UKOLN Annual Reports
Report for the period
1 August 2003 to 31 July 2004
November 2004
ISSN 1466-2949
UKOLN Annual Reports
Report for the period
|
|
Introduction | A brief history of UKOLN
UKOLN Strategic Advisory Committee | The Director
Policy and Advice | Research and Development
Distributed Systems and Services | Resources
and Administration
Publications | Presentations
Committees | Visitors
During this year, our major organizational goal has been the development of a new three-year Strategy to take UKOLN forward in partnership with our core funders, the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) and the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council (MLA). In parallel, both JISC and MLA have been formulating their new strategic vision statements and each organization has published a document outlining their objectives and tasks for the coming years. The JISC Strategy 2004-06 is introduced by the new Chair, Sir Ron Cooke and reflects and supports both government objectives and the needs of the education and research communities. The MLA document "Investing in Knowledge" presents an over-arching five-year strategy envisioned by the Chief Executive Chris Batt. We look forward to a closer working relationship with both funding organisations in the years ahead.
Reviewing the new initiatives which have been promoted in the past twelve months, much activity has been associated with the UK research process and its associated information base. The Research Councils (RCUK) have published their "Vision for Research" which outlines the new eResearch paradigm. This is underpinned by a distributed computing infrastructure providing high-performance data processing capabilities, together with collaborative technologies to facilitate the growth of virtual organisations across disciplinary groups and exemplified by the eScience applications. Reference to a national e-infrastructure is included in the HM Treasury Spending Review Report "Science and innovation investment framework 2004-2014" and a clear steer is given of the expected directions for the technological support of future scientific research. The report also acknowledges the need to consider the future of scientific publications and open access principles.
The highly publicized House of Commons Science and Technology Committee Report "Scientific Publications: Free for all?" is focused on this theme. It describes the importance of the availability of research findings in the form of traditional articles but also recognises the value of providing access to primary data. The implementation of this latter construct, has the potential to truly revolutionise the scholarly communications process and generate new scientific discoveries in a way which has not previously been possible. It is important to acknowledge that this trend can equally be applied to the arts and humanities as well as to science and engineering, and a new Commission on Cyberinfrastructure for the Humanities & Social Sciences has been created in the United States to explore the eResearch implications for these domains. More locally, the launch of the new Research Libraries Network in the UK is an interesting development which has the potential to contribute to the eResearch agenda.
Looking across sectors at progress in developing a "Common Information Environment or CIE", the CIE Group was launched this year and has begun the challenging process of articulating the common vision of an interoperable network space with shared content and services for learning, research, health and cultural heritage. Various Frameworks, Roadmaps and Architectures have been published which describe the service-oriented approaches to building a knowledge infrastructure.
We must be very clear in our vision of this increasingly integrated and converging landscape which is constantly evolving around us, and ensure that our communications engage the user communities and reflect their diverse needs and aspirations.
Once again we have produced a range of well-received outputs from our services and projects and have listed the highlights below. The diversity of activities is striking and demonstrate that UKOLN is continuing to deliver in the key areas of primary interest to our stakeholders:
As is usual at this point, I would like to extend my sincere thanks to colleagues at UKOLN for continuing to demonstrate their much-valued commitment to the organization and the communities we serve. The quality of outputs they produce is of a consistently high quality and they act as eloquent ambassadors for the organization.
This year has been particularly challenging personally and I thank the team for their support during the times when I was unavoidably absent from base.
During the year we have appreciated the guidance of Professor James Davenport at the University of Bath, and the interest of members of other academic departments and the Library - it is a pleasure to collaborate in this way.
Finally, I would like to thank the core funders JISC and MLA, for their continued support of UKOLN during the past twelve months.
Dr Liz Lyon, Director, October 2004
UKOLN and its antecedent organisations 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.
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 organisation - 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. Collection Description Focus was established and jointly funded by JISC, the British Library and the Research Support Libraries Programme. During 2002 UKOLN continued to expand and widened its sphere of influence and impact through new collaborations. 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 was established and is hosted jointly by UKOLN and the Institute for Learning and Research Technology (ILRT). UKOLN also contributed to recent international standards developments including the Open Archives Initiative and the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative. UKOLN also provided technical support and advice to the New Opportunities Fund (NOF) Digitisation Programme.
In 2003 as a discrete department UKOLN was reorganised 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.
In 2004 UKOLN became a partner in the UK Digital Curation Centre, which will provide a major new service for the community. The other partners in this venture include The University of Edinburgh (lead), The University of Glasgow and the Central Laboratory of the Research Councils (CCLRC). In an agreement with JISC, MLA and DCMI, UKOLN will act as the UK adviser on the technical development and implementation of the Dublin Core metadata standard.
As a partner in the Delos Network of Excellence in Digital Libraries, work developed on varying projects including the organisation of the European Conference on Digital Libraries (ECDL), which is to be held at the University of Bath in September 2004.
In October 2003 Sara Hassen, UKOLN's Events and Marketing Manager left for a new role at the JISC. Natasha Bishop took over the role in October 2003 and now works alongside Sarah Smith who joined in September 2003 as Events and Marketing Assistant.
We also saw the departure of Paul Miller, UK Interoperability Focus, in December 2003 for a new position as Common Information Environment Director at the JISC.
Cora Eley started in her role as Assistant Resource Coordinator in July 2004 to boost the Resources and Administration office after Sally Criddle, Resource and Coordinator and Team Leader left on maternity leave. Jenny Taylor, is now covering Sally's post. Marieke Guy, QA Focus, is also on maternity leave.
In line with the University of Bath'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. Peter Dowdell is now based in Brighton, Monica Duke in Leeds, Penny Garrod in Plymouth. Rosemary Russell is based in London and Amanda Closier in Birmingham.
Our thanks are due to the members of the Strategic Advisory Committeewho have generously contributed their time and expertise in support of UKOLN and all of its activities.
The membership of the Strategic Advisory Committee as of 31st July 2004 is detailed below:
| Chair - Liz Lyon | Director, UKOLN |
| Professor Peter Brophy | Director, CERLIM |
| Maewyn Cumming | Senior Policy Advisor, Interoperability & Infrastructure, e-Government Office |
| Professor James Davenport | Director of IT, University of Bath |
| John Dolan | Assistant Director, Libraries & Information Services, Birmingham City Library |
| Nicholas Kingsley | County & Diocesan Archivist, Gloucestershire Records Office |
| Martin Nail | Research Programme Manager, MLA |
| Geoff Smith | Programme Director, British Library |
| Louise Smith | Director, MDA |
| Alan Robiette | Programme Manager, JISC |
| Ben Toth | Head of Knowledge Management, NHS Information Authority |
| Joe Wilson | Scottish Qualifications Authority |
acting as an agent for knowledge transfer
Much of the focus for this year has centred on developing the new three-year Strategy and accompanying Work Programme which was presented to the JISC Integrated Information Environment Committee in June and approved. Three areas were identified as priorities for the year ahead: the Common Information Environment, digital repositories and the embedding of open standards and metadata developments. As a part of this forward planning, our core work area will expand to include the Collection Description Focus activity and in addition, our political and financial position at the University of Bath has been agreed. As a Head of Department, there has been opportunity to engage in wider strategic planning activities and to continue to contribute to institutional objectives.
In parallel with longer-term planning, Dr Liz Lyon has led a number of current initiatives. The largest of these is the new Digital Curation Centre in which UKOLN is a partner with the University of Edinburgh (lead), the University of Glasgow and CCLRC. Liz Lyon is a member of the Centre Directorate as Associate Director Outreach and UKOLN leads the Outreach and Community Support Programme. As with the setting up of any sizeable distributed service, much time has been allocated to start-up activities and the Centre will have its public launch in November 2004.
We continue to promote the JISC interests in eResearch and the Director has contributed to the new Virtual Research Environment (VRE) Roadmap through membership of the VRE Working Group (part of JISC Support for Research Committee), to two consultation workshops aimed at soliciting the views of the community, as a speaker at the Research Councils Cross ICT Conference and to the Arts and Humanities Research Board ICT Experts Panel.
Connected to the eResearch agenda is the open access debate and in particular emphasizing the importance of self-archiving of data from research activities. Dr Lyon has disseminated outputs from the innovative eBank UK Project on both sides of the Atlantic at both the CNI Task Force meeting in Washington and at the JISC CNI Conference in Brighton. There is also interest in Australia in the outcomes of this project and forward planning for Phase 2 is well underway.
During 2004, UKOLN has also engaged with the new MLA objectives and has sought to re-focus its services to these communities. The Director participated in the 4th International Cultural Content Forum in Banff, Canada and on a more local level, has made significant contributions to the strategic development of the South West Museums, Libraries and Archives Council (SWMLAC). This has been achieved through continued membership of the Board of Directors, through a keynote presentation at the Annual Forum meeting and as a member of the ICT Strategy Steering Group.
UKOLN is a partner in the new EU-funded Framework 6 Programme Delos Network of Excellence for Digital Libraries and is leading the Knowledge Extraction and Semantic Interoperability cluster. The Director has been responsible for the co-ordination of this cluster and has also overseen UKOLN activities in the dissemination work package which has included the production of the Delos Newsletter.
Finally, UKOLN has been occupied with the organisation of a major international conference ECDL 2004 and as Conference Chair, Dr Lyon has had a role in overseeing the development of the programme, production of the proceedings and planning for the event.
influencing policy and informing practice
UKOLN's Policy and Advice team has an outwards-facing remit. The team members seek to disseminate advice and support to our user communities on best practices in the development and use of digital library services.
The areas addressed within the team include interoperability issues and access technologies (in particular the Web) together with sectoral support for the Public Library sector. In addition to these broad areas team members also provide support in more specialist areas including support for the NOF-digitise digital library programme, support in the development and use of collection- level description metadata and in the area of bibliographical management.
The eighth in the series of annual Institutional Web Management Workshops, took place in July 2004 at the University of Birmingham. This event continues to provide an opportunity for delegates to hear about new developments and examples of best practice from the community. Newcomers this year were invited to attend a pre-workshop session on an Introduction to JISC and the Web Community. This session provided a useful opportunity for delegates to hear about the wide range of JISC services and to gain an awareness of the challenges faced by the Web management community and the solutions that are available. Once again this workshop attracted many new members of the institutional Web management community and is regarded as a valuable staff development opportunity.
The issue of standards has also been of particular relevance to UKOLN. The QA Focus Project provided an opportunity to address use of standards in JISC's digital library programmes. Building on this work, UKOLN has been closely involved with a JISC study on standards for JISC's programmes. There has been close working with the team commissioned to advise JISC on the future and UKOLN looks forward to implementing appropriate recommendations.
Since its establishment, UK Web Focus has worked closely with the JISC-funded TechDis service and has run several joint events. This year UK Web Focus participated in an Accessibility Summit hosted by TechDis. The Summit provided an opportunity for a small group of experts to discuss the limitations of traditional views of Web accessibility and to outline some of the key factors in the development of a more sophisticated model which would address the particular challenges of e-learning accessibility. Subsequently a joint paper was written (which also included a contribution from Elaine Swift of the University of Bath's Centre for the Development of New Technologies in Learning) which was accepted for publication by the Canadian Journal of Learning and Technology. The ideas outlined in this paper will form the basis of further work for supporting our communities.
JISC's OSS Watch advisory service is another body with which UK Web Focus is working. OSS Watch contributed to the briefing papers published by QA Focus and ran sessions at this year's Institutional Web Management Workshop. In return UK Web Focus participated in OSS Watch's opening conference. There are close links between use of open standards and use of open source software - and also challenges in the deployment of open standards and open source software within institutions. The invitation to join the OSS Watch Advisory Group will provide an opportunity to strengthen these links.
The pervasiveness of Web services means UK Web Focus needs to manage approaches to engagement with user communities carefully. The approach being taken is to work through appropriate regional groups, including the JISC Regional Support Centres (RSCs) and the MLA Regional Agencies. This year workshops have been held for RSC Wales and RSC Yorkshire and the RSCs themselves, together with workshops for EMMLAC (East Midlands Museums, Libraries and Archives Council) and NEMLAC (North East Museums, Libraries and Archives Council).
UK Web Focus has also been engaging with the cultural heritage community through contributions to the annual national mda conference and the Museums and the Web 2004 conference.
This year saw UK Web Focus address the use of the Web to support collaborative working, including Blogs, Wikis and instant messaging. A high-profile presentation on this topic at the annual UCISA Management Conference was followed by repeat sessions at the HEWIT annual conference in Wales and at the University of Sussex.
A related new area of work has been exploring the potential of the Semantic Web to support collaborative working. UK Web Focus has been examining the FOAF (Friends Of A Friend) Semantic Web application to support community-building for conference participants. Use of FOAF was explored at the Institutional Web Management Workshop and the rationale was described in a paper presented at the IADIS Web Based Communities 2004 Conference.
Interoperability Focus is a national post maintained by UKOLN's core grant. The Focus works across a broad range of issues relating to the development and use of services which facilitate the effective discovery of, access to, and use of digital resources. The Focus is active in a number of areas related to the development of standards, and engages in dissemination and advocacy work to raise awareness of standards and best practice on their use.
The Focus supports the work of the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI) in several areas. During 2003-2004, the Focus continued to chair the Dublin Core Collection Description Working Group and to serve on the DCMI Advisory Board. Contributions were also made to the activity of the CEN MMI-DC workshop, which complements the work of DCMI by developing specifications at the European level; the Focus' effort has been concentrated in the current work on the representation of "application profiles".
Since Spring 2004, the Focus has supported the NISO Metasearch Initiative in its efforts to help library service providers develop common approaches to searching a range of heterogeneous resources from a single interface, and is chairing the sub-group working on collection-level description.
Also at the European level, the Focus contributed actively to the work done within the EC-funded Minerva Project to develop a set of technical guidelines for digitisation programmes. In the UK, the Focus continued to contribute to the work funded by JISC to enhance effective discovery of and access to resources through the development of the JISC Information Environment (IE). In particular, the Focus was active in advising the project led by MIMAS to develop a pilot Service Registry for the IE.
In the area of e-learning standards and specifications, the Focus collaborated closely with members of CETIS, particularly in their work on the UK Learning Object Metadata (LOM) Core application profile. The Focus also supported the development of the draft British standard, BS8419, on the interoperability of metadata systems for e-learning.
The Focus is a member of the UK e-Government Unit's Metadata Working Group, and has been an active participant in the recently formed Technical Metadata Working Group.
The Focus supports the broader work of its core funders in the area of interoperability by sitting on various steering/advisory/review groups for the programmes and projects that they fund and manage.
UKOLN provided an advisory service of technical advice and oversight to the New Opportunities Fund's (NOF) digitisation programme. This ambitious nationwide initiative to create significant, sustainable online resources from across a wide range of cultural sources has seen significant involvement from UKOLN throughout its life. UKOLN has provided a Technical Advisory Service in partnership with the AHDS (Arts and Humanities Data Service) since 2001, tasked with supplying and coordinating advice to the many participants involved in digitisation work.
The Technical Advisory Service (TAS) was wound down in March 2004 (the programme deadline for final completion of the projects). A reduced extension service was maintained until July 2004 in order to support NOF with the final few projects completing their activities The completion of the programme also saw a significant shift in the type of work carried out by the TAS, with most attention being paid to examination of the published work of projects and particularly to assessing their compliance to the published programme standards, a requirement of the grant for all participants. As of July, over 85% of projects had been signed off as fully compliant, with the remainder expected to achieve compliance with revised timeframes. Where several projects were failing to reach compliance with their initial online work, TAS worked with them to help them achieve compliance and so sign off. Material was published on a new section of the TAS Web site called "Compliance Corner".
A good practice guide for digitisation projects has been assembled from a distillation of the best advice and practice generated through the lifetime of the programme.
The Collection Description Focus is a national post established in 2001, and was funded during 2003-2004 by the JISC, MLA and the British Library.
The aim of the Focus is to improve co-ordination 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.
Work on developing the application profile has taken place during the year through the dc-collections@jiscmail.ac.uk email list. It is planned to submit a revised version of the Research Support Libraries Programme (RSLP) collection description metadata schema, created at UKOLN as a collection-level description application profile to the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI).
Two Briefing Papers were published during the year on the subject of The RSLP Collection Description Schema and Model and The JISC Information Environment Service Registry. They are available in hard copy as well as being accessible from the Collection Description Web site.
The second paper in the Case Study series was also published which describes the EnrichUK database. Another two papers have been commissioned and will be published in autumn 2004. The Focus continued to publish a Newsletter every two months, co-ordinated a set of articles on collection description that were published in Ariadne issue 40, and contributed articles to print and digital publications. Presentations were made at the mda conference in September 2003 and the CPI Seminar on 'Joined up resources: local studies through libraries, archives and museums' in November 2003.
The Focus has continued to provide support to various projects, including the COPAC/Clumps Interoperability Project (now completed) and the JISC Information Environment Service Registry.
Collection Description Focus held a Collection Description Schema Forum in February 2004 in London. The purpose of the day was to provide an opportunity for implementers and policy makers to review the progress that has been made in the creation of collection-level descriptions and, in the light of current developments, plan strategies for the future. The thirty-nine delegates included four from the United States. Presentations from the Forum and a summary of the main points raised in discussion have been added to the Web site.
The Tutorial is intended for individual use from the Web site and as an integral part of customised training programmes carried out by the Focus. It uses a modular structure, and initially covered how to plan a collection description database, how to 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. During the year further sections have been added on terminology, schemas, customising results display to different audiences, and the option for users to feed back comments to the Focus.
As part of a public and academic libraries initiative in Bath, a Web page listing all the libraries in the area had been proposed. The Focus advice was that a better solution was to create a collection description database, and to extend this to museums, archives and art galleries; this was agreed as an objective in December 2003.
The Focus agreed to assist the project with guidance on using the RSLP collection-level description schema, overseeing data collection and editing entries. The University of Bath Library offered to host the database on its server and take responsibility for its maintenance in the longerterm, and a member of the library staff set up the structure of the relational database. A programmer was contracted to create the search and results display pages, and a part-time member of the library staff agreed to take on data collection.
Initial contact with collections was made in the early part of 2004, and a seminar was held at the University of Bath for representatives of these collections, where there was positive agreement on participation. Draft entries were created from existing public Web pages to give collections a feel for what the descriptions should contain. These entries were then amended by the collections, and appropriate Library of Congress Subject Headings added. The first entries were added in July, and most entries completed by the first week in August. It is intended to launch the database in autumn 2004.
From the beginning it was planned that the project should use open source software, so that it could be reused, and that the metadata schema, the database, associated search and results pages and subject indexing should all use accepted existing standards. Some interest in reusing the database has already been expressed.
From 1st August 2004, the Focus no longer has separate funding, but will be integrated with other UKOLN policy and advice activities. A work plan for the next year has been agreed, which will include further effort activity on the online tutorial, a review of collection description activity world-wide, supporting further work on the metadata schema, and the completion of the Tap into Bath database.
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 Department of Culture, Media and Sport-funded programme of projects to improve library services to visually impaired people began in 1999 and has been continued into 2004. Following the acceptance of the recommendations in UKOLN's review of National Union Catalogue of Alternative Formats (NUCAF) in 1999, the development of this tool into Revealweb: 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. During the year advice was given on the use of specific MARC21 fields and the MARC21 Holdings format 007 field coding was extended for further types of accessible formats. Additional pages were created for the Revealweb cataloguers help desk.
Data collection and data entry for the Collection Register database, supervised by Bibliographic Management, took place between July and October 2003. Cataloguers at the National Library for the Blind then took on maintenance of the database, and Bibliographic Management carried out training for them in November 2003.
Bibliographic Management visited the National Centre for Tactile Diagrams, at the University of Hertfordshire, in January 2004 to review their cataloguing and advise them on best practice. Advice was also given on creating records that could be exported to Revealweb. The Revealweb union catalogue and collection register was launched in September 2003, and has been promoted at a number of events in 2003 and 2004. Bibliographic Management spoke on Revealweb at a British Library staff development day in November 2003.
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 results are tabulated and analysed and a conflated hit rate produced for the previous twelve months. The hit rate is the percentage of items for which records were found. A second search of the database six months after the original search identifies records subsequently added to the database. The results of this produce the recheck hit rate. The results are available from the UKOLN Web site.
Methods of accessing the BNB files have had to be revised through the year, as the British Library installed its new Corporate Bibliographic System. Since BLAISE was shut down in May 2004, access to the files has been via Z39.50. The various changes, and some continuing problems, mean that carrying out the survey has required more time during the year. It is expected that remaining problems will be resolved in the next few months.
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 to discussions on the usefulness to libraries of the book trade format ONIX.
In January 2004, Ann Chapman was invited to join the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals/British Library (CILIP/BL) Committee on the Revision of the Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules (AACR). The Committee provides the UK input into the revision process, which has just started work on the 3rd edition, which is provisionally planned for publication in 2007.
Bibliographic Management presented a session on the MARC 21 format for cataloguing staff of the University of Bath Library and the University of the West of England Library in October 2003.
Public Library Networking Focus has organised four national workshops which have been held at the University of Bath. The fourth workshop took place on 5-6th May 2004. This event focused on the development of quality e-content and e-services, now that the People's Network ICT infrastructure is in place. The event offered an opportunity to discover what other library authorities were doing in terms of building digital content and electronic services and to hear what some of the key players outside public libraries have to say on topics such as Content Management Systems, award winning Web sites and wireless access in libraries.
The Focus has worked with the Networked Services Policy Task Group which this year has published two issue papers, one on e-Books and one on adaptive technologies in public libraries.
The potential for use of e-books in public libraries has been the main area which has been addressed during the year. Support has been provided for the LASER-funded Co-East project and for several public libraries which are in the process of implementing e-book services. A regular Public Sector News column has been published in the UKOLUG Newsletter (which is now known as eLucidate. (public sector column for about 2 years up to June 2004). Regular columns have also been published in Ariadne. In addition the Focus was on the editorial board for the Program: Electronic Library And Information Systems journal.
The JISC-funded QA Focus Project officially finished on 31 July 2004. The project, which started on 1 January 2002, supported JISC's digital library programmes. QA Focus developed a quality assurance (QA) framework which could be used by projects funded under JISC's digital library programmes to ensure that project deliverables were functional, widely accessible and interoperable. The quality assurance framework was supported by a wide range of briefing documents which provided brief, focused advice on use of standards and best practices in a range of areas including selection of standards, digitisation, Web, metadata, software and service deployment. In addition to the briefing documents QA Focus published a range of case studies which described the approaches taken by projects themselves in the use of standards and best practices.
During 2002 the QA Focus Project was provided by UKOLN in conjunction with ILRT at the University of Bristol. However, following ILRT's decision to refocus on its core activities, the AHDS (Arts and Humanities Data Service) replaced ILRT from January 2003 until the end of the project.
During the development of the QA framework the QA Focus team sought to validate its approaches by presenting its work at several peer-reviewed conferences. This included papers presented at the EUNIS 2003 conference in July 2003, the ichim03 conference in September 2003, the IADIS Internet/WWW 2003 conference in November 2003 and the Online Information 2003 conference in December 2003. In addition a paper was accepted for the ECDL 2004 conference in September 2004.
A series of workshop presentations were given which described how the QA methodology could be deployed. In addition to several workshops aimed at the JISC development community, additional workshops were also held for the UK institutional Web management community, the public library Web management community and at several workshops organised by JISC Regional Support Centres. These additional workshops provided an opportunity for work funded by the JISC to have a wider impact than originally intended.
In order to increase the impact of the QA Focus deliverables, it is proposed to make the QA Focus briefing documents available under a Creative Commons licence, which will allow the documents to be updated, copied and distributed for non-commercial use provided that acknowledgements are given to UKOLN and AHDS. This will help to ensure that the benefits of the JISC funding are maximised and will avoid others having to repeat the work that has been carried out. This should be of particular benefit to sectors such as the museums, libraries and archives communities as UKOLN is well placed to ensure that this sector is made aware of these resources.
UKOLN staff who have been working in the Policy and Advice Team during the year have been Brian Kelly (team leader), Penny Garrod (Public Library Networking Focus), Pete Johnston (Interoperability Focus), Paul Miller (Interoperability Focus until December 2003), Ann Chapman (Bibliographic Management and Collection Description Focus), Bridget Robinson (Collection Description Focus), Marieke Guy (QA Focus, until December 2003), Richard Waller (NOF-digi Technical Advisory Service until March 2004), Amanda Closier (from February 2004) and Peter Dowdell (NOF-digi Technical Advisory Service). Paul Miller left in December 2003 to take up a post as the Director of the CIE (Common Information Environment).
advancing knowledge through research and development
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.
The last year has seen the completion of existing projects and the start-up of new projects. Whilst some projects such as the Open Archives Forum have come to an end, R&D staff are taking on the challenge of new projects such as the Digital Curation Centre and the Delos Network of Excellence. Increasingly, management of projects is located across UKOLN teams, offering potential for staff to benefit from new cross-team groupings.
The R&D team has continued to pursue a number of themes within its project work; namely research into the development and use of emerging metadata standards, open access to data and journal article 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.
The Subject Portals Project (SPP) Phase II was funded by JISC from September 2003 until September 2004. The principle aim has been to provide seamless access to a range of subject-based information resources for users in the UK Higher and Further Education community, and beyond. Phase II has further enhanced the subject portal software developed in previous phases and the 'portlets' will be released as Open Source Software (OSS). All eight Resource Discovery Network (RDN) hubs are participating in this phase: Artifact (Arts and Creative Industries), EEVL (Engineering, Mathematics and Computing), GEsource (Geography and the Environment), BIOME (Health, Medicine and Life Sciences), Altis (Hospitality, Leisure, Sport & Tourism), HUMBUL (Humanities), PSIgate (Physical Sciences), SOSIG (Social Science, Business and Law). UKOLN has continued to provide project management. ILRT at the University of Bristol provides the technical lead.
The three core areas of SPP functionality are: authentication (Athens Single Sign On or local eg LDAP, for non-Athens users), customisation and user data storage. Building on the core functions are the portlets, which include cross-searching (also known as meta-searching), newsfeeds, alerting, and 'additional services' such as e-journal searching. The software complies with the key emerging portal standards: WSRP, the communication protocol which allows portals to aggregate remote portlets and JSR168, the Java portlet standard which has been developed during the lifetime of the project. This means that SPP portlets can be embedded in third-party portal environments, such as uPortal. The project is working with several universities to test deployment within institutional portals.
Each RDN hub has developed a demonstrator subject portal, based on the jointly developed software. User testing has revealed that users are impressed with the ability to cross-search a range of resources in their subject area. Users can search according to a search profile, or they can select resources individually. The search mechanism has mainly used the Z39.50 protocol, but is extensible; OAI has also been used within the project.
At the time of writing SPP is in discussion with JISC about ways of continuing to support and maintain the software. In order to release the software as Open Source, a GPL licence will be issued; this has restrictions on software re-release. There have been enquiries from a number of different organisations interested in using the software.
In late 2003 the Standardization CEN/ISSS Workshop on Metadata for Multimedia Information - Dublin Core (MMI-DC) approved CEN Workshop Agreement (CWA) 14855: Dublin Core Application Profile Guidelines. UKOLN is continuing work with partners within the CEN MMI-DC workshop to formulate a further CWA to cover Guidelines for machine-readable representation of DC Application Profiles. These guidelines will propose a detailed data model as the basis for both human-readable and machine-processable DC Application Profiles. This work draws on parallel data modelling work within the JISC IE Metadata Schema Registry project, and helps us to build contacts within the wider European DCMI community.
UKOLN has continued to provide support to the Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) through the joint production, with the National Library of Australia, of a regular current awareness bulletin entitled " What's new in digital reservation?" In this reporting period, three issues of the bulletin have been produced.
The JISC IE Metadata Schema Registry Project started in January 2004 and runs until June 2005. UKOLN is partnered in the project by ILRT at the University of Bath. Contributing associate partners are the Centre for Educational Technology Interoperability Standards (CETIS) and the British Educational Communications and Technology Agency (Becta). The overall objective of the project is to provide access to information on metadata vocabularies and application profiles used for resource description in the UK learning, teaching and research communities. The project will demonstrate how a metadata schema registry might act as the primary source for authoritative information about metadata schemas recommended by the JISC IE Standards framework. The Registry will be targeted at the spectrum of education communities, aiming to provide a service sufficiently generic to handle schema based on both the Dublin Core and IEEE LOM.
The project builds on work that took place within the MEG Registry Project, funded by JISC and Becta in 2002/3, which developed RDF-based registry and schema creation tools. These tools were readily usable with Dublin Core but less so with the more hierarchical model of IEEE LOM. The JISC IE Metadata Schema Registry plans to re-engineer the MEG software to accommodate the IEEE LOM format, supporting ongoing cooperation between the Dublin Core and IEEE LOM standardisation communities.
A schema registry will allow various initiatives within the JISC IE to publish application profiles in a common registry, making them available to others. This provides a concrete way of encouraging sensible uniformity alongside necessary divergence. It helps avoid unnecessary duplication of effort and supports sharing of common approaches. The project hopes to progress consensus on a proposed approach to registering application profiles, initially targeting the JISC IE and e-learning projects and services. By improving disclosure and discovery of metadata semantics there will be the potential to provide a foundation for richer registry functions (e.g. mapping) that might be developed in future. The main focus of UKOLN's work over the initial six months of the project has been on refining the data models for Dublin Core and LOM application profiles. Also UKOLN has led requirements gathering in collaboration with CETIS, Becta and other JISC projects and services, recently made available as a functional requirements specification. A number of technical meetings have taken place, and various documents have been produced, all accessible from the UKOLN Web site.
Over the next period, development work will carried out by ILRT whilst UKOLN will explore formulating registry policy and usage guidelines. A workshop for schema developers is planned later in 2004. The project seeks contributions from other JISC projects and services as regards input of user requirements, feedback on models, testing of the tools and registration of application profiles.
In late 2003 the JISC announced funding for a second phase of the IESR Project to start in January 2004. Phase I started in December 2002. The IESR is a project over three centres to pilot a registry, a machine-readable catalogue of the resources that form the JISC Information Environment. These centres are MIMAS at the University of Manchester, UKOLN at the University of Bath and the Cheshire team at the University of Liverpool. UKOLN is involved in work packages in the following areas: metadata revision and design; portal liaison; research into alternative models and requirements gathering and evaluation.
The current JISC Information Environment (IE) architecture includes a set of Shared Services, which will act as 'middleware' between the different aspects of the IE, and the IESR will form one of these services.
The IESR will contain service and collection descriptions of resources predominantly within the JISC HE & FE communities and the descriptions will include technical information on how to access the resources as well as descriptive information about the resources themselves. The important difference between the IESR and other online directories is that the IESR is primarily being designed to be accessed by other applications i.e. as a machine-to-machine service, rather than simply as a Web interface for human users.
Portals and other services will be able to use the registry as a source of information about which collections are available, and also as a means of providing direct access to those collections.
In the first phase of the project, metadata formats for agents, collection and service descriptions were devised and published. Data creation guidelines have been written and data has been received from six service providers: AHDS, EDINA, MIMAS, RDN, UK Data Archive and the UK Mirror Service. A prototype database has been built, with Z39.50 and web interfaces. The latter is available from the Project Web Page (Z39.50 connection details can also be found here)
The second phase of the IESR has aimed to bring the prototype Service Registry up to a level of robustness and functionality that will be suitable for a service of production quality. The focus has been on developing the following areas further:
a) Software and metadata: The metadata was reviewed early in the project, in the light of the stakeholder requirements that were identified during the first phase. The functionality of the prototype Service Registry has been extended to support new methods of access to the Registry's own data. Interfaces for the creation and update of IESR metadata records are being developed during the second phase. A research work package, led by UKOLN, is in the process of investigating how IESR metadata could be made available using a UDDI registry. This research package will also look at alternative models for the delivery of the Registry, including RDF and related semantic Web initiatives such as DAML-S and OWL.
b) Content expansion: The pilot phase of the IESR involved the creation of metadata about services provided by the AHDS (Arts and Humanities Data Service), EDINA, MIMAS, RDN (Resource Discovery Network), UK Data Archive and the UK Mirror Service. It is proposed that this coverage would be expanded in the second phase of the project.
c) Evaluation: UKOLN will continue to conduct further evaluation activity during the course of the second phase.
d) Promotion and dissemination: As the IESR moves into a production system, advocacy within the community of potential users of the service will be essential to encourage portals and other elements of the Information Environment to make use of the information within the Service Registry.
The eBank UK Project spans a number of UKOLN's areas of interest: curation, resource discovery and access, institutional archives, the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH), metadata schemas and the wider landscape of scholarly communications. The aim of the project is to illustrate how original and derived data can be managed in an integrated fashion, as the volume of digital data being created increases.
eBank UK was funded by the JISC under the Semantic Grid and Autonomic Computing Programme. The project partners are the School of Electronics and Computer Science and the School of Chemistry at the University of Southampton, and PSIGate, one of the RDN subject hubs, based at the University of Manchester.
Within the first year of funding, eBank UK has made progress on a number of fronts. An OAI-PMH repository has been set up at the University of Southampton. The repository extends the use of Open Archives to the dissemination of experimental research data. It is specialised to support the deposition of data from crystallographic experiments. The eprints.org software was modified to deliver the repository.
Curation of data must include support for discovery services. eBank UK has developed a demonstrator that uses the OAI-PMH to aggregate metadata, and supports discovery both of datasets and related publications. Embedding techniques have been used to integrate the search interface into PSIgate, which has an established user base hailing from scientific disciplines. These demonstrators are useful for learning about different ways in which data can be discovered and re-used.
The discovery of and access to data are underpinned by metadata descriptions. The repository and aggregator have provided a test bed to explore suitable metadata schemas for the description of datasets in crystallography. The role of packaging formats is being investigated. A supporting study on metadata schemas is being published by the project. A second supporting study concentrates on issues of provenance.
Finally, as a project which involves interdisciplinary research, eBank UK is well aware of the challenges of cross-community collaboration. Discussions with various stakeholders were held in a workshop which took place in early August. This was attended by representatives from a number of communities.
It is estimated that using traditional methods, only 20% of the data generated in Crystallography experiments is published. Exponential growth of data in other disciplines presents similar problems. eBank UK is one first step in realising the aim of disseminating and curating data more effectively.
The project is now in its closing stages. The principal objective of the project was to develop a demonstrator of a national service through which the UK Higher and Further Education communities could access the collective output of eprints from UK repositories. This central purpose has been now been achieved.
This two-year project was 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 the OCLC Office of Research. The project built upon the RDN's experience in implementing the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting to share metadata between the RDN partners in order to create the aggregated search facility known as ResourceFinder.
A service demonstrator is also now available. The Statistics option on the website toolbar gives information about the harvested items in the repository and how the repository has grown over time since January 2004. The charts are clickable and present information about the data providers which have been harvested. The number of metadata records is now around 54,000. Approximately 80,000 records are available to us from within the UK, but problematic records (strange use of DC metadata fields, duplicated records, etc.) have been excluded. It is now possible to search over specified repositories - a feature suggested at a number of the five eprints UK workshops held around the UK in 2004.
The project experienced some delays because of a number of staff changeovers. As a result, the investigation of the practicality and usefulness of a number of added services took place close to the end of the project. These services involve gathering both the metadata and full text of eprints (where this is available), and passing it to three external Web services. These include an author authority service, where either additional information is added to the record or the form of the name is validated. The second is the automatic assignation of subject classification to the metadata records. This work is being undertaken with OCLC. The third service involves the parsing of bibliographic references into structured forms, using the OpenURL standard, for the automatic linking of citations. This work has been taking place in conjunction with the University of Southampton. The results of these investigations will be published in the project's final report.
The records, enhanced or plain vanilla, will be made available to end-users in two main ways. The first of these is a central interface, integrated into the RDN's Web pages, which will provide access to all of the harvested and enhanced metadata. Secondly, through the development (now completed) of configurable discovery services that would enable academic institutions and other organizations to embed ePrints UK directly within their own services. The project is providing tools for the embedding of an ePrints UK interface into the eight RDN subject hubs and the Education Portal based at the University of Leeds. These tools should be available by the end of the project in mid-October 2004.
Four supporting studies have been produced in the course of the project, covering important related issues, such as the potential use of the technology in the Research Assessment Exercise, business models and IPR, and collection development. As part of ePrints UK, UKOLN has produced some guidelines on the metadata that needs to be made available by institutional repositories. These provide useful 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 the ePrints UK service and other service provider archives.
Background
Scientists and researchers across the UK are generating large amounts of data through experimental methodologies, simulations and observational techniques. This volume is increasing dramatically with the advent of Grid-enabled applications. The e-Science Data Curation Report highlighted the importance of ensuring that this deluge of data being created in e-science and e-research should remain available and valid for future researchers. In response to these findings the JISC and the EPSRC, through the e-Science Core Programme published a call in 2003 for bids to establish a Digital Curation Centre (DCC) to lead research and development into key areas of data curation and preservation and to pilot the development of generic support services for maintaining digital data and research results over their entire life-cycle for current and future users.
The Digital Curation Centre
JISC appointed a Consortium to set up and run the new Digital Curation Centre for three years providing development, advisory and outreach services to the wider community. The Consortium started in March 2004 (and EPSRC research funding will begin on 1 September 2004). UKOLN is part of the DCC Consortium in partnership with University of Edinburgh (Informatics, Law, Information Services and leading research institutes); University of Glasgow (HATII and Information Services) and The Council for the Central Laboratory of the Research Councils (CCLRC).
The overall mission of the DCC is continuing quality improvement in data curation and digital preservation. The work of the DCC is split into four key areas Research, Development, Advisory Services and Community Support and Outreach. UKOLN is leading the Outreach and Community Support Programme.
The aims of the DCC are to build the Centre and its Associate Network in such a way that research, development, services and outreach interact positively:
Since March 2004 the Digital Curation Centre has been in a start-up phase in preparation for its official launch on 5th November 2004. During this phase there has been widespread dissemination about the DCC including presentations, posters, conference papers and articles. Activity at UKOLN has focused on planning for the official launch.
The Research and Development Team is led by Rachel Heery, Assistant Director
Staffing on projects: Manjula Patel (ARCO, Digital Curation Centre, DELOS), Amanda Closier (JISC IE Services Registry, QA Focus), Michael Day, (ePrints UK, Digital Preservation Coalition, Digital Curation Centre, eBank UK, ePrints UK), Leona Carpenter (Open Archives Forum), Philip Hunter (Open Archives Forum, ePrints UK), Rosemary Russell (Subject Portal Project), Marieke Guy (Subject Portals Project), Pete Johnston (JISC IE Metadata Schema Registry, JISC IE Services Registry), Monica Duke (eBank UK), Rachel Heery (eBank UK, JISC IE Metadata Schema Registry, CEN MMI-DC).
building innovative systems and services based on Web technologies
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. It has been a difficult year for the RDN, with the JISC review of all RDN services meaning that it has been necessary to be very cautious about developing new components of the service. Despite this, a complete overhaul of the metadata harvesting that is used to underpin ResourceFinder (the interdisciplinary search of the RDN) has been undertaken. Version 2.0 of the OAI Protocol for Metadata Harvesting is now being used to harvest records from most of the RDN hub catalogues. This activity has also provided an opportunity to bringer greater consistency across the RDN in terms of the records being harvested. The central database upon which ResourceFinder is based now contains over 100,000 RDN resource descriptions gathered from the RDN hubs using the ARC open source implementation of the OAI-PMH.
A Search/Retrieve Web Service (SRW) interface to ResourceFinder has also been developed. Thanks are due to the Cheshire team at the University of Liverpool who supplied the software that made this interface possible. Announcing the availability of an SRW interface to the RDN on the 'cetis-metadata' mailing list resulted in quite a lot of interest, notably from the LionShare peer-to-peer elearning project in the USA and Canada. As a result of this, UKOLN staff attended an informal information-sharing day between interested parties in the JISC community and LionShare partners.
The RDN-include service continues to be used, though there has been little growth in uptake over the last year or so. It would appear that discontinuation of the RDN Roadshows may be the reason for this. About 35 sites actively still use RDN-Include in their live services. There have been no major changes to the software used to provide RDN-include over the last year. However, work has tentatively begun on offering RDN-Include as a 'portlet' using the Web Services for Remote Portlets (WSRP) specification. This will make RDN-Include available for embedding within institutional portal frameworks such as uPortal.
UKOLN staff have continued to be closely involved in RDN/LTSN partnership activities, providing much of the technical groundwork that permits the sharing of records between the two organisations using the OAI protocol. UKOLN's work on the RDN/LTSN Learning Object Metadata Application Profile has also helped inform the development of the UK LOM Core being undertaken by CETIS. UKOLN staff have also continued to contribute to the UK and international discussions about the use of identifiers (both for learning objects and for resources more generally). An informal collaboration with staff at OCLC produced a proposal for the PURL-based Object Identifier (POI). As part of the RDN/LTSN interoperability work, a POI look-up service has been developed that ensures that the use of POIs becomes more seamlessly integrated into RDN and LTSN cataloguing interfaces.
This RDN Project, funded under the JISC X4L Programme, plans to develop RDN services significantly for post-16 users. As part of the project, UKOLN staff have completed the development of a Web-based tool that allows existing RDN records to be enhanced with FE level, FE subject and FE notes fields. The tool also allows records to be uploaded from FE colleges into the RDN.
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 presentations, tutorials and attendance at various meetings.
UKOLN's work in this area continues to focus on the relationships between the technologies specified in the technical architecture and emerging Web services, 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. As part of this last area of interest, UKOLN staff have been tracking the pilot UDDI registries currently being set up by members of the GRID Engineering Task Force.
This year has seen a significant growth in interest in the protocols and standards specified by the JISC IE standards framework, largely because of external factors such as the NISO Metasearch Initiative, increased institutional deployment of OpenURL resolvers, the widespread use of RSS across all sectors and the continuing growth in uptake of the OAI-PMH. In addition, the year saw evidence of growing convergence between 'digital libraries' and 'elearning systems'. UKOLN staff worked closely with CETIS staff on the development of the E-Learning Framework, a service-oriented architecture for elearning systems, and a view of the relationships between the IE and the ELF continues to be developed. More recently, this work has also been used to inform discussions around the JISC's 'Virtual Research Environment'.
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 130,000 visitor sessions per month. During the year UKOLN staff have worked closely with colleagues in the JISC Executive to encourage the uptake of RSS by all JISC-funded services. This work has resulted in a redesign of the RSS-xpress homepage and the development of some simple help pages about how to use the tool. 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 110,000). DC-dot has been updated in line with the "Expressing Qualified Dublin Core in HTML/XHTML meta and link elements" DCMI recommendation (also authored by UKOLN staff), that was issued in November 2003.
The role of the Web editor continues to be one of supporting work across the UKOLN Web site, with particular emphasis on Ariadne - improving navigation and increasing the use of stylesheets; the DELOS Newsletter, which required building and then re-designing to reflect the newly designed DELOS Web site; and - most recently - the DCC Web site.
As the roles of web and desktop publishing begin to merge, the Web Editor's remit was extended to include the production of a printed version of the UKOLN Newsletter - now newly designed in a fresh, more accessible format. QuarkXpress was employed from scratch for the graphic design and a variety of challenges arose from the imperative of controlling layout driven by the limited space inherent in a printed publication. The result was a 6-page, 4-colour gatefold newsletter including high-resolution images. Content for the newsletter was provided by colleagues across UKOLN and edited by the Ariadne editor. A web version of the newsletter was also produced.
There was a total of 1,558,536 visitor sessions to www.ukoln.ac.uk for period August 2003 to July 2004. This is an increase of 171,860 on last year's figures.
Ariadne issues 37 to 40 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.
During the year Ariadne focused on a range of current themes and while the new editor made a fairly firm policy decision to eschew the currently popular 'themed issue' on the grounds that readers uninterested in the theme chosen would have little to read in that issue, he was prepared to co-locate some articles from the same area of activity, provided unrelated material also appeared.
For example the Magazine moved from its usual layout in issue 38 (January 2004) in order to highlight the information services of benefit to students and practitioners in the Further Education sector from the various RDN hubs, while nonetheless offering a wide range of other items as well. However this form of concession was most apparent in issue 40 (July 2004) where a number of articles relating to Collection Description appeared together, with three articles representing different sizes of project from the small-scale through to the JISC Information Environment Service Registry at the other end of the continuum. Nonetheless an equal proportion of articles covered other subjects such as moves towards library groupware, rights management and digital library requirements, an introduction to the Search/Retrieve URL service and institutional repositories.
The latter topic is in many ways quite representative of the policy more generally adopted with regard to issue content. By and large it is considered a sensible strategy to monitor the topics that are coming to the fore and accept that no one subject will dominate for one issue but will instead tend to re-occur over several issues. In this respect institutional repositories and scholarly publishing would bear this approach out. Other themes such as digital preservation, rights and digital library technologies may have appeared with slightly less frequency but they and other themes have been seen to appear on a fairly regular basis over the past year and indeed further back. The intention is to follow where possible the community's thinking leads while remaining on the lookout for new issues.
While continuing to commission and accept submissions from a broad range of academics and information specialists across the UK and US, as has been the case since 1996, Ariadne does not reject material arising from the European mainland and beyond. It has, for example, covered the findings of the completed The European Library Project, focusing on technical solutions and metadata development, and also PrestoSpace, the new FP6 integrated project for the preservation of fast-disappearing audio-visual heritage.
Other moves over the year have been to increase in a moderate way the number and range of reports of events with a similar objective in relation to reviews. A policy of making publishers more frequently aware of their publications' appearance in the Magazine seems to have paid off as the number of unsolicited items submitted for review seems to have increased over the year. Of course not all publishers will always be delighted with reviewers' findings, but that is the nature of the process. It was also decided to increase the number of items appearing in the Ariadne Newsline quite radically. Most recently these items have been organised into material relating to forthcoming events for the notice of readers and into items more readily characterised as news.
UKOLN's internal and external server machines are predominantly Sun/Solaris-based, though the RDN service and UKOLN's internal development servers are both Linux-based. Office and home desktop machines run Windows NT, Windows 2000 or Windows XP (with about 50% now running the latter). In an effort to streamline the management of desktop PCs within UKOLN, we have begun investigation into the use of the Active Directory system offered by the University computing services. In general, UKOLN staff are highly mobile. UKOLN's trial wireless router in the UKOLN offices has been used to support various meetings as well as being used on a day-to-day basis by some staff. This use of wireless within UKOLN offices is now complemented by the growing availability of wireless access across the campus.
UKOLN has continued to support the University of Bath's pilot eprint archive project. As part of this activity we undertook a short, practical comparison of the eprints.org software and the DSpace software in order to help shape the University's choice of software platform in this area.
The Distributed Systems and Services team consists of Peter Dowdell (Software Developer and NOF Advisor), Monica Duke (Software Developer), Shirley Keane (Web Editor), Andy Powell (Assistant Director and Team Leader), Greg Tourte (Systems Developer), Richard Waller (Ariadne Editor and NOF Advisor) and Eddie Young (Systems Support).
Pete Cliff, who left UKOLN towards the end of July 2003, was replaced by a combination of Monica Duke and Greg Tourte, who both have other roles within UKOLN's project activities.
Breakdown of current funding
The chart below shows the breakdown of income received for the period August 2003 to July 2004.
UKOLN's core activities during the period were jointly funded by MLA (Museums, Archives and Libraries Council) and the JISC. This funding supported UKOLN's activities providing advice and support in the areas of Web, public library networking, bibliographic management, interoperability, event management and its information and communications services, including the production of the online magazine Ariadne. From January, UKOLN's work providing technical support to the JISC Information Environment became part of its core activities. In addition, the funding supported the work of the Director, and made provision for 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: the Digital Curation Centre (DCC); eBank UK; JISC Information Environment Technical Advisory Service; ePrints UK; Fair Portal; Hilt 2; IE Service Registry; IE Metadata Schema Registry; QA Focus; RDNC; Subject Portals Project (SPP); and Enhancing the RDN for Further Education, part of the JISC X4L Programme.
The following projects provided research grant income during the period: DELOS, ARCO, Open Archives Forum and CEN MMI-DC, all funded by the European Commission; CD Focus, funded jointly by MLA, the JISC and the British Library; the EnrichUK Portal, funded by the New Opportunities Fund; and the Revealweb Database funded by the Department for Culture Media and Sport via the National Library for the Blind.
Consultancy income was received from the New Opportunities Fund (NOF) for provision of technical support to the NOF Digitisation Programme and the JISC for work related to the Digital Preservation Coalition What's New Bulletin for the PADI website.
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 2004, held at the University of Birmingham, and the Public Library Web Managers Workshop 2004, held in Bath.
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; and Make Sense of Standards.
It has been an extremely busy but 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 300.
The feedback from delegates has been very positive including comments such as:
"Very interesting, stimulating and inspiring" (Public Library Web Managers Workshop)
"An excellent event" (ePrints Workshop Bath)
"An excellent forum for exchange of views and networking" (Institutional Web Managers Workshop)
The full list of events organised by the Events Team is as follows:
| 4th Open Archive Forum Workshop | Bath, 4-5 September 2003 |
| Open URL Meeting | London, 17 September 2003 |
| Series of five ePrints workshops: Bath, Oxford, Manchester, Nottingham and Edinburgh | February - May 2004 |
| Collection Description Focus Schema Forum | London, 12 February 2004 |
| JISC Terminologies Services Workshop | London, 13 February 2004 |
| Public Library Web Managers Workshop | Bath, 5-6 May 2004 |
| JISC Joint Programmes Meeting | Brighton, 6-7 July 2004 |
| JISC/CNI Conference | Brighton, 8-9 July 2004 |
| Institutional Web Management Workshop | Birmingham, 26-28 July 2004 |
Members of the Resources and Administration Team are Natasha Bishop (Events & Marketing Manager), Ruth Burt (Office Administrator), Ali Cook (Financial Administrator), Sally Criddle (Resource Co-ordinator and Team Leader), Birgit Kongialis (Financial Administrator), Sarah Smith (Events & Marketing Assistant), Jenny Taylor (Assistant Resource Co-ordinator) and Cora Eley who joined in July to work as Assistant Resource Co-ordinator during Sally Criddle's maternity leave.
spreading the word
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.
Ann Chapman
Chapman, A. and Danskin, A.
A new direction for bibliographic records?: the development of Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (part 2)
Catalogue and Index, No.149, Autumn 2003
Danskin, A. and Chapman, A.
Bibliographic records in the computer age
Library+Information Update, Vol.2 (9) September 2004, pp.42-43
Chapman, A.
Accessible formats revealed
Library+Information Update, Vol.3 (6) June 2004, pp.41-43
Chapman, A. and Robinson, B.
Collection-level description: thinking globally before acting locally
Ariadne, Issue 40, July 2004
Amanda Closier
A Quality Assurance Framework For Metadata,
Library Trends (with D. Hiom and B. Kelly).
Michael Day
Preservation metadata. In: G. E. Gorman and Daniel G. Dorner, (eds.), Metadata applications and management, (International Yearbook of Library and Information Management 2003/2004), London: Facet Publishing, 2004, pp. 253-273.
Preserving the fabric of our lives: a survey of Web preservation initiatives. In: T. Koch and I. T. Sølvberg, (eds.), Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries: 7th European Conference, ECDL 2003, Trondheim, Norway, August 17-22, 2003, Proceedings, (Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2769), Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 2003, pp. 461-472.
Integrating metadata registries with digital preservation systems to support interoperability: a proposal. In: Proceedings of the 2003 Dublin Core Conference (DC-2003), Seattle, Washington, USA, 27 September - 2 October 2003, pp. 3-10. http://purl.oclc.org/dc2003/03day.pdf
Renardus: cross-browsing European subject gateways via a common classification system (DDC). In: I. C. McIlwaine, (ed.), Subject retrieval in a networked world: proceedings of the IFLA Satellite Meeting held in Dublin, OH, 14-16 August 2001, (UBCIM Publications, new series, 25), Munich: K.G. Saur, 2003, pp. 25-33 (with Traugott Koch and Heike Neuroth).
The selection, appraisal and retention of digital scientific data: the ERPANET / CODATA workshop. Ariadne, Issue 39, April 2004. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue39/erpanet-rpt/
Improving the quality of metadata in eprint archives. Ariadne, Issue 38, January 2004 (with Marieke Guy and Andy Powell). http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue38/guy/
3rd ECDL Workshop on Web Archives. Ariadne, Issue 37, October 2003. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue37/ecdl-web-archiving-rpt/
DPC/PADI What's new in digital preservation, issues 6-9, 2003-2004 (with Gerard Clifton and Elena Vukovic). http://www.dpconline.org/graphics/whatsnew/
Prospects for institutional e-print repositories in the United Kingdom. ePrints UK supporting study, no 1, May 2003. http://www.rdn.ac.uk/projects/eprints-uk/docs/studies/impact/
Review of: Susan S. Lazinger, Digital preservation and metadata: history, theory, practice, (Englewood, Colo.: Libraries Unlimited, 2001). Journal of the Society of Archivists, 24(2), October 2003, pp. 243-244.
Review of: Mary Beth Weber, Cataloging nonprint and Internet resources: a how-to-do-it manual for librarians, (New York: Neal-Schuman, 2002). Program, 37(4), 2003, 278-279.
An Ontology Server for the Agentcities.NET Project, (Technical Note), October 2003 (with M Patel) http://www.agentcities.org/note/00008/
Delivering OAI Records as RSS: An IMesh Toolkit module for facilitating resource sharing, Ariadne, Issue 37, October 2003 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue37/duke/
A Grand Day Out, Ariadne, Issue 37, October 2003. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue37/public-libraries/
Adaptive technologies in public libraries, Networked Services Policy Task Group, Issue Paper No. 1, January 2004. http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/public/nsptg/adaptive-technologies/
Public Sector News, eLucidate, Vol.1, Issue 1, UKOLUG, Jan-Feb 2004, http://www.ukolug.org.uk/content/newsletter/elucidate_1_3/eLucidate1-1.pdf
2003, 2004: A backward glance and thoughts on the future, Ariadne, Issue 38, January 2004. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue38/public-libraries/
Public Sector News, eLucidate, Vol.1, Issue 2, UKOLUG, Mar-Apr 2004, http://www.ukolug.org.uk/content/newsletter/elucidate_1_3/eLucidate1-2.pdf
The Changing Face Of The Public Library, Ariadne, Issue 39, April 2004. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue39/public-libraries/
Ebooks in UK Public Libraries: where we are now and the way ahead, Networked Services Policy Task Group, Issue Paper No. 2, July 2004. http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/public/nsptg/e-books/
Weblogs: Do They Belong In Libraries? Ariadne, Issue 40, August 2004. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue40/public-libraries/
Shelf Life, Inside HE, Hero Web site, May 2004, http://www.hero.ac.uk/uk/inside_he/archives/2004/shelf_life6606.cfm
Public Sector News, eLucidate, Vol.1, Issue 3, UKOLUG, May-Jun 2004, http://www.ukolug.org.uk/content/newsletter/elucidate_1_3/eLucidate1-3.pdf
Improving the Quality of Metadata in ePrint Archive, Ariadne, Issue 38, Jan 2004 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue38/guy/
Ideology or Pragmatism? Open Standards and Cultural Heritage Web Sites, Ichim03 Conference, September 2003 http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/qa-focus/documents/papers/ichim03/
Metadata futures: steps towards semantic interoperability. In: Diane Hillmann and Elaine Westbrooks, (eds.), Metadata in Practice: a work in progress, American Library Association, Chicago 2004, pp. 257-271.
Metadata schema registries in the partially Semantic Web: the CORES experience. In: Proceedings of the 2003 Dublin Core Conference (DC-2003), Seattle, Washington, USA, 27 September - 2 October 2003, pp. 11-18 (with Pete Johnston, Csaba Fülöp and András Micsik). http://purl.oclc.org/dc2003/03heery.pdf
Dublin Core Application Profile Guidelines. CEN Workshop Agreement (CWA) 14855. CEN European Committee For Standardization, Brussels, November 2003. (with Thomas Baker, Makx Dekkers, Thomas Fischer) ftp://ftp.cenorm.be/PUBLIC/CWAs/e-Europe/MMI-DC/cwa14855-00-2003-Nov.pdf
Delivering HILT as a JISC IE shared service. HILT Project deliverable, October 2003. http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/hilt/m2m-report/hilt-final-report.pdf
Metadata for Harvesting: the Open Archives Initiative and How to find things on the Web (with Marieke Guy), The Electronic Library. Volume: 22, Number: 2, 2004
Review of the Octavo digital edition of William Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience [1794 & 1826]: Ariadne, Issue 36, July 2003.
Metadata Schema Registries In The Partially Semantic Web: the CORES experience. In: Proceedings of the 2003 Dublin Core Conference (DC-2003), Seattle, Washington, USA, 27 September - 2 October 2003, pp. 11-18 (with Rachel Heery, Csaba Fülöp and András Micsik). http://purl.oclc.org/dc2003/03heery.pdf
Metadata And Interoperability In A Complex World, Ariadne, Issue 37, October 2003. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue37/dc-2003-rpt/
Guidelines For Encoding Identifiers In Dublin Core And IEEE LOM metadata, March 2004. (with Andy Powell, Lorna Campbell and Phil Barker). http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/dcmi-ieee/identifiers/
Technical Guidelines for Digital Cultural Content Creation Programmes, April 2004. Edited by Pete Johnston, with contributions from the MINERVA WP4 Working Group. http://www.minervaeurope.org/structure/workinggroups/servprov/documents/techguid1_0.pdf
The JISC Information Environment Service Registry, June 2004, Collection Description Focus Briefing Paper. http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/cd-focus/briefings/bp3/
Ideology or Pragmatism? Open Standards and Cultural Heritage Web Sites, Kelly, B., Dunning, A., Guy, M. and Phipps, A. ichim03 Conference Proceedings on "Cultural Institutions and Digital Technology" (Sept 2003). http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/qa-focus/documents/papers/ichim03/
Developing a Quality Culture for Digital Library Programmes, Kelly, B., Guy, M. and James, H., Informatica Vol. 27 No. 3 Oct. 2003. ISSN 0350-5596. http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/qa-focus/documents/papers/eunis-2003/
Widening the Focus for the Future, Ariadne, Issue 37, October 2003. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue37/web-focus/
Deployment of Quality Assurance Procedures for Digital Library Programmes, Kelly, B., Dawson, A. and Williamson, A. IADIS Internet/WWW 2003 Conference Proceedings. http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/qa-focus/documents/papers/iadis-2003/paper/
An Introduction to Metadata, Metadata Deployment and Quality Assurance for Metadata, IM@T-Online, December 2003.
Improving the Quality of Your HTML, Ariadne, Issue 38, February 2004.
http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue38/web-focus/
Using FOAF to Support Community-Building, IADIS Web Based Communities 2004 Conference. http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/conferences/iadis-2004/
Building Online Communities: The Barriers and the Bruises, Heap, J and Kelly, B. IADIS Web Based Communities 2004 Conference. http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/conferences/iadis-2004/
FOAF: Using Open Standards to Support Community Building, Ariadne, Issue 39, May 2004. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue39/web-focus/
UKOLN Strategy & Core Work Programme August 2004 - July 2007. Submission to JISC and MLA May 2004.
Towards a Typology for Portals, Ariadne, Issue 37, October 2003. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue37/miller/
Knowledge discovery in an agents environment. In: Christoph Bussler, John Davies, Dieter Fensel, & Rudi Studer, (eds.), The Semantic Web: research and applications, first European Semantic Web Symposium, ESWS 2004, Heraklion, Crete, Greece, May 10-12, 2004, proceedings, (Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 3053), Heidelberg: Springer-Verlag, 2004, pp. 121-136 (with Monica Duke).
AMS: metadata for cultural exhibitions using virtual reality. In: Proceedings of the 2003 Dublin Core Conference (DC-2003), Seattle, Washington, USA, 27 September - 2 October 2003, pp. 193-202 (with Nicholas Mourkoussis, Martin White, Jacek Chmielewski and Krzysztof Walczak). http://purl.oclc.org/dc2003/03mourkoussis.pdf
ARCO -an architecture for digitization, management and presentation of virtual exhibitions. In: Proceedings Computer Graphics International, Crete, Greece, June 16-19, 2004, Los Alamitos, Calif.: IEEE Computer Society, 2004, pp. 622-625 (with Martin White, Nikolaos Mourkoussis, Joe Darcy, Panos Petridis, Fotis Liarokapis, Paul Lister, Krzysztof Walczak, Rafal Wojciechowski, Wojciech Cellary, Jacek Chmielewski, Miroslaw Stawniak, Wojciech Wiza, James Stevenson, John Manley, Fabrizio Giorgini, Patrick Sayd and Francois Gaspard).
An Ontology Server for the Agentcities.NET Project. Agentcities Task Force Technical Note, actf-note-00008, 1 October 2003 (with Monica Duke). http://www.agentcities.org/note/00008/
Fourth Open Archives Forum Workshop - In Practice, Good Practice: the Future of Open Archives. Ariadne, Issue 37, October 2003. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue37/oa-forum-ws-rpt/
Guidelines for encoding identifiers in Dublin Core and IEEE LOM metadata, Draft for discussion, May 2004, (with Pete Johnston Lorna Campbell and Phil Barker) http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/dcmi-ieee/identifiers/
RDN/LTSN Partnerships: Learning resource discovery based on the LOM and the OAI-PMH, Ariadne, Issue 39, April 2004 (with Phil Barker) http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue39/powell/
DCMI Abstract Model, DCMI Working Draft, February 2004 (with Mikael Nilsson, Ambjvrn Naeve and Pete Johnston) http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/dcmi/abstract-model/2004-02-04/
Proposals for DC Rights-related Terms, Proposal to the DC Usage Board, (with Stuart Weibel and Eric Miller) http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/dcmi/dc-rights/
Improving the Quality of Metadata in Eprint Archives, Ariadne, Issue 38, January 2004 (with Marieke Guy and Michael Day) http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue38/guy/
Expressing Dublin Core in HTML/XHTML meta and link elements, DCMI Recommendation, November 2003 http://uk.dublincore.org/documents/dcq-html/
Chapman, A. and Robinson, B. Collection-level description: thinking globally before acting locally Ariadne, Issue 40, July 2004.
QA for Collection-level description. With Bridget Robinson MDA Conference Workshop, Winchester, 9 September 2003
Using the RSLP schema. MDA Conference Workshop, Winchester, 9 September 2003
Collection-level description and cross-domain partnerships. With Bridget Robinson CPI Seminar 'Joined-up resources: local studies through libraries, archives and museums', Stamford, 25 November 2003
From analytical model to implementation and beyond. With Bridget Robinson CD Focus Schema Forum, CBI Conference Centre, London, 12 February 2004
Tap into Bath: using collection descriptions in a local context. With Bridget Robinson Tap into Bath Seminar, University of Bath, Bath, 20 April 2004
Tap into Bath: thinking globally before acting locally. With Bridget Robinson Tap into Bath Seminar, University of Bath, Bath, 10 August 2004
Quality Assurance Workshop, London, July 2004. http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/qa-focus/presentations/jisc-digitisation-07-2004/
The OAIS Reference Model: current implementations of the OAIS. Chinese-European Workshop on Digital Preservation, Beijing, China, 14-16 July 2004. http://www.csdl.ac.cn/meeting/cedp/schedule.html
Metadata for preservation. Chinese-European Workshop on Digital Preservation, Beijing, China, 14-16 July 2004. http://www.csdl.ac.cn/meeting/cedp/schedule.html
eBank UK: linking scientific data, scholarly communication and learning. JISC Joint Programmes Meeting, Brighton, UK, 6-7 July 2004 (with Rachel Heery).
Documenting to preserve your data: metadata in support of digital preservation. Beginner's Guide to Metadata, Archaeology Data Service Workshop, University of York, UK, 23 June 2004.
Metadata in support of digital preservation. Beginner's Guide to Metadata, AHDS Performing Arts Workshop, University of Glasgow, UK, 19 May 2004.
Cross-browsing subject gateways with the Dewey Decimal Classification in the Renardus Service (demonstration). JISC Terminology Services Workshop, London, UK, 13 February 2004.
Digital preservation. Lecture for MSc Library and Information Management, Unit 6A: Advanced Information Systems, University of Bristol, UK, 15 October 2003.
Integrating metadata registries with digital preservation systems to support interoperability: a proposal. DC-2003: 2003 Dublin Core Conference: Supporting Communities of Discourse and Practice - Metadata Research & Applications, Seattle, Washington, USA, 28 September - 2 October 2003.
Image metadata: interoperability and exchange. SEPIA Conference: Changing images: the role of photographic collections in a digital age, Finnish Museum of Photography, Helsinki, Finland, 18-20 September 2003. http://www.knaw.nl/ecpa/sepia/conference.html
Preservation metadata initiatives: practicality, sustainability, and interoperability. ERPANET Training Seminar: Metadata in Digital Preservation, Archivschule Marburg, Germany, 3-5 September 2003. http://www.erpanet.org/www/products/marburg/marburg.htm
A survey of Web preservation initiatives. ECDL 2003: 7th European Conference on Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries, Trondheim, Norway, 17-22 August 2003. http://www.ecdl2003.org/presentations.html
Digital preservation - are metadata really crucial? Panel session, ECDL 2003: 7th European Conference on Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries, Trondheim, Norway, 17-22 August 2003.
EnrichUK and the UK's digitisation programme, International Seminar on Digitisation, Lisbon, 11 May 2004.
OAI and OAI-PMH for absolute beginners, Scholarly Communication Third Workshop on the Open Archives Initiative (OAI3) CERN, Geneva, 12-14 February 2004. http://agenda.cern.ch/askArchive.php?base=agenda&categ=a035925&id=a035925s2t4/transparencies
It's a book, but not as we know it: ebooks in libraries, Kent, May 2004. http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/public/present/#cilip-2004
UK Public Libraries in the 21st Century, Bristol, May 2004. http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/public/present/#bristol-2004
Providing a Support Infrastructure for Digital Library Programmes, Online Information 2003 conference, London, December 2003. http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/qa-focus/presentations/online-2003/ (with Richard Waller)
Approaches to Metadata Quality, JISC Usability and Quality Assurance Workshop, 24 November 2003. http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/qa-focus/presentations/jisc-11-2003/
The Subject Portals Project: A General Overview, JISC JCIE Meeting, 18 November 2003 (with Jasper Tredgold). http://www.portal.ac.uk/spp/documents/phase2/presentations/jcie/20031118-jcie_files/frame.htm
eBank UK: linking scientific data, scholarly communication and learning. JISC Joint Programmes Meeting, Brighton, UK, 6-7 July 2004 (with Michael Day).
Delivering HILT as a shared service. JISC Terminology Services Workshop, London, UK, 13 February 2004.
Application Profiles - guidelines for machine-readable representation. CEN ISS Workshop on DC Metadata, Brussels, 28 January 2004.
Application Profiles - tutorial session. DC-2003: 2003 International Dublin Core Conference, Seattle, Washington, USA, 28 September - 2 October 2003.
ePrints UK Demo, JISC Joint Programmes Meeting, Brighton, 6-7 July 2004.
Putting ePrints software into the user community, ePrints Round Table Workshop, Brunei Gallery, SOAS, University of London, June 23, 2004.
A Whirlwind guide to ePrints, ePrints UK workshop, University of Manchester, 22 April 2004.
Overview presentation, CILEA, Sagrate, Milan, 5-6th March, 2004.
The Open Archives Forum, OAI3 conference, CERN, Geneva, 12 February 2004. http://homes.ukoln.ac.uk/~lispjh/oai3-ppt/pjh-12-feb-04-final2_files/frame.htm
The Open Archives Forum OAI PMH Tutorial, CERN OAI3 Workshop, Geneva 12 February 2004. http://agenda.cern.ch/askArchive.php?base=agenda&categ=a035925&id=a035925s2t4/transparencies
A Whirlwind guide to ePrints, First ePrints UK workshop, University of Bath, 6 February 2004.
Community Deliverables from the Open Archives Forum, ECDL 2003, Trondheim, Norway, 18 August 2003. http://www.oaforum.org/otherfiles/OAF-Poster.htm
Guidelines for machine-processable representation of Dublin Core Application Profiles, CEN/ISSS MMI-DC Workshop, Brussels, 23 September 2004
The JISC IE Metadata Schema Registry and IEEE LOM Application Profiles, CETIS Metadata/Digital Repositories SIG Meeting, Liverpool, 30 June 2004. http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/projects/iemsr/dissem/pres/cetisliv/
Collection Description Metadata Element Sets, NISO Metasearch Initiative Meeting,Durham, North Carolina, 22 April 2004. http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/nisomi/tg2/20040422/cdmes.htm
The Dublin Core Collection Description Application Profile, Collection Description Schema Forum, London, 12 February 2004. http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/events/cdfocus-schema-forum/presentations/ppt-2000-html/p-johnston.html
Dublin Core Collection Description Working Group, DC-2003: Supporting Communities of Discourse and Practice - Metadata Research and Applications, Seattle, Washington, USA, 1 October 2003. http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/dcmi/dc2003/cdwg/slides.htm
Metadata schema registries in the partially Semantic Web: the CORES experience, DC-2003: Supporting Communities of Discourse and Practice - Metadata Research and Applications, Seattle, Washington, USA, 29 September 2003. http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/presentations/dc-2003/johnston/slides.html
Quality Assurance for Museum Web Sites, mda 2003 conference, Winchester, September 2003. http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/mda-2003/
Ideology or Pragmatism? Open Standards And Cultural Heritage Web Sites, ichim03 conference, Paris on 10-12th September 2003. http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/qa-focus/presentations/ichim03/
QA for Digital Library Projects, Edinburgh, September 2003. http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/qa-focus/presentations/edinburgh-09-2003/
Benchmarking RSC Web Sites, Edinburgh, September 2003. http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/rsc-2003-09/
The Role of Metadata, London, October 2003. http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/seminars/talis-2003-10/
Quality Assurance for Digital Library Programmes: The QA Focus Approach, London, November 2003. http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/qa-focus/presentations/jisc-10-2003/
Preserving Web Sites, London, November 2003. http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/nof-preservation-2003/
Quality Assurance Workshop, London, November 2003. http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/qa-focus/presentations/jisc-11-2003/
Benchmarking Web Sites, Swansea, November 2003. http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/rsc-wales-2003/
Digital Preservation, Oxford, November 2003. http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/meetings/egyptology-2003-11/
Open Source? No, Open Standards!, Oxford, December 2003. http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/conferences/osswatch-2003/
Accessibility and e-Learning, Oxford, December 2003. http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/oxford-12-2003/
Beyond WAI: Thoughts on Web Accessibility, York, February 2004. http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/meetings/accessibility-summit-2004-02/
Benchmarking Web Sites, Beverley, February 2004. http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/rsc-yorkshire-2004/
JISC Disability Workshop, London, March 2004. http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/jisc-disability-2004-03/
Benchmarking Web Sites, Huddersfield, March 2004. http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/rsc-yorkshire-2004/
Benchmarking Web Sites, Rotherham, March 2004. http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/rsc-yorkshire-2004/
What Can Internet Technologies Offer? Manchester, March 2004. http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/conferences/ucisa-2004/
Using FOAF to Support Community-Building, Lisbon, March 2004 http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/conferences/iadis-2004/
Web Accessibility - Beyond WAI, Leicester, April 2004. http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/conferences/museums-web-2004/
Benchmarking Web Sites, Leicester, April 2004. http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/emmlac-2004-04/
Making Effective Use of Electronic Resources, Portsmouth, April 2004. http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/rsc-se-2004-04/
Implementing A Quality Assurance Framework for Your Web Site, Bath, May 2004. http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/pub-lib-2004/
Accessibility, NOF support and the Lessons, London, June 2004. http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/seminars/net-gain-2004-06/
QA for Metadata, Brighton, July 2004. http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/qa-focus/presentations/jisc-07-2004/ (with Jane Barton)
What Can Internet Technologies Offer?, Brighton, July 2004. http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/seminars/sussex-2004-07/
An Introduction to JISC and the Web Community, Birmingham, July 2004, http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-2004/talks/optional-introduction/ (with Louisa Dale)
Life After Email: Strategies for Collaboration in the 21st Century, Birmingham, July 2004, http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-2004/talks/kelly/
Beyond Web Accessibility: Providing a Holistic User Experience, Birmingham, July 2004, http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-2004/talks/phipps-kelly/ (with Lawrie Phipps)
QA for Web Sites - What Goes Wrong and How Can We Prevent It?, Birmingham, July 2004, http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-2004/sessions/closier/
eBank UK - linking research data, scholarly communications and learning, JISC CNI Conference, Brighton, July 2004. http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ukoln/staff/e.j.lyon/jisc-cni-july04.ppt
Reflections on a changing landscape - information as a consumer utility, JISC Joint Programmes Meeting, Brighton, July 2004. http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ukoln/staff/e.j.lyon/joint-prog%20mtg-july04.ppt
e-Research: Trends, requirements and challenges, Cross Research Council ICT Conference, NeSC, Edinburgh, 17-19 May 2004. http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ukoln/staff/e.j.lyon/crossrc-ict-may04.ppt
Enhancing access to e-resources, JISC RSC South East Workshop, April 2004. http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ukoln/staff/e.j.lyon/rsc-se-22april04.ppt
Realising the scholarly knowledge cycle: the experience of eBank UK, CNI Task Force, Alexandria, Virginia, USA, Spring 2004. http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ukoln/staff/e.j.lyon/lyon-cni-spring04-final.ppt
Moving towards e-Research: some recent trends, JISC Collaborative e-Research Environments Workshops, Edinburgh and Warwick, February/March 2003. http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ukoln/staff/e.j.lyon/e-research-workshop-warwick.ppt
Transformational Change? The potential impact of ICT on Museums, Libraries and Archives. SWMLAC Forum, November 2003 (with Bob Sharpe). http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ukoln/staff/e.j.lyon/transf-change-final.ppt
Introducing Research Grids and e-Science - what's in it for the Humanities? Digital Resources for the Humanities Conference, September 2003. http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ukoln/staff/e.j.lyon/introgrids-drh03.ppt
Knowledge discovery in an agents environment. First European Semantic Web Symposium (ESWS-2004), Heraklion, Crete, Greece, 12 May 2004.
ARCO technologies. Presentation to Italian Museums, GUINTII Headquarters, Florence, Italy, 25 March 2004.
Metadata requirements for digital museum environments. Department of Computer Science seminar, University of Bath, UK, 9 January 2004.
Ontology servers and metadata vocabulary repositories. openNet Technical Meeting, 17 December 2003, Oxford, UK, 17 December 2003.
Overview of ARCO technology. Museums Association Conference and Exhibition (MACE 2003), Brighton, UK, 6 October 2003.
JISC Architecture(s), JISC/DEF Meeting, Bristol, September 2004.
Encoding DC in XHTML, XML and RDF, ECDL 2004 Tutorial, Bath, September 2004.
Metasearching - an overview, BCS Metasearch Day, Oxford, July 2004.
Web Services and the JISC IE, JISC All Programmes Meeting, Brighton, July 2004.
Library Hacks, Public Library Web Managers Workshop, Bath, May 2004.
Digital Library and MLE integration - where are we now and where do we want to be? UCISA TLIG-SDG, Exeter, April 2004.
MetaSearching - a technical overview, JSTOR Seminar, London, March 2004.
Open for Business - Open Archives, OpenURL, RSS and the Dublin Core, Tutorial at UKSG, 2004, Manchester, March 2004.
An overview of the OpenURL, UKOLN/JIBS OpenURL Meeting, London, September 2003.
Collection-level description and cross-domain partnerships. With Ann Chapman CPI Seminar 'Joined-up resources: local studies through libraries, archives and museums', Stamford, 25 November 2003.
From analytical model to implementation and beyond. With Ann Chapman CD Focus Schema Forum, CBI Conference Centre, London, 12th February 2004.
Tap into Bath: using collection descriptions in a local context. With Ann Chapman Tap into Bath Seminar, University of Bath, Bath, 20th April 2004.
Tap into Bath: thinking globally before acting locally. With Ann Chapman Tap into Bath Seminar, University of Bath, Bath, 10th August 2004.
Developing portal services: the Subject Portals Project, European Library Automation Group Meeting (ELAG 2004), Trondheim, Norway, 9-11 June 2004.
Providing a Support Infrastructure for Digital Library Programmes, Online Information 2003 conference, London, December 2003. http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/qa-focus/presentations/online-2003/ (with M. Guy)
ECDL 2004 Conference Organising Committee (Chair)
BIC Bibliographic Standards Technical Subgroup
CILIP Cataloguing and Indexing Group
CILIP/BL Committee on AACR
Full Disclosure Partner Group
Reveal Policy Advisory Group
Reveal Database Management Group
ECDL 2004 Conference Programme Committee
ECDL 2004 Conference Programme Committee (Chair)
DCMI Registry Working Group (Co-chair)
JISC Focus on Access to Institutional Resources Advisory Board
DCMI Advisory Board member
Dublin Core Metadata Initiative Collection Description Working Group (Chair)
Dublin Core Metadata Initiative Advisory Board
e-Government Unit Metadata Working Group
e-Government Unit Technical Metadata Working Group
NISO Metasearch Initiative Task Group 2: Collection Description
Program Committee, ECDL 2004
CC-Interop project Steering Group
IADIS WWW/Internet 2003 International Conference Program Committee
Institutional Web Management workshop Programme Committee (Chair)
JISC Committee for the Support of Research
JISC Fair Enough Project Steering Group
JISC Collection Description Focus Management Board
JISC VRE Working Group
RDN Management Board
BSI IDT Information & Documentation
CURL Resource Discovery Task Force
University of Bath Learning & Teaching Committee
University of Bath Enterprise Education Group
University of Bath I4 Working Group
SWMLAC Board
SWMLAC ICT Steering Group
AHRB ICT Expert Panel
Delos Scientific Board
Common Information Environment Group
NERC DataGrid Advisory Committee
UKOLN Strategic Advisory Committee (Chair)
British Council Knowledge & Information Advisory Committee
ECDL 2004 Conference Committee (Chair)
Dublin Core Metadata Initiative Architecture Working Group
DCMI Registry Working Group
ECDL 2004 Programme Committee
Dublin Core Advisory Board
Dublin Core Usage Board
Dublin Core Architecture Working Group (Chair)
University of Bath Information Services Committee
University of Bath Web Editorial Advisory Committee
University of Bath Acceptable Use of Computing Facilities Committee
ECDL 2003 Programme Committee
DC 2003 Tutorial Track (Chair)
PALS Metadata and Interoperability Working Group
OAI-Rights Technical Working Group
ECDL 2004 Conference Organising Committee
| 23/09/03 | John Blunden-Ellis, PSIgate Service Manager, PSIgate |
| 29/09/03 | Susan Eales, Collections Manager, JISC DNER |
| 27/10/03 | Mike Tedd, Professor of Computing Sciences, University of Wales, Aberystwyth |
| 14/01/04 | David Corney, Rutherford Appleton Library |
| 20/01/04 | Mackenzie Smith, Associate Director for Technology, MIT |
| 11/02/04 | Robin Wilson, Director, Digital Identifier & Metadata Services |
| 05/03/04 | Matthew Stiff, Data Services Unit Manager, National Monuments Record Centre |
| 23/04/04 | Else Nordheim, Library Director, Ostfold University College |
| 05/05/04 | Alan Blunt, Chief Executive, SCRAN |
| 11/05/04 | Neil Beagrie, BL/JISC Partnership Manager, The British Library |
| 12/05/04 | Elaine Peterson, Associate Professor, The Libraries |
| 20/05/04 | David Giaretta, Space Science & Technology Department, CCLRC |
| 30/06/04 | Sean Martin, Head of Architecture & Development, The British Library |
| 13/07/07 | Jerome McDonough, Digital Library Development Team Leader, New York University |
Content by Shirley Keane
of UKOLN.
Page last revised on:
05-Dec-2005
Email comments to web-support@ukoln.ac.uk