UCISA User Support Services Conference - April 2000Brian Kelly (UKOLN) and Justine Kitchen (RDN) ran a workshop session on Finding Resources Locally and Remotely at the UCISA User Support Services workshop on Time for a Fresh Perspective at the University of Lancaster on 3rd-5th April 2000. The workshop took place on Monday, 3rd April from 15:45-16:45.
University web sites provide many links to remote resources. Collections of links, sometimes referred to as "gateways" may be managed centrally, by departments, or by individuals. But increasingly institutions are finding that maintaining gateways is expensive, both in terms of maintaining the quality of the resources and using link management systems to provide rich functionality which users expect to find.
In this hands-on and discussion session participants will explore institutional gateways and the national gateways (known as hubs) which are managed by the RDNC (Resource Discovery Network Centre). The session will provide an opportunity for participants to discuss the relationships between institutions, the RDNC and RDN hubs.
Following these exercises and discussions, participants should have a clearer understanding of what makes a quality institutional gateway and how duplication of effort can be avoided locally, by making the most of national services already available.
Brian Kelly is UK Web Focus, a national, JISC-funded web coordination post based at UKOLN (UK Office For Library and Information Networking), University of Bath. Brian has previously worked at the Universities of Loughborough (1984-90), Liverpool (1990-91), Leeds (1991-96) and Newcastle (1995-96). In November 1996 Brian took up his current post in Bath. His responsibilities include monitoring web developments, information dissemination, providing advice and representing JISC on the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). Brian presented a short paper at the WWW 8 conference and will be delivering another two at the WWW 9 conference to be held in Amsterdam in May 2000.
Dissemination of information on web developments is one of the important aspects of Brian's responsibilities. In addition to organising the annual web manager's workshop, and participation at events such as UCISA TLIG events, Brian publishes articles in a variety of publications, including the Ariadne (see <http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/>) and Exploit Interactive (see <http://www.exploit-lib.org/>) web magazines.
Justine Kitchen took up the post of Information and Training Manager at the Resource Discovery Network Centre (RDNC) in November 1999. RDNC is the co-ordinating body responsible for the development of the Resource Discovery Network (RDN), which is funded by JISC the AHRB and ESRC. RDN is made up of five faculty-based hubs, providing access to gateways of high quality Internet resources, selected and evaluated by Internet subject specialists
In addition to contributing to the development of the RDN website, Justine's role involves ensuring the provision of, and support for, communications, evaluation, marketing, publicity and training across the thirty HE institutions which make up the RDN.