About UKOLN

UKOLN is a centre of expertise in digital information management, providing advice and services to the library, information, education and cultural heritage communities by:

• Influencing policy and informing practice
• Promoting community-building and consensus-making by actively raising awareness
• Advancing knowledge through research and development
• Building innovative systems and services based on Web technologies
• Acting as an agent for knowledge transfer

UKOLN is based at the University of Bath directed by Dr Liz Lyon and currently has a staff of twenty-nine. UKOLN is funded by the Council for Museums, Libraries & Archives (MLA); the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) of the funding bodies for higher and further education in England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland; as well as by project funding from the JISC, EPSRC and the European Community. UKOLN also receives support from the University of Bath where it is based. More details on UKOLN activities can be found on its website: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/activities/.

UKOLN aims to inform practice and influence policy in the areas of: digital libraries, metadata and resource discovery, distributed library and information systems, bibliographic management, and web technologies. It provides network information services, including the Ariadne magazine, and runs workshops and conferences.

Achievement Highlights

A selection of our significant achievements over the last year include:

• Funding has been secured for new projects and extensions including JISC IESR Phase 3, IEMSR Phase 2, eBank Phase 2 and as a partner in a £5.5 million EPSRC Grand Challenge project led by the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Bath.
• A number of significant reports and papers have been published including a Report on Digital Repositories (for JISC and co-authored with AHDS), an analysis paper describing the JISC IE and Google, a more general commentary on the Resource Discovery Landscape (both for JISC) and the Good Practice Guide for Developers of Cultural Heritage Web Services for MLA and the EU MINERVA Project. This latter document has had 20,000 downloads to date.
• UKOLN is contributing to the scoping and development of the e-Framework and its conceptual common and domain-specific service elements in collaboration with CETIS, and to common information environment standards work. We have joined with AHDS on the Digital Repositories study and with TechDis on accessibility work.
• UKOLN staff have been invited to make presentations and have had papers accepted at key international conferences and events, including the SURF/JISC/CNI conference on Institutional Repositories in Amsterdam, the CNI Taskforce spring meeting in Washington DC, at JCDL in Denver, the DCMI Conference in Madrid, at WWW2005 in Japan, at the Danish Information Grid meeting in Copenhagen and at a German government e-Science Conference in Berlin.
• For the first time, UKOLN itself hosted a major international Digital Libraries research conference: the 8th European Conference on Research and Advanced Technologies for Digital Libraries ECDL 2004 at the University of Bath. The event was attended by over 250 delegates with three leading international key-note speakers, 47 peer-reviewed papers, panels, tutorials and workshops covering a very wide range of topics. The Proceedings have been published by Springer in the Lecture Notes in Computer Science Series.
• UKOLN leads the Outreach activities of the Digital Curation Centre and was responsible for the successful 1st International Digital Curation Centre Conference held at Bath in September 2005. Planning continues for the launch of the new electronic journal, the International Journal of Digital Curation. We have also contributed to the delivery of Services, Development work and the Research Agenda
• The Events Programme once again included many successful conferences and workshops such as the international Digital Cultural Content Forum in Oxford, the 9th Institutional Web Management Workshop in Manchester and four workshops including two themed events on Service Registries.
• The eBank UK Project continues to be of considerable international interest in its exploration of the changing nature of scholarly communications in the context of e-Research, the open access data publishing model and the subsequent linking of research data to derived articles. The eBank aggregator service demonstrator was first shown at the e-Science All Hands Meeting at Nottingham in September 2004.
• UKOLN leads the Knowledge Extraction and Semantic Interoperability cluster of the EU-funded DELOS Network of Excellence and published outputs have included a report on Semantic Interoperability in Digital Libraries, the Proceedings of a workshop on Digital Repositories held in Crete in May 2005 and Issues 2 and 3 of the DELOS Newsletter.
• The ARCO technology providing Augmented Representation of Cultural Objects has been demonstrated by virtual walk-throughs and interaction with augmented reality applications, bringing this European-funded project successfully to completion.

Interoperability Focus
This activity explores, publicises and mobilises the benefits and practice of effective interoperability across diverse information sectors, including libraries and the cultural heritage and archival communities. A key aspect of this work is the identification and exploitation of synergies with existing UKOLN and external projects, with a view to maximising returns on the ongoing work of projects.

UK Web Focus
The UK Web Focus advises UK higher and further education, museums, libraries and archives about emerging Web technologies and acts as the JISC representative to the World Wide Web Consortium. A range of support activities and materials are produced. UKOLN's own information services are being used as a test bed for innovative developments and good practice.

Bibliographic Management
This activity is concerned with the standards used to create bibliographic records; the formats in which bibliographic data are stored, exchanged and retrieved and the quality of bibliographic records in terms of currency, accuracy, consistency and functionality. Current activities include participating in a project to develop and maintain the National Union Catalogue of Alternative Formats (NUCAF), which was set up to assist visually impaired people and developing a simple tool that libraries can use themselves to assess the quality of their catalogues.

Research and development
UKOLN 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. Our chief funders in this area of activity are the JISC, EPSRC and the European Community.

A number of themes underlie UKOLN's 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 research and development work has an international reputation and we are active contributors to the ongoing development of the Dublin Core.

Projects are typically undertaken in collaboration with other partners from the HE community. Current projects include:

• JISC IE Metadata Schema Registry (IEMSR) - to provide authoritative information on metadata vocabularies and application profiles used for resource description in the UK learning, teaching and research communities. UKOLN is partnered in the project by the Institute for Learning & Research Technology (ILRT) at the University of Bristol. Contributing associate partners are the Centre for Educational Technology Interoperability Standards (CETIS) and the British Educational Communications and Technology Agency (Becta).
• The JISC Information Environment Service Registry (IESR) - to pilot a registry of the collections and services that form the JISC Information Environment. Partners in the project are Manchester Information and Associated Services (MIMAS) at the University of Manchester, UKOLN at the University of Bath and the Cheshire team at the University of Liverpool.
• eBank UK - to investigate how original and derived data can be managed in an integrated fashion, as the volume of digital data being created increases. 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.
• Digital Curation Centre - 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 project partners are the 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).
• Grand Challenge Immortal Information - UKOLN is a partner in this EPSRC-funded multi-million pound project which is investigating robust ways of handling information and knowledge - for example, design models, processes and rationale - over the lifetime of project-services. UKOLN is providing the project with expertise in the area of digital information management, with particular regard to digital curation.
• DELOS - as part of this EU funded network of excellence, UKOLN is working with partners throughout Europe on a joint program of activities aimed at integrating and coordinating the ongoing research activities of the major European teams working in Digital Libraries with the goal of developing the next generation Digital Library technologies.

Software Development and Systems
The Software & Systems Team supports UKOLN activities by building innovative systems and services based on emerging technologies as well as ensuring high quality technical support to all members of UKOLN staff. Innovative 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 advisory services to the JISC concerning the development of the e-Framework and the JISC Information Environment, the latter focusing 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, and the integration of the information environment with managed learning environments.

• Information management technologies: we are building on our toolkit and demonstrator work in the areas of metadata management, Z39.50, and directory services. DC-dot, a Dublin Core metadata generator, has attracted significant interest.
• Information services: UKOLN is a leading international site for information about digital library research. It provides the Ariadne. In addition to descriptions of our own work, our web site includes pages, which complement our research and awareness interests: on metadata, on digital library technologies and on interoperability. Ariadne has been published since January 1996. Initially funded by the eLib programme, it continues to provide a valuable dissemination function within the UK HE community primarily.
• Events Management: UKOLN is experienced in arranging conferences, workshops and other events in support of its own work and on behalf of its funders, particularly the JISC. These include the annual CNI/JISC conferences, various JISC special events, and project related events.

Organisational structure
UKOLN staff are organised into four teams: policy and advice, research and development, software and systems, and resources and administration (including, events management), although there is considerable cross group working. A small number of staff currently work remotely and UKOLN supports flexible and home working where appropriate.

Staff development
UKOLN's most valued resource is its staff. We are committed to investing in the skills and resources of our staff. Training and development of staff, both to maximise the benefits to the organisation and to enable individuals to reach their full potential is facilitated in the following ways:

• Induction programmes are designed for all new staff, which introduces them to their line manager, the administrative support team and other UKOLN and University staff.
• Appraisals are conducted on an annual basis.
• The UKOLN Seminar Series aims to facilitate discussion of "hot topics" within UKOLN, to develop staff interaction and to broaden staff knowledge and understanding of wider issues.
• Staff are encouraged to attend relevant University of Bath and external training events.
• Other development activities that may be undertaken include membership of a specific UKOLN working group, mentoring and job secondments, job sharing and job exchanges.