UKOLN
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"A centre of excellence in digital information management, providing advice and services to the library, information and cultural heritage communities."

UKOLN is based at the University of Bath.

Rachel Heery

It is with great sadness that we report that Rachel Heery, former Deputy Director of UKOLN, died on Friday 24 July 2009, after a long-term illness. Rachel joined UKOLN in 1995, and led the R&D Team and later became Deputy Director until her retirement in 2007.

A tribute to Rachel Heery from her UKOLN colleagues.


Job Title

Assistant Director, Research and Development

Research and Development Team Leader

Rachel retired October 2007

Contact Details

UKOLN,
University of Bath,
Bath,
BA2 7AY
tel: +44 (0) 1225 386724
fax: +44 (0) 1225 386838
email: r.heery@ukoln.ac.uk

Job details

As Assistant Director for Research and Develoment at UKOLN I am responsible for the strategic direction of our research, and for seeking funding to support that research. I lead the Research and Development team and co-ordinate UKOLN's contribution to a number of externally funded projects.

The R&D team have pursued a number of coherent themes within their project work over the last few years: the development and use of emerging metadata standards, Web based resource discovery, digital preservation and the management of metadata schemas.

Projects in which the R&D team are currently involved include: the Open Archives Forum, the Subject Portals Project, ARCO, IMesh Toolkit, JISC Information Environment Service Registry, ePrintsUK, FAIR PORTAL, HILT, JISC/Wellcome Web Archiving study, Digital Preservation Coalition.

I have a particular interest in the structured expression of metadata element sets in schema languages. I am enthusiastic about the potential of the Semantic Web, and believe the sharing of schemas and ontologies will be a first step towards achieving the required infrastructure. Within recent research I have been involved with colleagues in demonstrating the role of metadata schema registries, and taking forward a data model for the combination of metadata schemas in application profiles. This work also looks towards the collaborative creation of metadata (metadata sharing). At present I am working on the MEG Registry project and CORES project.

I am co-chair of the DC-Registry Working Group, with Harry Wagner from OCLC, and I am a member of the DC Advisory Board.

Current membership of committees:

  • ICADL 2006 Programme Committee
  • PV2005 Programme Committee
  • DCMI 2005 Programme Committee
  • JISC Repositories and Preservation Advisory Group
  • JORUM Steering Group
  • DCMI Advisory Board

Past membership of committees:

  • ECDL 2004 Programme Chair
  • FAIR Advisory Board
  • ECDL 2003 Panel Chair
  • DCMI 2004 Programe Committee

Here are lists of my presentations and publications.