on the Quality Guidelines produced by DESIRE I, and explores the application of machine readable quality vocabularies to various quality aspects of information management. Instances of such applications might include collaborative ratings services, the ranking of search service results, or displaying quality information for resources linked to displayed web pages. PICS (Platform for Internet Content Selection) technology originally provided the basic infrastructure for rating and filtering Internet content, now RDF provides a means to create richer rating metadata and broadens the application areas which might be developed.
Building on this initial work, UKOLN has developed a demonstrator showing some 'proof of concept' scenarios for using quality ratings, first to rank hit lists and secondly to display ratings for resources linked within a web page. The demonstrator uses the ROADS subject gateway SOSIG to illustrate how search results might be ranked based on quality ratings from an accessibility ratings service.
A second demonstration shows how an end user might display ratings for links within a page, to assist the user to decide whether that link is worth following. This enables the end user to gain additional information about a resource from another 'metadata service', so for example a service might provide ratings (metadata) describing the target audience of a resource or its relevance to a particular curriculum level.
Such ratings services offer interesting possibilities for enhancing 'base-line' metadata with additional information from other specialised services. The technology used in the demonstrator is based on ratings held in a ROADS database transported via WHOIS++ or via HTTP in an RDF/XML format. Retrieval of ratings depends on availability of a mechanism to search the ratings database by a URL, and this feature has been fed back into the ROADS software.
Further work on ratings enables 'peer communities' to create their own ratings for particular web resources and to view the ratings alongside the resource by using the 'What's related' feature in Netscape.
Other DESIRE partners are progressing work on integrating white pages directory services with existing search services to allow cross searching of descriptions of people as well as web resources. Collaboration between NetLab at the University of Lund and OCLC has produced a demonstrator of automatic classification technique to add classification codes automatically to harvested metadata.
CURL Exemplars in Digital Archives (Cedars) is a Consortium of University Research Libraries (CURL) project funded by JISC through eLib phase 3. The main aims of the project are to address some of the strategic, methodological and practical issues of digital preservation through research and the development of demonstrators, to promote awareness of the importance of preservation and to help identify guidance for 'best practice'. Lead sites in the project are the Universities of Cambridge, Leeds and Oxford. UKOLN is mostly involved with the parts of the project that relate to the important issue of preservation metadata.
UKOLN initially carried out a study of digital preservation metadata on behalf of the project's Access Issues Working Group. A preliminary report, entitled Metadata for preservation, was published on the Web in August 1998. This identified several digital preservation issues that could be addressed by the creation and maintenance of metadata and described a number of existing metadata projects and initiatives. Papers based on this work were given at Guidelines for Digital Imaging, a joint Research Libraries Group (RLG) and National Preservation Office (NPO) conference held at the University of Warwick in September 1998 and at the Third Metadata Workshop held in Luxembourg in April 1999.
UKOLN and the Cedars Project Officer based at Oxford University Computing Service are currently working on the follow-up to this study, namely the production of a draft preservation metadata specification for adoption by the project. A preliminary list of metadata elements was produced and introduced at the Cedars Demonstrators II meeting held at the University of Leeds in March 1999. Since then the draft document has been extensively discussed at project working group meetings and at a specially convened 'brainstorming' meeting held at University College London in May 1999. Work is currently proceeding into the production of a revised metadata specification that will be open for public review.
The BIBLINK project is funded through the European Union's Fourth Framework Telematics for Libraries Programme. The project is co-ordinated by the British Library and is due to run until February 2000.
The aim of the project is to establish an automated flow of metadata, describing electronic publications, between publishers and national bibliographic agencies. Workspaces will be established by the participating national libraries. Records within such workspaces will be accessible to publishers and other third parties as well as the national bibliographic agencies themselves, as part of the process whereby authoritative bibliographic records are produced.
The BIBLINK workspace has been fully specified and the project has entered the development phase. During the last year, a French software house, Jouve, has been developing the software for the demonstrator. UKOLN have been leading the testing and verification work package, which involves managing the alpha and beta testing, and agreeing acceptance of the final release. The demonstrator phase is imminent, at which point the software will be installed by a number of national libraries.
UKOLN will run the demonstrator in the UK, with input from a number of electronic publishers. The British Library will verify use of the system by a prototype incorporation of the workspace in their existing processes. The BIBLINK Demonstrator will consist primarily of a BIBLINK Workspace, which is esentially a shared database containing BIBLINK Workspace Records. Publishers will be able to input records in Dublin Core or SGML formats. National bibliographic agencies will access the Workspace to enhance the records by adding subject headings and applying authority control for names.
Although UKOLN are no longer formally partners of the NfL2 eLib phase 3 project, we continue to have an interest in some of the more technical aspects of the project and have contributed a redesign of the metadata schema it uses, based on Dublin Core version 1.1. UKOLN will continue to provide assistance to NewsAgent until December 1999, primarily to help transition the service to a server based at Library Information Technology Centre at South Bank University. This work will include configuration of the NewsAgent robot and other tools that were primarily developed by UKOLN as part of NewsAgent phase 1.
PRIDE, a European Union DGXIII funded project, is investigating the ways in which directory technologies, specifically LDAP and X.500, can be used to form the basis of authentication, payment, resource discovery, brokering and alerting functions within a library service environment. UKOLN have contributed to the technical parts of a state of the art review that has been undertaken by the project. We have also been involved in developing the PRIDE architecture and the detailed software design. During the coming months UKOLN will be involved in developing a Resource Description Framework (RDF) robot that will be used to gather remotely held descriptions of collections, services and other resources into the PRIDE directory. We will also be involved in the deployment of a PRIDE demonstrator run in France, Germany, Ireland and the United Kingdom and also in Hungary and Australia.
Agora is a 'hybrid library' project within phase 3 of the eLib programme and is based on the MODELS project. It's objective is to explore issues of distributed, mixed-media information management, based on an open standards-based platform. The project is lead by the University of East Anglia, with UKOLN, Fretwell-Downing Infomatics and the Centre for Research in Library and Information Management (CERLIM) as partners. It works with associate groups of libraries (who deploy the solution in the context of their electronic collection management procedures), service providers (who will interwork with the broker), and system developers (who will provide technical knowledge). The first release of the Agora hybrid library management system (HLMS) from Fretwell-Downing is scheduled for this summer.
UKOLN has compiled a set of resources to be accessed within Release 1, based on suggestions from library associates and investigation of other suitable sources (this version is reliant on Z39.50 as the search protocol). It includes library catalogues (UK and overseas), abstract and indexing services, subject gateways and museum image databases. OCLC have kindly agreed to allow Agora to access a subset of FirstSearch databases.
The Agora system will be installed over the coming months in the associate libraries where user evaluation will be carried out in controlled groups, working towards specification of the next release (due summer 2000). We also plan to demonstrate Agora at a number of professional events, to gain feedback. Another meeting for Agora service provider associates will be held in the autumn to demonstrate Release 1, provide feedback and discuss issues.
Agora continues to use the BSCW web groupware product to support internal project communications. A new structure for the workspace was designed, to make navigation around the workspace easier. An article about our selection and trialing of products was published in Vine 109 (February 1999 issue). A training session for library associates and project staff was held in April and a short tutorial covering the basic BSCW features has been developed.
In September 1998 UKOLN organised a meeting at the British Library in London to discuss the issues associated with collection description. The meeting was attended by representatives of eLib Phase 3 projects, various library automation suppliers and other interested parties. One of the outcomes of the meeting was the setting up of a small working group, charged with developing a small set of 'core' collection description attributes that could be used to describe collections in a consistent way across the range of activities undertaken by eLib projects. The working group, chaired by UKOLN, produced an interim report on work in progress in October 1998 and is in the final stages of producing a report entitled Simple Collection Description. The report builds on the earlier work in progress, detailing a set of 23 'core' attributes for simple collection description and providing examples of their use. The attribute set will be used as the basis for collection description in the RIDING and Agora eLib phase 3 projects.
UKOLN have also been finishing an eLib supporting study entitled Collection Level Description - a review of existing practice. This will be published soon. Incorporating work by a number of authors, this eLib supporting study takes a detailed look at the state of the art for collection description as it currently exists in the library, archival, museum and Internet/web communities.
Recently UKOLN have been awarded funding for a short-term project in response to the RSLP Circular 1999/1. This will enhance our existing work in the area of collection description to develop a metadata schema and associated tools for projects in the collaborative collection management and research collections in the humanities and social sciences strands of the Programme, enabling them to describe the collections that they make available in a consistent way. The groundwork for this project will be done in collaboration with Mike Heaney, University Library Services Directorate, University of Oxford and will be funded by OCLC.
And finally, UKOLN have used the ROADS software to build a database of descriptions of the collections covered by the 'JISC Current Content Collection'. The ROADS database uses the attributes identified by the eLib collection description working group (above) as the basis for these descriptions. We hope to enhance the database over the coming months, in collaboration with JISC.
DC-dot, UKOLN's web-based Dublin Core generator has been used to describe almost 10,000 different web resources, and there have been over 120 downloads of the DC-dot software.
Rachel Heery, Andy Powell, Michael Day, Tracy Gardner and Lou Daly all work on a variety of UKOLN's metadata projects. Manjula Patel works on the BIBLINK project. These projects are co-ordinated by Rachel Heery and Andy Powell co-ordinates technical development work. Rosemary Russell is the Agora Communications manager.
Web Service Developments
UKOLN now publishes two electronic magazines, the well established Ariadne and the newcomer, Exploit Interactive. The new magazine runs on an NT platform, and uses Microsoft Site Server 3.0 and Visual Interdev as management tools. The range of software experience and skill in the group is therefore broadening, and now covers the two most popular operating systems for the creation of web sites. Both magazines will be indexed in Bowker-Saur's soon to be released web version of LISA (Library and Information Science Abstracts).
Ariadne magazine, now three years old, is one of the original eLib projects, funded under the training and awareness'part of the eLib programme. Its initial JISC funding, originally for two years and extended for a further year, came to an end with Issue 18, whose paper version contained 24 pages: twice its regular size. The web version of Issue 18 was also a very large undertaking. The print edition has ceased publication, but the magazine continues to flourish on the web as a valuable dissemination tool for the UK information technology community. We are currently setting up an arrangement in which Ariadne will be mirrored by a server in the University of Goettingen.
The first web only Ariadne, Issue 19, was released in March 1999. As well as featuring four main articles, this edition marked the launch of several new regular columns, including a number of JISC related services, such as EEVL Eye On Engineering (news from the EEVL engineering gateway) and Biz/Ed Bulletin (news from the Biz/Ed gateway). Access statistics continue to climb, and user sessions are now in excess of 800 per day. Ariadne 20, published in June 1999, was the first to feature a new design produced in-house by the lead editor. The redesign covered both graphics and navigation structures. Issue 20 includes a new regular column, JISC ASSIST, which provides news on the JISC ASSIST awareness unit. Citation information will be available from all Ariadne pages from Issue 21 (September 1999) onwards.
Exploit Project
The Exploit project is an accompanying measure within the European Union's DG XIII Telematics for Libraries Programme. Its aims are to promote awareness, provide current information, and assist in the improved dissemination of project deliverables via the Exploit database (presently being developed by the Deutsches Bibliotheksinstitut in Berlin) and the web magazine, produced by UKOLN.
Areas of activity in the project include:
Exploit Interactive Web Magazine
The pan-European magazine is published quarterly. The first two issues were published in April and July 1999 and the publication date for Issue 3 is set for late October 1999. The main language of the magazine is English, though contributors are encouraged to provide additional European language versions of articles.
The issues contain a mixture of feature articles from the Telematics for Libraries projects and the broader library and networking communities, regular articles and news and events items, along with an interactive Java crossword puzzle. The feature articles provide the reader with a glimpse behind the scenes of the various projects. The broader community contributions include coverage of the IST Programme: one of the four thematic programmes under the Fifth Framework Programme for Research and Technological Development and commercial product and organisational profiles such as the recent articles on Blue Angel Technologies' MetaStar suite.
The editors work closely with various project co-ordinators, the DG XIII Office and members of the broader library and networking communities.
Recent developments include the Exploit Interactive Forum which readers can access from the issue home page. It is hoped that this new feature will provide a forum for discussion related to issues raised within articles, along with general discussion within the EU Telematics community. Future additions will include the use of Dublin Core Metadata.
eLib
The management of the eLib programme pages has been much improved with the development of a ROADS database from which RDF format metadata can be automatically embedded into the web pages. Access to the metadata can be obtained by clicking the 'DC metadata' link in the page footer of an eLib page. This new eLib site resource provides a useful testbed for the ROADS software; and use of RDF enables experience to be gained in the use of tools to manage and make use of this important new metadata format. The ISG has also undertaken the systematic replacement of Microsoft Word files available on the eLib site with PDF format files. These, though also a proprietary format, can be opened using the freely distributed Adobe Acrobat browser plug-in. UKOLN will continue to host and develop the eLib pages, and details of Phase 3 projects and information related to eLib events, such as the eLib conference held at York in December 1998.
UKOLN hosted services
UKOLN continues to host web pages for a number of organisations including the Society of Chief Librarians, the European Union's BIBLINK project, the JIBS (JISC-assisted bibliographic dataservices) User Group and LISSPS (Library and Information Studies Students and Prospective Students). In addition it provides web access to a number of documents on behalf of the Library and Information Commission. From May this year UKOLN has been providing access to Stories from the Web, an interactive site for children, developed as part of an LIC funded project. This accounts for the large increase in requests to hosted services that can be seen over the last three months.
Mirror Sites
UKOLN mirrors the US publications D-Lib, the magazine of digital library research and the Katherine Sharp Review, a journal authored by students who are concerned with topics relevant to library and information science
Philip Hunter and Bernadette Daly co-edit Ariadne and Exploit Interactive and provide web support and development services. Adam Batenin, a Bath University PhD student is providing technical development assistance on a casual basis. Brian Kelly co-ordinates the group.
UKOLN have organised the following conferences and workshops during the year. The events organised support the work of UKOLN and its funders, particularly the JISC who provide additional funding for this service.
| 2-4 June 1999 | Imesh Framework Workshop. A workshop organised by the Resource Discovery Network Centre on behalf of the IMesh initiative with JISC support, University of Wawick. |
| 3-4 March 1999 | Digital Preservation Strategy Workshop. A National Preservation Office and JISC funded, invitation-only workshop, University of Warwick. |
| 22 March 1999 | Library Resource Sharing and Discovery: catalogues for the future. A one-day workshop presented by the eLib Clump Projects and co-ordinated by UKOLN, London. |
| 28-29 January 1999 | MODELS 8 Workshop: an integrated information environment for learning and teaching. Bath. |
| 2-4 December 1998 | Information Ecologies: the impact of new information 'species'. Organised by the eLib Programme and co-ordinated by UKOLN, York. |
| 28-30 September 1998 | Guidelines for Digital Imaging. A joint National Preservation Office/Research Libraries Group preservation conference, University of Warwick. |
| 15-17 September 1998 | Institutional Web Management Workshop. A workshop organised jointly by UKOLN and Netskills, University of Newcastle. |
The events above were organised by Hazel Gott with assistance from Birgit Kongialis.
Administrative support is provide by Ruth Burt, the UKOLN Office Administrator, Ali Cook, the Financial Administrator and Sally Criddle, the Resource Co-ordinator. Birgit Kongialis provides administrative support to the general office as well as support for the Events Management activities.
Over the last few years UKOLN has diversified its funding base, a trend that is likely to continue. This section summarises UKOLN's sources of income and outlines how its funds are spent.
The following chart shows the breakdown of project funding received for the period (April to March) 98/99.
Core
UKOLN core activities are funded by the LIC and JISC. This funding supports UKOLN's distributed library systems, public library networking and bibliographic management work. In addition, it supports the Director, as well as some information services work, some events management activities and administrative support. Funding of core activities has been agreed with the LIC to July 2001 and with the JISC to July 2000.
JISC Projects
During this period the JISC through the eLib Programme has supported work on the ROADS, NewsAgent, Agora and CEDARS projects. In addition, UKOLN receives funding from JISC for the post of UK Web Focus and for the partial funding of the Web Officer and Events Manager posts. The JISC also jointly funds the Interoperability Focus post, with the LIC.
LIC Projects
The WebWatch project was funded by the BLRIC to July 1998. The LIC and the JISC jointly fund the Interoperability Focus. The BLRIC/LIC funded Full Disclosure, a study for a national programme of retrospective catalogue conversion.
EU Projects
During this period work continued on the BIBLINK project and the second phase of the DESIRE project commenced in August 1998. Work also commenced on a further two EU projects, PRIDE and EXPLOIT.
Other project income
We are grateful to OCLC, who contributed to the funding of UKOLN's continuing work on collection descriptions.
Events, studies and other income
During the year we managed events to the value of £79,300 for the JISC and £37,450 for the BLRIC. In June 1998 UKOLN hosted it's own conference, Information landscapes for a learning society: networking and the future of libraries 3. The conference was self-financing and produced a surplus of approximately £21,000 once all expenses and an overhead to the University had been paid. During the period other income of approximately £9,000 was received in the form of royalties and sales of UKOLN publications, some bibliographic surveying services that UKOLN provides for the British Library and other events organised in support of UKOLN's work.
Expenditure
Full details of income and expenditure during this year have been submitted to our funding bodies in accordance with their conditions of grant.
UKOLN has extensive communication and dissemination channels nationally and internationally and staff contribute to the community through membership of a wide range of influential committees. A special issue of the Journal of Documentation devoted aspects of UKOLN work and edited by Lorcan Dempsey was published in January 1999. A selective list of publications, presentations and committee memberships follows. Also included are the software tools that were either developed or significantly enhanced during the year and a list of some of the visitors that UKOLN received.
| 26/08/98 | Dan Greenstein, Director, Arts & Humanities Data Service |
| 08/09/98 | Kristiina Hormia-Poutanen, Project Manager, Helsinki University |
| 14/09/98 | Steve Ashwell, Informatics Officer, The Health Care Libraries Unit |
| 21/09/98 | Sue Brown., Head of Professional Services, the Library Association |
| 25/09/98 | Lydia Matheson, Project Co-ordinator, Stories from the Web |
| 15/10/98 | Ben Toth, Information Manager. National Health Service |
| 29/10/98 | Dan Brickley, Technical Research Officer, ILRT, University of Bristol |
| 29/10/98 | Debra Hiom, Research Officer, ILRT, University of Bristol |
| 09/11/98 | Nicholas Kingsley, Hon. Secretary , The National Council on Archives,, Birmingham Central Library |
| 12/11/98 | Johann van Halm, consultant |
| 23/11/98 | Jon Wallis, Senior Lecturer in Computing, University of Wolverhampton |
| 23/12/98 | Chris Rusbridge, Programme Director, Electronic Libraries Programme |
| 12/01/99 | Martin Hamilton, Research Associate, ROADS Project |
| 02/02/99 | Stephen Pinfield, Andrew Hampson, Ian Upton, Project Leader, BUILDER, University of Birmingham |
| 02/02/99 | Clive Massey, Ingenta Ltd, University of Bath |
| 04/02/99 | Mary Rowlatt, Information Services Manager, Essex Libraries |
| 08/02/99 | Lesley Huxley, Training and Liason Manager, ILRT, University of Bristol |
| 12/02/99 | Janet Lees, Managing Director, OCLC Europe |
| 18/02/99 | Marcus Austin, Future Publishing, Bath |
| 19/02/99 | David Liddell, Information Systems Consultant |
| 19/04/99 | Stephen Green, Policy Adviser, Archives & Libraries, Heritage Lottery Fund |
| 30/04/99 | Elizabeth Graham, Assistant Coordinator, Electronic Libraries Programme |
| 06/05/99 | Robert Davies, Carpenter Davies Associates, London |
| 26/05/99 | Vincent Galante, Head, Information Systems. La Trobe University, Victoria, Australia |
| 09/06/99 | Ronald Milne, Programme Director, Research Support Libraries Programme, Edinburgh |
| 09/06/99 | Jordina Escala, University of Barcelona, Spain |
| 17/06/99 | Debora Parr, UKEL Co-ordinator, EARL |
| 07/07/99 | Danny Sullivan, Editor, Search Engine Watch |
| 12/07/99 | Terry Noreault, Director of Office of Research OCLC, Dublin, Ohio |
| 15/07/99 | Sue Howley, Deputy Chief Executive & Head of Research, Library and Information Commission |
| 20/07/99 | Peter Underwood, Aberystwyth and Cape Town |
| 23/07/99 | Michael Heaney, Associate Director, Oxford University Library Services Directorate |
| 29/07/99 | Alan Robiette, Consultant (in connection with HE Mall) |
| 30/07/99 | Geoff Ryman, Head of New Media Developments, Central
Office of Information |
Last updated on 27-Oct-1999
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