Award for Stories from the Web

Stories from the Web, an LIC funded project for children, was highly commended in the recent Library Association/Emerald/MCB University Press Public Relations and Publicity Awards. These awards are presented annually to public libraries for excellence in publicity work.

Stories from the Web aims to stimulate the imagination of children and encourage them to share, explore, read and enjoy stories in a geographically distributed, collaborative network environment. The project has developed an innovative web site that includes extracts from children's stories by top authors such as R K Rowling and Laurence Anholt and stories, poems and comments written by children visiting the site. The colourful site is easy to navigate and continual evolving to include story-related activities and competitions. The site has been developed and is maintained by Sarah Ormes at UKOLN and Lydia Matheson, the Project Co-ordinator, based in Birmingham Central Library. The project is a partnership between UKOLN, Birmingham (the lead partner), Bristol and Leeds City Library Services.

Stories from the Web was entered in the Multi-Media and Web Page Publicity Material category. The judges felt that the partners in the project demonstrated "enthusiasm, commitment and innovation" and highly commended the "collaborative work amongst professionals and children representing a wide geographical area in the creation of this exciting web site". The significant research value of the project was also recognised. The site was also highlighted in a recent article Why the Net is good for the book in the Independent.

Editorial

This first Newsletter of the New Year provides updates on all our continuing projects as well as details of the three new EC projects that we will begin work on shortly. We are delighted to report on the success of Stories from the Web at the recent Library Association/Emerald Public Relations and Publicity Awards and the successful launch of the Resource Discovery Network in November. Since the last Newsletter in July, we have organised and held two workshops for web managers. As well as the annual workshop for web managers in the HE/FE institutions, for the first time we also held an event for web managers in the public library sector. This was so well received that it is also likely to become an annual event. We report on both of these events elsewhere in the Newsletter. Following a meeting in August, an international Z39.50 specification for library applications and resource discovery known as The Bath Profile has been developed and Paul Miller explains its significance in our feature article.

Management Committee

In the interests of encompassing representation from a broader spectrum of sectors, we are pleased to welcome Ray Lester and Mary Auckland to the UKOLN Management Committee. Ray is the Head of Library & Information Services at the Natural History Museum and Mary is Director of Library & Learning Resources at the London Institute. Both have worked with us previously and they are currently both members of the Interoperability Focus Advisory Committee. Ray has taken over as chair of the Management Committee from Richard Heseltine, who stepped down during the summer.

The Committee currently consists of: Ray Lester, Mary Auckland, Peter Brophy (Director & Chair in Information Management, CERLIM at Manchester Metropolitan University), Alice Colban (JISC Secretariat), James Davenport (University of Bath representative), John Dolan (Head of Birmingham Central Library), Sue Howley (LIC), Frances Hendrix (Director of LASER) and Howard Nicholson (Librarian at the University of Bath).

Policy and advice

Public Library Networking Focus - Sarah Ormes

Public Library work over the last few months has concentrated on dissemination and awareness activities. Both Sarah Ormes and Sally Criddle were busy over the summer giving presentations and writing papers. The hot topic for the summer was filtering. Following the issue paper, An Introduction to Filtering, written for the Networked Services Policy Taskgroup, Sarah has given presentations at Umbrella, the Library and Information Show and with Sally at the National Acquisitions Group conference on the topic of filtering. All materials used in these presentations are accessible on the Public Libraries area of the UKOLN web site. The materials cover many issues to do with filtering software and particularly focus on the importance of developing acceptable use policies when providing public Internet access.

UKOLN continues to work with the Networked Services Policy Taskgroup in producing issue papers on networking topics for public librarians. At the time of writing, a paper by Julia Harrison (Essex Library and Information Service) about the range of networked services public libraries could provide is being printed. Early in the year papers about security issues, copyright and equality of access will also be produced. Six copies of all papers produced by the taskgroup are sent to each UK public library authority. The papers can also be accessed through the taskgroups web site.

Much of Sarah and Sally's time over the summer has been spent on co-authoring a new book for Library Association Publishing with Ian Winship and Alison McNab. Entitled 'The Public Librarian's Guide to the Internet' the book will act as an introductory guide to the Internet for public librarians. At the heart of the book will be a directory of Internet resources which will be of particular use to public librarians. This book is expected to be published in the first half of 2000.

We have recently launched a directory for UK public library staff called Public Library People, which will hold contact details for those working in the public library sector. The directory can be searched using surname, job title or the name of the employing library or authority. The directory supports LDAP which enables the database to be searched directly from an email client, providing that client supports LDAP. Public Library People has initially been implemented as part of the EC funded PRIDE project.

Public Library People search interface

In November the first workshop for public library web mangers was held, here at the University of Bath. Forty one people attended the workshop, which ran from lunchtime on Monday to lunchtime on Tuesday.

The aim of the two days was to bring public library web site managers together to give them an opportunity to share their experiences, learn about the some of the tools that are available to assist with the creation and maintenance of sites and to hear about some future web developments.

The emphasis was on the practical aspects of web site management, discussing issues that arise and the technologies that are available now to assist development and maintenance. The workshop was opened by Lorcan Dempsey and amongst the excellent speakers, Chris Batt, the Chief Networking Advisor to the LIC, gave an inspirational introduction to The People's Network, describing the project's mission as being "to improve the quality of life for all citizens by facilitating the People's Network as a sustainable network of access points/learning centres that will provide a national gateway or channel co-ordinating all public sector information resources". A full report of the workshop has been published in Issue 22 of Ariadne. Presentation given are available on the web .The site also provides abstracts of the presentations, links to resources mentioned and a brief biography of each speaker.

Interoperability Focus - Paul Miller

Z39.50

As reported in the last issue of the Newsletter, the Z39.50 protocol remains important to the digital library environment within which UKOLN operates. Evidence of this may be seen in the amount of time devoted to the protocol by Interoperability Focus, including attendance of the latest meeting of the Z39.50 Implementor's Group (ZIG) in Stockholm, work on developing and advocating the Bath Profile (described elsewhere in this issue), and the preparation of an introductory article on the topic for Ariadne. Effort continues to be invested in the evolution of the Bath Profile in order to gain formal recognition for it, to ensure that vendors are aware of the Profile and its implications and to explore alternative ways in which it might be used in real-world situations.

The Dublin Core

The Dublin Core Metadata Initiative held its seventh workshop in Frankfurt during October, with UKOLN staff once again attending and playing a role in the debates. The Dublin Core's Directorate has stated that the long-anticipated formalisation of Qualifiers will be visible by 1 January 2000 with the publication of a first set. These qualifiers are important for those who wish to further clarify the meaning of values given for existing Dublin Core elements, and projects in the UK and elsewhere have adopted localised solutions to this for some years. The creation of a community-wide set will increase visibility of the qualifiers and, if everyone uses them, greatly enhance the prospect of interoperable metadata descriptions. As part of this effort, a registry is proposed in which both the formal qualifiers of the community at large and localised qualifiers used in individual projects can be registered, allowing users to understand current practice as well as mapping between different terms for similar concepts.

The International DOI Foundation

During the summer, the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) funded UKOLN to join the International Digital Object Identifiers (DOI) Foundation on its behalf. This arrangement is similar to that whereby UKOLN's Web Focus represents JISC on the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).

The Digital Object Identifier is potentially of great relevance to the community as it allows the unambiguous identification of electronic resources by means of various potentially unique identification systems. Current work on identifying 'appropriate copies' is also of relevance to JISC and others, creating an environment in which a user will be able to search for a work and only be offered those repositories from which they will be allowed to retrieve it (their local library, an electronic document repository to which their institution subscribes, etc.).

Digital Object Identifiers are being pushed by a number of the larger publishing houses around the world, and as their deployment within resources grows, so will their value to the end-user community. Through involvement at this stage, JISC has an opportunity to augment the perspective of the non-publisher in these discussions, and to shape a set of tools of value to many.

The Bath Profile: one giant leap for interoperability?

Since their inception, the Clumps and Hybrid Libraries projects funded under Phase 3 of the Electronic Libraries Programme (eLib) have grappled with trying to make different Z39.50 systems interoperate in a predictable fashion. In this, they have not been alone.

In August 1999, JISC funded a meeting which gathered a number of those who have been tackling these same problems around the world. This meeting built upon work within eLib projects and elsewhere, as well as incorporating long-running discussion from the international ZIP-PIZ-L mailing list hosted by the National Library of Canada.

Three days of hard work resulted in formulation of a new Profile for Z39.50, The Bath Profile: an international Z39.50 specification for Library Applications and Resource Discovery. This Profile was released for widespread comment, and has been discussed in public at a special Concertation Day in the UK, at the Seventh Dublin Core Workshop in Germany, and elsewhere.

Comments from this consultation process are now informing some minor revisions to the document, which will then be presented to the next meeting of the Z39.50 Implementors Group in Texas in January 2000. Following discussion there, we hope to rapidly progress the Profile to ISO accreditation as an Internationally Registered Profile.

What, then, does this Profile offer?

Firstly, it aims to reduce the complexity and uncertainty faced by those facilitating searches across multiple Z39.50 Targets, especially those supplied by different vendors. To do this, we have taken efforts to tightly define both the range of attributes associated with each Z39.50 Access Point, and the behaviour to be expected from client and server.

The Profile is aimed at a fairly basic level, primarily concerned with title/author/subject-type searches on diverse bibliographic databases. It is anticipated, though, that this Profile might be adopted as a common core to other, more detailed, Profiles in particular regions, domains and functional areas, and significant progress was made towards this amongst the authors of other Profiles (including ONE, vCuc, CENL, DanZIG, the Finnish Z39.50 Profile, and the Texas Libraries Profile) present at the Bath meeting. With the realisation of this aim, users will be assured a basic level of cross-searching capability across a wide range of domains and vendor solutions.

The current release of the Profile addresses three key 'Functional Areas', with the intention to add others in the future. The current Functional Areas are Basic Bibliographic Search & Retrieval, Cross-Domain & Extra-Domain Search & Retrieval, and Bibliographic Holdings Information Search & Retrieval.

Within each of these Functional Areas, we have defined a limited number of Levels of Conformance, with Level 0 intended to encompass as many existing implementations as possible, Level 1 defining the functionality we might wish to specify in systems currently under construction, and Level 2 defining a number of functions which we feel it is currently infeasible to require across the board, but which we feel effort should be directed towards.

More information about the issues discussed can be found at the following locations:

http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ services/elib/ projects/#hybrid
http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ services/elib/ projects/#clumps
http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ interop-focus/activities/ z3950/int_profile/ bath/
http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/interop-focus/activities/ z3950/int_profile/ bath/draft/
http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/interop-focus/activities/ events/bath-profile-concertation/

MODELS - Paul Miller

UKOLN has run two workshops in the highly successful MODELS series since the last issue of this newsletter. As demonstrated by the breadth of their attendance lists, both tackled significant issues of relevance to a broad community.

Both workshops were held at the University of Warwick's Scarman House conference facility, and most ably organised by Joy Fraser, UKOLN's Events Manager.

At MODELS 9, participants looked back over a number of the MODELS series' achievements, including Interoperability Focus, the eLib Clumps and Hybrid Libraries, the Dublin Core's Warwick Framework, and others. The main emphasis, though, was upon the Models Information Architecture, MIA, and its value to the broad range of digital information environments represented. MIA was originally introduced early in the MODELS series, and has been refined over time in order to encompass a richer set of functions, as well as drawing more explicitly upon experiences from beyond the library domain.

A number of tasks were identified in order to move forward with work on MIA. These included tighter integration between some aspects of MIA and the emerging concept of a Distributed National Electronic Resource (DNER) within JISC, as well as work to explicitly map information requirements within the cultural heritage community and elsewhere.

At MODELS 10, the complex issue of rights management was explored. This workshop drew upon experience from the commercial sector and, explicitly, European funded projects such as IMPRIMATUR and <indecs>. Although there was clearly some difference in emphasis between the commercial publishers and the public sector tendencies of the library community, the underlying models discussed did appear largely relevant to both groups.

Some key items worth noting here include the need for some work to map more explicitly between the academic and commercial views of the rights management process, as well as enhancing our understanding of the relationship between the library and what commercial models term the rights holders or brokers; both of which might conceivably be subsumed within the library to some degree. There was also talk of seeking funding for pilot projects which might explore the electronic clearance of rights between the user, the higher education institution through which they gain access, and the rights holder, as well as work to explore the technicalities of realistically expressing complex statements of rights in a machine and user-understandable form.

A further workshop is currently being planned in conjunction with the mda. MODELS 11 will be held in January 2000, and will explore issues related to the creation and use of terminological tools such as thesauri and controlled vocabularies.

UK Web Focus - Brian Kelly

UK Web Focus is the JISC funded post for monitoring web developments and keeping the UK Higher Education community informed of key web developments and their implications.

The main UK Web Focus event of the past six months was the national 'Institutional Web Management' workshop. This workshop, the third annual event aimed at members of University web teams, was held at the Goldsmith's College London in September 1999. The event attracted 124 participants and consisted of a mixture of presentations, discussion groups, demonstrations and hands-on sessions. Most of the speakers were experienced web practitioners from the higher education community. A Trade Fair was organised for the last day which was attended by commercial companies, training companies and web service providers. Delegates attending the workshop, also enjoyed a Caribbean Barbecue, and a Thames river trip from Greenwich which took them past the Millennium Dome and the Thames Barrier.

At the public library web managers workshop organised by UKOLN in November 1999, Brian Kelly spoke about web development in the higher education community and suggested some lessons that public libraries can learn from this. He addressed the question of what is going to happen to the web next and how these new developments might be integrated public library sites. Also in November, Web Focus was a member of the judging panel for the EARL Consortium of UK public libraries annual Best on the Web awards for the best UK public library presence on the web. This year's winner went to Kingston upon Thames.

Other recent dissemination activities include talks on future technologies, given at the Web 2000 event held at the University of Bradford, 'The next steps for institutional web services' given at the JANET User Support Workshop at the University of Plymouth in September 1999, a workshop session, 'Managing your institutional web gateway' at the same event and 'Technology issues: where are you now?' at the HyLiFe conference held at the Open University Conference Centre in October 1999. In addition, Brian was an invited speaker at the 'Consolidating the European Library Space' event which was held in Luxembourg from 17-19 November 1999 and spoke on promoting project web sites.

Presentations given by Web Focus can be viewed on the web.

Scientific, Industrial and Cultural Heritage

A European research framework for memory organisations, Scientific, Industrial and Cultural Heritage, outlines a shared research framework for the library, archive and museum communities. It considers converging concerns as these sectors move into a shared network space. It was prepared for the Cultural Heritage Unit of the EC DGXIII by Lorcan Dempsey, with support from an international working group.

Bibliographic Management - Ann Chapman

Full Disclosure

In June 1999, UKOLN and the National Council on Archives completed a report on their study on a national strategy for retrospective conversion of catalogues in libraries and archives in the UK. The report was submitted to the British Library, the Library and Information Commission and Library and Information Cooperation Council who jointly commissioned it and was accepted by them.

The report recommended a 10 year plan which should deal with around 80% of the existing catalogue records not presently in machine readable form. The initiative needs a coordination focus and the team recommended placing this in the long term within the new Museums, Libraries and Archives Council (MLAC). In the short term, the commissioning group has revised its composition and is now operating as the Full Disclosure Implementation Group (FDIG) as recommended in the report. UKOLN has been asked to provide a representative on the FDIG Partner Group; this will receive reports on progress from FDIG itself.

The full report is available on the UKOLN web site. A printed version of the full report has been distributed to all those who attended the study conference and to a range of representatives of library and archive groups and governmental bodies. A summary leaflet has also been widely distributed.

LISU/UKOLN Currency Survey analysis

UKOLN and the Library and Information Statistics Unit at Loughborough University (LISU) have been working on a study to carry out additional analysis on the Currency Surveys database. The study began in January 1999 and a report was submitted to the BNB Research Fund in September. Once this has formally been accepted, the report will be available on the UKOLN web site and in a print version from LISU.

This study analysed acquisitions patterns in the UK under the following strands. (1) Tracking over time book acquisition dates in relation to publication dates. (2) Quantifying over time the acquisition of paperbacks in relation to hardbacks. (3) Quantifying over time proportional changes in the acquisition of materials on different subjects. (4) Tracking stock retention in selected libraries.

NUCAF Review

In 1999, the Department of Culture, Media and Sport made a grant of £200,000 to be spent by the Library and Information Commission on improving library and information services to visually impaired people. Most of the provision of such services in the past has been in the voluntary sector, and there has been little co-ordination or collaborative work.

Visually impaired people rely on alternative formats to standard print (tactile, audio and large print and now electronic forms) but only around 5% of the annual UK publishing output is converted to an alternative format. The existing union catalogue is incomplete and access to it is restricted. At present users must register with each service provider they wish to use and there are no arrangements for inter-lending in place. Then copyright permission must be sought from rights holders each time there is a decision to produce an alternative format - and that permission may be withheld or so tightly prescribed that very limited use can ever be made of it.

In this situation visually impaired people have a much poorer library and information service than those without sight problems, despite valiant work by the voluntary sector. In addition, libraries are now required to provide reasonable access to services under the provisions of the Disability Discrimination Act. Accordingly, working with Share the Vision, the LIC has drawn up a programme of projects to address these issues.

Project 1. Develop and maintain the National Union Catalogue of Alternative Formats (NUCAF).
Project 2. Enhancing ease of access for visually impaired people.
Project 3. Best Practice/Best Value
Project 4. Co-ordinating alternative format title selection.

Further details of this programme can be found on the LIC web site under the 'Improving access for blind and visually impaired people initiative'. Multi-source Currency Survey A report on the first year of this survey was published earlier in 1998 and copies of this report are still available from UKOLN priced £12.

Research and development

New projects for Research and Development team - Rachel Heery, Assistant Direcror, R&D

We have been successful in gaining funding from the EC Fifth Framework IST programme for both of the proposals in which we were involved. The final negotiations for the SCHEMAS and Reynard projects are now in hand, both have fixed budgets and work programmes and only the formalities of contract signing remain.

Renardus

Reynard: an Academic Subject Gateway Service for Europe will provide UKOLN with funding for the equivalent of 1.5 full time research and development staff over the three years of the project. The project is due to start in January 2000 and we will be working with 12 European partners, some of whom are old friends from previous projects and some new. We are looking forward to tackling the issues of interoperability and organisational collaboration which arise with large scale integration of existing services. We see this work as building on the work of existing projects such as DESIRE and fitting well with new activity on the IMesh Toolkit and SCHEMAS. It will complement the development of the RDN.

Reynard aims to establish a pilot European academic subject service, co-ordinated by national initiatives. It is intended that the service will integrate searching and browsing of resources across a range of existing subject gateways and metadata repositories maintained by the project partners. The pilot system will be based on a generic broker architecture that UKOLN will specify, with Netlab at Lund University and the Technical Knowledge Centre and Library of Denmark (DTV) having the main responsibility for building the service. A shared test environment will be established within which national initiatives can experiment with co-operative efforts for sharing metadata, exploring technical solutions and investigating possibilities for linguistic interoperability (the pilot itself will support only English indexing and searching). The pilot broker service will provide a single point of access to a range of gateways, based initially on emerging national gateways which include:

UK: Resource Discovery Network (partners UKOLN, ILRT)
Netherlands: DutcESS (partner Koninklijke Bibliotheek)
Finland: Finnish Virtual Library Project (partner Jyväskylä University library)
Germany: WEBIS (Niedersaechsische Staats- und Universitaetsbibliothek Goettingen)

The project will investigate issues arising from cross disciplinary, as well as cross national integration. During the life of the project at least one additional gateway will be added from one of the other countries involved in the projects (Denmark, France, Sweden). Reynard aims to foster a collaborative model on a European scale for the provision of subject access to Internet resources. The system will be specified with extensibility in mind so that in future it may extend to cross-sectoral collaboration with museums and archives, and the target academic user group may be extended to a larger audience. UKOLN's work will focus on:

Specifying the architecture that underpins the extended service
Contributing to developing an organisational structure for management and collaboration
Facilitating service provision
Establishing a test-bed environment
Investigating data sharing
Reviewing business models
Liasing with the RDN

SCHEMAS

SCHEMAS : Forum for metadata schema implementers is a two year accompanying measure to the EC Fifth Framework Programme which will provide UKOLN with funding for equivalent of 1 full time research and development staff member over the two years of the project. The project is due to start in February 2000 and our partners will be the German National Research Centre for Information Technology (GMD) and Pricewaterhouse Coopers, Luxembourg. We have worked with Tom Baker from GMD and Makx Dekkers from Pricewaterhouse in the context of metadata projects and the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative over the last few years.

SCHEMAS will provide a training platform for metadata schema designers and implementers, particularly those involved in FP5 projects but also a wider audience in European services. It aims to assist implementers in the design of schemas which will meet the local needs of their implementation while following existing standards closely enough to interoperate with other web systems. The project's main objectives are to provide information regarding the status and use of new and emerging metadata standards, and to promote good practice guidelines for adapting metadata standards for local use in customised implementation specific schemas.

In order to achieve these objectives SCHEMAS will organise four workshops with accompanying training material, provide a focussed informational web site, and develop general and multi-lingual metadata registries which will serve as an example of good practice and provide a technology base line. The topics of the workshops are expected to be be:

Gathering requirements from registry creators and users (UK, May 2000)
Multilingual registries (Germany, October 2000)
Registering diverse range of metadata schemas: digital preservation, rights management, user profiles, collection descriptions (Central Europe, April 2001)
Options for structure of registries (Amsterdam, September 2001 )

SCHEMAS will build a knowledge base with components including a Metadata Watch (information about relevant people projects, programmes, tools, guidelines), and a Standards Watch (information about standardisation activities). UKOLN have specific responsibility for constructing a Metadata Registry which will be a database of schemas linking to elements and their definitions, this will include recognised standards, less formally recognised schemas, and application specific customised schemas. In order to achieve this we intend to build on work done to develop a DESIRE metadata registry (due for completion February 2000). As part of the more general registry our partner GMD will build a Multilingual Registry which will focus on the use of RDF to link local schemas in any language to the (English) standards on which they are based. UKOLN's main responsibilities will be to:

Organise the workshops
Prepare workshop materials
Contribute to workshops
Provide a prototype registry : investigate and implement structured registry, liaise with external correspondents to encourage registration, recommend best practice
Provide project web site: structure web site to provide information, training material and access to registries, enable contribution to web site by external correspondents
Promote and disseminate project outcomes.

BIBLINK - Manjula Patel, Technical Research and Development

The BIBLINK project is now in its final stages. The Demonstrator phase has begun and it is expected that some 26 publishers will be submitting records to various workspaces hosted by the Consortium partners.

Several partners have now installed the NT version of the software. UKOLN are running the Solaris version and expect the publishers associated with the British Library and UKOLN to create records for electronic publications in this workspace. Rachel Heery Assistant Director, Research and development The translations for the language interfaces are also underway. It is hoped that UKOLN will be able to provide a 'central repository' with all the different interfaces available at their workspace. The annual project review in November gave a very favourable report of the project and suggested that further exposure of the project to other National Libraries would be of benefit.

DESIRE

Subject gateway handbook

The DESIRE Information Gateways Handbook was produced in September as a collaborative effort between all partners. The Handbook provides practical support for libraries and other organisations interested in setting up information gateways on the Internet. It addresses a range of managerial, information and technical issues and outlines existing tools and documentation providing a wealth of examples of existing practice. UKOLN staff wrote a number of chapters covering topics such as:

Metadata formats
Cataloguing
System requirements
Scalability
Future proofing
Interoperability
Working with information providers

Workshops

In September a DESIRE workshop for European national libraries was hosted by the Koninklijke Bibliotheek in The Hague on the theme 'Building national and large-scale Internet Information Gateways'. The workshop was attended by representatives from more than twenty European national libraries and participants were able to exchange information on their own approaches to resource discovery and update each other on progress. We hope this workshop will form the basis of further collaboration. UKOLN staff also participated in September in the 'DC roadshow', a one day workshop focusing on Metadata for Networked Resources, with Carl Lagoze and Eric Miller hosted by ILRT at the University of Bristol.

Metadata registry

As part of the DESIRE effort UKOLN are now concentrating on building a demonstrator of a metadata registry. We have scoped the content of the registry and set up an initial database to fulfil the registry function. We intend the DESIRE registry to have sufficient functionality to enable disclosure of authoritative usage of metadata at a variety of levels. For a given schema the registry will provide: · Definition of element semantics · Agreed usage · Permitted values and rules for content · Definition of qualifier semantics We also intend to facilitate the definition of 'cross-walks' between schemas so that equivalent elements from different schema can be linked. This will require work on developing a user interface to the registry to allow input of existing mappings. Our task now is to populate the database with definitions from particular schemas and ensure we can express the relation between different entities in the schema. Our initial input will be of the DC qualified element set (prototype version), and the BIBLINK element set. This will allow us to test the structure of the database as regards elements, qualifiers, local usage and permitted values. Once we have tested the structure of the registry we will then populate the database with schema in use within the DESIRE project (e.g. ROADS schema, the DESIRE LDAP directory schema). This will be due for delivery in February 2000.

PRIDE - Lou Daly, Technical Development and Research

PRIDE (People and Resources Identification for Distributed Environments) is a European Commission funded project. The two year project (June 1998 to June 2000) underwent its second review in early November. The reviewers' report indicates that the project's solutions match libraries' needs and that the exploitation potential is high.

PRIDE will allow single point access to a global range of information resources in a way that supports a large number of services and functions. It will provide:

A single source of descriptions of both library-based and Internet services
Identification of suitable resources and services as a prelude to searches
Declaration of personal profiles accessible to disclosure agents
Authentication and authorisation for service access and electronic payment services
One-stop declaration of personal information in place of multiple service registrations.

These distributed services will be of equal importance to the user and the service provider.

Parallel efforts, by the various project partners, are underway in a number of key areas:

Individual software module testing
Identifying, collecting and formatting directory content from existing data and information
Preparing the 'platform' of distributed servers on which the Demonstrator will run initially.

The project is also identifying the best entry point, for such a distributed international directory system, and all partners are involved in outlining dissemination strategies.

The software development stage is essentially complete and component testing and validation has begun. This testing phase prepares the way for field testing of the PRIDE Demonstrator scheduled for mid January 2000. At this stage software developers are ready to make final adjustments and configuration settings in areas identified by the testing group.

PRIDE's directory schema has been finalised although some minor adjustments are likely to be made as issues of theoretical discussion become the criteria of practical implementation. The directory data format has been specified in LDIF (Lightweight Directory Interchange Format) and the task of mapping existing information collections is proceeding. Although the use of LDIF makes the importation of large amounts of existing data possible, the format conversion process, when concerned, as PRIDE is, with such wide ranging sources and types of information, can be problematic.

The project's single logical database is created by a number X.500 servers running on either UNIX or Windows NT operating systems. Several are already place with set up and configuration proceeding on still more. Ten servers are expected to be in place by January 2000 providing the platform for the PRIDE Demonstrator during initial tests as well as providing the basis for the core functionality in future. At least one server will be implementing the strong encryption OpenSSL based implementation. While the details of how PRIDE is to appear within the developing global X.500 information base are to be worked out, it is not inconceivable that the root of the PRIDE tree might be "domain component = pride-inf, country = UK".

The project's profile will be raised significantly in early 2000 as partners focus on their dissemination strategies. Overt dissemination, through articles presentations and other means will raise awareness within the library and information communities. Within PRIDE, through its use of automated gathering and informing processes, lies the inherent ability of raising community awareness of collection owners and service providers represented in the directory's content.

IMesh Toolkit - Tracy Gardner, Technical Development and Research

The IMesh Toolkit project evolved out of discussions within the IMesh community which was set up to encourage international collaboration amongst subject gateways.

More information on IMesh can be found at: www.desire.org/html/subjectgateways/community/imesh/

For further project details, including the proposal, see: www.imesh.org/toolkit/

IMesh Toolkit will build on existing subject gateway software to develop a configurable, reusable and extensible toolkit for subject gateway providers. A complementary research strand will consider issues of relevance in the distributed, international subject gateway environment, including metadata sharing and reuse. The toolkit will support the research activity and the research activity will guide the development of the toolkit.

The IMesh Toolkit Project started in September 1999 and is funded under the National Science Foundation/JISC International Digital Libraries Initiative. UKOLN's partners in this project are ILRT at the University of Bristol and The Internet Scout Project at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

CEDARS - Michael Day, Research Officer

The Cedars (CURL Exemplars in Digital Archives) project is funded by JISC (through eLib) and administered by the Consortium of University and Research Libraries to investigate issues and develop practical exemplars relating to the long-term preservation of digital materials. UKOLN's involvement in the project largely relates to the important issue of preservation metadata, building upon a review of metadata formats carried out for the project by UKOLN in 1998.

The project, in co-operation with UKOLN, is currently developing a set of preservation metadata elements (and their definitions) and it is hoped that an initial version of a draft Cedars metadata specification will be released for peer-review very shortly.

Collection Description Andy Powell, Assistant Director Distributed Systems and Services

We are currently involved in a number of initiatives relating to collections descriptions. Andy Powell and Rosemary Russell have both worked on a review of existing practices for eLib. Their report takes a detailed look at the state of the art for collection description as it currently exists in the library, archival, museum and Internet/web communities.

Andy Powell is also the author of a study for the eLib collection description group. This study builds on an earlier report on work in progress, outlining a simple conceptual model of collections and the services that provide access to those collections. The report takes a very broad view of the meaning of 'collection' including, for example, traditional library, museum and archival collections and their catalogues or finding aids, databases, web-sites and subject gateways. It enumerates a set of 23 'core' attributes for simple collection description and provides examples of their use. It also discusses a possible approach for categorising different 'types' of collections.

In addition to this, our work continues on the short term project within the Research Support Libraries Programme. This project enhances our existing work in the area of collection description to develop a metadata schema and associated tools for projects in the collaborative collection management and research collections in the humanities and social sciences strands of the Programme. This will enable them to describe the collections that they make available in a consistent way.

During the recent DC-7 Dublin Core Workshop in Frankfurt, UKOLN suggested the formation of a Dublin Core Collection Description Working Group. This has been widely welcomed and we will be submitting a proposed charter for the group to the DC Advisory Committee in the near future. The group will develop a set of guidelines for describing collections using the Dublin Core Metadata Element Set and will be international in composition. Clearly, we hope that this initiative will benefit from our existing work in this area as outlined above.

Resource Discovery Network Launched

RDNC Systems and Interoperability Manager Andy Powell

The Resource Discovery Network (RDN) was officially launched at Congress House in London on 19 November 1999. Over 200 delegates attended to hear introductory speeches by Lynne Brindley, Pro Vice Chancellor of Communication and IT, at the University of Leeds and Howard Newby, President of the Committee of Vice-Chancellors and Principals. Attendees also had the opportunity of meeting with RDN staff, seeing demonstrations of current services and hearing about future plans.

The RDN provides effective access to high quality Internet resources for the UK learning and research communities. Over the next couple of years RDN will develop to provide rich entry points to a full range of Internet, bibliographic, documentary and data resources. RDN is a co-operative network consisting of a central organisation, the Resource Discovery Network Centre (jointly hosted by UKOLN and the AHDS at King's College London) and a number of independent service providers called hubs. RDN will be much more than a collection of isolated databases. While each hub maintains its own character and identity, collaboration enables RDN to offer another level of service to users. This will include the opportunity to search for resources across several hubs at the same time.

RDN is currently freely accessible to all via the Internet and is funded by JISC, the Economic and Social Research Council and the Arts and Humanities Research Board.

Hubs are now established in the areas of 'Health and Life Sciences', 'Engineering, Maths and Computing', 'Humanities', 'Physical Sciences' and 'Social Sciences, Business and Law'. A successful proposal has been submitted by The Consortium of Academic Libraries in Manchester to conduct a consultancy with a view to advising on the creation of a 'Creative Arts and Industries' hub.

Some hub services are already available, based primarily on pre-existing subject gateways including SOSIG, Biz/Ed, OMNI and EEVL. The RDN web pages, hosted by UKOLN, offer cross-searching, cross-browsing and other services, all of which will be extended as new gateways are made available by the hubs. These services are dependant on the adoption of a 'standard' search protocol and a broadly consistent approach to resource description by all the hub gateways. An 'Interoperability Framework' that addresses these issues is currently being developed by a working group within the RDN

Other policy documents are also under development, including a collections policy, a rights management framework, an information and training strategy, and a business plan.

UKOLN Newsletter

Issue 10 January 2000 ISSN 0963-7354

Contents