Ariadne 67 Now Available

 

Number 67 of Ariadne is planned to be the last issue to appear in the look and feel to which readers will have become accustomed for some time. The intention is to display the issue in its new and more user-friendly format, as the editor writes, 'with uninterrupted service uppermost in our mind while attending to the not inconsiderable legacy material the publication by now holds. Our intention is to ensure the current and previous content remains available without any break in accessibility to the Ariadne site.'

This issue contains its usual range of main articles, event reports and reviews. Not least the librarians amongst us will be interested in the JISC-funded Library Impact Data Project (LIDP) which gives an overview of its work in looking for the link between library usage and student attainment as part of the Activity Data strand of the wider Information Environment Programme. We welcome two contributions from colleagues at the University of Bath which describe a recent series of events introducing social media to research students and report on experiences of piloting Elluminate Live! at the University.

Meanwhile we also include an article on the importance of work on promoting interoperability of language resources as a support to ambitious new initiative to accelerate Europe-wide language technology research. The initiative, the META-NET Network of Excellence, seeks to improve significantly on the number of language technologies that can assist European citizens in coping with the existing linguistic barriers confronting them.

We are also grateful to contributors from South Carolina who have sent us an overview of a digital library infrastructure that affords canonical citation for 'quoting' images, a system which will prove useful for creating commentaries, arguments, and teaching tools. The significance of the developments this article describes will not be lost on readers interested in digital collections with considerable image content. Staying that side of the Atlantic, we have welcomed an article from librarians at Harvard and other institutions on the U.S. East Coast who are members of the Biodiversity Heritage Library, a consortium of 12 natural history and botanical libraries. They describe results from a study to identify and develop a cost-effective and efficient large-scale digitisation workflow for special collections library materials.

Back in the U.K., the issue also contains an interesting story from the Institute of Education which describes the battle with link rot in the library catalogue which will no doubt resonate with librarian colleagues across the land. The article goes on to explain how this effort changed into something far more strategic in nature, the Digital Educational Resource Archive, which is addressing a matter that is more than a little topical. Returning to the West Country, if not to Bath, Issue 67 also offers a description of collaboration between the University of Bristol and Bristol City Council on ‘the development or adoption of standards with regard to the exchange of time- and location-sensitive data within the Bristol region, with particular emphasis on transport, the environment and sustainability,’ as well as pilot work on a mobile Web application within the University to offer access to data within ‘an “on-the-move” context via a smartphone.’