The QA Focus Web site
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The QA Focus project was funded by the JISC to support JISC's digital library programmes. QA Focus was provided by a partnership of UKOLN (University of Bath) and the AHDS (who replaced the TASI service).
QA Focus's remit was to help ensure that project deliverables were interoperable and widely accessible. We sought to ensure that projects deployed appropriate standards and best practices. We did this by providing support materials which explained the recommended standards and best practices and carrying out a number of surveys which helped to share evolving practices across the projects.
QA Focus also developed a QA methodology which was designed to suit projects' development environment and culture.
The QA Focus project ran from 2002 - 2004. After the successful completion of the project the Web site ceased to be maintained, except for some minor updates to the site. The Web site was frozen in January 2013.
An introduction to the work on QA Focus is given in the Summary of the QA Focus Methodology and Implementing Your Own QA briefing documents.
The other resources provided by the project were:
The key outputs of the QA Focus project have been uploaded to Opus, the University of Bath institutional repository. These are:
The QA Focus Briefing Documents are available for use under a Creative Commons licence. The licence allows you to download, edit and use the documents for non-commercial purposes provided you give appropriate acknowledgements.
A summary of the technical architecture of the QA Focus web site is available.
In order to help ensure the robustness of the QA Focus web site a series of automated technical audits were carried out.
An automated technical audit was carried out in August 2004, shortly after the finish of the project. This audit showed that the web site appears to conform with HTML standards and apart from a small number of links to a database which is no longer running, most internal links function correctly.
Note that an additional audit of internal links was carried out on 7 August 2012. It was found that the majority of internal links are still working correctly.
On 7 January 2013 the Xenu link checking tool was used to provide a report on the validity of internal links on the QA Focus Web site and provide a summary of the URLs on the Web site. The report is available.
An archive of the QA Focus Web site is available on the Internet Archive. On 11 June 2013 this Web site had been crawled 85 times going back to 1 April 2003. The most recent archive was taken on 18 January 2013.
Note that this Web site is also available on the UK Web archive.
The QA Focus project was carried out by staff at UKOLN (Brian Kelly, Marieke Guy and Amanda Closier), TASI, University of Bristol (Karla Young and Ed Bremner) and AHDS (Hamish James, Alastair Dunning and Gareth Knight).
Brian Kelly (Project Manager)
UKOLN
University of Bath
BATH
BA2 7AY
Email: B.Kelly@ukoln.ac.uk
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Web page by Brian Kelly of UKOLN.
Last Modified 11-June-2013
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