UKOLN Annual Reports
Report for the period
1 August 2001 to 31 July 2002
Presented to Resource and to the JISC | September 2002
Resource grant number: LIC/RE/033
UKOLN Annual Reports
Report for the period
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Mission |
Introduction |
Achievement Highlights
Acknowledgements |
A Brief History of UKOLN |
Staff Changes and Activities
UKOLN Strategic Advisory Committee |
The Director |
Policy and Advice
Research and Development |
Distributed Systems and Services |
Information and Communication
Resources and Administration |
Publications, Presentations, Committees and Visitors
UKOLN is a centre of expertise in digital information management, providing advice and services to the library, information, education and cultural heritage communities
UKOLN's objectives are to:
It has been a year of new and emerging organisational structures, agenda and technologies.
Our core funding bodies have continued to implement planned initiatives: the JISC has a new organisational structure supporting the programme of work and has set up a series of new committees to provide strategic input and direction.
Following the publication in May of the government White Paper "Your Region, Your Choice: Revitalising the English Regions", Resource is progressing its regional agenda through the creation of nine Regional Agencies which will be responsible for each of the three domains: museums, archives and libraries.
In a successful cross-sectoral initiative, the Digital Preservation Coalition was launched in February 2002 aiming "to secure the preservation of digital resources in the UK and to work with others internationally to secure our global digital memory and knowledge base".
Our own institution, the University of Bath, welcomed its new Vice-Chancellor, Professor Glynis Breakwell in September 2001 and continued to extend its role in promoting research through the Bath e-prints server and through e-learning initiatives. UKOLN has been actively involved in each area, collaborating with the service implementers in the Library and the Division of Access & Continuing Studies (DACS).
This year, UKOLN has a new Strategic Advisory Committee which is fulfilling the strategic role of the Management Committee and comprises representatives from all of the stakeholder communities.
There are also a number of major technical developments gathering momentum which have begun to impact on the landscape of digital libraries.
In the world of e-business, the rapid growth of Web Services has made headlines with familiar names such as Google and Amazon implementing applications based on this new standards-driven approach. Viewed as a means of building interoperable applications, backed by key business players such as IBM and Microsoft, and referenced in the most recent version of the Government Interoperability Framework (e-GIF) published in April, UKOLN has monitored developments closely.
In parallel, Grid Computing technologies, exemplified in the UK e-Science Programme, a set of multi-disciplinary initiatives creating applications based on these technologies and generating large volumes of data, ("science data libraries"), has received high-level government support with the Chancellor, Gordon Brown MP, opening the National e-Science Centre in Edinburgh in April.
There have been many headline-grabbing claims in the media about the combined potential of Web Services and Grid Technologies. There is no doubt that both will have a significant impact on the way we live and work in the future and in this context, in the development of distributed digital libraries.
UKOLN has been proactive in all of these areas and will continue to provide high quality leadership, policy advice and guidance at a national and international level to all of its stakeholders.
Whilst activities during the period 1 August 2001 to 31 July 2002 are described in some detail elsewhere in this report, the highlights listed below serve to indicate both the quality of work and the broad range of communities that UKOLN serves, as well as the sheer volume of output that UKOLN delivers on an annual basis:
I would like to take this opportunity to give a formal word of thanks to the members of the Management Committee who together have contributed much time and expertise to UKOLN and which has been greatly valued by staff. In particular, warmest thanks are due to Dr Ray Lester for chairing the committee with skill and understanding through a period of major change for the organisation.
We are indebted to the University of Bath for ongoing support and especially to Professor James Calderhead, Dean of DACS and Howard Nicholson, University Librarian for both the provision of accommodation in Wessex House and in the Library & Learning Centre, and for their continued interest in UKOLN and its goals.
Finally, I would like to express my personal thanks to UKOLN staff. It has probably been one of the busiest years in terms of work schedules and colleagues have demonstrated great commitment which is reflected in the impressive list of activities and achievements.
We look forward to the year ahead and in engaging further with the emerging technologies and initiatives that will help to shape the digital libraries of the future.
Dr Liz Lyon, Director
UKOLN and its antecedent organisations have been based at the University of Bath for over 23 years. In 1979 the Centre for Catalogue Research was established with Philip Bryant as Director. Funded by the British Library Research & Development Department, it was preceded by several projects initiated by Maurice Line, University Librarian, looking at catalogues and bibliographic data.
In 1987 the Centre for Bibliographic Management (CBM) was established. The change of name recognised the wider role the Centre was playing in the UK library world. Lorcan Dempsey and Ann Chapman became research officers at CBM during this period.
Two years later in 1989, the UK Office for Library Networking (UKOLN) was established to work alongside CBM, after a grant was made available by the British Library Research and Development Department (BLR&DD).
In 1992 CBM and UKOLN merged to form UKOLN: The Office for Library and Information Networking. UKOLN was jointly funded by the ISC (now the JISC) and BLR&DD. Derek Law was Chair of the Management Committee.
Lorcan Dempsey was appointed as Director of UKOLN in November 1994 following the retirement of Philip Bryant, and in 1995 UKOLN revised its name to the UK Office for Library and Information Networking. At this time UKOLN began its work within the eLib framework. The ROADS project was initiated and planning began for Ariadne magazine. Professor Mel Collier became chair of the Management Committee.
In 1996 the UK Web Focus post was established. UKOLN got its first experience of working on EU- funded projects as DESIRE and BIBLINK began and work commenced on NewsAgent. Dr Richard Heselatine became chair of the Management Committee.
UKOLN was reviewed by its funding bodies in 1997 and was congratulated on "becoming recognised as a centre for excellence at international levels in the areas of networking and associated new technology and standards development". Preparatory work began on EU projects PRIDE and EXPLOIT; BLRIC funded projects WebWatch, CIRCE and Stories from the Web; and on the JISC-funded Agora.
In 1998 Work commenced on the JISC-funded Agora project and the EU-funded EXPLOIT project. UKOLN also contributed to Cedars, an eLib programme project on digital preservation.
In April 1999 the research funding function of the British Library was transferred to the Library and Information Commission (LIC). The Interoperability Focus, an initiative jointly funded by the LIC and the JISC, was appointed. UKOLN's bid to host the Centre for the Resource Discovery Network, a JISC-funded initiative, in partnership with the Arts and Humanities Data Service (at King's College London) and the University of Hull, was successful. The IMesh Toolkit project, funded by the JISC and the National Science Foundation (of the US) began.
In 2000 Dr Liz Lyon was appointed as the new Director following Lorcan Dempsey's appointment to the post of Distributed National Electronic Resource (DNER) Programme Director for the JISC. The staffing structure was refined to map teams of staff more closely on to actual ways of working and to align staff groupings with our strategic aims and objectives. Activities were delivered through the Policy and Advice, Research and Development, Distributed Systems and Services and Events and Web-based Information Services teams. Work commenced on the EU-funded projects Renardus, SCHEMAS and Cultivate. UKOLN was realigned within the University of Bath and became a Centre within the Division of Access and Continuing Studies (DACS). Resource: The Council for Museums, Archives and Libraries - a new UK strategic organisation - replaced the Libraries and Information Commission (LIC) and the Museums and Galleries Commission (MGC).
In 2001 Resource, in partnership with the JISC, commissioned a formal review of UKOLN by the Information Management Research Institute at the University of Northumbria. The outcomes of the review were very positive and recognise the success that UKOLN has achieved over past years and the significant impact it has made at a technical and strategic level. UKOLN was also recognised as delivering good value for money. A new Strategy and Work Programme covering all of UKOLN's activities for the next three years was produced. UKOLN has contributed to the development of the Distributed National Electronic Resource (DNER) and published an important study, The DNER Technical Architecture: scoping the information environment in May. Collection Description Focus was established, (jointly funded by JISC, the British Library and the Research Support Libraries Programme), reflecting the importance of prioritising the standard description of collections across the sector.
During 2002 UKOLN has continued to expand and widened its sphere of influence and impact through new collaborations. One area is the Grid/e-Science arena. UKOLN's work developing a service architecture for the JISC Information Environment highlighted areas of synergy with the Open Grid Services Architecture and developments within the UK e-Science Core Programme.
The JISC Quality Assurance Focus post has been established and is hosted jointly by UKOLN and the Institute for Learning and Research Technology (ILRT). UKOLN has also contributed to recent international standards developments including the Open Archives Initiative and the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative and this work continues to underpin and inform our core activities. UKOLN continues to provide technical support and advice to the New Opportunities Fund (NOF) Digitisation Programme.
In November 2001 Sara Hassen was recruited as Events and Marketing Manager filling the position left by Joy Fraser earlier in 2001; the role has now been expanded to include UKOLN's marketing activity.
Julie Stuckes also joined UKOLN in November as Subject Portals Project Manager. Her role is to co-ordinate the many and varied contributors. Julie acts as a facilitator to enable the development teams within the project to achieve their objectives.
Peter Dowdell joined UKOLN in January 2002. His workload is split 50/50 between New Opportunities Fund (NOF) digitise projects and the Resource Discovery Network (RDN). For NOF-digitise, he works as a technical advisor fielding queries from the projects and providing advice on best practice. At RDN he assists with the development of Web services and other functions.
At the beginning of May, Sally Criddle took maternity leave. Michelle Ibison joined shortly before Sally left to cover the post as Resource Co-ordinator and Team Leader.
Due to the expansion of the Events and Marketing activity in UKOLN Joanne Stone was taken on as Events Assistant in June 2002. This post was previously covered on a part-time basis by Birgit Kongialis. Birgit now works as Financial Administrator within the Resources and Administration Team as this is also an area in which the workload has increased due to the expanding size and activity of UKOLN; a small amount of her time is still allocated to administrative support of the Bibliographic post each month.
Jessica Lindholm was recruited on a short-term contract from February to June 2002 as Technical Development & Research Officer within the Research and Development Team; her work related to the ARCO (Augmented Representation of Cultural Objects) and RENARDUS Projects and she was also involved with the OA Forum (Open Archives Forum). Jessica has now returned to her previous post at NetLab, Lund University Libraries in Sweden.
Following the recommendations of the 2001 Review of UKOLN, the role and constitution of the management committee was revisited. As a result, a new Strategic Advisory Committee was created with new Terms of Reference and representatives from all of the stakeholder communities.
Formal thanks to Management Committee members are given elsewhere in this report and UKOLN has greatly valued the inputs from this group.
The membership of the Strategic Advisory Committee as of 31 July 2002 is detailed below:
- acting as an agent for knowledge transfer -
Throughout the year, Dr Liz Lyon has been instrumental in liaising with funders, providing coordination and strategic direction at the organisational level and in supporting individuals in achieving their personal goals. In addition to this work the Director has also contributed to particular work areas and activities which are detailed below.
Recognising the growing importance of Grid computing environments, UKOLN has built significant strategic links with the UK e-Science community. An international Workshop on the "Information Grid" jointly organised by UKOLN and the National e-Science Centre was held in April in Edinburgh. In addition, Dr Lyon gave a joint paper with Professor Tony Hey, Director of the e-Science Programme at the International JISC/CNI conference in June and she is a member of the new JISC Committee for the Support of Research which is focusing on Grid-related activities.
The Director has contributed to the Information Environment technical architecture work and has given presentations to the SCONUL and UCISA annual conferences this year. UKOLN is represented in a wider cross-sectoral group working towards a "Common Information Environment" which covers HE/FE (JISC), British Library, museums, archives and public libraries (Resource), Grid/e-Science and the NHS.
Direction of the CD-Focus activities has continued successfully and Dr Lyon is a member of the new Resource Collections Management and Development Group. She has also contributed to the NOF Technical Advisory service and NOF Portal work.
Further cross-sectoral activities have been actively pursued and meetings have been held at UKOLN coordinating work with the health community, the National Electronic Library for Health and with e-Government through the Office of the e-Envoy.
The Director has continued to contribute to European digital library activities through membership of the Delos Network of Excellence Advisory Board which met in January, through presentations at the Delos/NSF All Projects meeting in Rome in March and as a member of the Programme Committee for the forthcoming European Conference on Digital Libraries 2002 (ECDL).
New international links were established when Dr Lyon was invited to speak at the International Digital Library Conference in Beijing, China in July as one of the UK representatives. She presented a two-hour tutorial session and a conference paper.
On a more local note, UKOLN welcomed the new Vice-Chancellor of the University Professor Glynis Breakwell and presented a session about its activities which was followed by stimulating and interactive debate.
Within the organisation, there has been some minor re-structuring and re-positioning of the events activity to within the re-named Information & Communications Team resulting in all of our customer-focused activities being located within a single team. We have appointed two new posts in this area and have begun to address UKOLN's profile and marketing activity.
A very successful UKOLN Awayday was held in June which addressed "process" issues associated with our Strategy and Work Programme and in doing so, explored some of the areas touched on by the Review.
Finally, The Director chaired the first meeting of the new Strategic Advisory Committee in July which consists of representatives from all of the communities which UKOLN serves.
- influencing policy and informing practice -
Interoperability Focus is a national post, originally directly funded by the JISC and by Resource, and now maintained by UKOLN's core grant. The post, held by Paul Miller, was established in January 1999, initially for a period of three years, and has been supplemented by additional effort from Pete Johnston since January 2001. Paul Miller is based within Academic Services at the University of Hull, and acknowledges additional support from that institution.
In line with the growing trend for cross-sector collaboration, the scope of Interoperability Focus remains broad, encompassing a range of issues related to the creation and use of interoperable services across a range of domains, including the cultural heritage sector, archives, libraries and government.
Interoperability Focus is active in a variety of standardisation activities, including being a member of the Office of the e-Envoy's e-Government Champions Metadata Working Group, and the Executive Committee of the Consortium for the Computer Interchange of Museum Information (CIMI). Additionally, Interoperability Focus represents the JISC's interests with both CIMI and the International DOI Foundation.
The Focus continues to support the work of the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative, and Pete Johnston has participated in working groups developing XML Schemas for representing DC metadata.
Dissemination and awareness raising are important aspects of the work of Interoperability Focus, with a range of publications and presentations delivered in the past 12 months both in the UK and abroad. These include delivery of the keynote presentation to the New Zealand Digital Forum, a high-level event opened by the Prime Minister of New Zealand, and intended to shape a national strategy for ubiquitous access to cultural heritage material in New Zealand.
Across the UK, a wide range of agencies are involved in the creation and description of educational content for use throughout the formal education system, and also by those of us who are 'learning for life'. Currently, these public and private sector bodies tend to use a wide range of techniques for describing their own and others' content, including de facto and de jure national or international standards and a variety of internally developed solutions. Such approaches make it difficult for teachers and learners - who will routinely require access to the offerings of more than one agency - to discover and evaluate material in an effective manner.
Under the auspices of Interoperability Focus, the Metadata for Education Group (MEG) seeks to progress a set of common objectives. The group is open to all comers and meets to discuss common solutions to a set of agreed problems. The MEG Web site, hosted by UKOLN, acts as the main vehicle for dissemination, and is supported by the JISCmail-hosted uk-meg mailing list.
Early deliverables from this group include the 'MEG Concord', enshrining the group's key principles of openness and portability for educational content. This document has a large number of signatories, including major organisations such as the BBC, Granada Media, Resource and the University for Industry. MEG has also embarked upon the registration of existing educational metadata schemas, and hosts a growing registry of these on the Web site. The MEG schema registry is currently being redeveloped with the support of funding from JISC and BECTa. Software development is being undertaken by ILRT, University of Bristol.
A significant aspect of Interoperability Focus' work from the outset has been concerned with placing UK needs and perspectives within an international context, both by disseminating UK experiences and bringing in the benefits of overseas developments.
This work has, to some extent, now been focused through a new line of activity in which Interoperability Focus is explicitly working with major digital cultural content creation organisations in the UK and abroad in order to identify existing and potential synergies upon which to capitalise. Work in this area is being undertaken in cooperation with Resource and CIMI, and resulted in a second international workshop, held in Washington DC in March.
UK Web Focus is a JISC-funded post which provides advice to the UK Higher and Further Education communities on Web developments.
The main event regularly organised by UK Web Focus is the Institutional Web Management workshop. This high-profile event has been held annually since it was launched in 1997. The workshop helps to influence Web management policies and inform practices by providing an opportunity for staff involved in institutional Web management within the UK Higher and Further education communities to hear about strategies for the future from luminaries within the sector. Participants can also update their skills, discuss challenges, learn from best practices and meet with their peers and establish links and networks.
This year's Institutional Web Management workshop was held at the University of Strathclyde between 16-18 June 2002. It was the most popular to date, attracting 176 participants. The evaluation forms also indicated that it was also the most successful, with a rating of 4.27 for the workshop content and 4.43 for the organisation, on a scale of 1 for poor to 5 for excellent. A number of innovations were introduced for this year's workshop, including a debate, a panel session and a vendor slot, together with no fewer than 24 parallel sessions. The workshop is now a proven success. Plans have started on the organisation for next year's event.
UK Web Focus gave papers at two international conferences: a paper on Benchmarking of Web Sites was given at the EuroWeb 2001 conference and a related paper, together with a talk on mobile devices was given at the Internet Librarian 2002 conference. Talks were given at a number of other conferences, workshops and seminars on a range of topics including the Semantic Web, benchmarking Web sites, e-books and mobile devices, archiving Web sites, QA for Web sites and Web standards.
Areas of work which have been addressed include e-books and mobile devices, preservation of Web sites, usage statistics, quality assurance for Web sites and Web standards. Additionally work has been carried out on a number of resources, including making the Institutional Web Management Workshop Web site available on mobile devices.
A presentation on the preservation of Web sites was given at a meeting of the Digital Preservation Coalition, and work on this area is continuing. Other areas of work that have been addressed include quality assurance for Web sites and Web standards. In both of these areas additional funding has been obtained to fund the QA Focus post and the NOF Technical Advisory Service. Further information on these activities is detailed in the next section.
The QA Focus post, launched in January 2002, has been set up to support JISC's Information Environment programme (5/99) by ensuring that funded projects comply with standards and recommendations to make use of appropriate best practices. To date throughout the creation of various materials on JISC programmes there have been no consistent established QA procedures against which the quality of these materials can be assessed. The new QA Focus post will develop and promote a QA framework to ensure a more rigorous approach to the establishment of consistent, high quality standards for all the JISC information environment projects and services and their associated 'products'.
The post is being funded by JISC and is provided by an equal partnership of ILRT (University of Bristol) and UKOLN. Initial work has been in disseminating the creation of the post. This has been done by publishing articles in Vine and Ariadne and through a Web presence on the UKOLN and JISC Web sites. The UKOLN QA Focus area also holds a database containing information on all the Information Environment projects, organisations and services that are involved in the 5/99 Learning and Teaching and Infrastructure Programme. Details on over 200 Web site testing tools can also be accessed.
The QA Focus has already held a number of workshops to disseminate information about its work and to detail possible QA activity that projects could undertake. During the summer the QA Focus began information gathering activities. In July 2002 a visit was made to Manchester Information and Associated Services (MIMAS) to investigate use of the technical standards and a further visit to Edinburgh Data and Information Access (EDINA) is planned for September.
It is anticipated that in the future the QA Focus will be able to offer a toolkit that will help users easily implement important QA processes within their projects.
Marieke Napier will be responsible for the metadata, Web site access, software and service deployment areas of the QA Focus role. Digitisation and other areas will be covered by ILRT.
The Technical Advisory Service is provided by UKOLN in association with the Arts and Humanities Data Service (AHDS) and the People's Network on behalf of the New Opportunities Fund. It provides technical advisory support for projects which are receiving NOF funding for digitisation work.
Initial support is provided through the Web site in the form of frequently asked questions, a programme manual and a collection of information papers. Topics covered by the information papers include Web site performance monitoring, collection-level descriptions, content management systems, the digitisation process and income generation and sustainability. One-to-one support is provided through the nof-support email address and by technical visits to projects. The Technical Advisory Service also maintains several mailing lists used by project staff. The NOF-digi mailing list currently provides a mechanism for project holders to seek advice. It also provides a useful mechanism for improving communications with and between projects and developing a sense of community.
In the first half of 2002 the Technical Advisory Service ran 10 workshops on a variety of topics relevant to the successful implementation and delivery of digitisation projects. These workshops have ranged from the specific (virtual reality, collection-level description, preservation) to the general, (putting your project plan into practice, evaluation and impact assessment), from the practical (creating learning resources, Web site creation) to the theoretical (metadata). They have covered all levels of expertise. The workshops have been well attended and received.
The Technical Advisory Service has also been involved in planning for the proposed NOF-digitise programme portal which is planned for launch during February 2003. The Technical Advisory Service created an email questionnaire which went out to all projects in June. Its purpose was to gauge awareness and readiness with regard to the Open Archives Initiative (OAI) across the programme. The questionnaire was very successful and about 70 replies were received. Although NOF have currently dropped OAI functionality as a requirement for participation in the portal, the issue is still very much alive and we will be pursuing this matter further in the second half of 2002, assisting, advising and encouraging projects which wish to make their metadata records available to third parties. Furthermore the Technical Advisory Service will be taking an active role in the development of the portal, liaising with the development effort and assisting projects with related queries.
The Technical Advisory Service has developed an online reviewing system, called the NOF-digitise Peer Review System (PRS). This application allows projects to post work-in-progress onto the reviewing site and to invite other reviewers (other projects) to view and comment on their pages. The PRS was launched in July 2002 and received favourable comments from its users.
An ongoing task of the Focus since September 2001 has been to establish contact with key players in the public library field, and gather information to inform future activities. This has involved attending events and conferences including: Libraries and Learndirect conference; APLAWS conference (Accessible Personalised Local Authority Web Sites); CPI/Instant Library seminars, CILIP events and the People's Network programme of events, 2002. A useful meeting with the Regional Development Officer, Geoff Warren, took place at UKOLN in June, to discuss a possible role for UKOLN in forwarding the regional agenda. Meetings have also been scheduled with the British Library Co-operation and Partnership Programme (CPP), and the London Libraries Development Agency (LLDA).
Dissemination forms an important aspect of the work of the Public Library Focus. Presentations included: Internet Librarian International Conference at Olympia, London and the SPIN Conference in Birmingham 2002. Presentations have also been given at a variety of workshops and seminars including several on e-books, which remain a popular topic. Interest in e-books intensified following the take-over of netLibrary by OCLC/PICA, and the Focus gave a presentation on e-books at a netLibrary event in Birmingham in May 2002. The Public Library column in Ariadne has been produced for issues 30-32, and future articles for Ariadne are planned.
The Networked Services Policy Taskgroup was relaunched as a partnership between UKOLN, Resource and CILIP following the closure of EARL in September 2001. The newly formed group operates as a dynamic expert forum to inform the vision and strategic development of the People's Network programme. Public library representation is drawn from all regions of the UK, as well as from the PULMAN project, Co-East and the British Council.
The group will continue to commission papers in the popular Issue Papers series, with Penny Garrod as series editor. Penny undertook an initial mapping exercise to identify suitable topics for future papers, and the final mapping document will be published on the Web. A databank of policy material will also be developed to form a resource for senior managers located on the People's Network Web site. UKOLN currently hosts the electronic version of the Issue Papers, and has taken over the production of the electronic copy previously undertaken by EARL.
Stories from the Web has entered a new phase, following meetings to explore future funding options. A new Web site, aimed at the 11-14 year old age group, has been developed by the Birmingham project team which will be launched in September 2002. Stories from the Web is also exploring collaborative working with 'Their Reading Futures' (TRF) - a new project co-ordinated by LaunchPad, the library development agency. LaunchPad is a partnership between: the Association of Senior Children's and Education Librarians (ASCEL); the Society of Chief Librarians (SCL); CILIP; the Youth Libraries Group (CILIP); Books For Students and the Arts Council of England, Literature Department. UKOLN continues to host and maintain the server for Stories from the Web, and remains an executive partner. The Focus has attended meetings to discuss future activities and funding options, and liaises with the project team on a regular basis. The Focus is currently conducting some initial research into the viability of introducing e-books into the Stories from the Web project. This would enable children to interact with electronic texts and develop new online and literacy skills - it may also attract more children from the new target age group of 11-14.
A major review of the Public Library People directory was undertaken in July 2002 involving emailing everyone listed in the directory. Responses are still coming in and the exercise will provide both useful statistics and qualitative data, which we will analyse prior to improving and promoting the service further.
UKOLN is a member of a panel of specialist advisers to the PULMAN project, managed by Essex County Council.
The Department of Culture, Media and Sport-funded programme of projects to improve library services to visually impaired people, which began in 1999, has been continued into 2002. Following the acceptance of the recommendations in UKOLN's review of the National Union Catalogue of Alternative Formats (NUCAF) in 1999, the development of this tool into Reveal: the National Database of Resources in Accessible Formats was made a priority in the programme of work.
UKOLN has continued to contribute to the project during the past year. There has been some revision of the bibliographic standard for Reveal and advice produced on the use of Guidelines for Subject Access to Individual Works of Fiction, Drama Etc. (GSAFD) for Reveal. In preparation for the migration of records from NUCAF to the new union catalogue, work has been done on identifying incorrect cataloguing practice in the past and suitable methods for rectifying problems found.
UKOLN has continued to work on the development of a Web-accessible register of collections of materials in accessible formats. The UKOLN Research Group has carried out the development of this tool, with Bibliographic Management providing input relating to accessibility issues, test data and the testing programme. The development stage is now complete and the database will shortly be relocated to a server at the National Library for the Blind. UKOLN will provide training for the person appointed to collect and enter data about the collections.
UKOLN continues to monitor the availability of bibliographic records in the BNB files on the British Library Database as it has done since January 1980. The surveys cover items with publication dates of 1974 or later, with a UK publisher or distributor, which are within the coverage of the British National Bibliography. Each month results are tabulated and analysed and a conflated hit rate produced for the previous twelve months. The hit rate is the percentage of items for which records were found. A second search of the database six months after the original search identifies records subsequently added to the database. The results of this produce the recheck hit rate. The results are available from the UKOLN Web site.
The British Library has closed its BLAISE online access to its files of catalogue records. Until the new Corporate Bibliographic System is in place, access to BNB records is now via the European Information Network Service GEM database. The changeover to using GEM has been smooth and impact on the survey has been minimal.
UKOLN is continuing to monitor the records contributed to the BNB files through the Copyright Libraries Shared Cataloguing Programme (CLSCP). This is now undertaken as an annual snapshot and the results are reported to the British Library and the CLSCP Steering Committee.
As Dublin Core is taken up by different information communities it is reviewed by the communities to see whether it can be used as it is or requires changes to definitions or additional elements. A number of application profiles, which record the modified definitions and additional elements or sub-elements, are now being developed. The international library community is currently developing a Library Application Profile (DC-LAP), and UKOLN is part of the working party looking at this. A revised second draft of the DC-LAP is now under consideration by the DC Usage Board.
The Collection Description Focus is a national post that was jointly funded, for a 12-month period in the first instance, by the JISC, the Research Support Libraries Programme (RSLP) and the British Library.
The aim of the Focus is to improve co-ordination of work on collection description methods, schemas and tools, with the goal of ensuring consistency and compatibility of approaches. The Focus provides support both for projects actively involved in collection description work and for those investigating or planning such work. It builds on the earlier RSLP collection description work carried out at UKOLN by Andy Powell.
Activities since August 2001 have included:
The Focus has provided support to projects working within a range of programmes, particularly the RSLP and NOF-digitise. The Focus has maintained a close relationship with the Crossroads project, which is developing a database of collection-level descriptions for museum, library and archive resources in the West Midlands. Marieke Napier of UKOLN worked with the Focus and provided technical advice on the design of the database for the project. A good relationship has also been established with the South-West Museums, Libraries and Archives Council, which is seeking to develop some of their earlier collection mapping work.
The Focus has worked closely with staff in UKOLN who are designing the architecture for the JISC Information Environment and others, (notably at MIMAS, Manchester Computing), developing the middleware services required to implement that architecture.
The activity of the Focus has an inherently cross-domain emphasis, and has benefited from the broader work on the effective exchange and reuse of information resources carried out by Paul Miller as Interoperability Focus. The Focus has raised awareness of collection-level description in international fora such as CIMI and DELOS, and a presentation was recently given to a meeting of the EC-funded Minerva project, which seeks to improve co-ordination of digitisation activities. There has also been interest in the CLD work from the Bibliothèque Nationale de France.
A proposal for a further year's funding was submitted in May, and that proposal has been accepted. For the next year, Resource will join the three existing funding partners in contributing to the financing of the Focus.
Members of the Policy and Advice team consist of Ann Chapman (Bibliographic Management), Peter Dowdell (NOF Technical Advisory Service), Penny Garrod (Public Library Networking Focus), Pete Johnston (Collection Description Focus and Interoperability Focus), Brian Kelly (UK Web Focus and Team Leader), Paul Miller (Interoperability Focus), Marieke Napier (QA Focus and NOF Technical Advisory Service) and Bridget Robinson (Collection Description Focus).
- advancing knowledge through research and development -
UKOLN's Research and Development team carries out applied and technical research within the context of a number of externally funded projects. The team is made up of seven members of staff encompassing a mix of technical and digital library expertise. The quality of their outputs has gained the team a place in the digital library research community and has contributed to UKOLN's international reputation. The R&D team value highly the contacts they have built up throughout Europe, the USA, Australia and Japan, chiefly through project work.
The R&D team have pursued coherent themes within the project work to which they have committed; namely research into the development and use of emerging metadata standards, Web-based resource discovery, 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.
Currently we have some new projects which came on stream in mid-2002, some of which are longer term such as ePrints UK, the FAIR PORTAL, and HILT2, and some of which are short term such as the JISC/Wellcome Digital Preservation study and Agentcities. Other projects have started recently, such as CORES, while others are of longer standing, in particular the Open Archive Forum and IMesh Toolkit. Various projects came to an end this year, significantly Renardus which brings to an end our direct involvement with European subject gateways, though within the UK this theme continues with our project management of the Subject Portals Project. The theme of metadata schema registries, followed within the SCHEMAS project, which finished in early 2002, will be continued within CORES.
Our chief funders remain the JISC and the European Community.
Previous work on subject gateway architecture has been carried forward by the Imesh Toolkit Project at UKOLN by looking at two components of interest, personalisation and annotation. In particular, the project has been evaluating the role of the Web Services model and the use of the Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) as an interface between components that contribute to subject gateway functionality. In the project's work on personalisation, tools based on these technologies have been built for demonstration and experimentation purposes. The advantages of the SOAP protocol are that it is platform- and language-independent, thus supporting interoperability between gateways, and reuse of tools and services. Development is relatively straight-forward, with many freely available toolkits emerging to support development in a wide range of programming languages. We have described how SOAP can be used as an interface for accessing and managing user profiles (on which basis personalisation services are built). Together with the Resource Discovery Network (RDN) a demonstrator has been built around SOAP services developed in Perl.
Another area of activity of the IMesh Toolkit Project is that of annotation. Annotation enables users of subject gateways to make and read digital comments and guidance about resources in a gateway's internet catalogue. By their nature, annotations do not have to be embedded alongside or stored with the base documents, a considerable advantage over their non-digital counterparts. Initial work concentrated on considering functionality in annotation applications across a variety of contexts including Virtual Learning Environments (VLE's) where a multiplicity of users in VLE's would have different uses and expectations of an annotation system. In response to a move towards co-operation with the RDN, work progressed to considering how an annotation system might work in conjunction with an existing resource discovery service without requiring the latter to make any major changes in its operation in order to provide a Web-based annotation capability.
As a means to providing a design which might readily be accessed by developers working in a variety of programming languages, the UML (Unified Modelling Language) design methodolgy was adopted and a set of use cases pertaining to a straight-forward set of functionality was produced. These use cases were validated using a further UML method and subsequently developed into data which could be used by developers. These initial use cases provided the basis upon which work could be carried forward on considering the viability of an extension to functionality which could prove useful to gateway developers, namely automated annotation moderation.
Dissemination activities continue through the Web site, through participation at events organised by the JISC and in the wider community, and through informal contact with other projects. A poster was presented at the DNER all projects meeting in January 2002. Poster presentations had been invited to answer the question "What will be the outputs from your project and how will they be of use to the wider educational community?" A presentation was also delivered on the Use of SOAP in the Management of Subject Gateway User Profiles at the DLI JISC/NSF meeting held in Edinburgh at the end of June 2002. A general presentation on personalisation was given at the Internet Librarian International conference in March 2002.
The Open Archives Forum (OA-Forum) provides a Europe-based community of interest for the dissemination of information about activity related to open archives and the Open Archive Initiative (OAI). It is funded as an Accompanying Measure in the Information Societies Technology (IST) Programme of the EU Fifth Framework. UKOLN co-ordinates the OA-Forum project, which runs from October 2001 to September 2003, and UKOLN's Research and Development Team contributes to all aspects of its work. UKOLN's partners in the project are Istituto di Elaborazione della Informazione, Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche (IEI-CNR) of Italy, and Rechenzentrum / Computing Center, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (HUB) of Berlin, Germany.
UKOLN leads the organisational issues strand of OA-Forum. It aims to:
UKOLN is drafting a substantial report on these issues, and has commissioned an expert review of IPR issues. A breakout session on organisational issues at the first OA-Forum Workshop identified (and uncovered intense interest in) key issues, and follow-up by participants through a cross-European working group is expected to be an early outcome in this area.
The OA-Forum's series of four workshops is the primary responsibility of IEI-CNR, along with leading the dissemination effort within the project. The first workshop, held in Pisa in May, was successful in the breadth of participation across countries and types of organisation and coverage of topics. UKOLN helped plan and run the workshop, organised speakers and rapporteurs from a number of UK organisations, and is currently working on plans for the other workshops. The second OA-Forum workshop will be held in Lisbon in the first week of December 2002, and will focus on libraries and archives. OA-Forum workshops provide opportunities for face-to-face information sharing and community building. Together with the OA-Forum Web site, they provide channels for wide participation in OA-Forum. UKOLN is contributing to the technical validation strand of OA-Forum, which is led by HUB. OA-Forum provides an information source covering software tools, interoperability issues and current OAI implementations (available via the Web site), and is reviewing the OAI protocol for metadata harvesting and a range of interoperating services. UKOLN has been particularly concerned with establishing shared understanding of the terminology of open archives through development of a glossary, the current draft of which is available on the OA-Forum Web site.
UKOLN's participation in the Open Archive Forum relates to work carried out in other areas. For example, the Resource Discovery Network (RDN) uses the OAI-PMH for harvesting metadata from Gateways, and, (through the nof-digitise Technical Advisory Service), UKOLN has recommended that recipients of New Opportunities Fund digitisation grants make their metadata available for harvesting in this way. Issues relating to metadata and to architectural and business models for information services are pervasive across the range of UKOLN's endeavours and working together with organisations throughout Europe (and beyond) has become increasingly important in this era of global information networks. Thus the experience, knowledge and information gained through the OA-Forum has significance and application beyond the bounds of this relatively small project.
Work on the Renardus (Academic Subject Gateway Service Europe) project was successfully completed in June 2002. The European Union had funded the project from January 2000 as part of its Information Societies Technology (IST) Programme. Renardus aimed to establish an academic subject gateway service in Europe and a focus for collaboration between existing subject gateway initiatives. The project was co-ordinated by the Koninklijke Bibliotheek (National Library of the Netherlands). UKOLN had responsibility for two out of the eight project work packages: namely those relating to business issues and the functional model of the Renardus Service.
In November 2001, the project hosted an invitation-only workshop for potential participant gateways and other relevant organisations. This was hosted at the Technical Knowledge Center of Denmark in Lyngby, near Copenhagen. UKOLN participants gave presentations on technical requirements for participation in Renardus and on sustainability issues. UKOLN has also contributed to general accounts of Renardus, presented at Internet Librarian International 2002 (London, March 2002) and published in The Electronic Library (forthcoming).
In the past year, UKOLN has revised the final architectural model for the broker system and co-ordinated the production of documentation. The documents produced describe the software components making up the Renardus broker, server toolkit, and the hardware for the actual Renardus broker installations, providing installation, maintenance and usage guidance, and outlining desirable future developments. A presentation entitled 'An architecture and metadata for browsing and searching across subject gateways' was given at the EU/NSF Digital Library All Projects Workshop (Rome, March 2002).
As part of other work packages, UKOLN produced a report on metadata sharing that explored the tradition of collaborative cataloguing in the library world and reviewed technologies and organisational issues concerned with exchange and reuse of metadata. UKOLN has also continued to be a participant in the project's working group on classification mapping. The project partners considered that it was important that the Renardus Service should offer access to the resources described by participating gateways through a generic browse structure. A general classification scheme - the Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC) - was chosen and the working group developed a technical approach for the mapping of local gateways' classification structures to it. This work was largely complete by late-summer 2001, and preliminary results were presented in a paper given to the IFLA satellite meeting 'Subject Retrieval in a Networked Environment' hosted by OCLC (Dublin, Ohio, August 2001).
UKOLN was also the leader of one of the two work packages that covered business and organisational issues. Following the publication of an introductory report on business issues in 2000, the final year of the project saw the production of several reports detailing the organisational structure of a sustainable Renardus Service and the potential business models that could support it. For example, UKOLN produced a report that described some popular business models used by Internet-based organisations and assessed whether any of them could be adopted for the future development of the Renardus Service. Other reports described detailed options for the organisational structure of a sustainable Renardus Service, outlining the roles and responsibilities of data providers (i.e. participating gateways) and a proposed management group. One outcome of this was that in June 2002, the project partners agreed to continue providing the Renardus Service after its project phase by the establishment of a membership consortium. At the same time a management group was established to maintain the Renardus Service (now hosted by the Niedersächsische Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek, Göttingen), to continue negotiations with potential collaborators and to deal with the general issues of communication and dissemination. The establishment of the Renardus Consortium means that there are good prospects for the continuation of the Renardus Service into a further phase of experimentation and service building. Both UKOLN and the Resource Discovery Network (as a data provider) will be involved in taking Renardus forward as part of these new arrangements.
The Resource Discovery Network consists of several subject-based hub sites offering specific communities a tailored view of the Web. The Subject Portals Project is focusing on improving and expanding the functionality of these services in order to develop them into subject-specific portals. SPP is a two-year project funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) and runs until August 2003.
In order to design software tools that simultaneously satisfy the needs of a variety of different sites and make it easier for institutional portals to embed our services in the future, the project has involved designing a series of Web 'portlets'. One portlet will be built for each of the key portal functions required, focusing initially on account management, cross-searching, user profiling and an alerting service.
Work to date has focused on producing user requirements, functional specifications, use cases, developing the domain model and prototyping. For the design process it was decided to adopted the UML methodology and implement a training initiative across the project team and also within the Research and Development team at UKOLN.
The project is made up of a dispersed team of developers and community specialists, all of whom also work on one or more of the RDN (Resource Discovery Network) hub sites. In order to manage accurately and control efficiently the software development work across this team, a development Web site has been set up with a central CVS (Concurrent Versions System) repository. This, along with regular virtual meetings using IRC (Internet Relay Chat), is proving very successful both for the individuals using it and the project as a whole.
In June a Preliminary Design Review was carried out, focusing on achieving agreement with all project participants on the use cases and domain model from which all software will be developed. July and August 2002 saw the project enter the first of two implementation phases and our first period of testing.
A major consideration for the project is how and where these tools will be used in the wider portal community. To that end, the project is actively sharing ideas with a number of institutional portal projects and will be looking to help them obtain the most from the project deliverables.
The central objective of the CORES project is to encourage sharing of metadata semantics. Sharing metadata semantics is key to building a Semantic Web environment and CORES is funded as an Accompanying Measure within the European Commission FP5 Semantic Web activity. The project will run for a year and a half from the start date in April 2002.
CORES addresses the need to reach consensus on a data model for declaring semantics of metadata terms in a machine-readable way. Consensus on the ground rules for declaring standard definitions of terms, as well as local usage and adaptations of those terms, will enable the diversity of existing standards to "play together" in an integrated, machine-understandable way. In order to achieve this level of interoperability, CORES will support applications reusing and adapting terms maintained by the standardisation initiatives.
UKOLN is working with PricewaterhouseCoopers, Luxembourg, Fraunhofer Gesellschaft, Bonn, and the Computer and Automation Research Institute, Hungarian Academy of Sciences (MTA SZTAKI) as partners in this project. The key activities within CORES are:
The Augmented Representation of Cultural Objects (ARCO) project started in October 2001. It is funded as part of the EU's Information Society Technologies (IST) Programme. The project will run for three years and has seven partners with the University of Sussex acting as coordinator and the Sussex Archaeological Society and the Victoria and Albert Museum acting as pilot sites. The overall aims of the project are to develop techniques for the capture, virtual representation and manipulation of cultural objects and artefacts. UKOLN is leading the work involved in coordinating and specifying user requirements from the museums and technical partners. UKOLN will also be involved in providing technical advice with regard to the metadata requirements of the project.
The project aims to:
All system components will be integrated through XML providing data exchange and interoperability. The project will demonstrate its results through a series of prototype system components leading to a final integrated system.
Specification of the first prototype was completed at the end of April and a two-week user trial was held at the University of Sussex in mid-April. The main intent of the first user trial was to provide a learning environment for all partners as to the state-of-art in various areas. A pipeline was established for the capture, manipulation, refinement and rendering of several museum artefacts using digital cameras and off-the-shelf software components. The project had its first review in May; this was successful and received positive comments from the reviewers.
Partners are currently engaged in the specification and implementation of the second prototype which is due in October 2002. This will be followed by another user trial to assess and evaluate the various aspects of the project.
This project will deploy an ontology server onto the Agentcities.NET network. It has secured funding to begin work in September and has a duration of six months.
As part of the SCHEMAS project, an accompanying measure under the European Union's Fifth Framework IST Programme, UKOLN has been involved in building a metadata vocabulary or ontology registry. The primary function of this registry is to provide a publication environment for the disclosure of customised metadata vocabularies or application profiles. Such a service was cited as being of primary importance by metadata schema developers and implementers, the target audience of the SCHEMAS project.
The registry aims to provide an environment in which individual terms as well as whole vocabularies can be investigated for adaptations, local usages and relationships with other vocabularies. At present, standard or canonical vocabularies such as the Dublin Core are readily accessible, but this is not the case for application profiles.
One major reason for such a Web-based service is to facilitate the convergence of vocabularies or ontologies within specific domains such as education, cultural heritage, publishing or rights management. The hope is that alignment in this way would improve the prospects of interoperability of systems in specific sectors.
Another use for such an ontology server is the automated querying of metadata vocabularies by agents for acquiring the semantics associated with specific metadata terms. This in turn would facilitate the type of reasoning and inference required to make the vision of the Semantic Web a reality.
The Cedars project was funded by JISC to investigate problems associated with the long-term preservation of digital information. Work on the project finished at the end of March 2002. The project had run for four years under the overall direction of the Consortium of University Research Libraries (CURL) with a project team lead by the University of Leeds.
The final year of the project focused on the consolidation and dissemination of project outputs rather than on the undertaking of new research. UKOLN's main contribution to Cedars has been in the area of preservation metadata, contributing to both the project's own outline metadata schema which was published in March 2000, as well as being a member of the OCLC/RLG Working Group on Preservation Metadata. In March 2002, UKOLN produced the 'Cedars guide to preservation metadata', one of a series of short publications intended to provide a non-technical introduction to topics of importance to the digital preservation issue. UKOLN also gave an introductory presentation on preservation metadata at the final Cedars Workshop held in Manchester, February 2002. UKOLN also contributed to the summaries of this event published in RLG DigiNews in April 2002 and on the Cedars Web pages.
From the beginning of 2002, UKOLN has been providing some support to the JISC's digital preservation activity in the establishment of a Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC). The DPC was established in 2001 in order to promote joint action on digital preservation in the UK and to help facilitate UK collaboration with international partners. As part of a joint initiative between the DPC and the National Library of Australia (NLA), UKOLN has begun to contribute information about UK digital preservation activities to the NLA's PADI (Preserving Access to Digital Information) subject gateway. UKOLN - in association with the NLA - is also contributing to the production of a quarterly current awareness bulletin entitled 'What's new in digital preservation.' The first issue of this was produced by UKOLN in May 2002.
UKOLN is currently leading an evaluation and feasibility study on Web preservation for the JISC and the Library of the Wellcome Trust. This will investigate existing Web preservation initiatives, including the Internet Archive, and make recommendations on how the JISC and Wellcome Trust could develop Web preservation initiatives to meet the needs of their respective communities. Work started on the feasibility study in May 2001 and will be completed by the end of the year.
The SCHEMAS project was completed in February 2002, having run for two years as an accompanying measure to the European Commission's Fifth Framework Programme. UKOLN's partners in this project were PricewaterhouseCoopers, Luxembourg, and the German National Research Centre for Information Technology, now merged with Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft. The project provided a forum for sharing information about metadata schemas and included a successful workshop programme. A total of four workshops were held attracting an international audience.
The project investigated and prototyped various approaches to implementation of the SCHEMAS registry, first implementing a simple HTML based registry then looking at the more challenging option of a Resource Description Framework (RDF) based registry. The project settled on implementing a registry based on the DESIRE demonstrator, also implemented by UKOLN for the Metadata for Education Group (MEG) registry. UKOLN took the lead in populating this registry with a number of schemas including application profiles, as well as activity reports relating to metadata activity and particular schemas.
The fourth SCHEMAS workshop was held in November 2001, a one-day event at Koninklijke Bibliotheek, the National Library of the Netherlands, in the Hague. During the day partners reviewed progress made in various aspects of the project, and UKOLN looked in particular at the work done on application profiles. Feedback from previous workshops had confirmed that customisation and localisation of standard metadata schemas is widespread. Building on the concept of "application profiles" we suggested means to express such variants, and proposed best practice guidelines. UKOLN demonstrated the SCHEMAS Registry.
Outputs from the SCHEMAS project informed much discussion of schemas, application profiles and registries at the DC2001 workshop in Tokyo which Rachel Heery attended in her role as co-chair of the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI) Registry Working group. Work on schemas and registries is now being taken forward within the CORES and MEG Registry projects.
The Research and Development staff work as a team across a number of projects, each having particular expertise in software development, library and information management, and project management. Particular areas of interest include, resource discovery, metadata schemas, schema registries, usability studies, personalisation, Semantic Web technologies, annotation, and digital preservation. The team members are Monica Bonett (Software Developer), Leona Carpenter (Technical Development and Research), Michael Day (Research Officer), Rachel Heery (Assistant Director and Team Leader), Manjula Patel (Technical Development and Research), Rosemary Russell (Research Officer), Julie Stuckes (Subject Portals Project Manager) and Richard Waller (Software Developer).
- building innovative systems and services based on Web technologies -
UKOLN provides a technical and interoperability advice role for the RDN, as well as hosting and developing the centralised RDN Web services.
In response to the popularity of RDN-include, the thrust of the recent JISC X4L call and a number of planned technical developments, the RDN has released a document outlining forthcoming developments and ways in which the RDN's data can be incorporated in local institutional services. The document covers simple linking, linking via VLEs, RDN-include, RSS news channels, SOAP and Z39.50 access. These services are now in place with the exception of the SOAP interface which is currently in development.
'Behind the Headlines' continues to be the second most visited page of the <www.rdn.ac.uk> service. Some minor improvements mean that the news item on the homepage is now selected at random every minute from the day's three stories. In addition, users are now presented with a link to the relevant news item at the BBC from each story listed at <www.rdn.ac.uk/>. In future an archive of stories featured on 'Behind the Headlines' will be made available.
ResourceFinder (an interdisciplinary search of the RDN) has recently been re-developed. This work has resulted in a new interface that is more streamlined, faster and that includes embedded links to 'value-added' discovery services, such as links to similar resources elsewhere, links to resources that cite the discovered resource and links to archived copies of the discovered resource. The central database upon which this service is based contains over 50,000 RDN resource descriptions, gathered from the RDN gateways using the OAI Protocol for Metadata Harvesting.
UKOLN staff have been doing some groundwork on integrating RDN services into Virtual Learning Environments. As part of this activity we have made a number of RDN Virtual Training Suite tutorials available through the University's Blackboard VLE.
RDN-Down Under, an OAI repository of RDN records relevant to Australia, has been made available to the National Library of Australia for use in a test-bed project. This work has included the development of a tool that can determine the country hosting a resource given a record identifier - this is available for use by hubs.
Following the formal launch of RDN-include, there has been considerable interest in the service with a total of 80 enquiries in the period directly after the launch. The RDN-include pages will shortly be updated to reflect current implementations of RDN-i and RDN-include.
Finally, we have been involved in discussions with various other parties about possible future collaboration including the LTSN, the UK Mirror Service, HERO, Jobs.ac.uk, BUFVC, CAB-International, ISI, Ingenta, Renardus, NISS, WebCT and OCLC. We have also been working closely with the Subject Portals Project and the IMesh Toolkit Project on technologies and tools for authentication, authorisation, annotation and metadata enhancement.
UKOLN provides a technical advisory service to the JISC concerning the development of the JISC Information Environment and has continued to disseminate information about the technical architecture in a wide variety of conferences, workshops and smaller meetings including:
Currently UKOLN's work in this area is focusing on the relationships between the technologies specified in the technical architecture and emerging Web services, the relationships between the information environment and the Grid, mechanisms to support the deposit of material into the information environment, the integration of the information environment with managed learning environments and the development of a pilot service registry for the information environment.
The RDN has been funded to develop a major e-prints service for the UK FE & HE communities following a successful bid to the JISC FAIR call to proposals. This project will see us working closely with RDN partners, OCLC and the University of Southampton to harvest and automatically enhance metadata about e-prints deposited in UK institutional e-print archives. The resulting enhanced metadata will be offered for searching through each of the RDN gateway services.
The Gate-Z project, funded under the JISC 5/99 programme, has now finished. We hope to encourage take-up and use of the Bath Profile gateway software that was developed by Crossnet during the project by submitting a write-up of the project for publication in Ariadne.
Our metadata-related Web-based tools, DC-dot, DC-Assist, RSS-xpress and OpenResolver continue to be widely used, downloaded and cited. DC-dot is currently used to describe nearly 1800 new resources each month. UKOLN have been working closely with the University of Bath and are hosting a copy of the eprints.org software to support the University of Bath's pilot eprint archive project.
UKOLN's internal and external server machines are predominantly Sun/Solaris-based. Office and home desktop machines run either Windows NT or Windows 2000 (about a 50-50 split currently, with a general move towards the latter). UKOLN works closely with the Bath University Computing Services to move server machines into the more secure environment of their machine room and to co-ordinate our network and service provision - Web caching, email routing, filestore archiving, the Domain Name Service, etc. In general, UKOLN staff are highly mobile. A recent and increasing trend towards using laptops instead of desktop machines means that UKOLN is currently investigating the possible use of wireless, broadband, global dial-up services and mobile computing technologies generally as well as looking at the delivery of more Windows 2000-based intranet services.
The Distributed Systems and Services team consists of Pete Cliff (RDN Systems Developer), Pete Dowdell (RDN Systems Developer/NOF-digitise Technical Advisor), Andy Powell (Assistant Director and Team Leader), Eddie Young (Systems Support).
- promoting community-building and consensus-making -
Ariadne issues 29 to 32 were published during the past year (September, December, March-April, and June-July). All of these were large issues: a total of 37 main articles were published, plus the usual regular columns, and more than a dozen 'At the Event' reports; many of them of interest to an international audience.
During the year Ariadne focused heavily on a number of current lines of development, including the Open Archives Initiative - Ariadne's editor reported on an important OAI conference at the Institute of Mechanical Engineers (London) held on the 11 of July 2001. It also looked at the opportunities created by the protocol for developing countries, and followed up with two articles based on practical experience of setting up e-print services. Other technical developments covered by Ariadne included Web Services - issue 29 kicked off with an article on the subject by Tracy Gardner (ex-UKOLN), now of IBM (Hursley). Brett Burridge looked at the Web Services-related 'Simple Object Access Protocol' (SOAP).
Ariadne published a number of useful overview articles in the course of these four issues, including one on the key issues in the delivery of electronic library services in the UK Higher Education context. Susi Woodhouse supplied a useful introduction to the NOF-Digitise Programme. Other subjects covered include: Content Management Systems, and a personal view of the portal concept by Paul Miller. Regular coverage of the annual WWW event continued: this year (WWW2002) held in Hawaii, courtesy of Libby Miller of ILRT.
Access statistics continue to rise: in May 2002 Ariadne had more than 2,500 user sessions per day (more than 78,300 for the month), and more than 6,500 page views per day (203,307 for the month).
Ariadne had 802,490 visitor sessions over the year with an average of 66, 874 sessions each month and 2,199 sessions every day. These figures show a substantial increase on last year, when there was an average of 1,305 visitor sessions each day.
Cultivate Interactive Web magazine continues to play an important disseminating role for the digital heritage and cultural content communities. The Cultivate Project recently expanded its remit to cover Russia as well as Central and Eastern Europe and the European Union. Cultivate-Russia will also be producing a Russian language version of Cultivate Interactive, based on advice and technical support provided by UKOLN.
Although the majority of articles cover projects or services, opinion pieces on current trends in the digital cultural heritage field and the Praxis section, which aims to give advice on how to put various applications and theories into practice, have also been well received. Articles published include discussion of the potential the Open Archives Initiative may hold for museums, an introduction to Content-Based Multimedia Information Handling and a report from the BBC on the crisis facing broadcasting organisations and how they hope to cope with invaluable but ageing archives.
Cultivate Interactive has received widespread dissemination since its launch giving it a high public profile within the appropriate communities from the onset. Presentations and poster displays on the magazine and the Cultivate Project have been given at a variety of events.
Since the last Annual Report three issues of Cultivate Interactive have been published, in October 2001, February 2002 and July 2002. In April 2002 Richard Waller took over from Marieke Napier as the magazine's lead editor.
The UKOLN home page makes use of a locally-developed tool known as RSS-xpress. This enables news entries on the home page to be included as HTML and also made available in an XML format known as RSS, which allows third parties to include automatically the news items on their Web sites.
There were 1,206,719 visitor session recorded for the period 1 August 2001 - 31 July 2002. On average that is 100,560 sessions a month and 3,306 sessions a day. This shows an increase on previous year's figures.
UKOLN recognises that marketing its activities and services is an important part of dissemination and community-building. An outreach working group has been set up in order to improve the ways in which we promote ourselves.
UKOLN's marketing effort was expanded to include an Events Assistant to enable us to manage a more extensive conference and workshop programme.
UKOLN exhibited at the Online Information exhibition 2001 held at Olympia in London on 4 - 6 December.
UKOLN has organised the following events during the year. Support has also been given for the REVEAL workshop and the Second International Meeting on National Digital Cultural Content Creation Strategies, held in Washington.
Events continue to be of prime importance in disseminating UKOLN's work but also in offering a forum for our communities to exchange ideas and experiences.
The Information and Communications Team consists of Sara Hassen (Events and Marketing Manager), Philip Hunter (Information Officer), Shirley Keane (Web Editor), Brian Kelly (currently Team Leader) and Joanne Stone (Events Assistant).
The following chart shows the breakdown of funding received for the period August 2001 - July 2002.
UKOLN's core activities during the period were funded by Resource and the JISC. The funding supported UKOLN's activities in the areas of public library networking, bibliographic management, event management and information services. In addition it supported the Director, some administrative and managerial support and office systems support.
Project income is categorised as JISC funding or research grants.
JISC income (other than core) for the year comprised of work on the following projects: DNER SLD, Digital Preservation Coalition, Filter, Hilt 2, IMesh Toolkit, Registry for Educational Metadata Schemas, Portal (FAIR), Quality Assurance Focus, Resource Discovery Network Centre, Subject Portals Project, Web Archiving Feasibility Study and UK Web Focus.
The following projects provided research grant income during the period: REVEAL, Collection Description Focus and the European Commission-funded projects ARCO, Cedars 2, CORES, Cultivate CEE and EU, Open Archives Forum and Renardus.
Income categorised as "consultancy" include that from the New Opportunities Fund.
UKOLN organises a number of workshops in support of its own work - as well as organising events for its funders and other stakeholders.
UKOLN received a small amount of income in the form of royalties from its Library Association publications, particularly The Public Librarian's Guide to the Internet, which was published in July 2000. (This information was not yet available for the table above).
Full details of income and expenditure during this year have been submitted to our funding bodies in accordance with their conditions of grant.
Members of the Resources & Administration Team consist of Ruth Burt (Office Administrator), Ali Cook (Financial Administrator),, Sally Criddle (Resource Co-ordinator and Team Leader), Michelle Ibison (Resource Co-ordinator & Team Leader, covering Sally Criddle's maternity leave), Birgit Kongialis (Financial Administrator).
- spreading the word -
UKOLN has extensive communication and dissemination channels nationally and internationally and staff contribute to the community through membership of a wide range of influential committees.
A selective list of publications, presentations and committee memberships follows. Also included is a list of some of the visitors whom UKOLN received during the year.
Monica Bonett
5th European Conference, ECDL 2001: Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries.
Cultivate Interactive, Issue 5, 1 October 2001.
<http://www.cultivate-int.org/issue5/ecdl/>
Leona Carpenter
Leona talks to Phil Cross about usability issues in the Renardus context.
Talking Heads No.4, Renardus project, September 2001.
<http://www.renardus.org/>
Ann Chapman
NUCAF to REVEAL: the national union catalogue of alternative formats.
Linda Hopkins (ed.), Library services for visually impaired people: a manual
of best practice.
Resource, October 2000, revision of chapter 10, March 2002.
A catalogue quality audit tool.
Library and Information Research News, Vol. 26, No.82, Spring 2002.
Library Management, Vol. 23, Nos. 6 & 7, 2002. (With O. Massey).
Revealing collections for visually impaired people.
SCONUL Newsletter, No. 25, Spring 2002.
Pete Cliff
Building ResourceFinder, using the OAI Metadata Harvesting
Protocol at the Resource Discovery Network (RDN).
Ariadne, Issue 30, December 2001.
<http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue30/rdn-oai/>
RSS - sharing online content metadata.
Cultivate Interactive, Issue 7, July 2002
<http://www.cultivate-int.org/issue7/rss/>
Michael Day
Metadata for digital preservation: a review of recent developments
In: P. Constantopoulos and I. T. Sølvberg, (eds.),
Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries: 5th European Conference,
ECDL 2001, Darmstadt, Germany, September 4-9, 2001, proceedings, (Lecture
Notes in Computer Science, 2163), Berlin:
Springer-Verlag, 2001, pp. 161-172.
<http://link.springer.de/link/service/series/0558/bibs/2163/21630161.htm>
Automated and manual approaches to the provision of thesauri and subject
vocabularies.
HILT project deliverable, 5 October 2001. (With Rosemary Russell)
<http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/hilt/interfaces/>
First Austrian Metadata Seminar.
Cultivate International, Issue 5, 1 October 2001.
<http://www.cultivate-int.org/issue5/austrian/>
Cedars guide to preservation metadata.
Leeds: Cedars Project, March 2002.
<http://www.leeds.ac.uk/cedars/>
Metadata for images: a report for the FILTER project.
FILTER project deliverable, 8 March 2002. (With Manjula Patel)
<http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/filter/report/>
The final Cedars Workshop: a report from Manchester, UK.
RLG DigiNews, Vol. 6, no. 2, 15 April 2002.
<http://www.rlg.org/preserv/diginews/diginews6-2.html#conference>
Cedars Final Workshop, Manchester Conference Centre,
UMIST, Manchester, 25-26 February 2002.
Leeds: Cedars Project, 22 April 2002. (With Maggie Jones)
<http://www.leeds.ac.uk/cedars/>
DPC/PADI What's new in digital preservation, Issue 1, 3 May 2002.
<http://www.dpconline.org/>
Business models in operation within Renardus.
Renardus project deliverable, June 2002.
<http://www.renardus.org/about_us/project_deliverables.html>
Metadata sharing in the Renardus context [part 1].
Renardus project deliverable, June 2002. (With Jessica Lindholm and Rachel Heery)
<http://www.renardus.org/about_us/project_deliverables.html>
Digital preservation and long-term access to the content of electronic serials.
Wayne Jones, (ed.), E-serials: publishers, libraries, users, and standards,
2nd ed. Binghamton, N.Y.: Haworth Press, 2002 (forthcoming).
Pete Dowdell
Book review: The Information Professional's Guide to Career Development Online.
Ariadne, Issue 31, April 2002.
<http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue31/book-reviews/dowdell.html>
Website review: Oxford Reference Online.
Ariadne, Issue 32, July 2002.
<http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue32/oxford-reference-collection/>
Penny Garrod
Public Library column.
Ariadne, Issue 30, January 2002.
<http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue30/pub-libs/>
Public Library column.
Ariadne, Issue 31, April 2002.
<http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue31/pub-libs/>
Public Library column.
Ariadne, Issue 32, July 2002.
<http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue32/public-libraries/>
Rachel Heery
What terms does your metadata use? Application profiles as machine-understandable narratives.
Journal of Digital Information, Vol 2., Issue 2, November 2001.
(With Tom Baker, Makx Dekkers, Manjula Patel and Gauri Salokhe).
< http://jodi.ecs.soton.ac.uk/>
A metadata registry for the Semantic Web.
D-Lib Magazine, Vol. 8, No. 5, May 2002. (With Harry Wagner)
<http://www.dlib.org/dlib/may02/wagner/05wagner.html>
Metadata sharing in the Renardus context [part 1]
Renardus project deliverable, June 2002. (With Jessica Lindholm and Rachel Heery)
<http://www.renardus.org/about_us/project_deliverables.html>
Philip Hunter
Beyond the online tutorial.
Ariadne, Issue 29, October 2001
<http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue29/pedagogy/>
The future of Web traffic analysis.
Vine, Issue 124, September 2001, pp. 51-54.
A content management and web publishing systems gazetteer.
Cultivate Interactive, Issue 5, October 2001.
<http://www.cultivate-int.org/issue5/cms/>
Ariadne, the Web, and the digital library.
ASSIGNation, January 2002.
The information Grid.
Ariadne, Issue 32, July 2002.
<http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue32/information-grid/>
Open Archives Forum - First Workshop: Creating a European Forum on Open Archives.
Ariadne, Issue 32, July 2002.
<http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue32/open-archives-forum/>
UKOLN joins up with UK e-science
Topics (University of Bath), Issue 126, 21 May 2002, p. 2. (With Liz
Lyon)
<http://www.bath.ac.uk/pr/topics/126.pdf>
Pete Johnston
Collective convergence: the work of the Collection Description Focus.
Ariadne, Issue 29, September 2001. (With Bridget Robinson)
<http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue29/robinson/>
Metadata sharing and XML.
NOF-digitise Technical Advisory Service Information Paper, January 2002.
<http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/nof/support/help/papers/metaxml.htm>
Collections and collection description.
Collection Description Focus Briefing Paper, No 1, January 2002. (With
Bridget Robinson).
<http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/cd-focus/briefings/bp1/>
An introduction to collection-level description.
NOF-digitise Technical Advisory Service Information Paper, March 2002.
(With contributions from NOF and Resource)
<http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/nof/support/help/papers/cldintro.htm>
Brian Kelly
Web Focus: report on the Fifth Institutional Web Management Workshop.
Ariadne, Issue 29, October 2001.
<http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue29/web-focus/>
WebWatch: carrying out your own WebWatch survey.
Ariadne, Issue 29, October 2001.
<http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue29/web-watch/>
Web Focus: mobile e-book readers.
Ariadne, Issue 30, January 2002.
<http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue30/web-focus/>
WebWatch: an update on search engines used in UK universities.
Ariadne, Issue 30, January 2002.
<http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue30/web-watch/>
Web Focus: guidelines for URI naming policies.
Ariadne, Issue 31, April 2002.
<http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue31/web-focus/>
WebWatch: an update of a survey of the numbers of UK university Web servers.
Ariadne, Issue 31, April 2002.
<http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue31/web-watch/>
Web Focus: report on the Sixth Institutional Web Management Workshop.
Ariadne, Issue 32, July 2002.
<http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue32/web-focus/>
WebWatch: revisiting 404 error pages in UK university Web sites.
Ariadne, Issue 32, July 2002.
<http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue32/web-watch/>
WebWatching national node Web sites.
Cultivate Interactive, Issue 7,July 2002.
<http://www.cultivate-int.org/issue7/webwatch/>
Liz Lyon
The people's heritage: democratising our memory institutions.
New Review of Information Networking, Vol. 7, February 2002, pp. 185-200
(With Paul Miller)
The JISC Information Environment and Web Services.
Ariadne, Issue 31, April 2002. (With Andy Powell)
<http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue31/information-environments/>
Emerging information architectures for distributed digital libraries.
In: Proceedings China Digital Library Conference 2002, Beijing, China.
UKOLN Strategy and Work Programme August 2002-July 2004.
Submission to Resource and JISC, August 2002
Paul Miller
Re-inventing the wheel? Standards, interoperability and digital cultural content.
D-Lib Magazine Vol. 8, No. 1, January 2002. (With Tony Gill)
<http://www.dlib.org/dlib/january02/gill/01gill.html>
The people's heritage: democratising our memory institutions.
New Review of Information Networking, Vol. 7, February 2002, pp. 185-200.
(With Liz Lyon)
Learning objects and the information environment.
Ariadne, Issue 32, July 2002. (With Ian Dolphin)
<http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue32/iconex/>
Towards a digital Cultural Content Forum.
Cultivate Interactive, Issue7, July 2002. (With David Dawson and John
Perkins)
<http://www.cultivate-int.org/issue7/washington/>
Marieke Napier
Cultivate Interactive Editorial.
Cultivate Interactive, Issue 5, October 2001.
<http://www.cultivate-int.org/issue5/mag-editorial/>
Developing an agenda for institutional e-print archives.
Ariadne, Issue 29, October 2001.
<http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue29/open-archives/>
Cultivate Interactive: uniting Europe through digital cultural heritage.
The New Review of Information Networking, Volume 7, 2001.
<http://www.taylorgraham.com/journals/nrinvol7.html>
Book review: The Invisible Web: uncovering information sources search engines can't see.
Ariadne, Issue 30, January 2002.
<http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue30/invisible-web/>
Multi-media and Image Handling: The future is textless.
Ariadne, Issue 30, January 2002.
<http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue30/dti/>
JISC QA Focus.
Vine, Issue 126, March 2002, pp. 12-16. (With Ed Bremner)
Quality assurance procedures in the JISC 5/99 Programme.
Ariadne, Issue 30, July 2002.
<http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue32/qa-focus/>
Manjula Patel
Workshop on Managing Digital Video Assets
Ariadne, Issue 29, October 2001.v <http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue29/patel/>
What terms does your metadata use? Application profiles as machine-understandable narratives.
Journal of Digital Information, Vol. 2, Issue 2, November 2001.
(With Tom Baker, Makx Dekkers, Rachel Heery and Gauri Salokhe)
<http://jodi.ecs.soton.ac.uk/Articles/v02/i02/Baker/>
Consensus based ontology harmonisation.
Poster, First International Semantic Web Conference 2002, Sardinia, Italy, 9-12 June 2002
Andy Powell
Namespace policy for the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI).
DCMI Recommendation, 26 October 2001. (With Harry Wagner)
<http://dublincore.org/documents/2001/10/26/dcmi-namespace/>
Working with the RDN.
RDN Policy Document, February 2002
<http://www.rdn.ac.uk/publications/workingwithrdn/>
Embedding RDN services into Virtual Learning Environments.
RDN Guidelines Document, February 2002
<http://www.rdn.ac.uk/publications/rdnvle/>
Bridget Robinson
Collective convergence: the work of the Collection Description Focus.
Ariadne, Issue 29, September 2001. (With Pete Johnston)
<http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue29/robinson/>
An introduction to collections & collection description.
Collection Description Focus Briefing Paper, No.1, October 2001. (With
Pete Johnston)
<http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/cd-focus/briefings/bp1/>
Julie Stuckes
Subject Portals project overview
Vine, Issue 126, March 2002, pp. 35-39.
Richard Waller
Cultivate Interactive editorial.
Cultivate Interactive, Issue 7, July 2002.
<http://www.cultivate-int.org/issue7/mag-editorial/>
Monica Bonett
The IMesh Toolkit project.
Joint IMesh - TERENA Portal Co-ordination Activity Meeting, Darmstadt,
Germany, 4-5 September 2001. (With Rachel Heery and Libby Miller)
Personalization and Web design.
Internet Librarian International 2002, Olympia, London, 18-20 March 2002.
<http://www.imesh.org/toolkit/work/dissemination/ili02/intro_files/frame.htm>
A SOAP-based approach to managing subject gateway user profiles.
JISC/NSF DLI Projects Meeting, Edinburgh, 24-25 June 2002.
<http://www.imesh.org/toolkit/work/dissemination/nsf02/intro_files/frame.htm>
Leona Carpenter
Technical requirements for participation in Renardus.
Renardus Workshop, Technical University of Denmark (DTU), Lyngby, Copenhagen, Denmark,
15-16 November 2001. (With Anders Ardö)
OAI, metadata, and preservation.
ICSTI Seminar on Digital Preservation of the Record of Science,
Paris, 14-15 February 2002.
Collaboration systems and tools: Renardus case study.
Internet Librarian International 2002, Olympia, London, 18-20 March 2002.
(With Lesly Huxley and Marianne Peereboom)
<http://www.internet-librarian.com/presentations/huxley.pps>
Renardus: an architecture and metadata for browsing and searching across
subject gateways.
EU/NSF Digital Libraries All Projects Meeting, Rome Italy, 25-26 March 2002.
Overviews of European activity.
1st Open Archives Forum Workshop, Pisa, Italy, 13-14 May 2002. (With Donatella Castelli and Susanne Dobratz)
<http://www.oaforum.org/otherfiles/pisa_overview.ppt>
Ann Chapman
Revealed: the truth behind the national database of resources in accessible
formats.
(Session 1: Introduction and background, Session 2: Standards and the system,
Session 3: The collection register)
CIG/Reveal seminar, Manchester Metropolitan University, Manchester, 26 March 2002.
CIG/Reveal seminar, CILIP HQ, London, 26 June 2002. (With Margaret Sheridan, Reveal Project Officer)
Demystifying metadata.
CIG Annual Conference, Royal Station Hotel, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, 16-17 April 2002.
Joint staff development seminar (University of Bath and University of West of England), University of Bath, 15 May 2002.
Staff development seminar, University of Westminster, London, 2 July 2002.
Reveal: uncovering collections for the visually impaired community.
Collection Description Briefing Day 2, The British Library, London, 14 May 2002.
Sally Criddle
The development of electronic services in public libraries.
MSc course in Information and Library Management, University of Bristol, 11 September 2001
.
<http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/public/present/msc2001/intro.htm>
Michael Day
Renardus: cross-browsing European subject gateways via a common classification
system (DDC).
IFLA satellite meeting: Subject Retrieval in a Networked Environment, OCLC Online Computer Library Center, Dublin, Ohio, USA, 14-16 August 2001. (With Traugott Koch and Heike Neuroth)
<http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/renardus/papers/ifla-satellite/ifla-satellite.html>
Metadata for digital preservation: a review of recent developments.
ECDL2001, 5th European Conference on Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries, Darmstadt, Germany, 4-9 September 2001.
<http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/presentations/ecdl2001-day/paper.html>
Metadata: an introduction.
West Midlands Regional Library Unit, Managing Networks staff development programme, Understanding New Technologies seminar,
University of Birmingham, 13 September 2001.
<http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/presentations/nhs-2001/mwd-01.ppt>
Renardus and business issues.
Renardus Workshop, Technical University of Denmark (DTU), Lyngby, Copenhagen, Denmark, 15-16 November 2001.
<http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/presentations/renardus-wk/renardus-bm.ppt>
UKOLN metadata projects: subject gateways and digital preservation metadata.
International Conference - Electronic Resources: Definition, Selection and Cataloguing, Biblioteca nazionale centrale di Roma, Rome, Italy, 26-28 November 2001.
<http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/presentations/rome-2001/paper.html>
Cedars work on metadata.
Final Cedars Workshop, UMIST, Manchester, 25 February 2002.
<http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/presentations/cedars-2002/day-slides.ppt>
Two views of the digital library.
NetLab and Friends: Tribute and Outlook After 10 Years of Digital Library Development, Lund, Sweden, 10-12 April 2002. (With Roddy MacLeod)
<http://www.lub.lu.se/netlab/conf/day.ppt>
Application Profiles: interoperable friend or foe?
The European Library (TEL) - The Gate to Europe's Knowledge: Milestone Conference, Deutsche Bibliothek Frankfurt am Main, Germany, 29-30 April 2002. (Delivered on behalf of Rachel Heery)
<http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/presentations/tel-2002/heery.html>
Metadata and the description of digital images.
JISC International Digital Image Symposium, London, 20-21 June 2002.
<http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/presentations/image-symposium/metadata.ppt>
Penny Garrod
Public libraries in the information age and the role of the librarian.
MSc course in Information and Library Management, University of Bristol, 31 October 2001.
<http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/public/present/msc2001/ppt-2001-pg/intro_files/frame.htm>
The right tools for the job? Hardware and software for ebooks.
UC&R group at Derby University, 22 November 2001.
<http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/public/present/derebook/>
e-Books for public libraries. Opportunity or threat?
E-Books and Public Libraries. A CPI seminar held at Stamford, Lincolnshire, 29 November 2001.
<http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/public/present/cpiebook/>
Benchmarking public library Web sites for accessibility and usability.
Internet Librarian International 2002, Olympia, London, 19 March 2002. (With Brian Kelly).
<http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/conferences/ili-2002/benchmarking/>
eBooks in context: the evolving UK information environment.
NetLibrary workshop, OCLC PICA Lecture Theatre, Birmingham, 16 May 2002.
<http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/public/present/netlibrary/ppt-2000/intro_files/frame.htm>
Can you read this? Accessibility and public library Web sites.
EPI 2002 Conference and Exhibition (Electronic Public Information), National
Motorcycle Museum, West Midlands, 22 May 2002.
<http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/public/present/epi-2002/ppt-2000/intro_files/frame.htm>
Rachel Heery
The IMesh Toolkit project.
Joint IMesh - TERENA Portal Co-ordination Activity Meeting, Darmstadt, Germany,
4-5 September 2001. (With Monica Bonett and Libby Miller)
The role of metadata schema registries.
Government Advanced Technology Circle Forum 24, Information Discovery, 13 September 2001.
Namespaces, schemas and application profiles.
Tutorial session at DC-2001: International Conference on Dublin Core and Metadata Applications, Tokyo, Japan, 22-26 October 2001. (With Andy Powell).
Registry demonstration.
Workshop at DC-2001: International Conference on Dublin Core and Metadata Applications, Tokyo, Japan, 22-26 October 2001. (With Harry Wagner)
Schemas in the real world: application profiles.
Sharing schemas: progress and future plans, 4th SCHEMAS Workshop, The Hague, Netherlands, 30 November 2001.
Application Profiles: interoperable friend or foe?
The European Library (TEL) - The Gate to Europe's Knowledge: Milestone Conference, Deutsche Bibliothek Frankfurt am Main, Germany, 29-30 April 2002. (Delivered by Michael Day)
<http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/presentations/tel-2002/heery.html>
Philip Hunter
Metadata for harvesting: the Open Archives Initiative and how to find things
on the Web.
Internet Librarian International 2002, Olympia, London, 20 March 2002.
The development of Ariadne, 1996-2002.
Presentation given to a group of visiting Canadian librarians, University of Bath, 27 March 2002.
The Development of Ariadne, 1996-2002.
Subject Librarians 'Assign' meeting (ASLIB), University of Bath, 4 September 2001.
Pete Johnston
RDF, XML & interoperability.
Managing networks, understanding new technologies, West Midlands NHS Librarians'
Workshop, University of Birmingham, 13 September 2001.
<http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/presentations/nhs-2001/rdfxml/index.htm>
XML: a brief introduction.
Managing networks, understanding new technologies, West Midlands NHS Librarians' Workshop, University of Birmingham, 13 September 2001.
<http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/presentations/nhs-2001/xmlintro/index.htm>
Collection description & Collection Description Focus.
JISC/DNER Moving Image & Sound Cluster Steering Group meeting, HEFCE, London,
24 September 2001. (With Bridget Robinson).
<http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/cd-focus/presentations/dnerclus/>
Towards consensus on collection-level description.
Collection Description Focus Briefing Day 1, British Library, St Pancras, London, 22 October 2001.
(With Bridget Robinson).
<http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/cd-focus/presentations/towards/>
Thinking collectively : approaching collection-level description.
Collection Description Focus Workshop 1, Staff House, UMIST, Manchester, 1 November 2001.
(With Bridget Robinson).
<http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/cd-focus/presentations/thinking/>
An introduction to metadata.
Metadata: from soup to nuts. Seminar for NOF-digitise projects. NOF, London,
5 February 2002. <http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/nof/support/workshops/metadata-002/presentation2/presentation2.ppt>
Multi-purpose metadata for collections : creating reusable CLDs.
Collection Description Focus Workshop 2, Aston Business School, Birmingham, 8 February 2002.
(With Bridget Robinson).
<http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/cd-focus/presentations/multipur/>
An introduction to collections and collection-level description.
Workshop: Collection-Level Description and NOF-digitise projects, NOF, London, 22 February 2002.
(With Bridget Robinson).
<http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/cd-focus/presentations/introcol/>
Collection-level description in practice.
Workshop: Collection-Level Description and NOF-digitise projects, NOF, London, 22 February 2002.
(With Bridget Robinson).
<http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/cd-focus/presentations/cldprac/>
A standard for collection-level description: The RSLP Collection Description
Model and Schema.
Workshop: Collection-Level Description and NOF-digitise projects, NOF, London, 22 February 2002.
<http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/cd-focus/presentations/stdrslp/>
XML and "meta-tagging".
Technical seminar for BECTa Pathfinder LEAs, Coventry, 26 February 2002.
<http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/interop-focus/presentations/bectapf/index.htm>
An introduction to the Dublin Core and the DCMI.
Gateway Group seminar on e-government, Blenheim Palace, 28 February 2002.
<http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/interop-focus/presentations/gateway/index.htm>
Raising standards for collection description : subjects and strength in
CLDs.
Collection Description Focus Workshop 3, Wolfson Suite, University Library, Edinburgh, 21 March 2002.
<http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/cd-focus/presentations/raising/>
Collections and collection-level description.
CIMI Members' meeting, Boston, Mass., USA, 22 April 2002.
<http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/cd-focus/presentations/cimicld/>
Collection-Level Description: potential and reality.
Collection Description Focus Briefing Day 2, British Library, St Pancras, London, 14 May 2002.
<http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/cd-focus/presentations/realise/>
Collection-Level Description and Interoperability.
Society of Archivists' EAD/Data Exchange Group, Public Record Office, Kew, 21 May 2002.
<http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/cd-focus/presentations/soaead/>
An overview of collection-level metadata.
British Computer Society Electronic Publishing Specialist Group, Ismaili Centre, London, 29 May 2002.
<http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/cd-focus/presentations/bcscld/>
Surveying the landscape: collection-level description and resource discovery.
JISC/NSF DLI All Projects meeting, Marriott Hotel, Edinburgh, 24 June 2002.
<http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/cd-focus/presentations/dlicld/>
Collections, services, and interoperability in the information environment.
Minerva Project WP3/4 meeting, Paris, 5 July 2002.
<http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/cd-focus/presentations/mincolsv/>
Collections and services in the information environment.
JISC Service Provider Workshop on Collection/Service Description, JISC, London, 11 July 2002.
<http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/cd-focus/presentations/colsvjie/>
Brian Kelly
Automated benchmarking of local government Web sites.
Euroweb 2001 conference, Pisa, Italy, 18-20 December 2001.
<http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/conferences/euroweb-2001/>
Liz Lyon
Developing information architectures - to support research, learning and
teaching.
UCISA Conference, London, 13-15 March 2002.
<http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/distributed-systems/dner/arch/presentations/dev-inf-arch/>
Information architectures and distributed digital libraries
EU/NSF Digital Libraries All Projects Meeting, Rome Italy, 25-26 March 2002.
<http://delos-noe.iei.pi.cnr.it/activities/internationalforum/international.html>
Building blocks and information architectures - to support learning, teaching
and research.
SCONUL Annual Conference, Robinson College, Cambridge, 10-12 April 2002.
<http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/distributed-systems/dner/arch/presentations/sconul2002/>
Shaping the e-future? Grids, Web Services and digital libraries.
4th International JISC/CNI Conference, Edinburgh, 26-27 June 2002. (Joint presentation with Prof. Tony Hey, Director UK e-Science Programme)
<http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/distributed-systems/dner/arch/presentations/jisc-cni-2002/>
Building digital libraries for the future - a UK perspective.
Pre-conference Tutorial session, China Digital Library Conference 2002, Beijing, China, 8-12 July 2002.
Emerging information architectures for distributed digital libraries.
China Digital Library Conference 2002, Beijing, China, 8-12 July 2002.
Paul Miller
An introduction to GIS for NOF projects.
NOF-Digitise GIS workshop, London, 3 September 2001.
<http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/interop-focus/presentations/nof/iap-html/gis/gis_files/frame.htm>
Collection description: a cross-domain perspective.
Collection Description Focus Briefing Day, London, 22 October 2001.
<http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/interop-focus/presentations/cd-focus/iap-html/collections_files/frame.htm>
Metadata issues.
British Council seminar on Digital Libraries, Loughborough, 13 December 2001.
<http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/interop-focus/presentations/britcoun/iap-html/britcoun_files/frame.htm>
Aiding resource discovery: some views from the worlds of education and
the cultural heritage.
Metadata Standards Conference for Local Government, London, 14 January 2002.
<http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/interop-focus/presentations/lg_metadata/iap-html/local_gov_files/frame.htm>
What is an information architecture?
Putting your Project Plan into Practice seminar for NOF-digitise projects, London, 30 January 2002.
<http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/interop-focus/presentations/nof_arch/iap-html/nof_architecture_files/frame.htm>
Technical standards and the content lifecycle.
People's Network Information Environment Workshops, Bath, 9 April 2002 and London, 15 April 2002.
<http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/interop-focus/presentations/pn/iap-html/pn_files/frame.htm>
Who's who and what's what: a whistle-stop tour of current political, philosophical,
programmatic and pragmatic efforts to build the Information Environment(s).
SCONUL Annual Conference, Robinson College, Cambridge, 10-12 April 2002.
<http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/interop-focus/presentations/sconul/iap-html/sconul_files/frame.html>
A framework for access to the nation's heritage.
Keynote Presentation to New Zealand Digital Forum, Wellington, New Zealand, 15-16 May 2002.
Empowering learning.
Digital Cultural Heritage workshop, Maastricht McLuhan Institute, Maastricht, Netherlands,
11-13 July 2002.
Who is this for? Characterising audience.
New Directions in Metadata conference, Edinburgh, 15-16 August 2002.
Marieke Napier
You've digitised but now what?
Workshop given with TASI, November 2001.
Cultivate Interactive overview.
Workshop given at the Darwin Museum, Moscow, Russia, 16 February 2002.
<http://homes.ukoln.ac.uk/~lismn/>
Introducing - QA Focus.
JISC DNER Programmes Meeting, January 2002.
<http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/qa-focus/presentations/>
Metadata: soup to nuts.
Metadata: from soup to nuts. Seminar for NOF-digitise projects. NOF, London, 5 February 2002
<http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/nof/support/workshops/metadata-2002/>
Web site creation: good practice guidelines.
Workshop given for NOF, 19 February 2002. (With Bridget Robinson and Pete Johnston)
<http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/nof/support/workshops/website-2002/>
Metadata for harvesting: The Open Archives Initiative and how to find things
on the Web.
Internet Librarian International 2002, Olympia, London, 20th March 2002.
<http://www.internet-librarian.com/conference02/wednesday.html>
From project to service: sustaining your work post-NOF digi.
Workshop given for NOF, 16 May 2002.
<http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/nof/support/workshops/sustainability-2002/>
QA for Websites.
Institutional Web Management Workshop 2002: The Pervasive Web, 18-20 June 2002. (Materials written for a parallel session and presented by Brian Kelly)
<http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-2002/materials/napier/>
Manjula Patel
Using the SCHEMAS Forum Registry.
Sharing schemas: progress and future plans, Fourth SCHEMAS Workshop, The Hague, 30 November 2001.
<http://www.schemas-forum.org/workshops/ws4/presentations/mp-ws4-v2-talk_files/frame.htm>
Andy Powell
DNER Architecture.
JISC Journals Working Group, London, 20 September 2001.
<http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/distributed-systems/dner/arch/presentations/dner-arch-jwg/>
The DNER - a national digital library.
ZIG Meeting, York, 4-5 October 2001.
<http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/distributed-systems/dner/arch/presentations/dner-arch-zig/>
Namespaces, schemas and application profiles.
Tutorial Session at International Conference on Dublin Core and Metadata Applications 2001, Tokyo, Japan, 22-26 October 2001. (With Rachel Heery)
<http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/presentations/dc9-app-prof-tut/>
DNER Architecture.
British Library internal seminar, St Pancras, London, 31 October 2001.
<http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/distributed-systems/dner/arch/presentations/dner-arch-bl/>
From provider to portal - a chain of interoperability.
NetLab and Friends: Tribute and Outlook After 10 Years of Digital Library Development, Lund, Sweden, 10-12 April 2002.
<http://www.lub.lu.se/netlab/conf/powell.ppt>
10-minute practical guide to the JISC Information Environment (for publishers!).
PALS conference: Delivering Content to Universities and Colleges, June 2002
<http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/distributed-systems/dner/arch/presentations/pals-2002-06/>
Technical overview of the JISC Information Environment.
JISC/NSF Digital Libraries Initiative (DLI) All Projects Meeting, Edinburgh, June 2002
<http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/distributed-systems/dner/arch/presentations/dli-all-projects/>
RDN, e-Prints UK and NOF-Digitise: a (very) small sample of UK OAI activity.
4th International JISC/CNI Conference, Edinburgh, 26-27 June 2002.
<http://www.rdn.ac.uk/publications/cni2002/>
Bridget Robinson
Collection description & Collection Description Focus.
JISC/DNER Moving Image & Sound Cluster Steering Group meeting, HEFCE, London,
September 2001. (With Pete Johnston)
<http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/cd-focus/presentations/dnerclus/>
Towards consensus on collection level description.
Collection Description Focus Briefing Day 1, British Library, London, 22 October 2001.
(With Pete Johnston)
<http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/cd-focus/presentations/towards/>
Thinking Collectively: approaching collection-level description.
Collection Description Focus Workshop 1, Staff House, UMIST, Manchester, 1 November 2001. (With Pete Johnston)
<http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/cd-focus/presentations/thinking/>
Multi-purpose metadata for collections: creating reusable CLDs.
Collection Description Focus Workshop 2, Aston Business School, Birmingham, 8 February 2001. (With Pete Johnston)
<http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/cd-focus/presentations/multipur/>
Ann Chapman
BIC Bibliographic Standards Technical Subgroup
DC-Libraries Working Group
Full Disclosure Partner Group
Reveal Development Steering Group
Reveal Database Management Group
CILIP Cataloguing and Indexing Group
Michael Day
Metadata Engine (METAe) Project Advisory Board
OCLC/RLG Preservation Metadata Working Group
Penny Garrod
Stories from the Web (UKOLN is an Executive Partner)
Networked Services Policy Taskgroup (NSPTG)
Rachel Heery
Agora Steering Committee
Dublin Core Metadata Initiative Advisory Committee
Dublin Core Metadata Initiative Registry Working Group (Chair)
Pete Johnston
Dublin Core Collection Description Working Group (co-chair)
DCMI Advisory Board
CC-interop Project Steering Group
Brian Kelly
JISCMail Steering Group
TASI Steering Group
HERO Technical Advisory Group
JISC Technology and Standards Watch
US-PALS Usage Statistics Group
Liz Lyon
Ensemble Management Board
JISC Committee for the Support of Research
RDN Steering Group
BSI IDT Information & Documentation
University of Bath Learning & Teaching Committee
University of Bath e-Education Support Group
University of Bath Portals Group
Resource Collections Management & Development Group
JISC Filter Project Consultative Forum
Delos Advisory Board
Common Information Environment Group
Networked Services Policy Task Group
UKOLN Strategic Advisory Committee (Chair)
Paul Miller
ADS Advisory Board
Bath Profile Editorial Group
Book Industry Communication Product Metadata Group
BSI IDT/2/18 - Identifiers
BSI IDT/2/7 - Computing Standards
Canadian Department of Heritage Inter-departmental Interoperability Forum
CETIS Metadata SIG,
Cheshire Steering Group
CIMI Executive Committee
Common Information Environment Group
Cultivate Interactive Editorial Board
Digital University Steering Group
DNER Development Team
DNER Data Cluster Steering Group
DNER Z Projects Cluster Steering Group
Dublin Core Advisory Board
Dublin Core 2001 Conference Programme Committee
ECDL 2001 Programme Committee
EC Working group on Metadata and National Policies for digitisation
EDNER Steering Committee
e-Government Champions Metadata Working Group
Forum for Network Coordination
HILT Steering Group
Iconex Management Committee
Metadata for Education Group
SeamlessUK Steering Group
UK National Union Catalogue Scoping Study Steering Group
UK Online Broadband Stakeholder's Group: Technology WG
Web of Science Enhancement Committee
Manjula Patel
Dublin Core Registry Working Group
Dublin Core Architecture Working Group
ViDe Video Access Working Group
Andy Powell
Dublin Core Advisory Committee
Dublin Core Collection Description Working Group (Co-chair)
Dublin Core Usage Board
Open Archives Initiative Technical Group
SCONE Steering Group
UK Mirror Service Steering Group
University of Bath Acceptable Use of Computing Facilities Committee
University of Bath Information Services Committee
University of Bath Managed Learning Environments Working Group
University of Bath Web Editorial Advisory Committee
UKOLN
University of Bath
Bath
BA2 7AY
UK
Phone: +44 (0)1225 386580
Fax: +44 (0)1225 386838
e-mail: ukoln@ukoln.ac.uk
<http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/>
© Resource and The University of Bath, 2002.
ISSN 1466-2949
Content by Shirley
Keane of UKOLN.
Page last revised on:
18-Aug-2003
Email comments to web-support@ukoln.ac.uk