http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/buzz/algorithm/ Recent content in Algorithm on Ariadne Hugo -- gohugo.io en-gb Fri, 13 Feb 2015 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/73/jenkins/ Fri, 13 Feb 2015 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/73/jenkins/ 2013 marked the 10th anniversary of SUNCAT. Back in 2003, SUNCAT (Serials Union CATalogue) started as a project undertaken by EDINA [1] in response to an observed need for better journals information in the UK, which was identified in the UKNUC report [2]. In August 2006, SUNCAT became a full service, and is now an established resource that contains serials records, including more and more e-journals information, of an ever-increasing number of libraries. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/71/rumsey-jefferies/ Mon, 08 Jul 2013 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/71/rumsey-jefferies/ In 2012 the University of Oxford Research Committee endorsed a university ‘Policy on the management of research data and records’ [1]. Much of the infrastructure to support this policy is being developed under the Jisc-funded Damaro Project [2]. The nascent services that underpin the University’s RDM (research data management) infrastructure have been divided into four themes: RDM planning;managing live data;discovery and location; andaccess, reuse and curation.The data outputs catalogue falls into the third theme, and will result in metadata and interfaces that support discovery, location, citation and business reporting for Oxford research datasets. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/71/charlton-et-al/ Mon, 08 Jul 2013 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/71/charlton-et-al/  ‘Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.’ Attributed to Albert Einstein In the last decade we have had access to data that opens up a new world of potential evidence ranging from indicating how children might learn their first word to the use of millions of mathematical models to predict outbreaks of flu. We explore the potential impact of learning analytics and big data for the future of learning and teaching. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/71/henshaw-kiley/ Mon, 08 Jul 2013 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/71/henshaw-kiley/ Online access is now the norm for many spheres of discovery and learning. What benefits bricks-and-mortar libraries have to offer in this digital age is a subject of much debate and concern, and will continue to be so as learning resources and environments shift ever more from the physical to the virtual. In order to maintain a place in this dual environment, most research libraries strive to replicate their traditional offerings in the digital world. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/70/kelly-et-al/ Fri, 30 Nov 2012 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/70/kelly-et-al/ The idea that if we could only improve how we communicate, there would be less misunderstanding among people is as old as the hills. Historically, this notion has been expressed through things like school reform, spelling reform, publication of communication manuals, etc. The most radical expression of the desire for better understanding is the invention of a whole new artificial language with the intention of providing a universal language for humanity. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/70/codata-2012-rpt/ Fri, 30 Nov 2012 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/70/codata-2012-rpt/ CODATA was formed by the International Council for Science (ICSU) in 1966 to co-ordinate and harmonise the use of data in science and technology. One of its very earliest decisions was to hold a conference every two years at which new developments could be reported. The first conference was held in Germany in 1968, and over the following years it would be held in  15 different countries across 4 continents. My colleague Monica Duke and I attended the most recent conference in Taipei both to represent the Digital Curation Centre – CODATA's national member for the UK – and to participate in a track of talks on data publication and citation. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/70/emtacl12-rpt/ Fri, 30 Nov 2012 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/70/emtacl12-rpt/ The three-day conference consisted of eight keynote presentations by invited speakers and a number of parallel sessions. The main themes set out for this year’s conference were supporting research, organisational change within the library, linked open data and other semantic web applications in the library, new literacies, and new services/old services in new clothes, along with other relevant perspectives on emerging technologies. We attended the conference to gain an overview of organisational changes happening across the sector in relation to technological developments and to gather opinion on the relevance of the academic library within a digital society. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/70/online-2012-rpt/ Fri, 30 Nov 2012 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/70/online-2012-rpt/ Online Information [1] is an interesting conference as it brings together information professionals from both the public and the private sector. The opportunity to share experiences from these differing perspectives doesn’t happen that often and brings real benefits, such as highly productive networking. This year’s Online Information, held between 20 - 21  November, felt like a slightly different event to previous years. The conference had condensed down to 2 days from 3, dropped its exhibition and free workshops and found a new home at the Victoria Park Plaza Hotel, London. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/69/eduserv-2012-rpt/ Mon, 30 Jul 2012 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/69/eduserv-2012-rpt/ The annual Eduserv Symposium [1] was billed as a ‘must-attend event for IT professionals in Higher Education’; the choice of topical subject matter being one of the biggest crowd-drawers (the other being the amazing venue: the Royal College of Physicians). The past few years have seen coverage of highly topical areas such as virtualisation and the cloud, the mobile university and access management. This year’s theme of big data is certainly stimulating interest, but what exactly are the implications for those working in research, learning, and operations in Higher Education? http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/69/whalley/ Mon, 30 Jul 2012 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/69/whalley/ Wikipedia has become internationally known as an online encyclopaedia ('The Free Encyclopedia'). Developed by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger and launched in 2001 it has, to date, editions in 285 languages. Wikipedia is but one subset of the Web-based applications known as 'wikis'. The original wiki (as wikiwikiweb) was developed by Ward Cunningham in the 1990s as the least complex way of rapidly sharing and communicating 'information'. Wiki is Hawaiian for 'quick'; repeating the word is equivalent to adding 'very'. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/68/darlington/ Fri, 09 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/68/darlington/ A great deal of information is accessible on the World Wide Web which might be useful to both students and teachers. This material, however, is of variable quality and usefulness and is aimed at a wide spectrum of users. Moreover, such material rarely appears accompanied by guidance on how it may be most effectively used by potential users. To make information more usable it must be made more readily discoverable and there should be clear – and preferably machine-readable – indications of its provenance and quality and the legitimate uses to which it may be put. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/68/hopkinson-zargaryan/ Fri, 09 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/68/hopkinson-zargaryan/ Early writing which first appeared as cuneiform protocols and then emerged in manuscript form and as printed materials is currently entering a new stage in its development – in the form of electronic publications. The Internet has drastically changed our understanding of access to library resources, to publication schemas, and has introduced brand new ways of information delivery. And as a result, the present situation could be described as a continuous increase in the amount of material being published only in electronic form, together with wide-scale conversion of paper-based material to digital formats. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/68/tonkin-rvw/ Tue, 06 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/68/tonkin-rvw/ Published by O'Reilly, as part of the Theory In Practice series, this book is essentially academic in focus. It takes the form of thirty chapters. The first eight of these aim to provide an introduction to the area of software engineering, or more specifically, the collection and use of supporting evidence to support software engineering practices. These initial chapters are satisfyingly broad in scope, covering topics from human factors and personality to complexity metrics and the process of authoring a systematic review. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/68/iassist-2011-rpt/ Tue, 06 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/68/iassist-2011-rpt/ The IASSIST [1] Conference is a long-standing annual event which brings together researchers, statistical analysts as well as computer and information professionals interested in all aspects of research data, from discovery to reuse. This 37th meeting spanned five days where participants could attend workshops, IASSIST business meetings and a myriad of presentations. This year, the event focused on the sharing of tools and techniques which ‘improves capabilities across disciplines and along the entire data life cycle’. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/68/fpw11-rpt/ Tue, 06 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/68/fpw11-rpt/ We have all heard at least some of the extraordinary statistics that attempt to capture the sheer size and ephemeral nature of the Web. According to the Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC), more than 70 new domains are registered and more than 500,000 documents are added to the Web every minute [1]. This scale, coupled with its ever-evolving use, present significant challenges to those concerned with preserving both the content and context of the Web. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/67/day-rvw/ Sun, 03 Jul 2011 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/67/day-rvw/ Over the past 20 years a great deal of information and guidance has been published to support cultural heritage organisations interested in undertaking digitisation projects. It is well over a decade now since the seminal Joint National Preservation Office and Research Libraries Group Preservation Conference on Guidelines for digital imaging [1] and standard introductory texts on digitisation like Anne Kenney and Oya Rieger's Moving theory into practice [2] and Stuart Lee's Digital imaging: a practical handbook [3] are of a similar age - although still extremely useful. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/65/wilson-et-al/ Fri, 29 Oct 2010 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/65/wilson-et-al/ The University of Oxford began to consider research data management infrastructure in earnest in 2008, with the ‘Scoping Digital Repository Services for Research Data’ Project [1]. Two further JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee)-funded pilot projects followed this initial study, and the approaches taken by these projects, and their findings, form the bulk of this article. Oxford’s decision to do something about its data management infrastructure was timely. A subject that had previously attracted relatively little interest amongst senior decision makers within the UK university sector, let alone amongst the public at large, was about to acquire a new-found prominence. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/65/thompson-hs/ Fri, 29 Oct 2010 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/65/thompson-hs/ URI stands for Uniform Resource Identifier, the official name for those things you see all the time on the Web that begin 'http:' or 'mailto:', for example http://www.w3.org/, which is the URI for the home page of the World Wide Web Consortium [1]. (These things were called URLs (Uniform Resource Locators) in the early days of the Web, and the change from URL to URI is either hugely significant or completely irrelevant, depending on who is talking—I have nothing to say about this issue in this article. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/64/salo/ Thu, 29 Jul 2010 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/64/salo/ Eager to prove their relevance among scholars leaving print behind, libraries have participated vocally in the last half-decade's conversation about digital research data. On the surface, libraries would seem to have much human and technological infrastructure ready-constructed to repurpose for data: digital library platforms and institutional repositories may appear fit for purpose. However, unless libraries understand the salient characteristics of research data, and how they do and do not fit with library processes and infrastructure, they run the risk of embarrassing missteps as they come to grips with the data challenge. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/63/rdmf4-rpt/ Thu, 29 Apr 2010 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/63/rdmf4-rpt/ The fourth meeting of the Research Data Management Forum was held in Manchester on 10 and 11 March 2010, co-sponsored by the Digital Curation Centre (DCC) [1] and the Research Information Network (RIN) [2]. The event took Dealing with Sensitive Data: Managing Ethics, Security and Trust as its theme [3]. Day 1: 10 March 2010DCC Associate Director Liz Lyon and RIN Head of Programmes Stéphane Goldstein welcomed the 45 delegates to the event, and began by introducing the keynote speaker, Iain Buchan, Professor of Public Health Informatics and Director of the Northwest Institute for Bio-Health Informatics (NIBHI), University of Manchester. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/61/stracchino-feng/ Fri, 30 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/61/stracchino-feng/ An overview of the first phase of developing a digital repository for multimedia resources at York University has recently been outlined by Elizabeth Harbord and Julie Allinson in Ariadne [1]. This article aims to provide a technical companion piece reflecting on a year’s progress in the technical development of the repository infrastructure. As Allinson and Harbord’s earlier article explained, it was decided to build the architecture using Fedora Commons [2] as the underlying repository, with the user interface being provided by Muradora [3]. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/61/lyte-et-al/ Fri, 30 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/61/lyte-et-al/ Institutional repositories are a major element of the Open Access movement. More specifically in research and education, the main purpose is to make available as much of the research output of an institution as possible. However, a simple search box and a long list of returned (keyword) artefacts derived from either an individual institutional repository (IR) or a federated search that would generate an even longer list, is no longer sufficient. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/60/isko-2009-rpt/ Wed, 29 Jul 2009 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/60/isko-2009-rpt/ I recently attended the first biennial Conference of the British Chapter of the International Society for Knowledge Organization (ISKO UK) [1] entitled ‘Content Architecture: Exploiting and Managing Diverse Resources’. It was organized in co-operation with the Department of Information Studies, University College London. If the intention was to focus on the diversity of resources out there, I also felt that the audience was very diverse in terms of levels of expertise and perspectives. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/59/waaijers/ Wed, 29 Apr 2009 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/59/waaijers/ Now that publications are increasingly being enriched with databases and audio-visual elements, the need for non-proprietary review systems – that is, peer review systems that do not require the assignment of copyright to the organiser of the peer review i.e. the publisher - is becoming ever-more pressing. Although there is a steadily growing number of peer-reviewed Open Access journals [1] and an active Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association [2], the supply fails to keep pace with the demand. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/59/pienaar-vandeventer/ Wed, 29 Apr 2009 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/59/pienaar-vandeventer/ Worldwide, the research paradigm is in the process of expanding into eResearch and open scholarship. This implies new ways of collaboration, dissemination and reuse of research results, specifically via the Web. Developing countries are also able to exploit the opportunity to make their knowledge output more widely known and accessible and to co-operate in research partnerships. Although there are exisiting examples of eResearch activities, the implementation of eResearch is not yet being fully supported in any co-ordinated way within the South African context. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/57/hannabuss-rvw/ Thu, 30 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/57/hannabuss-rvw/ Arguments about intellectual property rights (IPR) never go away, particularly now that technological and market changes drive the legal agendas along very fast. Nowhere faster probably than in software and business-methods patents, one of the more colourful aspects of a highly litigious field today. Much of the debate centres on the USA where R&D spending is highest (particularly by big players, who incidentally have the most lucrative and best-defended patents). Indeed a recent decision by the Senate (May 2008, the time of writing) to remove the Patent Reform Act from its calendar (among other things it would have changed the first-to-invent rule to a first-to-file rule) has been seen by commentators as further evidence of patent and policy failure. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/57/waaijers-et-al/ Thu, 30 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/57/waaijers-et-al/ The view that the results of publicly financed research should also be publicly accessible enjoys broad support in the academic community. Where their own articles are concerned, however, many authors hesitate to circulate them openly, for example by publishing them in Open Access journals or placing them in their institution’s repository. They ask themselves whether that will not be at odds with the copyright rules and whether they will gain – or perhaps even lose – prestige. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/57/stevenson/ Thu, 30 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/57/stevenson/ For online services, the importance of developing user-friendly and accessible Web sites is of paramount importance. This article is about user testing recently carried out by the Archives Hub [1], an online service run by Mimas [2], which is a national data centre that provides access to a whole range of online services for research, learning and teaching. The Archives Hub is a JISC-funded service that provides a gateway to search descriptions of archives for education and research, enabling researchers to discover unique archival sources held in repositories across the country. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/56/gatenby/ Tue, 29 Jul 2008 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/56/gatenby/ Libraries’ collections fall into three parts: physical, digital and licensed. These are managed by multiple systems, ILS (Integrated Library System), ERM (Electronic Records Management), digital management, digital repositories, resolvers, inter-library loan and reference. At the same time libraries are increasingly co-operating in collecting and storing resources. This article examines how to identify data that is best located at global, collective and local levels. An example is explored, namely the benefits of moving data from different local systems to the network level to manage acquisition of the total collection as a whole and in combination with consortia members. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/55/lewis/ Tue, 29 Apr 2008 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/55/lewis/ At the University of East Anglia (UEA), we have been taking part in the Primo Charter Programme in which various libraries in the Europe and the US have been able to work with Ex Libris on version 1 of their Primo product. We have learned a great deal from the process and there is interest throughout the library sector in the potential benefits of separating or decoupling the search and retrieval interface layer from the database layer when presenting library resources. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/54/cliff-rvw/ Wed, 30 Jan 2008 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/54/cliff-rvw/ When I was handed this book for review a colleague of mine said "rather you than me" and there is no doubt that Programming Collective Intelligence is probably not a book for everyone. However, if phrases like 'Bayesian filtering', 'Support-vector machines', 'Collaborative filtering' and 'Methods of clustering' do not deter you or better, engage your interest, then this work is well worth a look. One of the pleasing things to notice when picking up the book is its relatively small size and Toby Segaran has managed to condense a series of complex techniques into just eleven chapters of concise and interesting writing. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/54/search-engines/ Wed, 30 Jan 2008 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/54/search-engines/ ‘Human-powered search engines’ is perhaps a slightly unfortunate term, since it makes me think of lots of people running around on treadmills providing the energy to keep the servers powered up! However, it’s the term in general use, so we’ll go with it. Essentially it means a search engine which can, and will have its results (or at least the position of its results) affected by human intervention, usually by people rating individual results further up or further down the rankings. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/53/manuel-oppenheim/ Tue, 30 Oct 2007 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/53/manuel-oppenheim/ The development of an increasing array of tools for storing, organising, managing, and searching electronic resources poses some interesting questions for those in the Higher Education sector, not least of which are: what role do repositories have in this new information environment? What effect is Google having on the information-seeking strategies of students, researchers and teachers? Where do libraries fit within the information continuum? And ultimately, what services should they look to provide for their users? http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/53/kidmm-rpt/ Tue, 30 Oct 2007 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/53/kidmm-rpt/ About KIDMMThe British Computer Society [1], which in 2007 celebrates 50 years of existence, has a self-image around engineering, software, and systems design and implementation. However, within the BCS there are over fifty Specialist Groups (SGs); among these, some have a major focus on ‘informatics’, or the content of information systems. At a BCS SG Assembly in 2005, a workshop discussed shared-interest topics around which SGs could collaborate. Knowledge, information and data management was identified as a candidate. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/51/newsline/ Sun, 29 Apr 2007 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/51/newsline/ Introduction to Federated Searching Technology & DevelopmentsDate: 11 May 2007 Venue: Conference Room, Southport College, Mornington Road, Southport, PR9 0TT Delegate Fee: £50.00 This one day conference is aimed at further education library and information. As electronic content and sources of information, provided by academic libraries, become greater and vaster, the need for federated searching technologies has increased. This seminar will introduce delegates to the concepts of federated searching (also known as meta-searching) of library content, and will illustrate some of the current developments and initiatives within this field. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/50/2-dcc-conf-rpt/ Tue, 30 Jan 2007 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/50/2-dcc-conf-rpt/ The International Digital Curation Conference is held annually by the Digital Curation Centre [1] to bring together researchers in the field and promote discussion of policy and strategy. The second conference in this series [2], with the theme 'digital data curation in practice', was held between 21-22 November 2006 in Glasgow. Day OneOpening Keynote AddressHans Hoffman of CERN gave the opening keynote address. The e-Science 'revolution' is being both pushed by advances in technology and pulled by demands from researchers. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/50/search-engines/ Tue, 30 Jan 2007 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/50/search-engines/ It’s very easy simply to concentrate on the ‘Big Four’ search engines - Ask, Google, Live and Yahoo, while missing out on what is happening elsewhere. I know that I’m as guilty of that as anyone else and so for this column I thought I would look back over 2006 and see which search engines have come to my attention, what I think of them, and see how well they have actually fared. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/49/cig-2006-rpt/ Mon, 30 Oct 2006 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/49/cig-2006-rpt/ Restful accommodation and pleasant food prepared the delegates for the carefully balanced mix of social networking sessions and challenging seminars. Everyone was extremely friendly and most proved to be erudite socialites, networking in some cases with great assertiveness and sense of purpose. Cataloguing and classification was revealed as an area of library and information science that has survived years of neglect by most library schools to reveal itself as the much-needed solution to online resource accessibility. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/49/tourte-tonkin/ Mon, 30 Oct 2006 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/49/tourte-tonkin/ The recent Institutional Web Management Workshop (IWMW 2006) [1] was a rare opportunity to try out a few new pieces of technology. With events that occur at a different location each year, it is often difficult to do so, since the infrastructure at the venue may not be suitable, and it is difficult to liase effectively with technical staff at the venue before the event in order to put all the necessary technology into place. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/48/ferreira-et-al/ Sat, 29 Jul 2006 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/48/ferreira-et-al/ Efforts to archive a large amount of digital material are being developed by many cultural heritage institutions. We have evidence of this in the numerous initiatives aiming to harvest the Web [1-5] together with the impressive burgeoning of institutional repositories [6]. However, getting the material inside the archive is just the beginning for any initiative concerned with the long-term preservation of digital materials. Digital preservation can best be described as the activity or set of activities that enable digital information to be intelligible for long periods of time. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/48/newsline/ Sat, 29 Jul 2006 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/48/newsline/ UKeiG Training: Developing and managing e-book collectionsThe UK eInformation Group (UKeiG), in co-operation with Academic and National Library Training Co-operative (ANLTC), are pleased to present a course entitled 'Developing and managing e-book collections', to be held in Training Room 1, The Library, Dublin City University, Dublin 9 on Tuesday, 12 September 2006 from 9.30a.m. to 4.30p.m. Course OutlineThis course opens the door to a new electronic format. In the last six years, there has been an unprecedented growth in the publishing of e-books with an increasing array of different types available for all sectors. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/47/tonkin/ Sat, 29 Apr 2006 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/47/tonkin/ Despite the stability of many key technologies underlying today's Internet, venerable workhorses such as TCP/IP and HTTP, the rise of new candidate specifications frequently leads to a sort of collaborative manic depression. Every now and then, a new idea comes along and sparks a wave of interest, the first stage in the Internet hype cycle. Transformed with the addition of a series of relatively content-free conceptual buzzwords, the fragile idea is transmitted between and within communities until disillusionment sets in, when the terminology becomes an out-of-date reminder of a slightly embarrassing era that tomorrow's computer industry professionals will laugh about over a pint of beer. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/47/reese/ Sat, 29 Apr 2006 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/47/reese/ Surveying the current metasearch tools landscape, it is somewhat surprising to find so few non-commercial implementations available. This is especially true considering that, as a group, the library community has cultivated a very vibrant open source community over the past ten or so years. One wonders then, why this particular service has been ceded to the world of commercial vendors. One can speculate that the creation and management of a metasearch knowledge base has likely played a large role [1]. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/47/vanveen/ Sat, 29 Apr 2006 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/47/vanveen/ "I want my browser to recognise information in Web pages and offer me functionality to remix it with relevant information from other services. I want to control which services are offered to me and how they are offered." In this article I discuss the ingredients that enable users to benefit from a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) by combining services according to their preferences. This concept can be summarised as a user-accessible machine-readable knowledge base of service descriptions in combination with a user agent. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/46/day-rvw/ Wed, 08 Feb 2006 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/46/day-rvw/ The Annual Review of Information Science and Technology (ARIST) is an important annual publication containing review articles on many topics of relevance to library and information science, published on behalf of the American Society for Information Science and Technology (ASIST). Since volume 36 (2002), the editor of ARIST has been Professor Blaise Cronin of Indiana University, Bloomington. Professor Cronin's introduction to the 2004 volume highlighted some of the difficulties with planning a publication like ARIST, noting that it has a habit of not quite turning out as it was initially conceived [1]. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/46/maccoll/ Wed, 08 Feb 2006 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/46/maccoll/ Introduction: A ‘Googly’ for Libraries?A googly, or a ‘wrong’un’, is a delivery which looks like a normal leg spinner but actually turns towards the batsmen, like an off break, rather than away from the bat. (BBC Sport Academic Web site [1]. Search result found in Google).How should we understand Google? Libraries still feel like the batsman at whom something has been bowled which looks familiar, but then turns out to be a nasty threat. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/45/day-rvw/ Sat, 29 Oct 2005 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/45/day-rvw/ The Annual Review of Information Science and Technology (ARIST) is an important annual publication containing review articles on many topics of relevance to library and information science, published on behalf of the American Society for Information Science and Technology (ASIST). Since volume 36, the editor of ARIST has been Professor Blaise Cronin of Indiana University, Bloomington. The twelve chapters in volume 38 are divided into three sections, dealing with theory, technology, and policy. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/44/newsline/ Fri, 29 Jul 2005 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/44/newsline/ TASI Offers Workshops over Summer and Autumn Months The JISC-funded Technical Advisory Service for Images (TASI) is offering a number of workshops in the coming months, of which two below are given as examples. Building a departmental resource 11 August 2005 This workshop aims to demonstrate the steps for creating, maintaining and delivering an image collection. Through a range of hands-on activities, attendees will investigate suitable Image Management Systems (IMS), be introduced to Metadata, and consider its practical application. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/44/search-engines/ Fri, 29 Jul 2005 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/44/search-engines/ If, like me, you spend a lot of your time looking at search engines and search engine technology, you like a little variety in your life. It's always fun to look at new search engines and to see what is happening in the industry. However, while all roads may well lead to Rome, all discussions on search engines eventually return to Google; there is no getting away from the fact that Google is doing more in the search engine industry than anyone else. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/43/guy-rvw/ Fri, 29 Apr 2005 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/43/guy-rvw/ Anyone scaling the heights of metadata for the management and retrieval of digital information for the first time can be forgiven a degree of initial bewilderment. The same goes for this article, so a glossary of terms found here are offered in the spirit of saving readers' time [1]. David Haynes' book appears to go a long way to guiding its explorers through the foothills and beyond in this complete introduction to the subject for the information professional. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/43/newsline/ Fri, 29 Apr 2005 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/43/newsline/ Netskills Workshops in May 2005Web: http://www.netskills.ac.uk/ Netskills will be running the following workshops at North Herts College in Letchworth Garden City in May 2005: 10 May : e-Assessment: Tools & TechniquesFocuses on the tools available for creating e-assessment and the practical techniques required to use them effectively. The tools are considered both in terms of their functionality as well as their interoperability with other systems. 11 May: Design Solutions for e-LearningThis workshop examines how to design pedagogically effective e-learning to enhance traditional forms of teaching and learning. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/42/ananiadou/ Sun, 30 Jan 2005 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/42/ananiadou/ In this article we describe the role of the National Centre for Text Mining (NaCTeM). NaCTeM is operated by a consortium of three Universities: the University of Manchester which leads the consortium, the University of Liverpool and the University of Salford. The service activity is run by the National Centre for Dataset Services (MIMAS), based within Manchester Computing (MC). As part of previous and ongoing collaboration, NaCTeM involves, as self-funded partners, world-leading groups at San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC), the University of California at Berkeley (UCB), the University of Geneva and the University of Tokyo. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/41/newsline/ Fri, 29 Oct 2004 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/41/newsline/ Hyper Clumps, Mini Clumps and National Catalogues...The JISC-funded CC-interop Project completed its work during 2004 and now is holding an event to disseminate the key findings of the project. The project built on the work of the successful eLib Phase 3 "Clumps" projects and investigated three broad areas to inform about interoperability between physical and distributed union catalogues. Find out about: how distributed and large physical union catalogues can interact, including the building of a distributed catalogue capable of accepting remote Z39. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/41/search-engines/ Fri, 29 Oct 2004 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/41/search-engines/ In the last edition of Ariadne, I wrote about a few search engines that had come to my attention. Obviously the summer months are a fruitful period of development for search engine producers, because I've got a new crop to write about again! There are also some useful Web pages about search engines and developments in existing search engines that I've also discovered, so I'll be making mention of those as well. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/40/edina-rpt/ Thu, 29 Jul 2004 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/40/edina-rpt/ EDINA [1] held its first general information event for the Higher and Further Education communities on Tuesday 11 May 2004. EDINA Exchange took place in the National E-Science Centre at the University of Edinburgh. The day began with an introduction by EDINA Director Peter Burnhill, who took us through the programme for the day, and highlighted some of EDINA's notable recent achievements. The morning session then began with presentations on the various subject and resource type clusters in which EDINA is active. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/40/coyle/ Thu, 29 Jul 2004 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/40/coyle/ It is common to hear members of the digital library community debating the relative merits of the two most common rights expression languages (RELs) - the Open Digital Rights Language (ODRL) and the rights language developed for the Motion Picture Expert Group (MPEG) and recently adopted by the International Organization for Standardization [1] - and which is preferable for digital library systems. Such debates are, in my opinion, premature and should be postponed until this community has developed a clear set of requirements for rights management in its environment, including rights expression, the encoding of license terms, and file protection. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/40/www2004-rpt/ Thu, 29 Jul 2004 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/40/www2004-rpt/ WWW2004 [1] was the 13th conference in the series of international World Wide Web conferences organised by the IW3C2 (International World Wide Web Conference Committee). This was the annual gathering of Web researchers and technologists to present the latest work on the Web and Web standardisation at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). This conference is very much a networking event in both the technical and personal sense. For the last 3 years it has had pervasive wireless networking ('wi-fi') available, allowing interaction with the sessions and the speakers during the conference. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/39/teruggi/ Thu, 29 Apr 2004 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/39/teruggi/ Memory is our major link to the past; it has greatly influenced the evolution of humankind. Since the beginning of humanity, we have sought to preserve memories through the creation of artefacts that will transcend our own lifetime and so assure ourselves some form of posterity, perhaps even eternity. For some time writing has been the major complex medium of preserved reality. Not only does writing record human actions, beliefs and emotions, but it is an intellectual tool in itself, giving a temporal perspective on our thought as well as providing increasing levels of abstraction. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/39/erpanet-rpt/ Thu, 29 Apr 2004 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/39/erpanet-rpt/ On 15-17 December 2003, the ERPANET Project [1] and the ICSU (International Council for Science) Committee on Data for Science and Technology (CODATA) [2] held a joint workshop on the selection, appraisal and retention of digital scientific data at the National Library of Portugal (Biblioteca Nacional) in Lisbon. The workshop brought together around 80 participants, a mix of scientists, archivists and data specialists. Day OneAfter the opening introductions, the first presentation was an overview of CODATA data archiving activities given by Bill Anderson, co-chair of the CODATA Task Group on Preservation and Archiving of Scientific and Technical Data in Developing Countries. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/38/portole/ Fri, 30 Jan 2004 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/38/portole/ Abstract The PORTOLE (Providing Online Resources To Online Learning Environments) Project was a JISC-funded project which sought to produce a range of tools for tutors which could be used to enable them to discover information resources and to embed these into their course modules from within a University Virtual Learning Environment (VLE). The VLE in use at the Universities of Leeds and Oxford is the Bodington system. A key deliverable of the project was to produce tools that were designed with the ease of incorporation into other VLE environments in mind. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/37/lindholm/ Thu, 30 Oct 2003 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/37/lindholm/ The story behind Engine-e [1], a recently created robot-generated Web index, is best told by starting in 1994 with the development and maintenance of EELS (Engineering Electronic Library, Sweden) [2], a manually indexed quality-controlled subject gateway in Engineering. EELS was accompanied by the experimental robot-generated index, “All” Engineering [3], created within the DESIRE framework [4]. The solution used already in “All” Engineering is similar to that of Engine-e, but with some distinct differences. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/36/day-rvw/ Tue, 29 Jul 2003 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/36/day-rvw/ The Annual Review of Information Science and Technology (ARIST ) [1] will already be familiar to many readers of Ariadne. It is an important annual publication containing review articles on many topics of relevance to library and information science, published on behalf of the American Society for Information Science and Technology (ASIST) [2]. Volume 36 is the first volume to be edited by Blaise Cronin of Indiana University, in succession to Martha Williams who edited ARIST from volumes 11 to 35. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/36/tna/ Tue, 29 Jul 2003 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/36/tna/ OriginsWilliam of Normandy, having conquered England, decided in 1086 to take account of his new territory. The result was the Domesday Book (actually more than one), which now resides in the National Archives [1]. For the BBC, the 900th anniversary in 1986 presented an opportunity to produce a television series, hosted by Michael Wood. A more unusual production was to use the combination of computer and video known as interactive video to produce a kind of modern-day equivalent of William’s survey. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/34/rydberg-cox/ Wed, 15 Jan 2003 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/34/rydberg-cox/ The field of classics has a long tradition of electronic editions of both primary and secondary materials for the study of the ancient world. Large electronic corpora of Greek and Latin texts are available from groups such as the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae, the Packard Humanities Institute, and the Duke Databank of Documentary Papyri, and in the Perseus Digital Library [1]. Because such large collections of primary texts have already been digitized, it is now possible to devote concerted effort to developing new computational tools that can transform the way that humanists work with these digitized versions of their primary sources. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/33/dendrinos/ Wed, 09 Oct 2002 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/33/dendrinos/ The design of a speech agent for automatic library services is presented in this paper. The proposed system will be based on speech recognition and synthesis technologies, applied to the library environment. The client of the library can have access to various automatic electronic services through a sophisticated interface, making use of the embedded technologies. The access to OPAC, the loaning process, the database access and the resource retrieval are some of the services that could be greatly facilitated through the use of the system. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/30/dti/ Fri, 25 Jan 2002 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/30/dti/ The Software Technology Outreach Programme (1) was initiated in Autumn 2000 by the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) to bridge the gap between academia and industry. As Tony Stock explains “More than 1,000 advanced projects are carried out in UK universities every year, each producing on average five potential business applications - but companies are missing out because they and the universities are out of touch with each other”. Software Technology Outreach coordinates a variety of different workshops on relevant technology research areas that provide an opportunity for academic researchers to present to a commercial audience. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/30/ref-books/ Fri, 25 Jan 2002 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/30/ref-books/ Reference books have been ‘published’ on the web for some years. Several hundred dictionaries are freely available. Many specialist encyclopaedias and subject reference works have been converted to become experimental web services(1).This wave of reference publishing follows no concerted plan. There is no formal market for these services and perhaps there never was an expectation of profit. The early development of the web has been like this. Most of the notable achievements lacked a clear commercial motivation and this has led to the extraordinarily rich and varied choice that the web provides. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/30/web-focus/ Fri, 25 Jan 2002 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/30/web-focus/ Over the past 30 years or so we have seen a wide range of computer devices. Those of us over 40 may have distant memories of paper tape and punch cards. Over time these were replaced by terminals, followed by VDUs. Although the VT100 terminal became a de facto standard developments still continued, especially in the area of graphical devices. In the early 1980s personal computers came along. Within the UK the BBC microcomputer and various offerings from Sinclair had some degree of popularity. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/27/seti/ Fri, 23 Mar 2001 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/27/seti/ Distributed Solutions to Number Crunching Problems There are many problems that require the large scale number crunching capablilities of supercomputers. For instance calculating Pi to the nth level of precision, attempting to crack the latest encryption algorithm [1], mapping the human genome, or analysing radio waves from space. For some applications, a Supercomputer might not be enough; nor can every project can afford one. However, but with a little bit of clever software engineering applied to the Internet, there is a solution. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/25/decomate-ii/ Sat, 23 Sep 2000 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/25/decomate-ii/ The Decomate II project produced a working demonstrator system and service providing access to distributed, heterogeneous Economics information sources. The conference was held at the Casa de Convalescència, part of The Hospital Santa Pau, one of Barcelona’s great "Modernista" architectural monuments. Following a warm welcome from Carme Picallo, Vice-Rector for Research of the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB), Hans Geleijnse of Tilburg University and Decomate II Project Director, gave the keynote speech. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/25/mueller/ Sat, 23 Sep 2000 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/25/mueller/ Introduction and summaryIn the following pages I look at reading Homer in Greek as a paradigm of “reading with a dictionary” and other forms of “look-up” reading for which a digital environment offers distinct advantages. I take as my point of departure the activity of reading Homer in a print environment with a text, dictionary, and commentary, and then consider the added value of three electronic tools: the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae (TLG), a virtually complete archive of all ancient Greek textsthe Perseus Project, a bilingual text-and-dictionary web site that provides access to a large chunk of classical and Hellenistic Greek textsthe Chicago Homer, a specialized bilingual web site of Early Greek epic that will be published by the University of Chicago Press late in 2000 [1]What can you do with any electronic tool that you cannot do with a printed text and a dictionary? http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/24/search-engines/ Thu, 22 Jun 2000 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/24/search-engines/ In the courses that I run on Internet searching people often express concern, surprise or plain puzzlement at the way in which search engines relevance rank the results that they return. Consequently, I thought that it might be interesting to cover this subject in the column. Why rank pages? The search engines that are what I call 'free text' search engines will, in general terms, be much more comprehensive than those that provide access to websites via a directory or index. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/23/search-engines/ Thu, 23 Mar 2000 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/23/search-engines/ Ixquick and Multi search enginesBy now I’m sure that we’re all aware that just using one single search engine on its own isn’t a particularly effective way of searching the Web. Even the large search engines which index 200-300,000,000 pages hardly scratch the surface of the one billion or more pages that are currently publicly available. If you do find what you need with a single search engine, all well and good, but in many cases people are very often dissatisfied with that they get, and finish their search wondering if they have done all that they can to get everything possible. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/23/dovey/ Thu, 23 Mar 2000 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/23/dovey/ In the not so distant past, if a group of libraries wished to offer a single online catalogue to their collections, they had to adopt a physical union catalogue model: i.e. they would have placed their catalogue records into a single searchable database. More recently there has been much work in virtual union catalogues, whereby the user interface offers integrated access to multiple catalogues as if they were a single catalogue. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/22/planet-sosig/ Tue, 21 Dec 1999 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/22/planet-sosig/ The purpose of this article is to introduce The Question Bank contents and situate the resource in the context of its Information Space, that is its relationship to other projects that aim to make social surveys more accessible. I have the subsidiary aim of using this text to present the choices and decisions that need to be identified, preferably before undertaking the introduction of a medium sized web-based information resource. I aim to be decidedly non-technical, however many of the problems the Question bank team has overcome have been solved because of the increasing flexibility that newer software offers. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/21/subject-gateways/ Wed, 22 Sep 1999 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/21/subject-gateways/ This information paper was written by the National Library of Australia to describe the scope and intent of four of Australia's national subject gateways: Agrigate [2], the Australian Virtual Engineering Library (AVEL) [3], EdNA Online - the website of the Education Network of Australia (EdNA) [4], and MetaChem [5]. The four criteria shaping subject gateway development were identified as an operational framework, standards & guidelines, quality of service delivery, and scope. They have been mapped to the characteristics of the Australian subject gateways as described below. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/21/ecms/ Wed, 22 Sep 1999 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/21/ecms/ Technology issues are of utmost importance in Electronic Copyright Management Systems (ECMS). In fact, these technologies can in part determine the success or failure of these systems. In a traditional environment, consumers enjoy buying with efficient systems and security. This is even truer in the Internet. Thus the need to develop and deploy technologies that are efficient and can assure security. This work covers these technology issues, illustrating the following points in an objective way: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/20/web-focus/ Mon, 21 Jun 1999 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/20/web-focus/ The Eighth World Wide Web Conference (WWW8) was on a smaller scale than in the past few years. The numbers of delegates seemed to be down, and there was no accompanying exhibition. The conference appeared to be refocussing on the web research community, with delegates from commercial companies more likely to be software developers than marketing types. This refocussing also seemed to be reflected in the conference papers, which, as a number of people commented, seemed to be of a higher quality this year. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/19/bized/ Fri, 19 Mar 1999 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/19/bized/ Biz/edIntroducing Biz/edBiz/ed [1] is a free, subject-based information gateway service providing access to quality-assured Internet resources in business and economics. It is managed from the Institute for Learning and Research Technology (ILRT) [2] based at the University of Bristol. The core service was originally targeted at the needs of staff and students up to first year undergraduate level. However, funding under the Electronic Libraries Programme (eLib) [3] has enabled Biz/ed to encompass research users and those developing and using materials for more advanced courses in the HE sector. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/19/web-research/ Fri, 19 Mar 1999 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/19/web-research/ Interactive Media-rich Web Content - Using VideoOne of the major problems experienced by Web users is the amount of time needed to download data. As the speed and power of desktop computer has increased it has become possible for almost anyone with access to a PC to produce interactive web content using images, audio, and particularly video. Therefore, even though the available bandwidth of the Internet is increasing, the bandwidth requirements of the media available through it, and the number of users trying to access that information are also increasing. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/17/biblink/ Fri, 18 Sep 1998 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/17/biblink/ BIBLINK [1] is a project funded within the Telematics for Libraries programme of the European Commission. It is investigating the bi-directional flow of information between publishers and National Bibliographic Agencies (NBAs) and is specifically concerned with information about the publication of electronic resources. Such resources include both on-line publications, Web pages, electronic journals, etc. and electronic publications on physical media such as CD-ROMs. The project has recently finalised the Functional Specification for the ‘BIBLINK workspace’ - a shared, virtual workspace for the exchange of metadata between publishers, NBAs and other third parties such as the ISSN International Centre. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/17/verity/ Fri, 18 Sep 1998 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/17/verity/ AbstractThe majority of library enquiry systems usually consist of a non-graphical interface linked to a library catalogue (Online Public Access Catalog, or OPAC). Graphics, animation and sound are usually sacrificed to speed up the enquiry process. Some interfaces support the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (http) and can therefore be accessed on the World Wide Web (Web). Although they allow access using a number of keywords (author, subject, title, etc.), they do not provide any help on how the catalogues are accessed, how to structure or refine a query or how to evaluate the responses. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/17/editorials/ Fri, 18 Sep 1998 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/17/editorials/ We would like to thank all of the readers who participated in the Ariadne Web Survey, part of an evaluation of the Ariadne project being carried out by Dr. Anne L. Barker, Department of Information and Library Studies at the University of Wales Aberystwyth. The results of the survey will be of particular interest to those of us involved with the development and delivery of upcoming electronic publications. One such publication will be 'Exploit Interactive', the UKOLN deliverable in the Exploit project, funded under the EC Telematics for Libraries programme. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/16/search-engines/ Sat, 18 Jul 1998 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/16/search-engines/ Are you trying to search for something difficult and end up with enormous and completely useless results? The query in the table below is rather contrived but indicates the problem. In this article I hope to help you with these kinds of situation by pointing you in the right place, showing you the best of the search engine (SE) features and giving tips on managing the output that you get when a query returns thousands of answers. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/16/web-focus/ Sat, 18 Jul 1998 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/16/web-focus/ Since February 1998 HTML 4.0 [1], CSS 2.0[2], the Mathematical Markup Language MathML [3] and the Extensible Markup Language XML [4] have all become W3C Recommendations. These web protocols, all of which are concerned with the way in which information can be represented and displayed, were initially Working Drafts which were developed by the appropriate W3C Working Group. The Working Drafts were then made publicly available as W3C Proposed Recommendations. Following a review period the Proposed Recommendations were voted on by W3C member organisations. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/11/dl97/ Thu, 18 Sep 1997 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/11/dl97/ The ACM conference on Digital Libraries is, despite its short life, the premier conference for the field. This year the computer scientists, librarians and all those in-between travelled to Philadelphia in Pennsylvania for ACM Digital Libraries ‘97 [1]. The conference, from 23-26 July, took place in the Doubletree Hotel [2] in downtown Philly and was co-located with the more technical SIGIR ‘97 [3]. All of the usual conference elements were present with 28 papers, 2 invited talks, tutorials, workshops and a session for posters/demonstrations. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/11/sigir97/ Thu, 18 Sep 1997 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/11/sigir97/ SIGIR is a well established technical conference and a little daunting for those hangers-on from Digital Libraries ‘97 who did not have a background in information retrieval. It was good, therefore, that the opening Salton Award lecture by Tefko Saracevic of Rutgers University made us feel at home with a talk entitled Users Lost. He described the history of the field and, what he felt, was a split in the early 80s between the technical algorithm-based side and the user-oriented side. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/9/elvira/ Sun, 18 May 1997 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/9/elvira/ As regular readers of ‘Ariadne’ will know, the fourth annual ELVIRA conference has just taken place at Milton Keynes. The following article is based on my general impressions of the event. A more detailed and complete account can be found in the collected papers, which have been published by Aslib [1] . The ‘extended abstracts’ originally submitted for review are online at the ELVIRA Web site [2]. In the keynote address to the conference, Brian Cook (Griffith University, Queensland, Australia) identified the issues facing people working in the electronic (aka digital/virtual) library field. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/8/copac/ Wed, 19 Mar 1997 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/8/copac/ 1. IntroductionCOPAC is a new consolidated union catalogue which provides free access to a database of records provided by members of the Consortium of University Research Libraries (CURL). The CURL database has been in existence since 1987, permitting record exchange between member libraries and providing a reference service to library staff, and it has long been felt that the database would be of value to the wider academic community. COPAC is the product of a JISC funded project to make the CURL database accessible to the research community as a whole. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/8/electronic-reserve/ Wed, 19 Mar 1997 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/8/electronic-reserve/ Monash University is one of the largest universities in Australia. It has six campuses, five in metropolitan Melbourne, of which the biggest is in the suburb of Clayton, approximately 30 kilometers from the Central Business District and one in the South Eastern region of the State (the La Trobe Valley). Its newest campus is located at Berwick a major population growth centre, south-east of Melbourne. The University obtained government support for establishing the Berwick campus in 1993 and it was decided from the outset that this new campus would rely heavily on electronic delivery of courses and course materials from the University's other campuses. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/5/jisc/ Wed, 18 Sep 1996 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/5/jisc/ Liberalisation of the UK Higher Education network, a drive for greater economy and efficiency, and the promotion of training and awareness, all emerge as key recommendations in the Five Year Strategy, 1996-2001 published by the Joint Information Systems Committee last month. In his Chairman's Preface, Professor John Arbuthnott spells out JISC's role as one of "facilitating, not dictating or managing" the use of IT across the sector. The document talks of the advance of the 'virtual university', with services such as electronic teaching materials, bibliographic and statistical datasets and full-text journals distributed to students in geographically remote areas or in their own homes and workplaces. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/5/securing-forms/ Wed, 18 Sep 1996 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/5/securing-forms/ There are now many HTML FORMs in use in libraries of all types. These forms are usually the front ends to Common Gateway Interface (CGI) programs that implement such things as webopacs, electronic ILL requests and access to backend databases. Often these FORMs have to be authenticated to ensure that only valid library users can make use of the services. Web browsers and servers offer a number of a facilities for doing this authentication, each with different benefits and problems. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/4/wire/ Thu, 18 Jul 1996 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/4/wire/ What do you do in the world of networking/libraries/WWW? Since October 1995 I've been the Senior Trainer for the Netskills project, based at the University of Newcastle. Over the past 9 months I've been involved in developing our HTML Authoring kit and delivering training courses throughout the UK. I am also responsible for the quality control procedures for the Netskills training materials. In addition I have been keeping abreast with network developments, which has included developing a Web Futures talk, using collaborative features of the Web (as described in my Netskills Corner article in Ariadne edition 2). http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/3/adam/ Sat, 18 May 1996 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/3/adam/ The ADAM Project is creating a subject-based information gateway service that will provide access to quality-assured Internet resources in the following areas: Fine Art, including painting, prints and drawings, sculpture and other contemporary media including those using technologyDesign, including industrial, product, fashion, graphic, packaging, interior designArchitecture, including town planning and landscape design, but excluding building constructionApplied Arts, including textiles, ceramics, glass, metals, jewellery, furnitureMedia, including film, television, broadcasting, photography, animation,Theory, historical, philosophical and contextual studies relating to any other categoryMuseum studies and conservationProfessional Practice, related to any of the aboveThe 3-year JISC funding for ADAM was awarded to a consortium of 10 institutions, each with a vested interest in the creation of the service, as part of the Access to Network Resources initiative of the Electronic Libraries Programme. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/1/clic/ Fri, 19 Jan 1996 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/1/clic/ Chemistry is one of the most visual and "three dimensional" of sciences. For many generations, communication of the subject has been rooted on the printed pages of chemical journals, with even colour a rare event. Partially because of such limitations, the subject has evolved a complex and arcane symbolism for its written representation. The complexities of this "chemical nomenclature" in turn result in substantial risk of the propagation of errors and misinterpretation of results.