UKOLN Newsletter 
My background has been wholly in higher education, working in a range of university libraries and information services and most recently as Head of Research and Learning Support Systems at the University of Surrey where I had responsibility for a mix of innovative development work together with more ‘traditional’ services. The cross-sectoral nature of many UKOLN activities, encompassing cultural heritage, public libraries and increasingly UK government communities as well as further and higher education, provides opportunities for adopting a truly ‘interoperable role’ on the national scene. However, I think it is appropriate that my first six months have been spent largely looking inward at the organisation and its activities, its new position within DACS, the Division of Access and Continuing Studies, and in particular working in the context of the recent Review.
More details on these two initiatives are given below; both have provided significant and valuable opportunities for UKOLN to consider its positioning, organisational culture and values, together with its strategy and plans for the future. I am very much looking forward to leading the implementation of the new Strategy, which will build on the impressive achievements and successes of the past
In January, Resource, in collaboration with the JISC, commissioned a review of UKOLN (the last Review was in 1997) with a number of specific objectives. The work was carried out by a team based at the Information Management Research Institute at the University of Northumbria and led by Professor Mel Collier. A developmental approach was adopted which included a number of structured workshops, a user colloquium, interviews with ‘key informants’ and a questionnaire survey. These activities took place during February and March and involved all UKOLN staff and many members of our ‘customer and stakeholder’ communities. I would like to take this opportunity to thank everyone who took part in the Review for their time and contributions. The formal parts of the Review are now complete and the Final Report has been accepted by Resource. As a part of the Review process, we have developed a new Strategy and Work Programme for implementation during the coming year. We will be working closely not only with Resource and the JISC, but also increasingly with our expanding customer communities to ensure that UKOLN continues to provide an appropriate and valued range of high-quality services and activities.
As always, if you have any comments or queries about anything featured in the Newsletter please contact us.
Face-to-face meetings of the group are chaired by Professor Bruce Royan of the Scottish Cultural Resources Access Network (SCRAN), and work is moved forward on an associated mailing list.
The first notable deliverable from this group is the MEG Concord, announced at the beginning of December. The Concord attempts to capture the key objectives for MEG members, and points to ways in which MEG members can work together in order to improve upon the current situation. By early April, 45 organisations had signed the Concord, including the New Opportunities Fund (NOF), the JISC and the University for Industry (UfI).
More information about MEG can be found at:
http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/education/The event was billed as a management briefing, and covered such topics as what interoperability is and why it is useful, the role of large-scale managed funding efforts such as the New Opportunities Fund’s digitisation programme, collection level description and current e-government initiatives.
Copies of the PowerPoint slides from the day are available at:
http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/events/interop-2000/presentations.htmlThe fourth Institutional Web Management Workshop was held at the University of Bath on 6-8 September 2000. This year’s workshop, Institutional Web Management: the Joined-up Web,was the most popular to date, attracting about 150 delegates. The workshop covered a range of topics of interest to members of Web management teams including multimedia, dynamic content, personalisation, Web design, e-business, Web strategies and general management issues. A report on the workshop was published in issue 25 of Ariadne, see:http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue25/web-focus/
Brian Kelly has given a number of presentations on the subject of externally hosted Web services including talks at the Public Library Web Managers Workshop, hosted by UKOLN in October 2000 (see Public Library Networking Focus for further details). He also spoke about approaches to resource discovery in the UK HE community at the VERITY Conference, New Advances in Information Retrieval and Information Skills Development for Young People, held in Athens, Greece on 30 November-1 December 2000.
At the Internet Librarian International 2001 Conference held in London in March, Brian gave a presentation, ‘Beyond design: advertising on your Web site’. At the same event, in conjunction with Marieke Napier, he ran a half-day post-conference workshop on publishing Web magazines, e-journals and Webzines.
‘Advertising on the network’ was published in Vine, issue 120. This article was based on a workshop session on this subject given at the JANET User Support Workshop held at the University of Cambridge on 4-6 July 2000.
Presentations given by Web Focus can be viewed on the Web site.
The Advisory Service Web site is at:
http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/nof/support/intro.htmIn October 2000, the second annual workshop for Public Library Web Managers was held at the University of Bath. Over 40 public library Web officers attended the workshop, which ran for three days. The aim of the workshop was to bring public library Web site managers together to give them an opportunity to share their experiences, learn about some of the tools that are available to assist with the creation and maintenance of sites and to hear about future Web developments. Like the previous year the emphasis was on the practical aspects of Web site management. Highlights of the workshop included case-studies from three successful public library Web site developers, an introduction to the Data Protection Act, a guide to accessibility and a very damp and cold open-top bus tour of Bath. A full report of the workshop has been published in issue 26 of Ariadne. Presentations given at the workshop are available at: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/public/events/managing/
A feasibility study for the project, funded by the British Library Cooperation and Partnership Programme (BLCPP), was carried out between May and August 2000 by a team from UKOLN, the Royal National Institute for the Blind, the National Library for the Blind together with an independent library systems consultant. A report was submitted to BLCPP and the Reveal Development Steering Group and the recommendations and implementation plan accepted.
UKOLN will continue to contribute to work on Reveal, with the current focus on developing a bibliographic standard for the database, supporting work for the retrospective conversion project, and addressing issues related to the requirement for fiction indexing.
Together with Helen Brazier of the National Library for the Blind, presentations about the Reveal project were made at a British Library project showcase day on 17 October 2000 and at the first International Conference on Tactile Diagrams and Maps, at the University of Hertfordshire, 9-10 October 2000.
Then in 2000, an opportunity arose to offer the pilot study as a dissertation topic for the MA course of the Department of Library and Information Science at Loughborough University. It was selected by student Owen Massey, who carried out the pilot study in June 2000 using the University of Bath Library, with kind permission of the Librarian, Howard Nicholson. Technical and other support was given by library staff members Gavin Rea, Ann Cox and Diana Gibney.
The dissertation concluded that the technique was effective in picking up errors in descriptive cataloguing but less sound for name and subject headings. A simplified technique was proposed, reducing the amount of detail to be recorded, and a recommendation made that the audit be considered just one tool for evaluating catalogue quality. The next stage is for UKOLN to revise the audit tool and make it available via the Web site for other libraries to use.
‘Auditing catalogue quality by random sampling’, by Owen Massey, MA dissertation August 2000, is available from the Department of Library and Information Science at Loughborough University.
Taking these business issues into account, Leona Carpenter produced an initial version of the technical architecture for the broker service. The technical architecture is based on functional requirements for the broker, the emerging Renardus data model, and reviews of existing broker architectures and relevant technology standards and protocols that were carried out earlier within the project. The chosen architectural solution will support resource discovery by searching and browsing within a single, browser-based user interface across distributed Renardus databases via a Web-to-Z39.50 broker. The databases and database servers will be set up and maintained by individual gateways or clusters of gateways, according to agreed interoperability guidelines including an agreed data model. The architecture will also support access to a directory of descriptions of the participating subject-based gateways, built on harvested metadata and providing a basis for choosing a subset of gateways for cross-searching (an ‘information landscape’) as well as links to the gateways for end- users who require the specialist search and other services they provide.
Figure 1: The Renardus technical
architecture
As part of Renardus, Michael Day has been working on the project’s attempt to provide browse access to the content of participating gateways. Gateways currently use a wide range of different subject schemes to give access to their resources and the challenge for Renardus is to create browse structures that can link all of these to a single scheme. The general scheme that has been chosen for this within the project is the Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC). Participating gateways will be expected to map the DDC to their own browse structures. In order to facilitate this process, the project has set up a small working group to co-ordinate this work and to prepare some guidelines. In addition, a mapping tool has been adapted to facilitate the relevant workflow.
An alpha version of the pilot Renardus broker is being tested by project partners including UKOLN, and UKOLN staff have contributed to the evolving design of the user interface. Renardus is funded under the EU User-friendly Information Society Programme, so it is clear that careful attention must be given to meeting usability requirements. UKOLN has worked with the University of Bath HCI (Human–Computer Interaction) Group to survey a small group of potential Renardus users to determine their approach to typical information searching activities. Scenarios based on the survey results were then used to observe users carrying out searches. These observations are being abstracted as task models represented as activity diagrams, and it is envisaged that these will be useful in validating Renardus use case scenarios and devising test models for the evaluation of the broker pilot.
More information about Renardus is available at:
http://www.renardus.org/
This foundational work was carried out within two workpackages, Subject Gateway Requirements and Technology Review. The Institute for Learning and Research Technology (ILRT) leads the Subject Gateway Requirements workpackage. Its objective is to ensure that the IMesh Toolkit architectural and technical strategies are well-grounded in documented needs and practical requirements of subject gateways, not only those of the present, but also for the future. The requirements review is informed by the literature as well as by direct contact with the subject gateway community, through mailing lists and case-studies of subject gateways. This review provides scope and prioritisation for technical activities of the IMesh Toolkit project to ensure the relevance and usefulness of the IMesh toolset and interface. A draft report of a literature review prepared in this workpackage by ILRT is linked from the Web site. ILRT has also made available a searchable database of IMesh community participants, which is available at:
http://swordfish.rdfweb.org/discovery/2001/01/imesh/This database helps to identify the community of subject gateway developers with whom the IMesh Toolkit project can consult particularly for requirements gathering and feedback. You may generate an RDF description (follow the links from the Web page) to add yourself or your organisation if you wish to be included in this database. We hope to publish the final results of this workpackage shortly.
UKOLN led the Technology Review workpackage. Although this was an internal deliverable, the output is published on the project Web site. Reviews of a number of protocols and standards are available, including the well-established Z39.50 and LDAP, together with younger candidates such as SOAP and the Open Archives Initiative. Although nearing completion as a workpackage, we shall be following developments for the standards within the project and we hope to be able to update the Web page accordingly. A software-comparison report, which had been prepared for ROADS, has been updated and refocused for IMesh. Further information is available at:
http://www.imesh.org/toolkit/work/tech_review/With these latest additions, the IMesh Toolkit project Web site now contains several areas of information; it also gives contact details and makes available project documentation to interested parties.
Besides the redesign and expansion of the Web site, other dissemination effort by UKOLN included the presentation of a poster at the fourth Institutional Web Management Workshop, held at the University of Bath in September, and attendance at a JISC 5/99 all-projects meeting in Manchester in November, which provided an opportunity to gain familiarity with a number of UK learning and teaching infrastructure projects. The projects form part of the DNER development programme and range from those which are producing catalogues of digitised material to others which will be producing software of interest to the IMesh Toolkit project. We intend to work towards closer collaboration with these projects.
We shall attend the UK Synthesis meeting for participants in the JISC/NSF Digital Library Initiative. The meeting is organised by the DNER and will be held at the University of Bath on 24–25 May 2001.
The above-mentioned workpackages have now laid the foundations so that future effort will centre on designing a suitable architecture and identifying components for re-use or development, within an interoperable framework. The IMesh Toolkit project can be contacted at:
Imesh-toolkit@imesh.org and the IMesh Web site is available at: http://www.imesh.org/toolkit/ Return to Contents
Manjula Patel - Research and
Development Officer
The SCHEMAS project is funded as
part of the EU’s Information Society Technologies (IST) Programme. Work began on the
project at the beginning of February 2000 and is scheduled to run until December 2001.
SCHEMAS provides a forum for metadata schema designers involved in projects under the IST Programme and national initiatives in Europe. The project is a supporting measure and intends to inform schema implementers about the status and proper use of new and emerging metadata standards. It is developing good-practice guidelines to facilitate use of standard metadata formats in local implementations, and to find a way for extensions to schemas and local practices to be shared for re-use. The project is experimenting with metadata registries to support these aims. The project has three partners, PriceWaterHouse-Coopers (PwC), UKOLN and the German National Research Centre for Information Technology (GMD), with PwC taking the role of co-ordinator.
Work has progressed on the development of a schema registry. The DESIRE prototype has been very useful in providing context and in forging the concepts relating to ‘application profiles’. Early investigation of what is happening in real implementations led to an article in Ariadne, see
http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue25/app-profiles/ in which the idea of application profiles was introduced. Much interest in the idea came from implementers and domain specific communities looking to share experience of their use of metadata. Development and use of application profiles was a major theme in the DC-8, the eighth International Dublin Core Metadata Workshop in Ottawa in October 2000. A number of DC domain specific working groups are now developing application profiles appropriate for their communities of use.The original intention of the SCHEMAS project was to implement a simple HTML registry, for example the prototype now available on the Web site at:
http://www.schemas-forum.org/registry/However as work has progressed expectations have risen and we now intend to develop a registry based on RDF schemas which will enable automatic harvesting of schemas in the form of application profiles, as well as support internationalisation. The Extensible Open Registry software (named EOR and based on RDF schemas) has recently been installed on a machine at UKOLN. We shall run and maintain the main registry while GMD will investigate issues relating to multilinguality on its installation of the EOR. We are currently working on the datamodel for the registry.
The second SCHEMAS workshop (there will be four in all) took place at the end of November in Bonn. The theme for this workshop was ‘Publishing and sharing your metadata application profile’. Approximately 40 people attended the workshop, and it provided a very useful forum for the discussion of issues relating to application profiles, metadata registries and interoperability. The workshop took the form of introductory presentations followed by several case-studies (EULER, DCMI-Education, MathNet and EIONET) which served to raise various issues. The programme with presentations and other materials is available on the project Web site at:
http://www.schemas-forum.org/The project’s first review took place the day before the workshop started. The review was positive and recognised progress and achievements made to date. The reviewers felt that plans for provision of training materials needed to be revised to provide targeted information for particular audiences on the Web site rather than training material as such.
Three Metadata Watch reports and a Standards Framework report have been published. Feedback and comments indicate that these have proven to be useful to many people. A glossary and an interim HTML registry are also available, as well as links to other related projects.
Recent presentations given related to SCHEMAS work include
‘Modular management of complexity: application profiles’, given by Rachel Heery on 4 October 2000 at DC-8, the eighth International Dublin Core Metadata Workshop, which is available at:
http://uk.dublincore.org/workshops/dc8/applicationprofiles/
At present, we are organising the third SCHEMAS workshop, Managing Schemas in a Multilingual Semantic Web, due to take place in Budapest, 10–11 May 2001. The workshop will once again be preceded by a review of the project. The call for participation can be found on the project Web site at:
http://www.schemas-forum.org/workshops/ws3/ Return to Contents
Bridget Robinson -
Research Officer
The Agora project has had a very
busy period since the last update in July 2000. Case-studies were undertaken at the
library associate sites during the summer months. The reports have now been completed and
submitted to the Agora board. The case-studies covered four major aspects of users’
experience of interacting with Agora: the creation and use of information landscapes; the
utility of collection level descriptions (CLDs) as resource metadata; user reaction to,
and use of, cross-domain searching; and the use of interlending as a document delivery
mechanism within Agora. The main conclusions to be drawn from the case-study work are as
follows:
Information landscapes are a crucial part of the building blocks for the Hybrid Library Management System (HLMS), however they have proven both challenging to explain to users and difficult to tailor to meet the variety of user expectations. Release 2 of Agora will go some way to resolving this, but there needs to be more research into the best way to meet users’ requirements.
There are no firm conclusions to be drawn from the use of CLDs in the Agora HLMS. However, there is evidence to indicate that CLDs need to be fuller and richer, providing more detailed information about each separate resource in order to enable enhanced searching across CLDs for the purpose of resource discovery.
Users were enthusiastic about the possibilities offered by cross-domain searching and were generally pleased with the resources available. However, users clearly identified additional resources that they would like to see incorporated in any future iteration of the hybrid library. Prominent among these resources were Internet search engines and commercial booksellers. Development work by Fretwell Downing has now moved this forward so that non-Z39.50 targets can be added including services such as Amazon and Altavista.
It is crucial to ensure that resources made available within Agora are high-quality, reliable and well targeted to meet users’ expectations. This is critical to the success of any HLMS, particularly as the number of resources available increases.
The examination of interlending offered evidence that users strongly agree with the further integration of document delivery with the discovery and searching of resources. The basic interlending functionality offered to users within Agora was almost unanimously felt to be superior to the current system.
The real achievement of the Agora project to date has been the delivery of a working HLMS for the case-studies. This has offered users a unique opportunity to inform and shape the future development of the hybrid library. The case-studies have shown that the users have embraced the concept and are ready for an operational HLMS. There is eagerness to move forward and impatience that present systems, including Agora, cannot yet fully deliver the vision that the users themselves already possess.
Further case-studies are now being planned for April–May 2001. These will use the vastly superior second release of Agora and will build on the important lessons learned from the first studies. The Agora project will finish in July 2001 but many aspects of the Agora HLMS will be incorporated into software from Fretwell Downing Informatics, named ZPORTAL, due for release later this year.
Robin Murray, FDI Managing Director, believes that projects like Agora are important to the viability of developing commercially available, supported software solutions. ‘FDI has always valued its partnerships with R&D projects. Through our work with Agora, and other similar projects around the world, we have developed a much better understanding of how HLMS environments need to operate in practice. This knowledge has been invaluable to the development of our ZPORTAL solution.’
In order to disseminate information about the project to the wider community, Agora has participated in three Hybrid Library workshops - organised by UKOLN and supported by the DNER. The first was held in November at the British Library. Lynne Brindley, Chief Executive of the British Library, gave the keynote address. This was followed by an overview of the Hybrid Library Programme, and then individual presentations by each of the five projects: Agora, BUILDER, HeadLine, HyLiFe and MALIBU. Four of the projects provided practical workshop sessions in the afternoon. The day finished with a session from Stephen Pinfield entitled ‘The hybrid library and the DNER’.
The event was heavily oversubscribed, so two further days were organised for February 2001. The first was held on 20 February at Manchester Metropolitan University (MMU) and the second on 27 February at the University of Edinburgh Library. The days followed the same format as the British Library event, but had the advantage of being able to offer hands-on workshop sessions in the afternoon. Colin Harris, University Librarian at MMU, gave the opening address in Manchester and Bruce Royan, Chief Executive of SCRAN (Scottish Cultural Resources Access Network), in Edinburgh. All the events were very well received.
An Agora demonstrator is now available at:
http://hosted.ukoln.ac.uk/agora/
Michael Day - Research Officer
The Cedars project is an
eLib-funded project aiming to investigate issues and develop practical exemplars relating
to the long-term preservation of digital materials.
The Cedars Conference, Preservation 2000, was held in York on 7-8 December 2000. The conference, supported by the Joint Information Systems Committee, the Research Libraries Group and OCLC Online Computer Library Centre, was organised by UKOLN. It brought together over 150 people from all over the world (chiefly Europe, North America and Australia) to share information about ongoing projects and initiatives and to discuss current issues. In conjunction with the conference, a workshop entitled ‘Information infrastructures for digital preservation’ was held at the same venue on 6 December. The workshop concentrated on the metadata issues and included a report from the joint OCLC/RLG Working Group on Metadata for Digital Preservation. Links to papers and presentations delivered at the conference and workshop are linked from the Cedars project Web page at:
http://www.leeds.ac.uk/cedars/A review of the conference and workshop is available in Ariadne at:
http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue26/metadata/The Cedars project was originally scheduled to finish early this year (March 2001). Funding of an additional year has now been agreed with the JISC. The project extension will enable scalability testing of the Cedars demonstrator; some continued work on preservation metadata standardisation; and the organisation of some workshops dealing with collection management issues (in co-operation with the JISC’s Digital Preservation Focus activity and the Arts and Humanities Data Service). Michael Day has been invited to join the OCLC/RLG Working Group on Metadata for Digital Preservation which is co-operating closely with the CEDARS project.
Return to Contents
Rosemary Russell - Research Officer
HILT (HIgh Level Thesaurus
project) is a one-year project which began in September 2000, funded by RSLP and the JISC.
The lead partner is the Centre for Digital Library Research at Strathclyde University,
with UKOLN as the second main partner. Other partners are OCLC, MDA, National Council on
Archives, National Grid for Learning (Scotland), Scottish Library and Information Council
(SLIC) and Scottish University for Industry (SUfI).
The aim is to research, document and make recommendations on how to facilitate cross-searching and browsing by subject across a wide range of communities and services. These may include archives, libraries, museums, the DNER, RDN and other Web information services and initiatives. A key element of the project is attempting to reach a community consensus on potential solutions.
Groups of stakeholders representing different areas of interest (archives, government, libraries, museums, services and relevant projects) were identified and asked to participate in the project. A questionnaire was distributed to each stakeholder in November, with responses received in December. The questionnaire was designed to gather information about types of resource held by stakeholders, subject schemes currently in use, the types of access available to users (e.g. Z39.50) cross-searching requirements, and any perceived problems and issues. The project has also been collecting hypotheses from steering group and management group members, on how a high level thesaurus might operate. Analysis of the results is underway.
UKOLN is also carrying out a survey of user interfaces to thesauri and other subject terminologies. The survey is focusing on examining working systems that are available on the Web, for ease of access. A large number of schemes of different types have been identified in the review; a smaller cross-section will be examined in detail, hopefully from across the sectors of libraries, museums and archives. Both UK and international schemes are included. The study will liaise with the Renardus project research on browsing across subject gateways using DDC.
A workshop will be held on 19 June at Glasgow Caledonian University to seek feedback on progress to date. Anyone who would like to contribute to the project outcomes and recommendations is welcome to participate.
Further details are available on the Web site at:
http://hilt.cdlr.strath.ac.uk/ Return to Contents DNER Collections Subject Mapping Rosemary Russell - Research Officer UKOLN is working together with Verity Brack at the University of Sheffield on a subject mapping exercise for the DNER. The work began in November 2000 and is due to be completed by the end of March 2001. The aim is to gather information about all current DNER collections from disparate sources into a ‘master list’, thereby providing a working tool for analysis and collection development. It involves assigning subject headings to each collection, based on a controlled list of DNER subject categories. This will make it easier to identify gaps in current collecting areas.A data structure was designed to hold the collection information based on the RSLP collection description schema. Several additional attributes were included, in order to accommodate specific requirements; otherwise the structure and attribute semantics closely follow the RSLP original. The data provided was fairly sparse, but records include information such as access conditions and subscription requirements. In addition to subject headings, resource ‘types’ are also being assigned for each collection, again from a DNER controlled list.
One of the key issues arising is granularity: many of the collections contain a large number of sub-collections, which in turn may contain further sub-collections. Deciding the appropriate level(s) to record particular collections is not always straightforward. A balance needs to be struck between optimum usefulness and feasibility. Also, some JISC services provide access to additional resources which are not ‘licensed’ by the DNER, but which nonetheless make up a valuable part of their overall ‘collection’; again, a line has to be drawn. The resource created may eventually be made available to end-users with an appropriate Web interface.
Reveal Collections Register Richard Waller - Software Developer This work on collection level descriptions is funded by Resource as part of the Reveal initiative to improve library and information services to visually impaired people. It will bring together information about collections of materials in accessible formats held by more than 230 organisations in the UK. UKOLN, in partnership with Samsara Research, is developing a Web-based collection register based on the RSLP collection description schema. Users will be able to search for collections that hold materials of interest to them in their preferred format, and find information on how to contact them. Organisations will be able to edit their own entry via a Web form so that details are kept up to date. Additionally, the Reveal service will use the register for housekeeping data about each organisation’s participation in the Reveal project. The search page, results display and the Web entry form will be designed with accessibility for visually impaired users in mind.UKOLN has been in discussion with Reveal partners about the nature and description of elements in a schema for collection level descriptions and the element set will be based largely on the RSLP collection level description schema. Input of descriptions will be possible by means of an initial version of the Web entry form. End users’ searches will be supported by controlled indexing terms and text word searching. Entries will include data on the likely audience for particular collections, the number of titles held, individual and group membership conditions and charges, contact details and how organisations will contribute bibliographic records to the Reveal Union Database.
Return to ContentsWork on a ‘packaged tool’ for creating and storing RSLP project records has been carried forward based on preparatory work undertaken by Andy Powell. This simple system for managing collection level descriptions is in the final phase of development and testing in partnership with Samsara Research. It is based on an MS Access database and the layout closely reflects the organisation of the schema, dividing as fields into Collection elements, Subject elements, Agent elements and External Relationships.
There is a user-friendly interface, for example data already entered appears in a selection list in case it can be re-used. In addition to documentation planned to accompany these distributed databases, each field in the data entry screen possesses a rollover-type label which gives on-screen advice as to the nature of the field’s anticipated content and, where appropriate, even suggested syntax for the entry. The RSLP CLD tool also offers a facility for exporting collection descriptions in RDF syntax. In the future, this will provide an opportunity for RSLP projects to build a combined RDF-based database for searching across the combined RSLP collection descriptions.
The RSLP tool is currently being tested by selected RSLP projects, and we hope to make it available soon for downloading from the UKOLN Web site.
The project is concerned with the virtual representation and manipulation of cultural objects. UKOLN’s major role will involve the co-ordination of requirements from various museums and technical advice relating to metadata and XML.
Issue 26 marked the wind down of the eLib Programme after five years, with reviews of several of the Hybrid Library projects. This issue of Ariadne contained a retrospective personal overview by the Programme Director, Chris Rusbridge. There was also a review of the CLUMP projects; and Brian Kelly (UK Web Focus) used SiteServer tools to survey the whole range of eLib project Web sites. Lorcan Dempsey and Stephen Pinfield contributed an overview of the DNER, effectively opening our coverage of the Programme.
Several UKOLN staff members contributed to Ariadne 26, including Michael Day, who wrote an excellent review of the Preservation 2000 Conference in York (December), jointly organised by UKOLN, the Research Libraries Group (RLG) and OCLC. Sarah Ormes provided two substantial items - one of which looked at the e-book from a public libraries perspective. Bridget Robinson collaborated with David Palmer of UEA on a review of user case-studies for the AGORA project. Reflecting the changing interests of the community, Ariadne ran two articles looking at both the requirement for e-commerce technology in the UK HE sector (Andrew Aird), and the Microsoft Siteserver products which might be used to set up such services
(Brett Burridge).
Ariadne continues to tailor itself to the requirements of its users: issue 26 features our third questionnaire, and the results of this survey, as before, will be fed into the commissioning process. Ariadne’s access statistics continue to climb, and are very nearly double what they were a year ago. The average number of user sessions per day, for the period July–December 2000, was 1,450; in October 2000 we received over 540,400 hits to the site.
All seven issues of Exploit Interactive Web magazine have now been produced. The final issue was published on 16 October 2000 and included a number of review articles on the project. During its life-span Exploit Interactive has covered 32 Telematics for Libraries projects and contained 137 articles, including news and editorials, written by 102 individual authors. The magazine received 67,369 visitor sessions between 23 April 1999 and 30 October 2000, an average of 121 visitors a day.
More recently a database has been added to the site allowing users to obtain lists of articles or authors. The database can be found at:
http://www.exploit-lib.org/database/The final report on the Exploit Interactive Web magazine is now available from the home page at:
http://www.exploit-lib.org/
Exploit Interactive
Database
Marieke Napier - Information
Officer and editor of Cultivate Interactive
Issue 4 of Cultivate
Interactive, UKOLN’s pan-European Web magazine for the digital heritage and
cultural content communities, is due to be published on 7 May 2001. The format
is similar to that of its predecessor, Exploit Interactive, but it covers the
broader digital cultural heritage remit. The feature articles in the magazine either
detail relevant projects or focus on issues that will arise for projects submitting
proposals. Areas that have been and will be covered include eurospeak, intellectual
property rights, current trends and policy in the cultural heritage field, available
technologies and sources of information.
Project articles to date have included a guide to the HEREIN project, which monitors heritage policies, an exploration into the symbiosis between content and technology by the Perseus digital library team, and an outline of the concept of application profiles on the SCHEMAS project. More general articles have dealt with using graphics on the Web, giving presentations at conferences and recent calls for proposals - a piece was written for Cultivate Interactive by Bernard Smith, Head of the Cultural Heritage Applications Unit of the European Commission. There have also been a number of pieces on the theme of machine translation including an article by one of the top translation software distributors, WorldLingo.com. Although the majority of articles cover projects or services, opinion pieces on the current trends in the digital cultural heritage field are very welcome and readers are encouraged to email in any comments they have.
Cultivate Interactive has received widespread dissemination since its launch giving it a high public profile within the digital heritage and cultural content communities from the onset. Poster displays on the magazine and the Cultivate project have been given at events such as EVA 2000; additional presentations and workshops are planned for the future. It is also now easier for readers to register for an email announcement of new issues through the notification service that is available at:
http://www.cultivate-int.org/notification/
UKOLN continues to provide technical support services to the RDN. This work includes operating the central RDN Web site, maintaining cross-RDN search services, co-ordinating the interoperability framework and standards guidelines for the RDN as a whole and developing tools that support those standards.
The RDN was a participant in the Open Archives Initiative alpha test. Through UKOLN’s participation in this activity, we have been able to develop tools that will allow the RDN to experiment with a record-sharing rather than cross-searching approach to searching all RDN descriptions. The intention is to use the OAI Harvesting Protocol to share records between co-operating RDN gateways, enabling the development of a central RDN database. Our work with the OAI Protocol was presented at the OAI European Open Day in Berlin. We have also successfully submitted a poster session on this topic for the tenth World Wide Web Conference in Hong Kong.
The RDN has a licensing agreement with Routledge which is using RDN records as part of its Routledge Encyclopaedia of Philosophy and Philosophy Arena Web sites. UKOLN staff have developed a record exchange format and developed software tools to facilitate the transfer of data from the RDN hubs to Routledge. Also, part of the RDN agreement with Routledge is the creation of an RDN REP database containing RDN philosophy data. This database is hosted by UKOLN but made available for searching through the Routledge site. With other RDN staff, UKOLN staff have attended meetings with Pearsons (publishers), UK Mirror Service, DfEE, the British Library, the DEF project (Danish Electronic Library), MIMAS, LTSN and OCLC.
Pete Cliff co-presented a workshop at the Institutional Web Management event in September which looked at issues surrounding getting a variety of different institutional systems to work together. Pete also gave a presentation at the Public Library Web Managers Workshop on Web site management. From this, a Site Design Strategy for the RDN was developed. This document accompanies the RDN Style and PR Guidelines.
In addition to developing RDN-Include (described below), forthcoming UKOLN activities will concentrate on the development of shared tools and services within the RDN. These will allow lecturers and others to create and share their own resource descriptions and make them available alongside full RDN records as part of an integrated search and browse interface. All records will be available for use within RDN reading lists. The intention is to wrap this functionality within a more personalised RDN Web site. Part of the intention is to make the RDN service more useful within the context of institutional virtual learning environments. This work complements our involvement in the Subjects Portal Development project, a JISC 5/99 funded project that is developing three prototype subject portals to the DNER.
One of the implementation problems of RDN-Include has been the requirement for some technical effort at the host organisation. RDNi-Lite has been developed to counter this and can be implemented by anyone who can create a Web page.
RDN-Include is currently being used on the Manchester Metropolitan Library Web site and Oxford Brookes University Intranet. Other sites are testing the software. It will be used as part of a collaborative project with the British Library. In conjunction with BIOME, we are assisting the NHS in its implementation as part of the National Library for Health Virtual Branch Libraries.
Z-directory Another JISC 5/99 project we are involved in is Gate-Z. This project aims to develop a Z39.50-to-Z39.50 gateway that can be used to interface Bath Profile clients to non-Bath Profile targets. By placing Gate-Z in front of their servers, Z39.50 service providers will be able to offer Bath Profile compliant targets without having to modify their existing server configuration or software. Software development for this project is being subcontracted to Crossnet Systems Ltd and all software will be made available on an open-source basis.As part of the project we are trying to build up a comprehensive picture of existing UK Z39.50 targets. If you offer a target in the UK, please register it (or update your existing registration if necessary) using the Z-directory. We are trying to simplify the registration process with Z-directory by automating the collection of detailed information about the protocol features supported by each target using a Z39.50 robot. Information held in the Z-directory is also available as a set of Explain-Lite XML files as well as in human-readable form.
Metadata tools update UKOLN continues to develop and make available small-scale metadata-related tools and demonstrators. RDF Site Summary (RSS) is an XML application for sharing news feeds on the Web. UKOLN has developed RSS-xpress, a tool for creating, registering and viewing RSS news channels.We have continued to enhance DC-dot. This metadata editor has been regularly updated, to support the most recent recommendations emerging from the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative, and continues to be a popular DC creation tool. It has been used to describe over 32,000 different Web resources since it was first made available. We have also developed DC-assist, a small, flexible Web-based help utility designed to sit alongside other metadata tools. DC-assist can be configured to provide information tailored to your application and the metadata schema in use.
DNER Architecture Study Liz Lyon - Director, Andy Powell - Assistant Director and DS&S Team Leader On behalf of the JISC DNER Programme Team, UKOLN have been undertaking a study looking at the architecture of the DNER. This work has developed a functional model for the DNER, based largely on previous MODELS Information Architecture work, and has used this as the basis for a DNER systems architecture – the components and services that need to be made available on the network to support that functionality. The intention is to underpin the development of the DNER as a managed collection of resources in an integrated information environment and to provide a standards-based framework that supports a coherent set of co-operating network services. The findings of this study will be made available in a variety of formats through the UKOLN Web site at:http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/distributed-systems/dner/arch/
Deliverables will include a ‘DNER Architecture’ document, annotated PowerPoint presentations about the architecture, a set of usage scenarios, summaries of the functional model and a number of other supporting documents. These resources will be added to the Web site over the next month or so.
On 1 November a one-day workshop, entitled The Future is Hybrid: Libraries in the 21st Century, was held at the British Library in London. 50 delegates braved the rail network, after the floods of the previous weekend, to hear presentations from the Agora, BUILDER, HeadLine, HyLiFe and MALIBU projects, with small groups in the afternoon providing an opportunity for a more in-depth look at the projects. The demand for this workshop was so high that it was repeated at Manchester Metropolitan University on 20 February and at Edinburgh University Library on 27 February. Links to the Hybrid Library project presentations can be found at:
http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/events/hybrid/programme.htmlUKOLN’s Interoperability Focus hosted a one-day management
briefing, Interoperability at the Coalface, which was held at Church House,
Westminster, on 24 November. 100 delegates enjoyed the surroundings of the venue and heard
presentations by Susie Woodhouse from Resource, and from Paul Miller and Andy Powell of
UKOLN. More details of the event are available at:
The second SCHEMAS workshop took place in Bonn on 23–24 November. This event attracted about 40 delegates from all over Europe. The third workshop will be held in Budapest on 10–11 May.
For more details, see: http://www.schemas-forum.org/workshops/ws2/schemas-ws2.html.On 6–8 December the CEDARS project held a one-day workshop followed by a two-day conference at the Viking Moat House Hotel in York. About 70 delegates attended the workshop, Information Infrastructures in Digital Preservation, and were joined by another 80 delegates for the conference, Preservation 2000: An International Conference on the Preservation and Long Term Accessibility of Digital Materials. The conference was sponsored by OCLC and RLG. The delegates enjoyed stimulating presentations from an international list of speakers; the keynote addresses were given by Lynne Brindley, Chief Executive of the British Library, and Jim Michalko, President of the Research Libraries Group. The event was a great success bringing together projects from around the world. Details are available at:
http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/events/cedars-2000/Other events planned for 2001 include a MODELS workshop on authorisation on 24–25 April, the fifth Institutional Web Management Workshop, which this year is being held on 25–27 June at Queens University, Belfast, and the fourth and final SCHEMAS workshop in Amsterdam at the end of November.
Pete Johnston has recently joined UKOLN as Interoperability Research Officer, to support the work of the Interoperability Focus. Pete was previously working on a digital records management project at the University of Glasgow. The project was based in the University Archives, and he also contributed to work in the area of archival description using EAD, supporting the department’s role as a data provider to the HE Archives Hub. Pete’s technical experience is largely in the field of markup technologies (SGML, XML, XSL-T, XSL-FO etc.); he has a degree in Latin American Studies from the University of Liverpool.
Shirley Keane joined UKOLN as Web Editor in January of this year; her duties include responsibility for the Division of Access and Continuing Studies (DACS) Web site. Shirley has spent a number of years working in the classical record business - in Tokyo, Hamburg and London - before deciding to re-train as a Web designer. She qualified as a Certified Internet Webmaster (CIW) site designer in the spring of 2000 and joined Motortrak, a leading motor industry Web design company, as a Web designer in May 2000.
Sarah Ormes is taking a career break after spending five and a half years at UKOLN where she has been a leading light in advocating the adoption of networking technologies in the public library. We wish Sarah well in her new (ad)ventures.
Criddle, S., McNab, A., Ormes, S. and Winship, I. The public librarian’s guide to the Internet. London: Library Association Publishing, 2000, ISBN 1856043282.
The first Internet book specifically aimed at public librarians to be published in the UK.
Russell, R. (ed.) Making sense of standards and technologies for serials management. London: Library Association Publishing, 2000, ISBN 185604338X.
An edited collection of studies by well-known strategic and technical players, covering key enabling standards and technologies for serials management and access.
Chapman, A. NUCAF to REVEAL: the national union catalogue of alternative formats, in Library services for visually impaired people: a manual of best practice. London: Resource, 2000, ISBN 1902394437.
This manual is also available in Braille, audio cassette and computer disk formats, and on the Web site of the National Library for the Blind at:
http://www.nlbuk.org/bpm/Chapman, A. Bibliographic record provision in the UK: measuring availability against demand. Bath: UKOLN, 1999, ISBN 0951685651.
Report available from UKOLN, priced £12 plus £3 p+p.
Chapman, A. and Spiller, D. Trend analysis of monograph acquisitions in public and university libraries in the UK. Loughborough: LISU and UKOLN, 1999, ISBN 1901786293.
Report available from LISU, at Loughborough University, priced £17.50.
Criddle, S., Dempsey, L. and Heseltine, R. (eds.) Information landscapes for a learning society: networking and the future of libraries 3. London: Library Association Publishing, 1999, ISBN 185604310X.
Proceedings of the most recent UKOLN conference.
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If you have any comments on the newsletter please contact Sally Criddle, Newsletter Editor, at the above address or by e-mail.
UKOLN is funded by Resource: The Council for Museums, Archives and Libraries, the Joint Information Systems Committee of the Higher and Further Education Funding Councils, as well as by project funding from the JISC and the European Union. UKOLN also receives support from the University of Bath where it is based.
Web page by Sally
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Last updated on 29-May-2001
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