Monthly News

Events attended

• At the start of this month, I was invited to the State and University Library of Lower Saxony in Göttingen, Germany. Here, I gave two papers to an event organized by Germany's digitisation centres (based in Göttingen and Munich); the keynote on hybrid library/clump activity in the UK, and a second paper on Dublin Core and RDF. These papers are available on the IF web site. Other presentations in English were from Sandy Payette at Cornell and John Price-Wilkins from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor.
• Not nearly so exotic, the next biggish trip was to the ninth workshop in UKOLN's MODELS series, held at the University of Warwick. MODELS workshops have for a long time aimed to draw in experts from beyond the library community, but this workshop excelled itself with a wide range of representatives from the museum community and elsewhere. The focus of the workshop was upon the MODELS Information Architecture (MIA), and a lot of work was done examining ways in which such a model met the needs of diverse communities.
• At the end of the month, I travelled to Germany again. This time, the venue was Die Deutsche Bibliothek in Frankfurt, for five solid days of Dublin Core meetings, including the Executive Committee, the Advisory Committee and the full-blown workshop. The emphasis here was very much upon deliverables, with Stu Weibel asserting that the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI) would release a set of qualifiers for the fifteen elements by 1 January 2000.

Publications this month

• Report on August's ZIG meeting in Stockholm for Exploit Interactive.
• The Bath Profile. A draft of the Z39.50 Bath Profile is now available, and represents the combined work of a team of international experts in this area. The Profile is available for widespread comment until 12 November, after which time we'll work to incorporate significant suggestions and feedback. Comments so far have been extremely positive, and the Profile is causing great interest amongst vendors and many of the other Profiling efforts.

Work in Progress

• Along with Kevin Riley of Fretwell Downing Education, Paul Lefrere of the UK's IMS Centre, and Paul Bacsich and Andy Heath of Sheffield Hallam University, I'm writing a paper for the December issue of D-Lib magazine. The paper will discuss the various educational metadata efforts currently underway, including IMS, the European Ariadne project, and others.
• Working with Carl Lagoze of Cornell, Dan Brickley of ILRT in Bristol, Godfrey Rust of <indecs>, Jennifer Trant of AMICO and David Bearman of Archives & Museum Informatics, I've been involved in planning a workshop for early January in Washington. This meeting will serve to bring together practitioners from a variety of metadata efforts, with a view to defining a single abstract metadata model within which efforts such as Dublin Core, <indecs> and others can sit. Given the direction implied by the Dublin Core meeting in Frankfurt, it seems likely that the two efforts will move forward together.
• Addressing a number of the comments on the Bath Profile, an open meeting is to be held in late November, where the Profile will be presented, and where implementors, users, and vendors can ask questions and raise issues they have identified. The comments will be fed back into the revision process.

Committees

• I have been asked to join the Web of Science Enhancement Committee and the Technical Committee of the British and Irish Archaeological Bibliography.
• JISC has now joined the International DOI Foundation, where I will be representing the community's interests. I hope to write something for Ariadne on this soon...