Collection Description FocusPete Johnston & Bridget Robinson - cd-focus@ukoln.ac.uk
CD Focus website - http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/cd-focus
CD Focus discussion list - collection-description@jiscmail.ac.uk
Welcome to the first Collection Description Focus (CD Focus) news bulletin.
This is the first of the planned monthly news bulletins. The bulletins will cover the ongoing work of the CD Focus. We would also like to invite RSLP and other relevant collection and mapping projects to keep us up to date with information about their own progress and developments.
The Collection Description Focus was launched on 1st June. It is a national post, jointly funded for a twelve-month period by Joint Information Systems Committee/Distributed National Electronic Resource (JISC/DNER), the Research Support Libraries Programme (RSLP) and the British Library.
The Focus is located within UKOLN, and physically based at the University of Bath. The staff at UKOLN are supported by their partners in the CD Focus initiative, the Archives Hub and the mda. The Focus aims to improve co-ordination of work on collection description methods, schemas and tools, with the goal of ensuring consistency and compatibility of approaches across projects, disciplines, institutions and sectors. The Focus intends to provide support both for projects actively involved in collection description work and for those investigating or planning such work.
The Focus will be jointly run by Pete Johnston and Bridget Robinson. Pete joined UKOLN in January 2001 as Interoperability Research Officer to support the work of the Interoperability Focus. Prior to joining UKOLN Pete was a member of a digital records management project based at Glasgow University Archives Services. He developed tools and provided guidance to support the EAD-based collection level description work that was being undertaken by the archivists as data providers to the HE Archives Hub. He was also involved in issues of data structure and presentation during the initial stages of the Hub infrastructure development. Pete is particularly interested in issues of interoperability between EAD and the RSLP CLD schema.
Bridget Robinson joined UKOLN in January 2000 to work as Communications Co-ordinator on the Agora project. Agora is one of the five elib hybrid library projects, which began in January 1998. It forms part of Phase 3 of the elib programme investigating issues of digital library implementation and integration. Agora is due to finish at the end of July. CLDs have been an integral part of project. Bridget contributed to the special collection description issue of D-Lib September 2000 ( Collection Level Description - The RIDING and Agora Experience).
The CD Focus will be supported and informed by work carried out by other members of UKOLN, including the work by Andy Powell on RSLP collection description schema, and the broader work on the effective exchange and reuse of information resources carried out by Paul Miller as Interoperability Focus. The Focus will also liaise with the Collection Description Working Group within the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative.
On 22nd May Pete and Bridget attended a meeting of the REVELATION (Unlocking Research Resources for 19th and 20th Century Church History and Christian Theology) mapping partners at Birmingham Central Library. The project represents 461 collections. The meeting covered a review of the guidelines for Collection Description, a discussion of templates and use of fields and considerations for web interface developments. The template that they are using is essentially a composite of the data elements of ISAD(G) and the RSLP CLD schema plus other local elements. The main objective of the meeting was for the project partners to reach concensus on a workable template for collection description. The diversity and richness of the collections provided a useful example for the CD Focus team of the issues which will need to be addressed over the coming months.
Pete attended a dissemination event for the RSLP projects at the Business Design Centre in Islington on Thursday 14th June. It was a good opportunity to make contact with some of the key RSLP Projects and to see at first hand the range of approaches which have been taken, particularly in tailoring "standard" schemas and element sets to meet project-specific requirements.
The CD Focus team is in the process of drafting a questionnaire that will be sent out to relevant projects and stakeholders. The questionnaire will be used as a means of gathering information on project activity, standards and metadata schema adopted, implementation issues, software in use and areas where guidance is needed. The data gathered will inform subsequent visits, briefing papers, event agendas and other Focus activities.
Three regional workshops will be held during the project. There will also be two briefing days. The first will be held in the autumn and then a second briefing day will be held at the end of the project.
The Focus will be looking into the development of simple tools to facilitate the creation and management of collection descriptions including: tools to support transformations between different collection description schemas; enhancements to data creation interfaces; the use of a schema registry to publish and share CD schemas; and mechanisms for "harvesting" distributed descriptions.
All contributions for the next bulletin should be sent to cd-focus@ukoln.ac.uk by 3rd August 2001.
Collection Description FocusPete Johnston & Bridget Robinson - cd-focus@ukoln.ac.uk
CD Focus website - http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/cd-focus
CD Focus discussion list - collection-description@jiscmail.ac.uk
Welcome to the first Collection Description Focus (CD Focus) news bulletin.
This is the first of the planned monthly news bulletins. The bulletins will cover the ongoing work of the CD Focus. We would also like to invite RSLP and other relevant collection and mapping projects to keep us up to date with information about their own progress and developments.
The Collection Description Focus was launched on 1st June. It is a national post, jointly funded for a twelve-month period by Joint Information Systems Committee/Distributed National Electronic Resource (JISC/DNER), the Research Support Libraries Programme (RSLP) and the British Library.
The Focus is located within UKOLN, and physically based at the University of Bath. The staff at UKOLN are supported by their partners in the CD Focus initiative, the Archives Hub and the mda. The Focus aims to improve co-ordination of work on collection description methods, schemas and tools, with the goal of ensuring consistency and compatibility of approaches across projects, disciplines, institutions and sectors. The Focus intends to provide support both for projects actively involved in collection description work and for those investigating or planning such work.
The Focus will be jointly run by Pete Johnston and Bridget Robinson. Pete joined UKOLN in January 2001 as Interoperability Research Officer to support the work of the Interoperability Focus. Prior to joining UKOLN Pete was a member of a digital records management project based at Glasgow University Archives Services. He developed tools and provided guidance to support the EAD-based collection level description work that was being undertaken by the archivists as data providers to the HE Archives Hub. He was also involved in issues of data structure and presentation during the initial stages of the Hub infrastructure development. Pete is particularly interested in issues of interoperability between EAD and the RSLP CLD schema.
Bridget Robinson joined UKOLN in January 2000 to work as Communications Co-ordinator on the Agora project. Agora is one of the five elib hybrid library projects, which began in January 1998. It forms part of Phase 3 of the elib programme investigating issues of digital library implementation and integration. Agora is due to finish at the end of July. CLDs have been an integral part of project. Bridget contributed to the special collection description issue of D-Lib September 2000 ( Collection Level Description - The RIDING and Agora Experience).
The CD Focus will be supported and informed by work carried out by other members of UKOLN, including the work by Andy Powell on RSLP collection description schema, and the broader work on the effective exchange and reuse of information resources carried out by Paul Miller as Interoperability Focus. The Focus will also liaise with the Collection Description Working Group within the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative.
On 22nd May Pete and Bridget attended a meeting of the REVELATION (Unlocking Research Resources for 19th and 20th Century Church History and Christian Theology) mapping partners at Birmingham Central Library. The project represents 461 collections. The meeting covered a review of the guidelines for Collection Description, a discussion of templates and use of fields and considerations for web interface developments. The template that they are using is essentially a composite of the data elements of ISAD(G) and the RSLP CLD schema plus other local elements. The main objective of the meeting was for the project partners to reach concensus on a workable template for collection description. The diversity and richness of the collections provided a useful example for the CD Focus team of the issues which will need to be addressed over the coming months.
Pete attended a dissemination event for the RSLP projects at the Business Design Centre in Islington on Thursday 14th June. It was a good opportunity to make contact with some of the key RSLP Projects and to see at first hand the range of approaches which have been taken, particularly in tailoring "standard" schemas and element sets to meet project-specific requirements.
The CD Focus team is in the process of drafting a questionnaire that will be sent out to relevant projects and stakeholders. The questionnaire will be used as a means of gathering information on project activity, standards and metadata schema adopted, implementation issues, software in use and areas where guidance is needed. The data gathered will inform subsequent visits, briefing papers, event agendas and other Focus activities.
Three regional workshops will be held during the project. There will also be two briefing days. The first will be held in the autumn and then a second briefing day will be held at the end of the project.
The Focus will be looking into the development of simple tools to facilitate the creation and management of collection descriptions including: tools to support transformations between different collection description schemas; enhancements to data creation interfaces; the use of a schema registry to publish and share CD schemas; and mechanisms for "harvesting" distributed descriptions.
All contributions for the next bulletin should be sent to cd-focus@ukoln.ac.uk by 3rd August 2001.