UKOLN Annual Reports
Report for the period
1 August 2002 to 31 July 2003
September 2003
ISSN 1466-2949
UKOLN Annual Reports
Report for the period
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Introduction |
A brief history of UKOLN
UKOLN Strategic Advisory Committee |
The Director
Policy and Advice |
Research and Development
Distributed Systems and Services |
Information and Communication
Resources and Administration |
Publications
Presentations |
Committees |
Visitors
This has been a challenging year for UKOLN. The political and economic landscape has been particularly uncertain in the last twelve months. UKOLN has had to deal with issues which are being faced by many other Higher and Further Education Institutions: increasing pressures on space, and the associated need to meet the full institutional costs in the context of the Roberts Review and related initiatives, when an organization such as UKOLN is hosted within a University or College.
The University of Bath is resolving these difficult issues and, in parallel, is reviewing its academic structures and the positioning of UKOLN within those structures. This process has presented UKOLN with an opportunity to take stock and consider its mid -to-longer-term strategic options in relation to funding and governance models.
We have endeavoured to keep the needs and requirements of our stakeholders and user communities at the front of our minds during these discussions and we will maintain that approach in any future analysis. Meanwhile, our base on the Claverton campus in Bath is greatly valued and we will continue to support the goals of all our core funders in ways which are the most appropriate and beneficial to those organizations.
Looking at the wider political landscape there is also much movement and change. In the last nine months the concept of a common information environment has gained momentum through the production of demonstrators and the greater shaping of how best to promote and progress the concepts. In a flurry of strategic publications, we have observed the release of the DfES White Paper on the Future of Higher Education and also Success for All giving a vision for reforming further education and training. More recently the consultation document Towards a Unified e-Learning Strategy has been published and the community now has a welcome opportunity to contribute its views. The JISC has been reviewing its over-arching strategy together with its Development Strategy and UKOLN has been able to input into that process.
The Research Support Libraries Group report has been released which recommends the creation of the "…Research Libraries Network with a remit to develop, prioritize and lead a UK-wide strategy for research information provision". Also in the research arena, the UK e-Science Core Programme has begun to deliver Grid-enabled projects and services, and the potential implications for the future nature of science are reflected in the US National Science Foundation Cyber-Infrastructure report.
The DCMS has published its Framework for the Future document that eloquently describes a future for public libraries in lifelong learning, and an increasing number of Resource-initiated Regional Agencies have been created which build on the government's regional agenda. The Archives Task Force has continued its review of the UK's archival heritage through a series of consultation meetings. Meanwhile, in the museum sector, work to progress the recommendations made in the Renaissance in the Regions report is moving forwards with the announcement of Phase 1 Regional Museum Hubs in the North-East, South-West and West Midlands.
The NHS University and the National Knowledge Service have been launched with the aims of delivering improved learning opportunities and associated resources to the health sector. Finally, the Office of the e-Envoy has published new versions of the e-GIF (Government Interoperability Framework) and the e-Government Metadata Standard (e-GMS).
In this ever-changing environment, we look forward to sustaining a leading role in national and global collaborations in the future.
During the past twelve months we have continued to deliver a significant volume of project outputs, advice and guidance, papers and presentations to the communities with which UKOLN works. Whilst these are described in some detail in the following pages of this report, some of the highlights are listed here. They provide an indication of the wide range of areas and activities in which UKOLN is involved:
On this particular occasion, my first priority is to thank personally all colleagues at UKOLN for their support and commitment during a particularly challenging year. The teams have once again delivered the range and volume of high-quality outputs that our funders and communities expect from us, but this year have worked within an environment of uncertainty about future physical location and wider political positioning.
We very much look forward to a period of organizational stability, to further develop our portfolio of services and projects, and to building on our established strengths.
During the year we have welcomed the direction and guidance of Professor James Calderhead and Professor James Davenport at the University of Bath, who in turn have demonstrated a continued interest in our activities. Thanks to Howard Nicholson, University Librarian, who has provided accommodation within the Library & Learning Centre and has supported all aspects of our work. Our thanks are also due to the JISC and Resource for their continued funding and support.
Finally, I would like to thank the members of the Strategic Advisory Committee who have collectively and individually shared important insights into their different communities and have given of their valuable time to help further our organizational goals.
Dr Liz Lyon
Director
September 2003
UKOLN and its antecedent organizations have been based at the University of Bath for over 23 years. In 1979 the Centre for Catalogue Research was established with Philip Bryant as Director. Funded by the British Library Research & Development Department, it was preceded by several projects initiated by Maurice Line, University Librarian, looking at catalogues and bibliographic data.
In 1987 the Centre for Bibliographic Management (CBM) was 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.
Two years later in 1989, the UK Office for Library Networking (UKOLN) was established to work alongside CBM, after a grant was made available by the British Library Research and Development Department (BLR&DD).
In 1992 CBM and UKOLN merged to form UKOLN: The Office for Library and Information Networking. UKOLN was jointly funded by the ISC (now the JISC) and BLR&DD. Derek Law was Chair of the Management Committee.
Lorcan Dempsey was appointed as Director of UKOLN in November 1994 following the retirement of Philip Bryant, and in 1995 UKOLN revised its name to the UK Office for Library and Information Networking. At this time UKOLN began its work within the eLib framework. The ROADS project was initiated and planning began for Ariadne magazine. Professor Mel Collier became Chair of the Management Committee.
In 1996 the UK Web Focus post was established. UKOLN got its first experience of working on EU- funded projects as DESIRE and BIBLINK began and work commenced on NewsAgent. Dr Richard Heselatine became Chair of the Management Committee.
UKOLN was reviewed by its funding bodies in 1997 and was congratulated on "becoming recognised as a centre for excellence at international levels in the areas of networking and associated new technology and standards development". Preparatory work began on EU projects PRIDE and EXPLOIT; BLRIC funded projects WebWatch, CIRCE and Stories from the Web; and on the JISC-funded Agora.
In 1998 work commenced on the JISC-funded Agora project and the EU-funded EXPLOIT project. UKOLN also contributed to Cedars, an eLib programme project on digital preservation.
In April 1999 the research funding function of the British Library was transferred to the Library and Information Commission (LIC). The Interoperability Focus, an initiative jointly funded by the LIC and the JISC, was appointed. 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 King's College London) and the University of Hull, was successful. The IMesh Toolkit project, funded by the JISC and the National Science Foundation (of the US) began.
In 2000 Dr Liz Lyon was appointed as the new Director following Lorcan Dempsey's appointment to the post of Distributed National Electronic Resource (DNER) Programme Director for the JISC. The staffing structure was refined to map teams of staff more closely. Activities were delivered through the Policy and Advice, Research and Development, Distributed Systems and Services and Events and Web-based Information Services teams. Work commenced on the EU-funded projects Renardus, SCHEMAS and Cultivate. UKOLN was realigned within the University of Bath and became a Centre within the Division of Access and Continuing Studies (DACS). Resource: The Council for Museums, Archives and Libraries - a new UK strategic organization - replaced the Libraries and Information Commission (LIC) and the Museums and Galleries Commission (MGC).
In 2001 Resource, in partnership with the JISC, commissioned a formal review of UKOLN by the Information Management Research Institute at the University of Northumbria. The outcomes of the review were very positive.
UKOLN has contributed to the development of the Distributed National Electronic Resource (DNER). Collection Description Focus was established and jointly funded by the JISC, the British Library and the Research Support Libraries Programme.
During 2002 UKOLN has continued to expand and widened its sphere of influence and impact through new collaborations. One area is the Grid/e-Science arena. UKOLN's work developing a service architecture for the JISC Information Environment highlighted areas of synergy with the Open Grid Services Architecture and developments within the UK e-Science Core Programme.
The JISC Quality Assurance Focus post has been established and is hosted jointly by UKOLN and the Institute for Learning and Research Technology (ILRT). UKOLN has also contributed to recent international standards developments including the Open Archives Initiative and the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative. UKOLN also provides technical support and advice to the New Opportunities Fund (NOF) Digitisation Programme.
In 2003 UKOLN was reorganised as a department within the University and Dr Lyon, UKOLN's Director, now reports to Professor James Davenport, the Director of IT.
Funding was secured for the e-Bank project and for the NOF EnrichUK Collections Portal. UKOLN collaborated with the eEnvoy's Office in work for the European Committee for Standardization CEN/ISSS Workshop on Metadata for Multimedia Information - Dublin Core. Work also commenced on a pilot project to investigate the requirements of a Service Registry for the JISC Information Environment.
There has been a number of staff changes during this period.
In November 2002, Michelle Ibison, UKOLN's Resource Coordinator and Team Leader, covering Sally Criddle's maternity leave, left the department for a new role within the University. Jenny Taylor took over as Resource Coordinator in November until Sally's return in April 2003. Jenny now works alongside Sally as Assistant Resource Coordinator.
In March, UKOLN was sorry to say goodbye to Leona Carpenter who had worked for UKOLN since 1999 as a Technical Development & Research Officer. Most of her time was devoted to the Open Archives Forum and FAIR-PORTAL projects. Leona still has links with UKOLN, but is dedicating more of her time to writing.
We also saw the departure of Ruth Martin who had been working as Subject Portals Project Manager, in May 2003; Julie Stuckes, Information and Communication Team Leader, in July 2003, and Pete Cliff, RDN Systems Developer in July 2003.
Amanda Closier joined UKOLN in March 2003 as Research Officer for the IE Services Registry project.
Rosemary Russell returned to UKOLN in October after maternity leave. Her job covers research work for PORTAL (Presenting natiOnal Resources to Audiences Locally) and HILT (High Level Thesaurus) phase II.
Greg Tourte came to UKOLN to work on RDN development in March. He subsequently took over the position left by Pete Cliff as RDNC Systems Developer.
Marieke Guy returned from maternity leave in February 2003 as QA Focus.
In line with Bath University's policy on flexible working UKOLN staff have been encouraged to consider different working practices. There has been an increase in staff choosing remote working. Penny Garrod now works from her home in Plymouth. Rosemary Russell is based in London and Amanda Closier in Birmingham.
Our thanks are due to the members of the Strategic Advisory Committee, who have generously contributed their time and expertise in support of UKOLN and all of its activities.
The membership of the Strategic Advisory Committee of 31st July 2003 is detailed below:
Mary Auckland, Director of Library & Learning Resources, London Institute
John Borras, Assistant Director Interoperability & Infrastructure, Office of the e-Envoy
Peter Brophy, Director, CERLIM, Manchester Metropolitan University
Alice Colban, Policy Officer, Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC)
James Davenport, Director of IT, University of Bath
John Dolan, Assistant Director, Library and Information Services, Birmingham City Council
Nicholas Kingsley, County and Diocesian Archivist, Gloucestershire Records Office
Liz Lyon, Director, UKOLN, University of Bath (Chair)
Martin Nail, Research Programme Manager, Resource
Geoff Smith, Programme Director, The British Library
Louise Smith, Director, mda
Ben Toth, Head of Knowledge Management, NHS Information Authority
Anne Trefethen, Deputy Director, e-Science Core Programme
Joe Wilson, Project Officer, Scottish Further Education Centre
Alicia Wise, Head of Development, Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC)
Dr Liz Lyon has been proactive this year in developing and supporting effective communication between UKOLN and the core funders, (the JISC, Resource and the University of Bath), during a period of growing strategic discussion concerning the future shape and nature of the organization. This debate was initiated in September, when the demands on space at the University led to a review of the use of accommodation at the Claverton Down Campus. Later in July, a decision was made by the University that UKOLN should remain on campus and we are delighted with this outcome. Discussions are continuing between the University, the JISC and Resource, facilitated by the Director, on the issue of appropriately meeting institutional costs, good progress has been made to date.
A review of the University has been initiated by the Vice-Chancellor and UKOLN has been contributing to the process through the Director. In addition during the year, there have been changes in line management and Professor James Davenport, Director of IT, Department of Computer Science, and member of the University Executive, has been assigned responsibility for UKOLN. As well as providing more general strategic direction and leadership, including production of a "Futures" paper, Dr Lyon has contributed to specific work areas and activities and these are outlined below.
We continue to work in partnership with our core funders, both in cross-sectoral initiatives and in supporting their particular strategic aims and objectives. Our national role has been reflected in membership of the Common Information Environment (CIE) Group and the Director facilitated an awayday in April 2003 at which plans were progressed to move the concept forwards. The Director has also been a member of the JISC Development Strategy Group which has reviewed the development process and produced a new Strategy. It has been helpful and informative for UKOLN to be able to contribute to that process.
The work of the Regional Agencies is a key element in supporting the Resource regional agenda. Through membership of the Board of Directors of the South West Museums, Libraries and Archives Council (SWMLAC), Dr Liz Lyon has contributed to the Agency's strategic plan. She is also co-facilitating the meetings of the ICT Working Group.
During 2003, Dr Lyon has again led UKOLN activities focusing on Grid/e-science: she has organised and chaired a second joint workshop with the National e-Science Centre in May in Edinburgh and has secured funding for the new eBank project, which will work with research data from a Grid-enabled project (Combechem). She continues to contribute to national policy and strategy in this area through membership of the JISC Committee for the Support of Research and its associated groups, such as the Digital Data Curation Taskforce.
In response to the expanding community base, the Director has explored and promoted appropriate UKOLN support for the Further Education community through the fostering of closer working relationships with Regional Support Centres (RSCs) and the associated JISC Advisory & Support Services Liaison Team. Presentations have included the annual RSC Conference, an RSC Managers meeting and an RSC-South-West event.
Dr Lyon has maintained her involvement with existing UKOLN initiatives: directing the work of the Collection Description Focus, securing the extension of the NOF Technical Advisory Service; but has also engaged with new programmes such as Culture Online. UKOLN looks forward to the possibility of working more closely with the Department of Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) in the future. The valuable work of the British Council will be well known to readers and the Director was pleased to accept an invitation to join the organization's Knowledge & Information Advisory Council in February.
Finally, UKOLN continues to develop its role on the European digital library scene. The Director has provided support to the work of the Delos Network of Excellence, through acting as Workshop co-chair at ECDL 2003 and in participating as a core partner in the Delos2 proposal.
UKOLN's Policy and Advice Team has an outwards-facing dissemination and coordination role. Team members seek to work with UKOLN's communities by listening to the needs of the communities, disseminating appropriate advice through a variety of means and participating in a range of activities.
We seek to support the Higher and Further Education communities through our JISC funding. Increasingly we are looking to support the Further Education community, particularly through participation in events organised by JISC Regional Support Agencies (RSCs). We also seek to support the cultural heritage sector including libraries, museums and galleries. We are well placed to maximise our impact by repurposing solutions. In addition, we seek to ensure that deliverables from project work can be delivered to a wide audience.
Much of the advice on policies and best practices is gained through UKOLN work, including the activities of members of UKOLN's Research and Development, Information and Communication and Distributed Systems and Services teams. In addition, through our knowledge of and contacts with members of our communities, we are well placed to ensure that best practices implemented throughout our communities are shared widely.
Interoperability Focus is a national post, originally directly funded by the JISC and by Resource, and now maintained by UKOLN's core grant. The team comprises Paul Miller and Pete Johnston. Paul Miller is based within Academic Services at the University of Hull and acknowledges additional support from that institution.
In line with the ongoing trend for cross-sector collaboration, the scope of Interoperability Focus remains 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, libraries and government.
Interoperability Focus contributes to a variety of standardisation activities, including being a member of the Office of the e-Envoy's e-Government Champions Metadata Working Group, and the Executive Committee of the Consortium for the Computer Interchange of Museum Information (CIMI). Additionally, Interoperability Focus represents the JISC's interests with both CIMI and the International DOI Foundation.
The Focus actively supports the work of the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI) in several areas. The Interoperabilty Focus has contributed to the DCMI recommendation Guidelines for Implementing Dublin Core in XML, published in April 2003, and is also co-chair of the DCMI Collection Description Working Group. Both members of the Focus were members of the Programme Committee for the DC-2003 conference held in Seattle in October 2003, and continue to serve on the DCMI Advisory Board.
The work of the Cultural Content Forum, jointly created and maintained by Interoperability Focus, Resource and CIMI, continues. In March 2003, representatives of organizations responsible for funding or implementing the large scale digitisation of cultural content met in Pistoia, Tuscany, to explore issues relating to audience. The meeting resulted in funding being secured for further work in this area, and a report by Alice Grant of Alice Grant Consulting will be appearing on the Cultural Content Forum Web site shortly. Work is also well underway on preparations for the fourth meeting, which will be held in the Canadian town of Banff early in 2004. A number of the Canadian government's cultural agencies are closely involved in the preparatory work for this meeting which will focus upon the role of the cultural heritage sector in e-Learning activities.
Dissemination and awareness raising are important aspects of the work of Interoperability Focus: a range of publications and presentations has been delivered in the UK and abroad, details of which are available later in this report. In addition, contributions have been made to the CIMI Forum event on collection-level description in Edinburgh; and a workshop coordinated by DELOS on metadata for digital libraries held in Riga, Latvia.
In November 2002, the JISC launched a pilot project, led by MIMAS, University of Manchester, to investigate the requirements for a Service Registry for the Information Environment, and to develop a pilot registry. Pete Johnston contributed to the project's work on metadata schemas for collection and service description and to the successful Stakeholders' Meeting held in June 2003.
http://www.culturalcontentforum.org/
The Web Focus post has been in operation since November 1996. This post, which is funded by the JISC, advises the UK Higher and Further Education communities in areas related to the World Wide Web.
With the Web being so widely deployed there is now a need to focus on areas such as compliance with standards and best practices. This year an important area of work addressed by Web Focus was Web standards. We are seeing the arrival of updated data formats such as XHTML 1.0 which should provide greater interoperability of HTML resources and an Ariadne article about XHTML has been published. In addition, this format is being increasingly used on selected areas of the UKOLN Web site.
Web Focus activities in the standards area have been strengthened by close links with the QA Focus Project, described elsewhere. Web Focus has been in a position to contribute to QA Focus deliverables and also to disseminate QA Focus deliverables to other sectors. For example, benchmarking workshops have been organised for institutional Web managers and for the Further Education sector, through workshops organised by JISC Regional Support Agencies (RSCs).
Web Focus has sought to validate the QA Focus methodology in an international context by presenting its work at the EUNIS 2003 Conference. This also provided an opportunity for the approaches to be disseminated across a European community.
During the year Web Focus also worked in the area of Web accessibility. A survey of the accessibility of university home pages was published in October 2002, shortly after the Special Educational Needs Disability Act (SENDA) legislation became law. This provided an opportunity for the UK Higher Education community to develop an understanding of the extent to which home pages comply with W3C WAI guidelines. Participation in a number of seminars and panel sessions helped towards an appreciation of the difficulties which institutions may have in implementing compliance. In joint activities with the JISC's TechDis we are seeking to establish a pragmatic approach to ensuring that Web resources have an appropriate level of accessibility.
This year the seventh annual Institutional Web Management Workshop was held at the University of Kent. The event continues to provide a valuable forum for discussion and debate for members of the institutional Web management community and is regarded by this community as the premier event for Web managers.
In addition to supporting institutions, Web Focus also works closely with the JISC and JISC services. Web Focus is a member of the TASI Steering Group and the JISCMail Advisory group. The Web Focus also took part in the evaluation of bids for the recently established Open Source Software Watch post.
Within the wider community Web Focus has contributed to the Higher Education and Research Opportunities in the United Kingdom (HERO) Technical Advisory Group and has advised on the technical architecture of the HERO portal to UK universities. More recently Web Focus has been involved in the Higher Education Support Programme (HESP) Steering Group which is seeking to develop an additional portal for the community.
The QA Focus post has been established to support the JISC's Information Environment programme by ensuring that funded projects comply with standards and recommendations and make use of appropriate best practices by establishing internal quality assurance procedures. The post is funded by the JISC and is being provided by a partnership of UKOLN and the AHDS (Arts and Humanities Data Service). QA Focus aims to provide a support service and the emphasis is on advice and encouragement rather than a policing role.
The UKOLN involvement in the QA Focus work addresses a number of technical areas such as Web (including accessibility), software development, metadata and service deployment. The documentation we have produced is available from the QA Focus Web site. It includes:
An important QA Focus deliverable is a QA self-assessment toolkit which allows projects to check project QA procedures for themselves. A pilot module of the toolkit is currently being tested which addresses the QA requirements for mothballing a project Web site once the project has finished and funding ceases.
The toolkit draws on case studies and appropriate advisory documents and provides a checklist and, in a number of cases, a set of tools which allow projects to assess project deliverables for themselves. The toolkit is intended to highlight the importance of a variety of standards and best practices in a readable manner which can be understood by project staff ranging from project managers to technical developers.
QA Focus uses the QA methodologies on its own Web site. This ensures that the Web site fulfils its role by testing QA Focus procedures and guidelines. It also provides experience of potential difficulties.
QA Focus has a developmental focus. The work has provided the opportunity to collaborate with a variety of people and projects. As well as providing advice to projects, QA Focus will also advise the JISC on approaches to future programmes.
The project is due to finish at the end of 2003 but UKOLN will be considering seeking additional funding to continue its work. It is considered that QA procedures for development programmes in general (and not just within the JISC) will be an ongoing activity. Indeed, this will grow in importance as "Web Service" technologies are developed which will require more rigorous compliance with standards. UKOLN will be seeking to ensure that QA Focus deliverables are made available to a wide audience.
The NOF Technical Advisory Service (TAS) has continued to provide high-quality focused technical support to the National Lottery - funded NOF-digitise programme, set up by the New Opportunities Fund.
The last twelve months have seen the first fruits of the 150 projects awarded funding during 2001. More than 50 projects have now publicly launched their Web sites and thirteen projects have already been given formal compliance sign-off from NOF. As part of the service provided by UKOLN, the TAS team responds to requests sent to the nof-support email address. Over the last twelve months the team has handled 238 queries, up from 66 the year before. Some of this rise reflects the introduction of the compliance monitoring process, a service provided by BECTa. UKOLN is called in to provide technical advice when further information or clarification is required. Compliance referrals now account for nearly half the query work.
UKOLN also hosts and maintains the TAS Web pages. These pages contain a wealth of information about many different aspects of managing, planning and implementing a digitisation project on the Web. TAS provide regular updates of material to the site including FAQs, information papers and the recent "compliance corner" which contains concise tips and explanations for recurring issues unearthed during the ongoing compliance checks. Funding for the TAS is to continue into the next year at the current level of provision. Over the next year, the focus of the work will move across to preservation issues as the remaining projects bring their material online and wrap up their initial development efforts. TAS will also undertake a review of the material and data generated by its existence and put in to place plans to archive and package its legacy resources.
The Technical Advisory Service is provided by UKOLN in association with the Arts and Humanities Data Service (AHDS) and the People's Network on behalf of the New Opportunities Fund.
In the first half of 2002, UKOLN was asked to provide some technical specifications for a centralised database containing updatable records of the projects being launched under the New Opportunities Fund's NOF-digitise programme. Subsequently, UKOLN was awarded a contract to develop and maintain a system to provide such a service.
Development work began in August 2002 with the design and testing of a Web interface to the RSLP Collection Descriptions Framework, the metadata schema chosen for NOF-digi collection metadata. This was incorporated into the privately accessed projects area. Data input from the digitisation projects started in January 2003. The site currently contains 295 live collection descriptions and associated project information, giving unique one-stop access to the broad range of material being generated by this exciting programme.
The public facing pages on the collections portal were launched on 12 March 2003. These pages allow users to search across the many metadata field names stored with each collection, to browse according to alphabetic, geographic or subject category and to find more information about the programme and its impact.
UKOLN also furnished a feature-rich administrative interface to the site, which allows its owners to control extensively the content and behaviour of the pages and to access reports and other information about the system's performance.
Public Library Networking Focus is a national post maintained as part of UKOLN's core grant. The Focus aims to advise and support the UK public library community in the development of new networked services and electronic content. Activities currently divide into four areas outlined below.
The Focus supports and advises library authorities/consortia involved in developing and evaluating innovative ICT services. Several authorities are piloting ebook services, and the Focus is a member of the Project Advisory Board to the Co-East/Loughborough University/Essex libraries ebooks project, funded by the LASER Foundation. Membership of the OCLC PICA netLibrary User Group Committee provides vital contacts with academic libraries, publishers and aggregators, and also provides a focal point for all the current players from public libraries.
Support for new ebook services in Hampshire/Co-South and the London Borough of Richmond is ongoing. Activities have included: presenting a paper at the launch of LB Richmond's ebook service in March 2003, and jointly organising a one-day ebooks event with Hampshire libraries for the Co-South consortium. These key players act as pathfinders for the wider library community, and joint dissemination activities with service managers are in progress. An outline for a future issue paper on ebooks in public libraries has been drafted for the People's Network Networked Services Policy Task Group, and further articles are planned as projects complete and evidence becomes available.
In November 2002, UKOLN held a workshop for Public Library Web Managers at the University of Bath. The theme of the event was e-Government and creating public library Web sites for e-citizens. The keynote speaker was Maewyn Cummings of the Office of the e-Envoy, and some 50 delegates attended. The evaluation forms indicated that the workshop was successful in achieving its aims. An article summarising the event was subsequently published in Electronic Public Information (Society of Public Information Networks) in 2003, and a further article on interoperability and the role of public libraries was published in Managing Information.
Papers on ebooks and Web accessibility have been given at a range of events including: Government Computing; Internet Librarian International 2003 and local/regional public and academic library events.
Regular publications include the public library column in Ariadne and a public sector news column in the UKOLUG Newsletter (the UK Online User Group - a CILIP special interest group).
Issue papers on accessibility/adaptive technologies and ebooks have been drafted, and will be jointly authored with colleagues from Resource and Hampshire libraries.
An editorial function is provided for the Networked Services Policy Task Group issue papers; these papers are available online and are later distributed in hard copy to all library authorities.
Support for the Stories from the Web team at Birmingham libraries has been ongoing during their transition period from funded project to subscription service. A meeting between UKOLN staff and senior managers at Birmingham libraries took place in July 2003. UKOLN's existing and future role and contribution to the project was discussed. The Focus maintains a watching brief on national and international developments in online library services for children, and provides regular updates to the Stories from the Web Coordinator at Birmingham.
A paper was presented at the Youth Libraries Group Conference in September 2002, and a joint paper was presented with David Potts of Resource at a British Council seminar in December 2002.
Other activities include: managing the lis-pub-libs JISCmail email discussion list; maintaining the UKOLN Treasure Island Web site for young readers; liaising with UKOLN colleagues on the Public Library People directory service; content for Ariadne and the public library Web pages.
Bibliographic Management originated in the work of the Centre for Bibliographic Management (CBM) and is funded from the core grant. The work of this post is concerned with the standards, formats and quality of the data that describes, identifies and locates specific works of intellectual or artistic creation, in whatever physical form they exist. Other areas covered are retrospective cataloguing and conversion and bibliographic database performance measurement. The post has been temporarily reduced in scale while work is carried out for the Collection Description Focus.
Reveal: the national database for resources in accessible formats The Department of Culture, Media and Sport-funded programme of projects to improve library services to visually impaired people, which began in 1999, has been continued into 2003. Following the acceptance of the recommendations in UKOLN's review of the National Union Catalogue of Alternative Formats (NUCAF) in 1999, the development of this tool into Reveal: the National Database of Resources in Accessible Formats was made a priority in the programme of work. Bibliographic Management has continued to contribute to work on the union catalogue. Advice was given on the use of specific MARC21 fields and the MARC21 Holdings format 007 field coding was extended for accessible formats. Mappings between the NUCAF UKMARC-based format and the MAC21 format were created as part of the data migration process. A set of Web pages was set up as a Reveal cataloguer's help desk.
The Collection Register database was transferred to the National Library for the Blind server in February 2003. A Collection Description Officer was appointed in July 2003 for four months, and is trained and supervised by Bibliographic Management. During this period, collections will be contacted for details which will then be entered onto the database.
Bibliographic Management visited the Calibre Library for the Blind and Print Disabled in July 2003 to review its cataloguing and advise on best practice. Guidance was given on revising their genre categories using the Guidelines for Subject Access to Individual Works of Fiction, Drama, etc. (GSAFD).
The planned launch date for the Reveal union catalogue and collection register is 16th September 2003.
Monitoring the availability of BNBMARC records from the British Library Bibliographic Management 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's 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 are 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.
The process of accessing BNB records changed again when the British Library (BL) cancelled its contract with the European Information Network Service GEM database. Access is now through BLAISE, via PCAnywhere software, until the Corporate Bibliographic System is available in spring 2004.
Bibliographic Management was commissioned by OCLC to produce a currency survey methodology for its internal use based on the BNB Currency Survey. The design stage was begun in June 2002 and completed in August 2002. This required drawing up a new sampling base and revising the sampling instructions, sample documents and methods of sample return. Data recorded about sample items was also extended to provide additional analyses of the collected data.
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.
Through the BIC Bibliographic Standards Technical Sub-group, Bibliographic Management continues to contribute to the MARC21 development process and discussions on the usefulness to libraries of the book trade format ONIX. In September 2002 Bibliographic Management provided a one-day seminar at the University of Limerick on "Issues for Cataloguers" as part of the staff development programme of the Academic and National Library Training Co-operative (ANLTC) of the Republic of Ireland. This proved to be popular, attracting around 30 delegates, and comprised four sessions. These were "Demystifying metadata - a basic introduction into the world of metadata","Beyond books on cataloguing non-book materials","Quick, good and cheap on catalogue quality", and "Influencing suppliers of library management systems".
Bibliographic Management was part of the Society of College, National and University Libraries (SCONUL) team giving evidence to the Competition Commission hearing on 27 November 2002 on the acquisition by VNU Entertainment Media UK Ltd (formerly J. Whitaker and Sons) of Book Data Ltd.
The Collection Description Focus is a national post established in 2001 and was funded during 2002-2003 by the JISC, the Research Support Libraries Programme (RSLP), Resource and the British Library.
The aim of the Focus is to improve coordination of work on collection description methods, schemas and tools, with the goal of ensuring consistency and compatibility of approaches. The Focus provides support for both projects actively involved in collection description work and for those investigating or planning such work. It builds on the earlier RSLP collection description work carried out at UKOLN by Andy Powell. It is planned to submit the RSLP schema as a collection-level description application profile to the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI) in 2004. A draft mapping between the RSLP Collection Description schema and the IEEE LOM (Learning Object Metadata) standard for describing learning resources has been completed.
Three Position Papers were made available on the Web site for comment and discussion. The subjects were creating reusable collection-level descriptions, maintaining collection-level descriptions and administrative metadata for collection-level descriptions. Briefing Paper 2, on the RSLP model and schema, has been prepared and will be printed during the summer of 2003. The first of a series of Case study reports, on the Reveal Collections Register, was printed in July 2003.
The Focus continued to publish a newsletter every two months and a number of short articles have been published in print and digital publications. Presentations were made to a range of conferences, workshops and seminars.
During the year the Focus responded to a number of individual queries. These range from questions on a single issue to the more wide-ranging advice provided to the Arts and Humanities Data Service (AHDS) through a number of emails and a day visit to UKOLN by Malcolm Polfreman of AHDS. There has also been interest shown in collection-level description from both Australia and the USA. The Focus has continued to provide support to various projects, including the COPAC/Clumps Interoperability Project, the JISC Information Environment Service Registry and Enrich UK, the NOF-digi portal. The Focus also attended a meeting of the CURL Task Force on Resource Management to clarify the overlap between Focus work and the CURL/iCAS collection mapping work; it was agreed that contact should be maintained, with a view to possible joint working in the area of collection strength.
Two themed workshops were held, providing a forum for implementers to discuss their work and to exchange experiences. In Newcastle the theme was the relationship between collection-level description and collection management while in Cambridge the focus was on user perceptions of the usefulness of collection-level descriptions for resource discovery. Notes from the workshop breakout discussions were added to the Web site.
A Showcase Day on the theme of mapping the information landscape was held at the British Library in March 2003. In addition to presentations, the day featured demonstrations of nine different projects using collection-level descriptions. The final open discussion session identified terminology as a key issue, though it was acknowledged that this is not specific to collection-level descriptions but has much wider implications.
It proved difficult to find a suitable developer within the timescale for the Online Tutorial, so this was developed in-house. The prototype was demonstrated at the Showcase Day and it is planned to make the Tutorial openly available in the autumn of 2003. The Tutorial uses a modular structure, allowing the addition of further modules in the future, and is intended for individual use from the Web site and as an integral part of a training programme. Current modules include how to plan and create descriptions, an area to practise creating descriptions, links to existing collection-level description databases, an email discussion forum, a set of FAQs and a glossary. The Focus piloted its use in a training workshop for the JISC Resource Guide Advisers in June 2003 and has plans to run further sessions in 2003-2004.
The Management Board contracted Peter Brophy to carry out an evaluation of the work of the Focus since its inception. The evaluation report, presented in June 2003, concluded that the Focus had successfully carried out its work programme, and was valued by the communities it was seeking to influence and serve. Discussions with stakeholders and other analyses have indicated some changes in direction for the next year. Funding for a further period was recommended, and the JISC, Resource and the British Library have agreed to fund the post for another year.
Policy and Advice Team members are funded by the UKOLN core grant from the JISC, Resource and a variety of project funding. The Policy and Advice Team is managed by Brian Kelly. During the period covered by this report members of the Policy and Advice Team have included Brian Kelly (UK Web Focus), Penny Garrod (Public Library Networking Focus), Paul Miller and Pete Johnston (Interoperability Focus), Ann Chapman (Bibliographic Management/Collection Description Focus), Bridget Robinson (Collection Description Focus), Richard Waller and Pete Dowdell (NOF TAS) and Marieke Guy (QA Focus). In a number of cases team members are also involved in other UKOLN team activities.
UKOLN's Research and Development Team carries out applied and technical research in key areas of interest to UKOLN's stakeholder communities. Research at UKOLN informs the work of the Policy and Advice Team, and enables UKOLN's technical staff to engage with new technologies and emerging standards.
Involvement in national, European and international research work is an important factor in maintaining awareness of developments that may impact the UK information environment. The R&D team endeavour to maintain UKOLN's international reputation, and value highly the contacts built up throughout Europe, the USA, Australia and Japan, chiefly through project work.
The R&D team has continued to pursue a number of themes within the project work to which they have committed; namely research into the development and use of emerging metadata standards, Web-based resource discovery, open access and eprint repositories, digital preservation and the management of metadata schemas. By pursuing these themes, central to the development of digital libraries, we have been able to support UKOLN's core work while building up key competencies and skills to progress future work.
Our chief funders remain the JISC and the European Community.
2003 marks the completion of work on the IMesh Toolkit Project ,which was funded in 1999 under the JISC-NSF Digital Libraries Initiative. Partners in the project alongside UKOLN were the Institute for Learning and Research Technology (ILRT), the University of Bristol, and the Internet Scout Project, University of Wisconsin-Madison (ISP). Work at these two partner sites was completed in 2002, whilst UKOLN's contribution was extended to July of this year.
The IMesh Toolkit Project builds on the subject gateway approach to resource discovery, which first gained popularity in the e-Lib programme. The aim of the project was to advance research in the area and provide tools for developers building subject gateways. Amongst other achievements, the ILRT contributed significantly to the development of the Resource Discovery Framework (RDF), and specifically to the topic of RDF querying. At ISP, efforts centred on data storage and supporting the OAI-PMH protocol.
UKOLN was responsible for developing a number of components of functionality for subject gateways. Early in 2002 members of the project team had attended a UML training session funded by the JISC. The UML approach to design was then adopted to explore the functionality of annotation and reading list add-on components.
The annotation component adds user feedback capabilities to any UR-I based resource catalogue, both by permitting community feedback in the form of ratings, and by a moderated feedback database that permits readers to make appropriate comments. It is based on Perl using XML and XSLT technology for the output. The existence of an independent database of user-contributed feedback permits a number of exciting possibilities, such as collaborative filtering technology for journal entry ranking. It marks a potential change in the character of the Web from a read-only database to include the support of a user community.
The Reading List tool will support the reuse of subject gateway metadata records by enabling their inclusion in reading lists compiled by lecturers (or other users). The IMesh module can include resources that are made available in an OAI repository and produces a reading list in the form of an RSS file. RSS is a standard format that can be used to deliver a channel or newsfeed into portals that support RSS.
The module is designed to be used in conjunction with other tools; for example, it is expected that the subject gateway will provide the interface for searching resources and selecting the ones to be included in the reading list. The subject gateway should then create the list of suitable URLs to be submitted to the module. After the IMesh module has generated the RSS file, the user will be able to use tools such as an RSS Editor to make changes. The RSS file can then be displayed to users through a presentation system that understands RSS i.e. one that can display newsfeeds. Alternatively, newsfeeds can very easily be displayed in Web pages.
One other area of work has produced tools which process metadata records harvested using the OAI-PMH protocol. These harvested records may require some simple string-based transformations; for example, to deal with inconsistencies between records gathered from different sources. The records may need to be normalised to make them more consistent; for example, so that they all use the same dc:type vocabulary.
The IMesh Tookit project forms part of the wider JISC development programme and involvement with the programme continued through a meeting organised by the JISC and held in Warwick in July 2003. Project members demonstrated the annotation and reading list components during a session at this meeting. The JISC has also commissioned a synthesis review of the Digital Libraries Initiative Programme which will report later in the year. The project was invited to give a presentation at the Joint Open University - Universitat Oberta de Catalunya Seminar on Personalisation and Digital Libraries, held at The Open University, Milton Keynes in October 2002. This project has provided an excellent opportunity to build on UKOLN's expertise on the subject gateway approach to resource discovery, whilst moving ahead with technology developments (such as OAI and RDF) and linking to other ongoing efforts like the RDN.
The Subject Portals Project (SPP) Phase 1 was funded from September 2001 to August 2003 to develop the functionality of five participating RDN hub sites and to transform them into subject portals. These hubs were BIOME, the bio-medical sciences hub; EEVL, the engineering, maths and computer sciences hub; HUMBUL, the humanities hub; PSIGate, the physical sciences hub; and SOSIG, the social sciences hub. UKOLN has been responsible for project management of the project.
In their simplest form, subject portals are filters of Web content that present end-users with a tailored view of the Web within a particular subject area. In order to design software tools that simultaneously satisfy the needs of a variety of different sites and make it easier for institutional portals to embed these services in the future, the project has designed a series of Web "portlets" which sit within a portal framework. These portlets include an aggregated cross-search tool searching across both JISC-supported and non-JISC information resources specially selected by the hubs themselves; a streamlined account management system which acts as a trusted broker between the user and an authentication service such as Athens; a user profiling store; alerting services; and a range of additional services, such as aggregated newsfeeds.
The first phase of the project ended on 31 August 2003. Highlights of work so far include:
SPP has been successful in gaining funding for a second phase of the project, and UKOLN will continue its project management role. Over the next year the project will focus on the installation, maintenance and continued technical development of the portal software. At the core of this ongoing development is the continuation and expansion of the project's model of collaborative software development. During Phase 2, which will run from September 2003 to August 2004, the portal prototype developed by SPP will be installed at the five participating RDN hubs and two extra hubs: ALTIS, the hospitality, leisure, sport and tourism hub, and ARTIFACT, the arts and creative industries hub. Phase 2 will also involve extra interface design, further development of the portal services and development of additional services alongside user testing, impact evaluation and dissemination. There will also be further investigation of integrating portal services within institutional interfaces. It has been recognised that lessons learnt in Phase 1 have potential utility for others developing portals for learning and teaching who may wish to explore embedding the SPP portlet developments within their own portal environments.
The CORES Project was funded as an Accompanying Measure within the European Commission FP5 Semantic Web activity and aimed to encourage the sharing of metadata semantics. CORES ran for fifteen months and came to an end in June 2003. The partners in CORES were UKOLN; PricewaterhouseCoopers, Luxembourg; Fraunhofer Gesellschaft, Bonn; and the Computer and Automation Research Institute, Hungarian Academy of Sciences (MTA SZTAKI).
In November 2002 in Brussels, CORES facilitated a Standards Interoperability Forum which brought together key figures from some major standardisation activities to discuss practical issues of cross-standard interoperability. The Forum achieved consensus amongst participants on a resolution to assign Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs) to metadata elements as a useful first step towards the development of mapping infrastructures and interoperability services. The signatories of the "CORES Resolution" agreed to promote this consensus in their communities and beyond and to implement the key points of the agreement within the following six months.
The second major strand of CORES activity was the provision of a registry of core metadata vocabularies and application profiles: CORES built on earlier work by the DESIRE, SCHEMAS and MEG Registry projects to provide a metadata schema registry based on the use of the Resource Description Framework (RDF). A practical workshop to allow schema implementers to evaluate the usefulness of the registry was held in Budapest in March 2003. The project has had a paper on this work accepted by the DC-2003 conference, due to be held in Seattle in October 2003.
During 2002, the JISC and BECTA funded a six-month project to develop and enhance the software used to provide the metadata schema registry for the Metadata for Education Group (MEG). The MEG schema registry enables implementers of educational systems to discover information about metadata schemas in use and to disclose information about their own implementations of metadata schemas, with the aim of fostering reuse and encouraging convergence of approaches.
The work was undertaken as a collaborative effort between UKOLN (responsible for the data modelling and the workshop), and the Institute for Learning and Research Technology (ILRT), University of Bristol (software development). The registry was re-engineered as an application based on the Resource Description Framework (RDF) and a Java-based authoring tool was developed to support the creation and editing of schemas for submission to the registry. A one-day workshop for schema developers was held in Bath in January 2003. Participants had an opportunity to experiment with the software tools through a number of practical exercises and to discuss in detail the data model on which the registry is based.
A paper on this work was presented to the DCMI conference in Florence in October 2002 and a presentation was also contributed to the workshop on "Schemas and Ontologies", coordinated jointly by UKOLN and the National e-Science Centre in Edinburgh in May 2003.
The experience gained during this project has informed recommendations made for future work in this area within the JISC Information Environment and enhancements were made to the software within the CORES project.
The Augmented Representation of Cultural Objects (ARCO) is a three-year project which started in October 2001. It is funded as part of the EU's Information Society Technologies (IST) Programme. The project has seven partners with the University of Sussex acting as coordinator and the Sussex Archaeological Society and the Victoria and Albert Museum acting as pilot sites.
The overall aims of the project are to develop techniques for the capture, virtual representation and manipulation of cultural objects and artifacts. UKOLN is leading the work involved in coordinating and specifying user requirements from the museums and technical partners. UKOLN also has a major role in providing technical advice with regard to the metadata requirements of the project.
Specification of the second and third prototypes took place in October 2002 and April 2003. The second user trial was held in November 2002 at Saclay in France and at the Sussex Archaeological Society in Lewes, UK. The third user trial is planned to coincide with the exhibition of the ARCO system at the Museums' Association Conference due to take place in October 2003 in Brighton, UK. The ARCO metadata element set has undergone several iterations of change following feedback from museum and technical users. The latest version, intended for the fourth prototype, uses Dublin Core for resource discovery purposes and mda's SPECTRUM for descriptive curatorial metadata. The project had its second review in May 2003; this was successful and received very positive comments from the reviewers.
The project has held workshops at Web3D, EVA Florence and EVA London conferences in 2003. UKOLN gave the main ARCO presentation at EVA London, supported by demonstrations from other partners, and also presented a paper about the ARCO system at the Vision, Video and Graphics Conference held in Bath in June 2003.
Partners are currently engaged in the specification and implementation of the final prototype which is due in October 2003. In the final year the project aims to concentrate on integration, evaluation and assessment, as well as exploitation and marketing issues.
UKOLN was awarded a grant under a deployment support programme as part of the European Commission-funded fifth Framework IST project Agentcities.NET. Such deployment grants are a "series of grants to support independent new innovative exploratory work related to the Agentcities.NET network. The intention is to enable members to connect their existing or new agent systems to the Agentcities network and carry out exploratory mini-projects - leading to innovative ideas, technology development and new larger scale collaborative projects."
This six month deployment project,which began in September 2002, concentrated on taking forward the ideas and systems developed in a number of initiatives in which UKOLN has been involved, chiefly among these the EU-funded DESIRE and SCHEMAS projects, the UK MEG Registry project and the Dublin Core Metadata Registry initiative. All of these projects explored approaches to declaring and sharing metadata vocabularies using RDF Schemas. Software for a metadata vocabulary registry has been adapted to serve as an ontology server which can be queried by agents on the Agentcities.NET network. The contents of the server comprises metadata vocabularies which may be regarded as simple forms of ontology.
The aim of the project has been to investigate the support of automated querying of metadata vocabularies by agents, to acquire the semantics associated with specific metadata terms. The approach taken is that of using a registry within which metadata vocabularies are expressed and through which they are communicated. In a registry environment, individual terms as well as whole vocabularies can be investigated by agents. The registry supports the discovery, sharing and reuse of vocabularies, facilitating the convergence of vocabularies (or ontologies), in particular for specific domains. The hope is that alignment in this way will improve the prospects of interoperability of systems in specific sectors.
During this period, UKOLN coordinated a feasibility study on Web-archiving on behalf of the JISC and the Library of the Wellcome Trust. The study resulted in two reports. Firstly, UKOLN provided an introduction to the challenges of collecting and preserving the Web, an evaluation of existing Web archiving initiatives and some recommendations for the JISC and Wellcome Library. Secondly, Andrew Charlesworth of the University of Bristol's Centre for IT and Law produced a detailed appraisal of the legal position of Web archiving in the UK, Europe, the USA and Australia, covering issues relating to copyright, data protection and content liability, etc. Drafts of these reports were circulated to members of the project's advisory board at the end of 2002 and the final versions were published in February 2003.
UKOLN has continued to provide support to the establishment of the Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC), chiefly through the joint production with the National Library of Australia of a quarterly current awareness bulletin entitled What's new in digital preservation. In this reporting period, four issues of the bulletin have been produced. As part of the same initiative, UKOLN provides information about UK digital preservation activities to the NLA's PADI (Preserving Access to Digital Information) subject gateway.
In autumn 2002 the European Committee for Standardization CEN/ISSS Workshop on Metadata for Multimedia Information - Dublin Core (MMI-DC) contracted UKOLN with partners Tom Baker, Fraunhofer Gesellschaft and Makx Dekkers, DCMI Executive, to draw up a CEN Workshop Agreement 'Dublin Core Application Profile Guidelines', to be delivered in September 2003. A number of existing application profiles were consulted to identify the main problems facing developers. Guiding principles were then established and refined in consultation with the MMI-DC group. UKOLN's contribution was extended to provide example cases of how existing application profiles fit within the guidelines being produced. In order to achieve this, UKOLN has collaborated with the eEnvoy's Office using the UK eGovernment Metadata Standard.
The JISC has funded a fourteen-month project to investigate the requirements of a Service Registry for the JISC Information Environment (IE). The project started in November 2002. The Registry is intended to provide access to metadata describing JISC IE collections, their associated services, and the agents that own and/or administer the collections and services. The first phase of the project is intended to develop a pilot service, containing descriptions of a limited set of resources, which will assist in gathering requirements. Partners in the project are MIMAS at the University of Manchester, UKOLN at the University of Bath and the Cheshire team at the University of Liverpool. UKOLN takes responsibility for two key workpackages covering requirements gathering and evaluation.
The JISC IE is primarily intended for use by portals and other components of the JISC IE, although a Web interface will be provided for direct end-user access. The current JISC IE architecture includes a set of shared services for use by portals, aggregators and brokers and the JISC IESR will form one of the first of these services. Other services, for example portals, will be able to query the registry in machine-to-machine mode to facilitate resource discovery and retrieval.
The IESR is intended in the longer term to contain predominantly service and collection descriptions of resources within the JISC Higher Education and Further Education communities. The descriptions will include technical information on how to access the resources as well as descriptive information about the resources themselves.
One of the first tasks UKOLN undertook within the IESR Pilot Project was to identify potential stakeholders and clarify any role they might be willing to play in the project. Additional stakeholders were added as the project became more widely known. A questionnaire was circulated to identify stakeholders and make contact with those who were willing to participate further in the pilot.
UKOLN then carried out a User Requirements Survey. This questionnaire asked for views on how the IESR could be used and whether stakeholders had already created collection and service descriptions for any of their resources. Stakeholders were asked to look at initial drafts of the pilot registry's metadata schemas and to comment on them. As the registry is predominantly for machine-to-machine access, considerable discussions on protocols have taken place, covering both those used to access the registry and those of the services described in the registry. Stakeholders were given the opportunity to comment on quality control and administrative issues and to put forward any specific requirements they had of the IESR Project. The initial phase of IESR User Requirements work came to an end in July.
A series of face-to-face meetings was held to follow up the results of the User Requirements Survey. These meetings allowed stakeholders the opportunity to discuss specific issues raised by the proposed metadata schema and to detail individual service requirements in more depth. They also offered many stakeholders the chance to clarify how the registry might be of use to them.
During this requirements-gathering phase an email discussion list was set up for the benefit of those interested in the pilot's development. It was predominantly through this list that details of an IESR stakeholder meeting were publicised. The meeting took place in Birmingham and attracted interest from a range of projects and services. The scope of the pilot, the model and detail of the IESR's metadata were delivered and stakeholders were involved in breakout sessions on various aspects of the pilot's development. The results of these discussions fed into the requirements gathering and in some instances into immediate changes to the metadata.
Whilst the pilot is limited in what it can achieve and only a handful of key service providers will directly contribute records to the pilot registry, input from other stakeholders has been crucial. Throughout the initial requirements-gathering phase of the pilot many service providers outside the scope of the project were approached and their input will feed into both the registry's development and the project's final reports.
There has been considerable interest in the IE Service Registry and the number of identified stakeholders has grown steadily. Whilst some of the requirements identified in these initial stages may not feed directly into the development of the pilot, it is envisaged that they will have a considerable impact on any development of a full service registry.
The Open Archives Forum (OA-Forum) is a two-year project which has been under way since October 2001. It provides a Europe-based community of interest for the dissemination of information about activity related to open archives issues and the Open Archive Initiative (OAI). It is funded as an Accompanying Measure in the Information Societies Technology (IST) Programme of the EU Fifth Framework. UKOLN coordinates the OA-Forum Project, which runs until September 2003, and UKOLN's Research and Development Team contributes to all aspects of its work. UKOLN's partners in the project are Istituto di Elaborazione della Informazione, Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche (IEI-CNR) of Italy, and Rechenzentrum/Computing Center, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (HUB) of Berlin, Germany.
UKOLN leads the organizational issues strand of OA-Forum. It aims to:
In the course of the project UKOLN has commissioned an expert review of IPR issues, another on issues generated by the use of the OAI for traditional archivists, and a third on the use of the OAI Protocol for Metadata Harvesting for the Cultural Heritage Community. A breakout session on organizational issues at the first OA-Forum workshop identified (and uncovered intense interest in) key issues, and a report on the likely impact of these in the take-up of the technology will be complete by the close of the project.
The OA-Forum's series of four workshops is the primary responsibility of IEI-CNR, along with leading the dissemination effort within the project. The first workshop, held in Pisa in May 2002, was successful in the breadth of participation across countries and types of organization and coverage of topics. UKOLN helped plan and run the workshop, organised speakers and rapporteurs from a number of UK organizations and is currently working on plans for the fourth workshop, to be held in the University of Bath in the first week of September 2003. The second OA-Forum workshop was held in Lisbon in the first week of December 2002 and focused on libraries and archives. The third took place at the Humboldt University, Berlin, in late March 2003 and focused on the use of the protocol in the context of multimedia resources.
UKOLN is contributing to the technical validation strand of OA-Forum, which is led by our partners at Humboldt University. The OA-Forum Web site provides an information source covering software tools, interoperability issues and current OAI implementations (available via the Web site), and is reviewing the OAI Protocol for Metadata Harvesting and a range of interoperating services. UKOLN has been particularly concerned with establishing shared understanding of the terminology of open archives through development of a glossary, the current draft of which is available on the OA-Forum Web site.
In addition, the project has commissioned an online tutorial about the OAI Protocol based on two substantial pre-workshop tutorials the OA-Forum project ran in 2002-3. A number of people contributed to these, including Andy Powell and Pete Cliff of UKOLN, and Uwe Muller of Humboldt University in Berlin. The material was developed to some extent out of work done by various members of the OAI itself, including Herbert Van de Sompel, Michael Nelson, etc. The OA-Forum has built on the experience of these live tutorials, and the online version covers most of what potential implementers of the protocol need to know.
In addition to the main body of the tutorial, the author Leona Carpenter is currently creating a body of interactive quiz questions which should enhance the usability of the tutorial for those exploring the protocol on their own. Members of the OAI have been following the development of the tutorial. The tutorial shortly will be mounted at the Open Archives Forum Web site.
The Research and Development Team is led by Rachel Heery. During the period covered by this report members of the team have worked on the following projects: Monica Duke, Richard Waller, Greg Tourte (IMesh Toolkit), Manjula Patel (ARCO), Amanda Closier (JISC IE Services Registry), Michael Day, (ePrints UK, Web Archiving study, Digital Preservation Coalition), Leona Carpenter and Philip Hunter (Open Archives Forum), Ruth Martin and Julie Stuckes (Subject Portals Project), Rosemary Russell (FAIR PORTAL), Manjula Patel and Monica Duke, (Agentcities) and Rachel Heery (CORES, MEG Registry).
The Distributed Systems and Services Team supports the activities of other parts of UKOLN by building innovative systems and services based on Web technologies and by providing technical support to all members of UKOLN staff. These systems and services inform the policy and advice that UKOLN gives to the community and grounds our more theoretical research and development activities in practical implementations.
UKOLN provides a technical and interoperability advice role for the Resource Discovery Network (RDN), as well as hosting and developing the central RDN Web services. This year has seen a complete overhaul of the central RDN hardware with all our services now being delivered from a dedicated Linux machine. This has considerably improved the response times of the central RDN services.
As part of the overhaul, ResourceFinder (an interdisciplinary search of the RDN) was also re-developed. This work resulted in a new interface that is more streamlined, faster and which includes embedded links to "value-added" discovery services such as links to similar resources elsewhere, links to resources that cite the discovered resource and links to archived copies of the discovered resource. The central database upon which this service is based now contains over 70,000 RDN resource descriptions gathered from the RDN gateways using the ARC implementation of the OAI Protocol for Metadata Harvesting.
The RDN-Include service continues to be popular, with the software being downloaded by quite a large number of sites. About 35 sites actively use it in their live services. There have been no major changes to the software used to provide the RDN-Include service over the last year, apart from those necessary to incorporate the changes to ResourceFinder. However, guidance has been issued to the RDN Hubs about how they can offer 'Hub-Include' services based on RDN-Include.
UKOLN has been closely involved in RDN/LTSN partnership activities, providing much of the vision for the sharing of records between the two organizations using the OAI protocol and facilitating the development of several key technical standards that will be used within the partnerships. These include the RDN/LTSN Learning Object Metadata Application Profile and the RDN/LTSN Resource Type Vocabularies. UKOLN has also played a significant role in recent UK discussions about the use of identifiers for learning objects.
Finally, UKOLN has been involved in discussions with various parties about possible future collaboration involving the RDN including the UK Mirror Service, HERO, Sentient (Reading Lists Direct), the Internet Archive and OCLC.
UKOLN provides a technical advisory service to the JISC concerning the development of the JISC Information Environment and has continued to disseminate information about the technical architecture through a number of technically oriented articles, presentations at various conferences, attendance at meetings and the maintenance of a number of small software demonstrators.
UKOLN's work in this area continues to focus on the relationships between the technologies specified in the technical architecture and emerging Web services, the relationships between the information environment and the Grid, mechanisms to support the deposit of material into the information environment, the integration of the information environment with managed learning environments and the development of a pilot service registry for the information environment.
UKOLN has been working closely with CETIS on a number of areas of shared interest (metadata, vocabularies and identifiers for example) in order to help bridge the gap between learning technologies and digital library technologies.
Work on the ePrints UK project started in summer 2002. It is a two-year project that has been funded by the JISC as part of its Focus on Access to Institutional Resources (FAIR) Programme. UKOLN's partners in the project are the Resource Discovery Network (RDN), the University of Southampton and OCLC Research.
The main objective of the project is to develop a national service through which the UK Higher and Further Education communities can access the collective output of e-prints from UK repositories. Technically, the service will be based on the use of the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) to collect metadata from compliant repositories into a centralised database. Once gathered, both the metadata and the full-text of e-prints (where this is available) will be passed to three external Web Services that will attempt to enhance metadata records through: the addition (or validation) of authoritative forms of author names, the automatic assignation of subject classification, and the parsing of bibliographic references into structured forms-using the OpenURL standard - for the automatic linking of citations. The enhanced metadata will then form the basis of the ePrints UK service, which will be made available to end-users in two main ways.
Firstly, through a central interface, e.g. integrated into the RDN's Web pages, which will provide access to all of the harvested and enhanced metadata. Secondly, through the development of configurable discovery services that would enable academic institutions and other organizations to embed ePrints UK directly within their own services, providing access to ePrints filtered by subject. The project will test this approach by embedding ePrints UK into the eight RDN subject hubs and the Education Portal based at the University of Leeds. In addition, the project will produce a series of four supporting studies on issues relating to the setting-up, maintenance and sustainability of institutional e-print repositories and run a number of workshops and evaluative focus groups. To date, the ARC software has been implemented to harvest around 2,500records from selected UK repositories into a prototype database. Work is proceeding on arranging the delivery of these records to the Web Services being developed by OCLC Research and the University of Southampton.
As part of ePrints UK, UKOLN has produced some guidelines on the metadata that needs to be made available by institutional repositories. These provide some recommendations on the use of simple Dublin Core metadata to describe e-prints that - if they were widely implemented - would help facilitate more consistent results when searching and browsing records in the ePrints UK service and other service provider archives. The project has also produced the first of its supporting studies, an introductory study of the prospects for institutional repositories of e-prints in the UK. This reviews the development of institutional repositories in the UK, discusses a range of perceived impediments to the take-up of such services, and proposes some basic evaluation criteria for the project.
This RDN project, funded under the JISC X4L Programme, plans to develop RDN services significantly for post-16 users. This will be achieved by increasing the number of resources in hub Internet resource catalogues relevant to the Further Education (FE) community by gathering records enhanced with FE level and subject information from two major college collections. In addition, selected existing RDN resources will be mapped to FE level and subject information. These mapped resources will then be linked to the curriculum through the production of a number of subject-based showcase teaching packs.
As part of the project, UKOLN staff have developed a technical roadmap for the project and are currently in the final stages of developing a Web-based tool that will allow existing RDN records to be enhanced with FE level, FE subject and FE notes fields. The tool will also allow records to be uploaded from FE colleges into the RDN.
Our metadata-related Web-based tools, DC-dot, DC-assist, RSS-xpress and OpenResolver, continue to be widely used, downloaded and cited. RSS-xpress currently supports about 1000 visitor sessions per day and DC-dot is currently used to describe nearly 1800 new resources each month (this figure is unchanged since last year - the total number of different resources described using DC-dot since it was first made available is approaching 90,000). The OpenResolver source code has been used in at least two service environments outside UKOLN.
Z-Directory, the directory of UK Z39.50 targets maintained by UKOLN, now lists around 60 servers. This directory will, it is hoped, form a useful source of information for the pilot IE service registry.
UKOLN has continued to work closely with the University of Bath and is hosting a copy of the eprints.org software to support the University of Bath's pilot eprint archive project. UKOLN has also provided advice on the deployment of OpenURL resolver technology within the institution.
UKOLN's internal and external server machines are predominantly Sun/Solaris-based, though the RDN service and UKOLN's internal development server are both Linux-based. Office and home desktop machines run Windows NT, Windows 2000 or Windows XP (with a general move towards the latter). UKOLN has worked closely with the Bath University Computing Services to move all our main server machines into the more secure environment of their machine room and to coordinate our network and service provision - Web caching, email routing, filestore archiving, the Domain Name Service, etc. In general, UKOLN staff are highly mobile. An increasing trend towards using laptops instead of desktop machines means that UKOLN has installed a trial wireless router in the UKOLN offices. Several staff now have broadband access from home, some having used wireless access at home as well.
The Distributed Systems and Services Team consists of Pete Cliff (RDN Systems Developer), Pete Dowdell (RDN Systems Developer/NOF-digitise Technical Adviser), Andy Powell (Assistant Director and Team Leader) and Eddie Young (Systems Support).
Ariadne issues 33 to 36 were published during the past year (October, January, April, and July). A variety of main articles, regular columns, reviews and reports on events were published. For issue 36 it was pleasing to welcome the BIOME team back to the regular columns section and it is anticipated that it will be contributing further news and information.
During the year Ariadne focused on a range of current themes. For example, it continued to cover work arising from the Open Archives Initiative (OAI) with regard to the sharing subject gateway metadata through the use of the OAI Protocol for Metadata Harvesting as well as an overview of the DAEDALUS Open Archives Project and a report on the second OAI workshop. Similarly it continued the theme on scholarly publishing including the experience of developing a national e-prints archive and an article that makes a case for maximising the advantages and the UK's pre-eminence in the Research Assessment Exercise. In the same way the area of e-Learning has continued to receive attention in the course of the year with articles on exposing information resources for e-learning and a technical review of the Managed Learning Systems developed by the JISC 'Building MLEs in HE (7/99) Programme.
Unsurprisingly the matter of portals has loomed large in Ariadne 's sights this year and it has been possible to offer articles examining the issues arising from the current enthusiasm for syndicating content to portals together with some guidelines for good practice. Ariadne included an analysis of the features found in various types of portal (together with a comparison with the planned features for the JISC Subject Portals). An article deriving from the experience of members of the Subject Portals Project in respect of access management to portals was also included. It was then possible to offer a further article in a following issue that examined stakeholders' views of external resources within institutional portals.
Ariadne topped and tailed the year with its coverage of issues within the JISC Information Environment, beginning with a description of the five steps that content providers can take to integrate their resources into the JISC Information Environment and an article on student searching behaviour in the JISC IE. In the most recent issue it published contributions giving an overview of the aims and latest work in the development of the JISC IE Service Registry and also a graphical representation of how well known services and projects fit within the JISC Information Environment technical architecture. Spring 2003 saw the departure of Philip Hunter from the editorial chair into a role within the Research and Development Team. It was, however, possible to effect a smooth transition within editorial operations through a process of co-editing with his successor.
Ariadne had 1,293,640, visitor sessions over the year with an average 107,803 sessions each month and an average 3544 sessions every day. These figures show a substantial increase on last year, when there was an average 2199 visitor sessions each day.
Cultivate Interactive was set up as part of the CULTIVATE-EU Project which began in February 2000 under the European Commission's Information Society Technologies (IST) Programme. The Web magazine was intended, as the proposal put it, to "fill a gap existing today, which is precisely the lack of information on project results related to archives, museums and libraries, and its connection with the entrepreneurial side" Given the slightly unwieldy working title European Archives, Libraries and Museums Matters, the first issue of the magazine appeared in July 2000 under the editorial leadership of Marieke Guy (née Napier), and under the snappier title of Cultivate Interactive. The magazine has published five issues under EU funding, and a further four under CULTIVATE-CEE funding. Since the last Annual Report the final two issues of Cultivate Interactive have been published, in November 2002 and February 2003. Based on an original sample of 51 projects, the final position in terms of those projects providing a feature-length article during the lifetime of the magazine was determined as follows:
Position after
final issue 9
(Note that other projects have subsequently provided feature articles, but their inclusion would invalidate the above figures based on the original July 2002 sample).
Issue 8 of Cultivate Interactive included a variety of feature articles ranging from advice on giving presentations to audiences that may include people with visual or hearing impairments to an article offering more technical information on how school students are being encouraged to seek and transmit digital cultural information over wireless devices. Two articles from colleagues in Russia were also published. The first gave a view of new trends in state information policy in the Russian cultural sphere and the other an overview of the state of ICT development in the Smolensk region of the Russian Federation.
Issue 9 provided two articles on representing information to visitors in an archaeological context including the work of a project producing the first mobile augmented reality guide for archaeological sites and museums. Reflecting the "connection with the entrepreneurial side" mentioned above, another feature article highlights a project seeking to create a cultural heritage community in the less well-known regions of Europe where culture, environment and tourism represent the main resource of the area. It described how a revised business model and the use of technology represent a realistic hope of economic development. Another article described a project which is working on new ways of presenting ecological insights by combining multimedia technologies with geographic information and database systems.
The former editor published issue 6 of the magazine in February 2002 before moving to take up other work within UKOLN. The legacy of her work was indeed clear, not least in the content included in that issue which promoted the new activity starting under the banner of Cultivate Russia. Her successor, Richard Waller, was also keen to ensure that readers were aware of developments in that area. Accordingly, issue 8 sought to give space and attention to the work of Russian Federation colleagues, as mentioned above, including the appearance of issue 1 of Cultivate Russia Web-Magazine. He collaborated with the editor of the Russian sister Web magazine to assist in the publication of some past Cultivate Interactive articles.
The editor attended the annual review of the CULTIVATE-EU Project in October 2002 and gave a presentation on the current work of Cultivate Interactive. The review named Cultivate Interactive as recipient of one of the two special mentions made in a very positive assessment of the CULTIVATE-EU Project. It stated "…the e-zine is one of the most impressive and significant achievements of the project. It is noted that the e-zine has been successfully adopted with little change in format by the other two CULTIVATE projects." The final CULTIVATE-CEE Report in July 2003 expressed itself in the same manner.
UKOLN has undertaken to maintain the magazine's site at least until February 2006.
UKOLN received a new look this year which is reflected across the organization's publicity and printed materials. The Web site was updated to reflect the new image and, at the same time, it gave the Web Editor a chance to re-visit the underlying style and structure of the main areas of the site. Over time, more areas will be updated according to the new house style.
There was a total of 1,386,676 visitor sessions to www.ukoln.ac.uk for the period August 2002 to July 2003. This is an increase of 99,957 on last year's figures.
During the past twelve months the Information and Communication team focused on developing a new "look and feel" for UKOLN, to reflect better UKOLN's cutting-edge work in research and development, systems and policy and advice. The UKOLN logo has been updated and new colours and design can be seen throughout the Web site and all of UKOLN's publicity material.
A UKOLN leaflet has been produced. This will be a useful promotional tool for UKOLN and offers an overview of all the work with which UKOLN is involved.. In addition to the leaflet, a UKOLN poster has been developed that is used as part of UKOLN's exhibition material and is also available for staff to bring along to meetings and events.
The aim of the new promotional items is to remind people of the wide variety of work in which UKOLN is engaged. It offers an overview to all of UKOLN's projects and activity. This will provide useful information for people who know little about UKOLN, but also for people who want to find out more about UKOLN's new activities.
It has been another successful year for the Events Team at UKOLN with events taking place all over the UK. The number of attendees has ranged from 40 to 175.
The feedback from delegates has been very positive including comments such as:
"I found it very informative and the break-out groups were a particular highlight"
(Collection Description Workshop)
"Very enjoyable and friendly day" (Bath Profile Meeting)
"All very good and better than I expected" (Bath Profile Meeting)
"Flawless" and "very well planned well done!" (Institutional Web Management Workshop)
The Information and Communication Team consists of Julie Stuckes (Team Leader), Sara Hassen (Events and Marketing Manager), Shirley Keane (Web Editor) and Richard Waller (Information Officer).
The chart below shows the breakdown of funding received for the period August 2002 to July 2003.
UKOLN's core activities during the period were jointly funded by Resource and the JISC. This funding supported UKOLN's activities in the areas of public library networking, bibliographic management, interoperability, event management and its information and communications services, including the production of the online magazine Ariadne. In addition, this funding supported the work of the Director, some administrative and managerial support and office systems support.
Project income is categorised as JISC funding or research grants.
JISC funding for the year, other than core funding, comprised of work on the following projects: JISC Information Environment Technical Advisory Service; Digital Preservation Coalition; ePrints UK; Fair Portal; Hilt 2; IE Service Registry; MEG Registry; QA Focus; RDNC; Subject Portals Project (SPP); and Web Focus.
The following projects provided research grant income during the period: ARCO, CORES, OA-Forum and MMI-DC, all funded by the European Commission, CD Focus, funded jointly by Resource, the JISC, the British Library and the Research Support Libraries Programme (RSLP), and the EnrichUK Portal, funded by the New Opportunities Fund.
Consultancy income was received from the European Commission, for UKOLN's Agentcities work, the New Opportunities Fund, the JISC and the Wellcome Trust, the Academic and National Library Training Co-operative of the Republic of Ireland, the British Library and from the Department of Culture, Media and Sport.
UKOLN organises a number of workshops and seminars in support of its own work as well as organising events on behalf of its funders and other stakeholders. The funding reported here reflects the income received to support UKOLN's own events. These include the Institutional Web Management Workshop 2003, held at the University of Kent, and the Public Library Web Managers Workshop, held in Bath 2002.
In addition, our events management service organises events for the community, which this year included a joint workshop with the National e-Science Centre on semantic infrastructures for the GRID and digital libraries and a workshop introducing the CORES schema registry.
UKOLN receives a small amount of income in the form of royalties from its Library Association publications. This year monies were received from the following publications: Managing the Intellectual Record; Landscapes for a Learning Society; The Public Librarian's Guide to the Internet and Make Sense of Standards.
Members of the Resources and Administration Team are Ruth Burt (Office Administrator), Ali Cook (Financial Administrator), Sally Criddle (Resource Coordinator and Team Leader), Birgit Kongialis (Financial Administrator) and Jenny Taylor (Assistant Resource Coordinator). During the year Michelle Ibison worked as Resource Coordinator and Team Leader covering Sally Criddle's maternity leave.
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 selective list of publications, presentations and committee memberships follows. Also included is a list of some of the visitors whom UKOLN received during the year.
The Renardus broker service: collaborative frameworks and tools, The Electronic Library, Vol. 21, no. 1, pp. 39-48. (With Lesly Huxley and Marianne Peereboom)
Chapman, A.
Collection level descriptions as a tool for managing collections
ASSIGNation, Vol.20, No.3, April 2003
Chapman, A. and Danskin, A.
A new direction for bibliographic records?: the development of Functional Requirements
for Bibliographic Records
(part 1)
Catalogue and Index, No.148, Summer 2003
Using simple Dublin Core to describe eprints, ePrints UK project, 2003. (With Andy Powell and Michael Day). http://www.rdn.ac.uk/projects/eprints-uk/docs/simpledc-guidelines/
ePrints UK - Technical Documentation, ePrints UK project, 2003
http://www.rdn.ac.uk/projects/eprints-uk/docs/technical/-uk/docs/technical/
Developing the JISC Information Environment Service Registry Ariadne 36 Brack, V. and Closier, A. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue36/jisciesr/
2nd ECDL Workshop on Web Archiving, Cultivate International, Issue 8, November
2002.
http://www.cultivate-int.org/issue8/ecdlws2/
DPC/PADI What's new in digital preservation, Issues 3-5, November 2002 - May 2003. (With Gerard Clifton) http://www.dpconline.org/graphics/whatsnew/
Metadata in support of subject gateway services and digital preservation, In: Mauro Guerrini, (ed.), Le risorse elettroniche: definizione, selezione e catalogazione, Milan: Editrice Bibliografica, 2002, pp. 193-206 (Italian), 561-573 (English).
Digital preservation and long-term access to the content of electronic serials, In: Wayne Jones, (ed.), E-serials: publishers, libraries, users, and standards, 2nd ed. Binghamton, N.Y.: Haworth Information Press, 2003, pp. 167-195.
Collecting and preserving the World Wide Web: a feasibility study undertaken
for the JISC and Wellcome Trust, February 2003.
http://library.wellcome.ac.uk/projects/archiving_feasibility.pdf
Using simple Dublin Core to describe eprints, ePrints UK project, 2003. (With Andy Powell and Peter Cliff) http://www.rdn.ac.uk/projects/eprints-uk/docs/simpledc-guidelines
Prospects for institutional e-print repositories in the United Kingdom,
ePrints UK project supporting study, no 1, May 2003.
http://www.rdn.ac.uk/projects/eprints-uk/docs/studies/impact/
Review of: Blaise Cronin (ed.), Annual Review of Information Science and
Technology, Vol. 36
(Information Today, 2002), Ariadne, Issue 36, July 2003.
http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue36/day-rvw/
Public Libraries: United we stand, Ariadne issue 33, October 2002,
http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue33/public-libraries/
Creating websites for e-citizens: the Public Library Web Managers workshop, 2002, Ariadne issue 34, January 2003, http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue34/public-libraries/
Public sector column in UKOLUG Newsletter - (UK Online User Group is a special interest group of the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals [CILIP]). Column published in February, April, June 2003 editions.
A tour around local e-Government interoperability and the role of the Public Library. Managing Information. January/February 2003, pp.40-42.
Creating websites for e-citizens. Electronic Public Information. (magazine of SPIN - the Society of Public Information Networks). January/February 2003, pp.20-23.
Which Way Now? The future of UK public libraries, Ariadne issue 35,
April 2003,
http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue35/public-libraries/
Framework for the Future: Access to digital skills and services, Ariadne issue 36, July 2003, http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue36/public-libraries/
A QA Framework For Your Web Site, EUNIS 2003 conference proceedings,
http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/qa-focus/documents/papers/eunis-2003/.
QA Focus briefing documents,
http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/qa-focus/documents/briefings/
Application profiles: interoperable friend or foe? In: Michaela Michel and Britta Woldering, (eds.), TEL Milestone Conference, The European Library project, 2002, pp. 34-39.
The MEG Registry and SCART: complementary tools for creation, discovery and re-use of metadata schemas, In: Proceedings of the International Conference on Dublin Core and Metadata for e-Communities, 2002. Florence: Firenze University Press, 2002, pp. 125-132. (With Pete Johnston, Dave Beckett and Damian Steer) http://www.bncf.net/dc2002/program/ft/paper14.pdf
Principles of Metadata Registries, DELOS Working Group on Registries
White Paper, April 2003. (With Thomas Baker, Christophe Blanchi, Dan Brickley,
Erik Duval, Rachel Heery, Pete Johnston, Leonid Kalinichenko, Heike Neuroth
and Shigeo Sugimoto)
http://delos-noe.iei.pi.cnr.it/activities/standardizationforum/Registries.pdf
Current trends in Digitisation in Central and Eastern Europe. A report on the ICIMSS Meeting of National Librarians' (a DELOS CEE event) held in Torun, Poland, 3-4 February 2003. 'At the Event', Ariadne 35. March/April issue, 2003.
Hidden Treasures: The impact of moving image and sound archives in the 21st Century. A report on the meeting held at the British Library on Monday 7 October 2002. 'At the Event' report, Ariadne 34, December/January 2003.
Content Management Systems and Web Publishing Systems: links to sources and resources. At: Cultivate Russia Web-Magazine Issue 1, October 2002. (Edited translation into Russian from 'A Content Management and Web Publishing Systems Gazetteer' published in Cultivate Interactive, October 2001).
Collaboration, integration and "recombinant potential," Ariadne, Issue 33, September/October 2002. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue33/oclc-scurl/
The MEG Registry and SCART: complementary tools for creation, discovery and re-use of metadata schemas, In: Proceedings of the International Conference on Dublin Core and Metadata for e-Communities, 2002. Florence: Firenze University Press, 2002, pp. 125-132. (With Rachel Heery, Dave Beckett and Damian Steer) http://www.bncf.net/dc2002/program/ft/paper14.pdf
Collections et services: construire un environnement informationnel pour l'Europe,
Culture et Recherche, No. 93, November/December 2002, pp. 6-7. (With
David Dawson)
http://www.culture.gouv.fr/culture/editions/r-cr/cr93.pdf
Notes on the W3C XML Schemas for Qualified Dublin Core, Dublin Core Metadata Initiative, 2 April 2003. (With Tim Cole, Thomas Habing, Jane Hunter, Carl Lagoze and Andy Powell) http://dublincore.org/schemas/xmls/qdc/2003/04/02/notes/
Guidelines for implementing Dublin Core in XML, Dublin Core Metadata Initiative, DCMI Recommendation, 2 April 2003. (With Andy Powell) http://dublincore.org/documents/dc-xml-guidelines/
Principles of Metadata Registries, DELOS Working Group on Registries, White Paper, April 2003. (With Thomas Baker, Christophe Blanchi, Dan Brickley, Erik Duval, Rachel Heery, Leonid Kalinichenko, Heike Neuroth and Shigeo Sugimoto) http://delos-noe.iei.pi.cnr.it/activities/standardizationforum/Registries.pdf
Collection-level description: friend or foe? An overview of the use of collection-level description in libraries and related institutions, Alexandria, Vol. 15, no. 1, pp. 7-21. (With Bridget Robinson)
Approaches to validation of Dublin Core metadata embedded in (X)HTML documents, Poster, Twelfth International World Wide Web Conference, Budapest, Hungary, 20-24 May 2003. (With Brian Kelly and Andy Powell) http://www2003.org/cdrom/papers/poster/p109/p109-kelly.html
Approaches To The Preservation Of Web Sites, Online Information 2002 conference proceedings, http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/conferences/online-information-2002/
WWW 2003 Trip Report, Ariadne issue 36, July 2003,
http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue36/web-focus/.
An Update on Search Engines Used in UK University Web Sites, Ariadne issue 36, July 2003, http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue36/web-watch/.
A Standards-Based Culture For Web Site Development, Ariadne issue 35, May 2003, http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue35/web-focus/
Surfing Historical UK University Web Sites, Ariadne issue 35, May
2003,
http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue35/web-watch/
Interfaces To Web Testing Tools, Ariadne issue 34, January 2003,
http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue34/web-focus/.
A Survey Of Web Server Software Used By UK University Web Sites, Ariadne issue 34, January 2003, http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue34/web-focus/
Let's Get Serious About HTML Standards, Ariadne issue 33, October
2002,
http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue33/web-focus/
An Accessibility Analysis Of UK University Entry Points, Ariadne issue 33, October 2002, http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue33/web-focus/.
Providing Feedback On Cultivate Interactive Articles, Cultivate Interactive
issue 8, November 2002,
http://www.cultivate-int.org/issue8/annotations/.
Read Cultivate Interactive On Your PDA!, Cultivate Interactive issue 8, November 2002, http://www.cultivate-int.org/issue8/avantgo/
eBank UK: Building the links between research data, scholarly communication and learning. Ariadne Issue 36 (2003). http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue36/lyon/
UKOLN Futures: an analysis of strategic options for the organization from 2004. Submission to JISC and Resource. May 2003 UKOLN
Strategy & Core Work Programme August 2003 - July 2004. Submission to JISC and Resource May 2003.
Managing a distributed development project: the Subject Portals Project,
QA Focus Case Studies, November 2002. (With Jasper Tredgold)
http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/qa-focus/documents/case-studies/case-study-03/
Turning gateways into portals, Library and Information Update, Vol.
2, no. 6, June 2003, pp. 52-53.
http://www.cilip.org.uk/update/issues/jun03/article3june.html
Review of: Candice M. Benjes-Small and Melissa L. Just, The library and information professional's guide to plug-ins and other Web browser tools (Facet, 2002), Ariadne, Issue 34, December 2002/January 2003. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue34/martin/
ePrints UK: developing a national e-prints archive, Ariadne, Issue 35, March/April 2003. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue35/martin/
Just a distraction? External content in institutional portals, Ariadne, Issue 36, July 2003. (With Liz Pearce) http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue36/justadist/
Collaboration, integration & 'recombinant potential' Pete Johnston - October 2002. Ariadne 33. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue33/oclc-scurl/
Portals, PORTALs Everywhere Ian Dolphin, Paul Miller and Robert Sherratt - October 2002. Ariadne 33. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue33/portals/
The MEG Registry and SCART: complementary tools for creation, discovery and re-use of metadata schemas. Rachel Heery, Pete Johnston, Dave Beckett and Damian Steer - October 2002. Proceedings of the International Conference on Dublin Core and Metadata for e-Communities, 2002. Florence: Firenze University Press, 2002, pp. 125-132. PDF: http://www.bncf.net/dc2002/program/ft/paper14.pdf
An introduction to Web Services for Cultural Heritage Professionals Paul Miller
- February 2003. DigiCULT.Info 3, pp. 21-23
http://www.digicult.info/downloads/digicult_info3.pdf
Guidelines for implementing Dublin Core in XML. Andy Powell & Pete Johnston - April 2003. DCMI Recommendation http://dublincore.org/documents/dc-xml-guidelines/
Syndicated Content: it's more than just some file formats Paul Miller - April 2003. Ariadne 35. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue35/miller/
Understanding the International Audiences for Digital Cultural Content Paul
Miller, David Dawson and John Perkins - June 2003. D-Lib Magazine 9/6
http://www.dlib.org/dlib/june03/miller/06miller.html
Digitisation to presentation: building virtual museum exhibitions, Proceedings Vision, Video and Graphics Conference, Bath, 10-11 July 2003. (With Martin White, Patrick Sayd and Krzysztof Walczak)
AMS -Metadata for Cultural Exhibitions using Virtual Reality, To appear in Proceedings of the Dublin Core Conference, October 2003 (with Nicholaos Mourkoussis, Martin White, Jacek Chmielewski, Krzysztof Walczak)
5 step guide to becoming a content provider in the JISC Information Environment,
Ariadne, Issue 33, September/October 2002.
http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue33/info-environment/
Exposing information resources for e-learning: harvesting and searching IMS metadata using the OAI Protocol for Metadata Harvesting and Z39.59, Ariadne, Issue 34, December 2002/January 2003. (With Steve Richardson) http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue34/powell/
RDN/LTSN System Architecture, March 2003
http://www.rdn.ac.uk/publications/ltsn/sys-arch/
RDN OAI rdn_dc XML schema(s), March 2003
http://www.rdn.ac.uk/oai/rdn_dc/
RDN cataloguing guidelines - FE addendum, March 2003
http://www.rdn.ac.uk/publications/cat-guide/fe-addendum/
RDN admin metadata, March 2003
http://www.rdn.ac.uk/publications/cat-guide/admin/
JISC Information Environment Architecture Standards Framework, April
2003
http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/distributed-systems/jisc-ie/arch/standards/
RDN Interoperability and Standards Framework, November 2002
http://www.rdn.ac.uk/publications/interop-standards/
Identifiers for learning objects - a discussion paper, April 2003
http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/distributed-systems/lo-identifiers/
RDN/LTSN LOM application profile, April 2003 (draft)
http://www.rdn.ac.uk/publications/rdn-ltsn-ap/
Using simple Dublin Core to describe eprints, ePrints UK project, 2003. (With Pete Cliff and Michael Day). http://www.rdn.ac.uk/projects/eprints-uk/docs/simpledc-guidelines/
Notes on the W3C XML Schemas for Qualified Dublin Core, Dublin Core Metadata Initiative, 2 April 2003. (With Pete Johnston, Tim Cole, Thomas Habing, Jane Hunter and Carl Lagoze) http://dublincore.org/schemas/xmls/qdc/2003/04/02/notes/
Guidelines for implementing Dublin Core in XML, Dublin Core Metadata
Initiative, DCMI Recommendation, 2 April 2003. (With Pete Johnston)
http://dublincore.org/documents/dc-xml-guidelines/
Approaches to validation of Dublin Core metadata embedded in (X)HTML documents, Poster, Twelfth International World Wide Web Conference, Budapest, Hungary, 20-24 May 2003. (With Brian Kelly and Pete Johnston) http://www2003.org/cdrom/papers/poster/p109/p109-kelly.html
Mapping the JISC IE service landscape, Ariadne, Issue 36, July 2003.
http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue36/powell/
CD Focus News Bulletin, published bi-monthly, 7 published since 1/8/02
"Collection-Level Description: Friend or Foe? An Overview of the use of Collection-Level Description in Libraries and Related Institutions." Alexandria - The Journal of National and International Library and Information Issues, Volume 15 Number 1 2003. (With Pete Johnston)
PORTAL Work Package 6: Standards for the description of portal users
http://www.fair-portal.hull.ac.uk/deliverables.html
Networking multimedia resources: summing up the workshop, 3rd Open Archives Forum Workshop, Berlin, Germany, 27-29 March 2003.
Issues for cataloguers day seminar, University of Limerick, 24 September 2002 Part of the Academic and National Library training Co-operative, Republic of Ireland, staff development programme
Understanding visual impairment, a staff development training session for issue desk staff at University of Bath Library, 6 November 2002
Revealed: the truth behind the national database of resources in accessible formats CIG/UKOLN seminar (Session 1: Introduction and background, Session 2: Standards and the system, Session 3: The collection register) at Bristol Museum, Bristol, 18 February 2003
From small beginnings: developing collection-level description, at Collection Description Focus Showcase Day, the British Library, London, 25 March 2003
OAI-Tutorial, Open Archives Forum Tutorial, Berlin, 27 March 2003
Digital preservation: an introduction, University of Bristol MSc in Library and Information Management course, Bristol, 8 October 2002.
EnrichUK.net: The NOF-digitise Collection Portal, Collection Description Showcase, British Library, 23 March 2003.
An architecture for personalisation of subject gateways, based on web services, Joint Open University - Universitat Oberta de Catalunya Seminar on Personalisation and Digital Libraries, Milton Keynes, 18 October 2002. http://library.open.ac.uk/aboutus/myolib/presentations/IMesh/ppframe.htm
Ebooks in Public Libraries, National Acquisitions Group (NAG) Conference 2002, 19 September 2002
Our electronic future, Youth Libraries Group Conference 2002, 20 September 2002.
Usability and accessibility: are they two sides of the same coin and does it matter anyway?, Creating e-Citizens: developing public library websites for 2005. Public Library Web Managers conference 2002 (UKOLN). 5-6 November 2002.
Our electronic future: key issues and developments for ICT in public libraries and their impact on children, Joint paper with David Potts, Resource. British Council seminar: Children as readers: how library services help young people discover the pleasure of literature. 1-6 December 2002.
Ebooks 2003: research and development, British Council seminar organised by Resource. Ebooks and the future:e-xploring a new found land. 26-31 January 2003.
Ebooks in UK Public Libraries…the story so far, Official launch of ebooks service at London Borough of Richmond libraries. 24 March 2003.
Ebooks: do they belong in public libraries, Internet Librarian International 2003, 26 March 2003.
Public Libraries in the 21st century, Presentation to the MSc Information and Library Management course, Bristol University. 6 May 2003.
Building accessible and useable websites, Government Computing conference: Building quality government websites. 7 May 2003.
Ebooks in academic libraries: an overview, Avon University Libraries in Co-operation (AULIC) event. 12 May 2003.
Developing A QA Framework For Your Web Site, EUNIS 2003, Amsterdam
2-3 July 2003,
http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/qa-focus/presentations/eunis-07-2003/.
Catching Mistakes: Using QA to Address Problems on your Web Site,
Institutional Web Management Workshop 2003, University of Kent, 11-13 June 2003,
http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/qa-focus/presentations/iwm-2003/.
QA For Digital Library Projects, LT Scotland, 9 April 2003,
http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/qa-focus/presentations/strathclyde-04-2003/.
QA For Web Sites, Internet Librarian International 2003, 25-27 March
2003,
http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/qa-focus/presentations/ili-2003/.
Working With Jorum+, Manchester, 10 February 2003,
http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/qa-focus/presentations/jorum-02-2003/.
Quality Assurance And Your Project Deliverables, Nottingham, 31 October
2003,
http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/qa-focus/presentations/notts-10-2002/.
Introducing QA Focus, Edinburgh, 26 September 2002,
http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/qa-focus/presentations/edinburgh-09-2002/.
The MEG Registry and SCART: complementary tools for creation, discovery and re-use of metadata schemas, DC-2002: Metadata for e-Communities: Supporting Diversity and Convergence, Florence, Italy, 13-17 October 2002. (With Dave Beckett, ILRT, University of Bristol)
Schema registries and context, CORES Schema Creation and Registration
Workshop, Budapest, Hungary, 6-7 March 2003.
http://www.cores-eu.net/registry/ws1/heery1/heery1.htm
Review of other registries, CORES Schema Creation and Registration Workshop, Budapest, Hungary, 6-7 March 2003. http://www.cores-eu.net/registry/ws1/heery2/heery2.htm
Publishing and sharing schemas: an overview, Schemas & ontologies: building a semantic infrastructure for the GRID and Digital Libraries, National e-Science Centre, Edinburgh, 16 May 2003. http://www.nesc.ac.uk/talks/163/RachelHeery.pdf
The Open Archives Forum and its Deliverables. 21 May 2003. UKOLN seminar programme, University of Bath: Portals and ePrints
The Open Archives Forum and the international perspective on Organisational and Quality issues. (HTML version of Powerpoint presentation, May 2003). Presentation at the University of London Library, Senate House, London, 25 April 2003 (Seminar Programme: Gateways to Research and Lifelong Learning: Portals in Perspective).
Overview - European activities of Open Archives Multimedia Projects. Presentation given at Humboldt University, Berlin, 28 March 2003 (Third Open Archives Forum Workshop, 27-29 March).
Digitisation and the Open Archives Initiative. Presentation given at the DELOS meeting of National Librarians to discuss Current Trends in Digitisation, ICIMSS, Torun, Poland, 3rd February 2003.
Collection description: surveying the landscape, OCLC/SCURL Pre-IFLA
Conference: New Directions in Metadata, Edinburgh, 16 August 2002.
http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/cd-focus/presentations/survland/survland.htm
Collections and collection description : making CLD work for museums,
Pre-Conference Workshop, mda Conference "Common Threads," Birmingham, 3 September
2002.
http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/cd-focus/presentations/mdacoll/mdacoll.htm
Describing museum collections: metadata schemas for CLD, Pre-Conference
Workshop, mda Conference "Common Threads," Birmingham, 3 September 2002.
http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/cd-focus/presentations/mdadesc/mdadesc.htm
Collections revealed: The role and practical application of collection
description, CIMI Forum meeting, National Museums of Scotland, Edinburgh,
31 October 2002.
http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/cd-focus/presentations/forum/forum.htm
Collection-level description: from theory to practice, Minerva project
WP3 meeting, Paris. 24 January 2003. (With David Dawson)
http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/cd-focus/presentations/min2003/min2003.htm
The MEG metadata schemas registry: architecture and data model, MEG
Metadata Schemas Registry Workshop, Bath, 21 January 2003.
http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/education/regproj/ws1/megmodel/megmodel.htm
Overview of CORES architecture and introductory demonstration, CORES
Schema Creation and Registration Workshop, Budapest, Hungary, 6-7 March 2003.
http://www.cores-eu.net/registry/ws1/johnston1/johnston1.htm
The registry data model and its expression in RDF, CORES Schema Creation
and Registration Workshop, Budapest, Hungary, 6-7 March 2003.
http://www.cores-eu.net/registry/ws1/johnston2/johnston2.htm
An introduction to metadata, National Meeting on Metadata for Digital Libraries, Riga, Latvia, 16 April 2003. http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/presentations/delos-lat-2003/deloslat.htm
The MEG metadata schemas registry: a case study, Schemas & ontologies: building a semantic infrastructure for the GRID and Digital Libraries, National e-Science Centre, Edinburgh, 16 May 2003. http://www.nesc.ac.uk/talks/163/PeteJohnston.pdf
The data model & metadata schema for the JISC IESR Pilot, JISC IESR Stakeholders' Meeting, Birmingham, 26 June 2003. http://www.mimas.ac.uk/iesr/stakeholders/meeting_20030626/data_model.ppt
Web Site Benchmarking, Bedford College, 18 June 2003,
http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/rsc-eastern-2003/.
Web Accessibility: Too Difficult To Implement?, Institutional Web
Management Workshop 2003, University of Kent, 11-13 June 2003,
http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-2003/debate/.
Web Accessibility Panel, WWW 2003 conference, Amsterdam, 21-23 May
2003,
http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/conferences/www2003/.
Web Site Accessibility: Too Difficult To Implement?, Internet Librarian
International 2003 conference, London, 25-27 March 2003,
http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/conferences/ili-2003/accessibility/.
HTML Is Dead! A Web Standards Update, Internet Librarian International 2003 conference, London, 25-27 March 2003, http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/conferences/ili-2003/web-standards/.
Universal Web Accessibility: Is It Possible?, University of Sheffield,
30 January 2003,
http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/seminars/sheffield-jan-2003/.
Approaches to the Preservation of Web Sites, Online Information 2002 conference, 3-5 December 2002, http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/conferences/online-information-2002/.
Benchmarking Web Sites, Taunton College, 26 November 2002,
http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/rsc-sw-nov-2002/.
Planning Your Web Site, Evaluating And Benchmarking Your Web Site and Futures
For Your Web Site, II Workshop on Web Enabling Technologies for Scientists,
11-13 November 2002,
http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/trieste-2002/.
Search Facilities For Local Authority Web Sites, Public Library Web Workshop, 4-5 November 2002, http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/pub-lib-2002/.
Quality Assurance For Web Sites, Public Library Web Workshop, 4-5
November 2002,
http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/pub-lib-2002/.
Making Web Sites Accessible, University Of Nottingham, 7 November
2002,
http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/seminars/notts-nov-2002/.
Web Accessibility, Bristol College, 30 October2002,
http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/jisc-accessibility-oct-2002/.
An Update On Web Standards, University Of Edinburgh, 26 September
2002,
http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/seminars/edina-sep-2002/.
Enhancing access to e-resources. RSC-South West workshop, July 2003.
http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ukoln/staff/e.j.lyon/rsc-sw-july2.ppt
The Common Information Environment - in Context. Common Information Environment Group Awayday, April 2003. http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ukoln/staff/e.j.lyon/rsc-managers-jun03rev.ppt
Enhancing access the Collected Cultural Memory of the South West. SWMLAC Board, February 2003. (With Bob Sharpe)
Tools for the Trade? Supporting Multidisciplinary Research. JISC Committees (JCIE/JCSR) Awayday, December 2002. http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ukoln/staff/e.j.lyon/JISCAwayday-12dec.ppt
Seamless access and distributed development: the RDN Subject Portals Project, JISC Creating Environments for Learning conference, Birmingham, 3 December 2002.
The power of resource-sharing: RDN Subject Portals Project, Internet Librarian International 2003 conference, Birmingham, 25-27 March 2003.
Who is this for? Characterising Audience. Presentation to New Directions
in Metadata conference, Edinburgh, 15 August - 16 August 2002.
http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/interop-focus/presentations/oclc/ppt/audience.ppt
Delivering Heritage to the People - a UK perspective. Presentation
to Vestnord workshop, National and University Library of Iceland, Reykjavik,
29 August - 30 August 2002.
http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/interop-focus/presentations/oclc/ppt/audience.ppt
The MEG metadata schemas registry: architecture and data model. Presentation to Metadata Schemas Registry Workshop for Metadata for Education Group (MEG), University of Bath, 21 January 2003. http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/education/regproj/ws1/megmodel/megmodel.htm
An introduction to metadata. Metadata for Digital Libraries, DELOS meeting, Riga, Latvia,16 April 2003. http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/presentations/delos-lat-2003/deloslat.htm
Institutional portals and the PORTAL project. Presentation to Gateways
to Research & Lifelong Learning event, University of London Library, London,
25 April 2003.
http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/interop-focus/presentations/ull/ppt/ull.ppt
Stakeholder requirements for institutional portals: nobody wants the weather.
Presentation with Liz Pearce to JA-SIG Conference, Denver, Colorado, 10-June
2003.
http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/interop-focus/presentations/jasig/ppt/stakeholder.ppt
Portal Proliferation: Good, Bad, or Just Confused? Presentation to
Opening Doors: web-portals and the historic environment, British Museum, London,
17 June 2003.
http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/interop-focus/presentations/heirnet/ppt/portals.ppt
Overview of the ARCO Project, ARCH-IT Symposium, EVA London 2003, UK, 23rd July 2003, http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/arco/EVALondon2003/arch-it-introv2.ppt
Digitisation to presentation: building virtual museum exhibitions,
Vision, Video and Graphics conference, Bath, 10-11 July 2003.
http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/arco/vvg2003/VVG2003v2.ppt
Metadata Vocabularies and Ontologies, Ontologies & Communications Working Group Meeting, Agentcities Information Day 2, 10-11 September 2002, Lisbon, Portugal
An Ontology Server for the Agentcities.NET Project, Agentcities Information Day 2, 10-11 September 2002, Lisbon, Portugal
Technical overview of the JISC Information Environment, Institute of Physics Publishing, Bristol, September 2002. http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/distributed-systems/jisc-ie/arch/presentations/iopp-2002/
Key issues in access to electronic resources, JISC/SURF/Internet 2 workshop, Oxford, September 2002. http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/distributed-systems/jisc-ie/arch/presentations/jisc-surf-i2/
The JISC Information Environment and eLearning, IMS Digital Repositories Meeting, Sheffield, September 2002. http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/distributed-systems/jisc-ie/arch/presentations/ims-drwg-2002-09/
The JISC Information Environment and VLEs, JISC All-projects Meeting, Nottingham, October 2002. http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/distributed-systems/jisc-ie/arch/presentations/jisc-allprojects-2002-10/
The JISC IE - where next? EDINA, Edinburgh, November 2002.
http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/distributed-systems/jisc-ie/arch/presentations/edina-2002-11/
Tutorial: OAI and OAI-PMH for beginners, 2nd Open Archives Forum Workshop, Lisbon, Portugal, 5-7 December 2002.
IMS Digital Repositories Interoperability, CETIS Metadata and Digital
Repository Interoperability SIG, Milton Keynes, December 2002.
http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/distributed-systems/jisc-ie/arch/presentations/cetis-mdrsig-2002-12/
A brief overview of the OAI Protocol and its potential impact, Open Access: what does it mean for STI distribution? ICSTI/INIST/InSERM Joint Meeting, Paris, France, January 2003. Electronic arts and the Open Archives Initiative, Dutch Electronics Arts Festival, Rotterdam, Netherlands, February 2003.
JISC IE Architecture - external trends and their potential impact, JISC Development Day, London, April 2003. http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/distributed-systems/jisc-ie/arch/presentations/tech-trends-2003/
Machine interfaces to shared services, JISC Portals and Shared Services Programme Meeting, May 2003.
The JISC Information Environment and collection description, UN/WHO HIV/AIDS meeting, Geneva, Switzerland, May 2003.
A service registry for the JISC Information Environment, JISC IE Service Registry Stakeholder's Meeting, Birmingham, June 2003.
What's in a [DCMI] structured value? Cornell University Librarian's Metadata Group, Ithaca, N.Y., USA, June 2003.
The JISC Information Environment (and the Bath Profile), Bath Profile Four Years On: what's being done in the UK? Bath, 7 July 2003.
Introduction to Collections and Collection-Level Descriptions, 9 September
2003 mda pre-conference workshop, Winchester.
http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/cd-focus/presentations/mdaintro/ppt-2000-html/introc&cd.html
Introduction to Collections and Collection-Level Descriptions, 3 June 2003,
JISC RGA training workshop, University of Bath.
http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/cd-focus/presentations/jisc-rga-intro/ppt-2000-html/cdf-rgabr-3jun2003.html
Collection-level description & the Information Landscape: users evaluate
strategies for resource discovery, 30 January 2003, CD Focus Workshop 5, Cambridge
http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/cd-focus/presentations/information-landscape/b-robinson.htm
Collection-level description: tool for the trade or information trade-off?
8 November 2002 CD Focus Workshop 4, Newcastle.
http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/cd-focus/presentations/tool/b-robinson.html
Paper to mda Conference "Common Threads", Birmingham, 6 September 2002 HTML:
http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/cd-focus/presentations/mdathink/mdathink.htm
Content by Shirley
Keane of UKOLN.
Page last revised on:
19-Feb-2004
Email comments to web-support@ukoln.ac.uk