http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/buzz/open-archives-initiative/ Recent content in Open Archives Initiative on Ariadne Hugo -- gohugo.io en-gb Fri, 13 Feb 2015 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/73/white/ Fri, 13 Feb 2015 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/73/white/ I was an early starter in the world of metadata. Within hours of arriving at the offices of the British Non-Ferrous Metals Research Association in Euston Street, London, in 1970 to start a career as an information scientist I was writing my first abstract. ‘Writing’ is the correct verb as my A3 abstract would be typed up on an IBM golfball typewriter for production. At the bottom of this form was a section called ‘Index Terms’ and it was made very clear at the outset that mistakes in the abstract were regrettable, but mistakes in indexing were unforgivable. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/72/ball-fowler/ Wed, 26 Mar 2014 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/72/ball-fowler/ The Hartley Library at the University of Southampton has in excess of 15,000 bound PhD and MPhil theses on 340 linear metres of shelving. Consultation of the hard-copy version is now restricted to readers making a personal visit to the Library, as no further microfiche copies are being produced by the British Library and no master copies of theses are lent from the Library. Retrieval of theses from storage for readers and their subsequent return requires effort from a large number of staff. 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/70/lewis-et-al/ Fri, 30 Nov 2012 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/70/lewis-et-al/ This article describes the motivations behind the development of the ResourceSync Framework. The Framework addresses the need to synchronise resources between Web sites.  Resources cover a wide spectrum of types, such as metadata, digital objects, Web pages, or data files.  There are many scenarios in which the ability to perform some form of synchronisation is required. Examples include aggregators such as Europeana that want to harvest and aggregate collections of resources, or preservation services that wish to archive Web sites as they change. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/65/wolski-richardson/ Fri, 29 Oct 2010 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/65/wolski-richardson/ In 1999 Sir John Taylor [1], then Director General of the UK Research Councils, talked about e-Science, i.e. global collaboration in key areas of science and the next generation of infrastructure that will support it. It encompasses computationally intensive science that is carried out in highly distributed network environments or that uses immense datasets that require grid computing. In the US the term cyberinfrastructure has been used to describe the new research environments that support advanced data acquisition, data storage, data management, data integration, data mining, data visualisation and other computing and information processing services over the Internet. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/64/holley/ Thu, 29 Jul 2010 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/64/holley/ In late 2009 the National Library of Australia released version 1 of Trove [1] to the public. Trove is a free search engine. It searches across a large aggregation of Australian content. The treasure is over 90 million items from over 1000 libraries, museums, archives and other organisations which can be found at the click of a button. Finding information just got easier for many Australians. Exploring a wealth of resources and digital content like never before, including full-text books, journals and newspaper articles, images, music, sound, video, maps, Web sites, diaries, letters, archives, people and organisations has been an exciting adventure for users and the service has been heavily used. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/63/niso-d2d-rpt/ Thu, 29 Apr 2010 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/63/niso-d2d-rpt/ A crisp spring day in Atlanta saw a gathering of 50 participants coming from libraries, including many from the GALILEO consortium, from vendors, including sponsors Ex Libris and Innovative Interfaces, Inc., and from content providers such as JSTOR, for a series of presentations at the well-equipped and comfortable Georgia Tech Global Learning Center, Atlanta, Georgia, USA. The agenda [1] was an interesting mix of perspectives on a theme - switching focus from information resource users, particularly students, and how studying and interacting with them can inform our discovery and delivery systems, to details of ‘behind the scenes’ of these systems, technologies and standards such as OpenURL and SSO (Single Sign-on), and improvements needed to deliver more seamlessly what users want, as well as the development of new services such as bX recommender and BookServer. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/62/cetis-stds-2010-rpt/ Sat, 30 Jan 2010 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/62/cetis-stds-2010-rpt/ The stated intention of this working meeting organised by JISC CETIS, and held at the University of Bolton, UK, on 12 January 2010 was to: '[...] bring together participants in a range of standards organisations and communities to look at the future for interoperability standards in the education sector. The key topic for consideration is the relationship between specifications developed in informal communities and formal standards organisations and industry consortia. The meeting will also seek to explore the role of informal specification communities in rapidly developing, implementing and testing specifications in an open process before submission to more formal, possibly closed, standards bodies. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/62/chaudhri-et-al/ Sat, 30 Jan 2010 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/62/chaudhri-et-al/ The development of the Dublin Core Application Profiles (DCAPs) has been closely focussed on the construction of metadata standards targeted at specific resource types, on the implicit assumption that such a metadata solution would be immediately and usefully implementable in software environments that deal with such resources. The success of an application profile would thus be an inevitable consequence of correctly describing the generalised characteristics of those resources. Yet despite the earlier success of application profiles, more recent growth in usage of the DCAPs funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) has been slow by comparison [1]. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/61/hogenaar/ Fri, 30 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/61/hogenaar/ The Internet has caused a revolution in the way scientists and scholars have access to scholarly output. Only 15 years ago, the (university) library decided what sources should be offered to the staff and individual scientists could only hope the librarian would listen to their wishes. In this system scientists frequently had no instantaneous access to the information they wanted. In such instances they had to rely on the Interlibrary Loan System. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/61/callaghan-et-al/ Fri, 30 Oct 2009 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/61/callaghan-et-al/ The previous article about the Overlay Journal Infrastructure for Meteorological Sciences (OJIMS) Project [1] dealt with an introduction to the concept of overlay journals and their potential impact on the meteorological sciences. It also discussed the business cases and requirements that must be met for overlay journals to become operational as data publications. There is significant interest in data journals at this time as they could provide a framework to allow the peer-review and citation of datasets, thereby encouraging data scientists to ensure their data and metadata are complete and valid, and granting them academic credit for this work. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/60/or-09-rpt/ Wed, 29 Jul 2009 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/60/or-09-rpt/ I recently attended the annual Open Repositories 2009 Conference [1] in Atlanta, Georgia which hosted 326 delegates from 23 countries. For myself, as the SWORD [2] Project Manager, the event proved to be very worthwhile. My colleague Julie Allinson and I were both able to give a plenary presentation on the first day and a half-day workshop on the final day. Much of the conference addressed developments surrounding the Fedora, DSpace and EPrints systems that have occurred over the last year. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/59/russell/ Wed, 29 Apr 2009 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/59/russell/ EThOS 1 opened up access to UK doctoral theses in January 2009. It is a service by and for the research community. Although EThOS is still in beta version, it is already changing the way theses are accessed and is helping to raise the visibility of UK research. BackgroundDoctoral theses represent a special category of research writing and are the culmination of several years of intensive work. Traditionally difficult to access, they have as a result remained underused; so modernising access to research theses has been on the Higher Education agenda for many years in line with the changing characteristics of the working environment: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/57/voss/ Thu, 30 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/57/voss/ In recent years the principle of Service-oriented Architecture (SOA) has grown increasingly important in digital library systems. More and more core functionalities are becoming available in the form of Web-based, standardised services which can be combined dynamically to operate across a broader environment [1]. Standard APIs for searching (SRU [2] [3], OpenSearch [4]), harvesting and syndication (OAI-OMH [5], ATOM [6]), copying (unAPI [7] [8]), publishing, editing (AtomPub [9], Jangle [10], SRU Update [11]), and more basic library operations, either already exist or are being developed. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/57/newsline/ Thu, 30 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/57/newsline/ TASI Courses for Remainder of 2008TASI (the JISC Advisory Service for still images, moving images and sound) has a few places left on its autumn/winter training programme. http://www.tasi.ac.uk/training/training.html 14 November 2008 Optimising your Images using Adobe Photoshop21 November 2008 Introduction to Image Metadata27 November 2008 Essential Techniques in Digital Image Capture28 November 2008 Advanced Techniques in Digital Image Capture03 December 2008 Digital Photography - Taking Control of your SLR11 December 2008 Scanning with the CLA Licence12 December 2008 Copyright and Digital ImagesThe following newly released course has just been added to the programme: http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/57/rumsey-osteen/ Thu, 30 Oct 2008 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/57/rumsey-osteen/ The new framework for the description and exchange of aggregations of Web resources, OAI-ORE, had its European release in April 2008 [1]. Amongst its practical uses, OAI-ORE has a role to play in digital preservation and continued access to files. This article describes the basic outline of the framework and how it can support the PRESERV2 project digital preservation model of provision of preservation services and interoperability for digital repositories. The PRESERV approach recognises that effective preservation is founded on three fundamental actions on data: copy, move and monitor. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/56/or-08-rpt/ Tue, 29 Jul 2008 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/56/or-08-rpt/ This was the third international Open Repositories Conference, the previous two being held in 2007, San Antonio, Texas [1] and in 2006, Sydney [2], so Europe was the third continent to host the event. Southampton was gloriously sunny for the five days of the conference (1-4 April), so there was no need to use the disposable plastic macs that were provided in the delegate bags. The event tends to attract people who have either already set up digital repositories in their institutions, are thinking about it or are interested in various aspects of repositories. 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/54/allinson-et-al/ Wed, 30 Jan 2008 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/54/allinson-et-al/ This article offers a twofold introduction to the JISC-funded SWORD [1] Project which ran for eight months in mid-2007. Firstly it presents an overview of the methods and madness that led us to where we currently are, including a timeline of how this work moved through an informal working group to a lightweight, distributed project. Secondly, it offers an explanation of the outputs produced for the SWORD Project and their potential benefits for the repositories community. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/53/feijen-et-al/ Tue, 30 Oct 2007 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/53/feijen-et-al/ Introduction: Why DRIVER Is NeededOpenDOAR [1] lists over 900 Open Access repositories worldwide. Approximately half of them are based in Europe, most of which are institutional repositories. Across Europe many more repositories are being set up and supported by national and regional initiatives such as the Repositories Support Project [2] in the UK and IREL-Open [3] in Ireland. A recurring challenge for repositories is that of engaging researchers in Open Access and motivating them to deposit their work in OA repositories. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/53/waaijers/ Tue, 30 Oct 2007 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/53/waaijers/ While Cream of Science (Keur der Wetenschap), Promise of Science and the HBO Knowledge Bank (HBO Kennisbank) are among the inspiring results of the DARE Programme for the period 2003-06, what is more important in the long run is the new infrastructure that enables Dutch Higher Education and research institutions to provide easy and reliable open access to research results and teaching material as quickly as possible. Such open access ought to be the standard in a knowledge-driven society, certainly if the material and data have been generated with public funding. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/53/ooman-tzouvaras/ Tue, 30 Oct 2007 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/53/ooman-tzouvaras/ Europe's audiovisual heritage contains both a record and a representation of the past and as such it demonstrates the development of the 'audiovisual culture' we inhabit today. In this article we hope to offer an insight into the development of the Video Active Portal [1] which provides access broadcast heritage material retained by archives across Europe. We will explain how Video Active needed to find solutions for managing intellectual property rights, semantic and linguistic interoperability and the design of a meaningful user experience. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/53/kidmm-rpt/csip-va.html Tue, 30 Oct 2007 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/53/kidmm-rpt/csip-va.html Hopes and DeliverablesNear the start of CSIP, a list of project deliverables was drawn up. To encourage ‘buy-in’, top of the list was something of evident value - a Gallery Services application to help staff give customers what they wanted to know at the point of enquiry. But to deliver this and other applications, the ‘Virtual Repository’ would be necessary. An early ambition was to be able to link images to the National Art Library (NAL) catalogue; unlike the collections database, the library catalogue software couldn’t talk to the digital asset management system. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/52/kirsop-et-al/ Sun, 29 Jul 2007 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/52/kirsop-et-al/ The term ‘sustainable development’ was first coined by the Brundtland Commission, convened by the United Nations in 1983 [1]. It denotes ‘development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.’ Although defined originally to meet the concerns relating to environmental damage, it has since been used to encompass the broader needs of society through economic, social and political sustainability. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/51/treloar-groenewegen/ Sun, 29 Apr 2007 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/51/treloar-groenewegen/ This paper describes three inter-related repository projects. These projects were all funded by the Australian Commonwealth Government through the Systemic Infrastructure Initiative as part of the Commonwealth Government’s Backing Australia’s Ability - An Innovation Action Plan for the Future. The article will describe the background to all three projects and the way in which their development has been inter-related and co-ordinated. The article will conclude by examining how Monash University (the lead institution in all three projects) is re-conceiving the relationship between its different repositories. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/50/allinson-et-al/ Tue, 30 Jan 2007 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/50/allinson-et-al/ In May 2006, the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) [1] approached UKOLN [2] and the Eduserv Foundation [3] to collaborate on the development of a metadata specification for describing eprints (alternatively referred to as scholarly works, research papers or scholarly research texts) [4]. A Dublin Core (DC) [5] application profile was chosen as the basis of the specification given the widespread use of DC in existing repositories, the flexibility and extensibility of the DCMI Abstract Model [6] and its compatibility with the Semantic Web [7]. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/48/chudnov-et-al/ Sat, 29 Jul 2006 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/48/chudnov-et-al/ Common Web tools and techniques cannot easily manipulate library resources. While photo sharing, link logging, and Web logging sites make it easy to use and reuse content, barriers still exist that limit the reuse of library resources within new Web services. [1][2] To support the reuse of library information in Web 2.0-style services, we need to allow many types of applications to connect with our information resources more easily. One such connection is a universal method to copy any resource of interest. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/47/editorial/ Sat, 29 Apr 2006 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/47/editorial/ Perhaps I am not quite so cynical as I suppose when, despite being more than a little aware of the problem confonting us in respect of safeguarding electronic resources, I can nonetheless be shocked by the statistic Eileen Fenton provides us in her article on Preserving Electronic Scholarly Journals: Portico where she reveals the percentage of resources, from impeccable sources, that were no longer retrievable from the original hyperlink a mere 27 months after their appearance. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/47/krowne/ Sat, 29 Apr 2006 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/47/krowne/ In this article we present a framework, QMSearch, which improves searching in the context of scholarly digital libraries by taking a 'quality metrics-aware' approach. This means the digital library deployer or end-user can customise how results are presented, including aspects of both ranking and organisation in general, based upon standard metadata attributes and quality indicators derived from the general library information environment. To achieve this, QMSearch is generalised across metadata fields, quality indicators, and user communities, by abstracting all of these notions and rendering them into one or more 'organisation specifications' which are used by the system to determine how to organise results. 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/47/robertson/ Sat, 29 Apr 2006 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/47/robertson/ With the wider deployment of repositories, the Open Archives Initiative - Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) is becoming a common method of supporting interoperability between repositories and services. It provides 'an application-independent interoperability framework based on metadata harvesting' [1]. Nodes in a network using this protocol are 'data providers' or 'service providers'. Although repository software supporting OAI-PMH is not overly complex [2], without programming skills or access to technical support, implementing and supporting a repository is not an entirely straightforward task. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/47/jisc-repositories-rpt/ Sat, 29 Apr 2006 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/47/jisc-repositories-rpt/ The JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee) Digital Repositories Programme [1] held its second Programme meeting towards the end of March. Following in the collaborative tradition set by last October's joint Programme meeting with the Digital Preservation and Asset Management Programme [2], this gathering was themed around the cluster groups established by the Digital Repositories Programme [3] and included many guests from other JISC areas of work and beyond. These clusters seek to encompass many of the diverse issues being considered across the Digital Repositories Programme, including the different repository types (e-Learning and Scientific data), the infrastructural and technical issues (Integrating infrastructure and Machine services) and the social, cultural and legal topics (Legal and policy, Personal resource management strategies and Preservation). http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/46/e-theses-rpt/ Wed, 08 Feb 2006 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/46/e-theses-rpt/ Doctoral theses contain some of the most current and valuable research produced within universities, but are underused as research resources. Where electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs) are open access, they are used many times more often than paper theses that are available only via inter-library loan. Many universities and other organisations across Europe are now working hard to make ETDs more openly available and useful. In an attempt to co-ordinate this activity, an invitation-only workshop was held at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam in January, to see what could be learned from existing examples of best practice and to see how the participants might work together in the future. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/46/brophy/ Wed, 08 Feb 2006 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/46/brophy/ Introduction: The First WaveIt is worth remembering that there is a long history of successful commercialisation of digital library R&D projects in the UK. While there are probably even earlier examples, the obvious instances are the Birmingham Libraries Co-operative Mechanisation Project (BLCMP) and the South-West Academic Libraries Co-operative Automation Project (SWALCAP) from the 1960s. Both were initially funded by grants from the then Office for Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI, a body whose responsibilities were to be taken over by the British Library Research & Development Department (BLRDD) and later dispersed among various funders such as the Arts & Humanities Research Council (AHRC), the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) and the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council (MLA)). http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/45/vanderkuil/ Sat, 29 Oct 2005 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/45/vanderkuil/ ResultsCream of Science: The ChallengeOne of the key challenges of the DARE Programme [1] is to encourage scholars to deposit digital versions of their research output in a university archive (institutional repository) that, in turn, can make this output accessible on the Internet. With this in view, a project called Cream of Science was initiated in the summer of 2004. One of the prime aims of Cream of Science is to unlock top quality content to the scientific community and make it more easily and digitally accessible. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/45/greig-nixon/ Sat, 29 Oct 2005 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/45/greig-nixon/ DAEDALUS [1] was a three-year project (August 2002-July 2005) based at the University of Glasgow and funded by JISC's Focus on Access to Institutional Resources (FAIR) Programme [2]. The project established a number of different services for research material at the University of Glasgow. This approach enabled us to explore an institutional repository model which used different software (ePrints, DSpace and PKP Harvester) for different content, including: Published and peer-reviewed papersPre-prints, grey literature and thesesAdditional services were also developed including an open access e-journal (JeLit) and a subject-based repository for the Erpanet Project (ERPAePRINTS). http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/45/dsr-rpt/ Sat, 29 Oct 2005 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/45/dsr-rpt/ The number of available online digital collections is growing all the time and with this comes the need to discover these collections, both by machine (m2m) and by end-users. There is also a trend towards service-orientated architectures and a likely critical part of this will be service registries to assist with discovering services andtheir associated collections. UKOLN and the JISC Information Environment Services Registry Project (IESR) [1] organised a two-day workshop to look at some of the issues that are likely to be present in building a distributed approach. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/43/pearson-rvw/ Fri, 29 Apr 2005 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/43/pearson-rvw/ The 2nd edition of this practical guide to building and delivering electronic resource collections is, like the 1st edition, a compact guide (5 chapters with145 pages excluding bibliography and glossary), with an intended audience of students, new professionals, experienced practitioners and publishers. To address a subject of this scale and complexity with such a wide audience is, to say the least, a challenge. However, I found on reading this work that the authors have succeeded in this entirely. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/43/prudlo/ Fri, 29 Apr 2005 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/43/prudlo/ In recent years initiatives to create software packages for electronic repository management have mushroomed all over the world. Some institutions engage in these activities in order to preserve content that might otherwise be lost, others in order to provide greater access to material that might otherwise be too obscure to be widely used such as grey literature. The open access movement has also been an important factor in this development. Digital initiatives such as pre-print, post-print, and document servers are being created to come up with new ways of publishing. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/43/chudnov/ Fri, 29 Apr 2005 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/43/chudnov/ Library users have never before had so many options for finding, collecting and sharing information. Many users abandon old information management tools whenever new tools are easier, faster, more comprehensive, more intuitive, or simply 'cooler.' Many successful new tools adhere to a principle of simplicity - HTML made it simple for anyone to publish on the Web; XML made it simple for anyone to exchange more strictly defined data; and RSS made it simple to extract and repurpose information from any kind of published resource [1]. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/43/johnston/ Fri, 29 Apr 2005 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/43/johnston/ The JISC Information Environment Metadata Schema Registry (IEMSR) Project [1] is funded by JISC through its Shared Services Programme to develop a metadata schema registry as a pilot shared service for the JISC Information Environment (JISC IE). Partners in the project are UKOLN, University of Bath and the Institute for Learning and Research Technology (ILRT), University of Bristol. The Centre for Educational Technology Interoperability Standards (CETIS) and the British Educational Communications and Technology Agency (Becta) are contributing to the project in an advisory capacity. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/41/parkes-rvw/ Fri, 29 Oct 2004 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/41/parkes-rvw/ This is the 5th collection of papers from the biennial Libraries Without Walls Conference (LWW5). Reference to the preceding 4 volumes published in 1996, 1998, 2000 and 2002 respectively is rewarding to see how discourse and practice has developed. Access collaboration is now commonplace; 135 institutions are members of the UK Libraries plus access scheme, 157 are signed up for Sconul Research Extra. The Peoples Network has put 4000 Internet centres into public libraries, Athens passwords and off-campus access to databases has provided access to a growing collection of electronic content. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/41/editorial/ Fri, 29 Oct 2004 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/41/editorial/ For someone who is relatively ill at ease with numbers, it comes as no surprise that our lives grow increasingly controlled by them in ways which perhaps Orwell did not 'foresee' in 1984. Winston Smith tries very hard to remain an individual, as I hope do we all; indeed it is most often the great individuals whom we either cherish as a national treasure [1], or loathe most enthusiastically, but to whom we are rarely indifferent. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/41/campbell/ Fri, 29 Oct 2004 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/41/campbell/ The National Library of Australia (NLA) has been able to achieve new business practices such as digitising its collections and hosting federated search services by exploiting recent standards including the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH), handles for persistent identification, and metadata schemas for new types of content. Each instantiation of the OAI-PMH opens up new ways of creating and managing our digital libraries while making them more accessible for learning, teaching and research purposes. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/41/vanderkuil/ Fri, 29 Oct 2004 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/41/vanderkuil/ The SURF Programme Digital Academic Repositories (DARE) is a joint initiative of Dutch universities to make their academic output digitally accessible. The KB (National Library of the Netherlands), the KNAW (Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences) and the NWO (Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research) also cooperate in this unique programme. DARE is being coordinated by the SURF Foundation [1]. The programme will run from January 2003 until December 2006. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/41/jones/ Fri, 29 Oct 2004 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/41/jones/ The Theses Alive Plugin for Institutional Repositories (Tapir) [1] has been developed at Edinburgh University Library [2] to help provide an E-Thesis service within an institution using DSpace [3]. It has been developed as part of the Theses Alive! [4] Project under funding from the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) [5], as part of the Focus on Access to Institutional Resources (FAIR) [6] Programme. This article looks at DSpace, the repository system initially developed by Hewlett-Packard and MIT and subsequently made available as a community-owned package. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/41/godby/ Fri, 29 Oct 2004 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/41/godby/ A Metadata Standard for Learning ObjectsAs learning objects grow in number and importance, institutions are faced with the daunting task of managing them. Like familiar items in library collections, learning objects need to be organised by subject and registered in searchable repositories. But they also introduce special problems. As computer files, they are dependent on a particular hardware and software environment. And as materials with a pedagogical intent, they are associated with metrics such as learning objectives, reading levels and methods for evaluating student performance. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/40/turner/ Thu, 29 Jul 2004 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/40/turner/ A Little HistoryCornucopia is a searchable database of collections held by cultural heritage institutions throughout the UK. It is developed and managed by the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council (MLA) and was initially established in response to the Government’s Treasures in Trust report which called for a way to be found of recognising the richness and diversity of our collections. The original Cornucopia was set up in 1998. MLA, (then the Museums & Galleries Commission (MGC)), contracted Cognitive Applications to develop the site featuring data from the 62 museums in England holding collections which are ‘Designated’ as being of outstanding importance. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/40/editorial/ Thu, 29 Jul 2004 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/40/editorial/ Reading the interesting points Karen Coyle has to make in Rights Management and Digital Library Requirements puts me in mind, not so much of horses actually, as of one of cartoonist Gary Larson's cows. The bovine unfortunate in question, bedecked with shower cap, is being pushed along by the rest of the herd and complaining that no sooner has she stepped into the shower than some fool cries 'Stampede!' Much the same effect may be claimed from the fallout of the Napster affair and the sharing of millions of music files. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/40/newsline/ Thu, 29 Jul 2004 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/40/newsline/ Seminar Invitation from DEF - Danish Electronic Research LibraryThe DEF XML Web Services project invites you to participate in the seminar: Building Digital Libraries with XML Web Services on Friday 27 August 2004 from 9:30 to 16:00 at the Technical University of Denmark, Building 303, DK-2800 Lyngby. The headlines of the seminar are: § Setting the scene: XML - tools, visions, initiatives - Introduction to XML and Open Source Web Services http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/40/hey/ Thu, 29 Jul 2004 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/40/hey/ The University of Southampton has been one of the pioneers of open access to academic research, particularly, in the tireless advocacy of Professor Stevan Harnad and in the creation of the EPrints software [1], as a vehicle for creating open access archives (or repositories) for research. These activities have been supported by a long-standing programme of research into digital libraries, hypermedia, and scholarly communication. In the early days, before the vocabulary of open access issues was so well developed, we talked of the 'esoteric literature' - the 'not-for-profit' academic literature - and the Faustian bargain that the authors made with the publishers [2]. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/40/hill/ Thu, 29 Jul 2004 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/40/hill/ The last ten years have seen a huge investment in the creation of electronic resources for use by researchers, students and teachers. Increasing amounts of money are being spent now on providing portals and virtual learning environments (or learning management systems) for use within institutions and organisations, or for people focusing on particular subject areas. A portal is defined by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) as - " - a network service that brings together content from diverse distributed resources using technologies such as cross searching, harvesting, and alerting, and collates this into an amalgamated form for presentation to the user. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/39/eprints-rpt/ Thu, 29 Apr 2004 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/39/eprints-rpt/ The workshop was aimed at those interested in setting up institutional e-print servers where the outputs of their organisation (journal articles, papers, reports etc) could be published, stored and searched via a central institutional server. The event was fully booked which perhaps indicates that universities, colleges, academics and librarians are increasingly recognising the value of the e-print publishing model. The day was run by ePrints UK [1] (in conjunction with SOSIG), an RDN [2] project which aims to offer a new national e-print subject service by pulling together information from institutional servers and presenting it by subject discipline (via the RDN hubs). http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/39/oppenheim-rvw/ Thu, 29 Apr 2004 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/39/oppenheim-rvw/ This substantial (470-page) paperback is the second edition of one of the few UK-based textbooks on information retrieval (IR). The first edition appeared in 1999, and was criticised for being badly out of date and at times too complex for its intended undergraduate and postgraduate student audience. How does this second edition stack up? The first thing to say is that it is a lot better than the first edition - there are a number of new chapters that are well written and up to date, and some of the chapters that also appeared in the first edition have had errors removed. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/39/pearce/ Thu, 29 Apr 2004 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/39/pearce/ Personalisation has become an increasingly salient topic in the UK library and information management sector, yet to date much of the work undertaken has been in the academic and knowledge management sectors [1]. However, the South Yorkshire-based IT for Me Project [2] is looking to bring personalised access to online resources to public libraries. The project, which began in October 2003, will create a Web-based platform to provide access to personalised resources. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/39/newsline/ Thu, 29 Apr 2004 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/39/newsline/ The Joint Technical Symposium (JTS) - 24-26 June, TorontoThe Joint Technical Symposium (JTS) is the international meeting for organisations and individuals involved in the preservation and restoration of original image and sound materials. This year, JTS is scheduled to be held in Toronto, Canada, June 24-26, 2004. Preliminary program information is now available on the JTS 2004 website. See: http://www.jts2004.org/english/program.htm For more information please see the website or contact the organization responsible for coordinating the event on behalf of the Coordinating Council of Audiovisual Archives Associations (CCAAA): http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/39/powell/ Thu, 29 Apr 2004 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/39/powell/ Over the last eighteen months or so, the UK Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) has been funding some collaborative work between the Resource Discovery Network (RDN) Hubs [1] and Learning and Teaching Support Network (LTSN) Centres [2]. The primary intention of these subject-based RDN/LTSN partnerships was to: Develop collection policies that clarified the relationships between the two sets of activities.Enable the sharing of records within and beyond partnerships using the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) [3]. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/38/summers/ Fri, 30 Jan 2004 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/38/summers/ Net::OAI::Harvester is a Perl package for easily interacting with OAI-PMH repositories as a metadata harvester. The article provides examples of how to use Net::OAI::Harvester to write short programs that execute each of the 6 OAI-PMH verbs. Issues related to efficient XML parsing of OAI-PMH responses are discussed, as are specific techniques used by Net::OAI::Harvester. The Open Archives Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) is an increasingly popular protocol for sharing metadata about digital objects. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/38/jones/ Fri, 30 Jan 2004 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/38/jones/ The Theses Alive! [1] Project, based at Edinburgh University Library and funded under the JISC Fair Programme [2], is aiming to produce, among other things, a software solution for institutions in the UK to implement their own E-theses or Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETD) online submission system and repository. In order to achieve this it has been necessary to examine existing packages that may provide all or part of the solution we desire before considering what extra development we may need to do. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/38/editorial/ Fri, 30 Jan 2004 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/38/editorial/ At a time when long-running institutions such as Ariadne are understandably mindful of their independence [1], the decision not to persist in the editorial inclination to lead on articles slightly at a tangent to the main thrust of Ariadne’s work might be considered craven. However, under any other circumstances it might justifiably have been considered perverse and hence I begin by drawing your attention to the article by Marieke Guy, Andy Powell and Michael Day. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/38/guy/ Fri, 30 Jan 2004 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/38/guy/ Throughout the eprints community there is an increasing awareness of the need for improvement in the quality of metadata and in associated quality assurance mechanisms. Some [1] feel that recent discussion of the cultural and institutional barriers to self-archiving, which have so far limited the proliferation of eprint archives in the UK, have meant that anything that is perceived as a barrier between academics and their parent institutions needs to be played down. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/38/woldering/ Fri, 30 Jan 2004 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/38/woldering/ The European Library (TEL) Project [1] completed at the end of January 2004. The key aim of TEL was to investigate the feasibility of establishing a new Pan-European service which would ultimately give access to the combined resources of the national libraries of Europe [2]. The project was partly funded by the European Commission as an accompanying measure under the cultural heritage applications area of Key Action 3 of the Information Societies Technology (IST) research programme. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/38/5-99/ Fri, 30 Jan 2004 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/38/5-99/ The 5/99 Programme, as it became known, was funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) [1] in the year 2000. Quite simply the name, 5/99, refers to the number of a JISC circular letter. It was the fifth circular issued by the JISC in 1999. So the name is pretty meaningless to those outside the JISC or not involved in one of 54 projects that were funded via the circular. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/38/apps-rpt/ Fri, 30 Jan 2004 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/38/apps-rpt/ The Event at a GlanceWelcome - Pat HarrisThe OpenURL Framework for Context-Sensitive Services Standard - Eric Van de VeldeThe Promise and History of the OpenURL - Oliver PeschRelated Linking Standards: CrossRef and DOI - Ed PentzWhy Should Publishers Implement the OpenURL Framework? - Andrew PacePanel 1: Link Resolvers ExplainedPanel 2: Practical Perspectives for Librarians Translating Your Needs into Visions for the Future - Herbert Van de SompelQuestionsThis one-day conference, held by NISO (US National Information Standards Organization) on Wednesday 29 October at the American Geophysical Union in Washington DC, USA, attended by 150 people, was so popular it was ‘sold out’ a week before the event. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/37/nixon/ Thu, 30 Oct 2003 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/37/nixon/ DAEDALUS [1] is a three-year JISC-funded project under the FAIR Programme [2] which will build a network of open access digital collections at the University of Glasgow. These collections will enable us to unlock access to a wide range of our institutional scholarly output. This output includes not only published and peer-reviewed papers but also administrative documents, research finding aids, pre-prints and theses. DAEDALUS is also a member of the CURL (Consortium of University Research Libraries) SHERPA Project [3]. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/37/duke/ Thu, 30 Oct 2003 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/37/duke/ Subject Gateways act as a main point of access to high-quality resources on the Web. They are resource discovery guides that provide links to information resources which can be whole Web sites, organisational home pages and other collections or services, themed around a specific subject, such as the physical sciences or humanities. At their core is a catalogue of rich metadata records that describe Internet resources - subject specialists identify and select the resources and create the descriptions. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/36/powell/ Tue, 29 Jul 2003 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/36/powell/ This largely graphical article attempts to explain the JISC Information Environment (JISC IE) [1] by layering a set of fairly well-known services, projects and software applications over the network architecture diagram [2]. The JISC Information Environment (JISC IE) technical architecture specifies a set of standards and protocols that support the development and delivery of an integrated set of networked services that allow the end-user to discover, access, use and publish digital and physical resources as part of their learning and research activities. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/36/newsline/ Tue, 29 Jul 2003 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/36/newsline/ The British Library’s ground-breaking secure Electronic Delivery ServiceJune 2003 The British Library previewed its new and ground-breaking secure Electronic Delivery Service at the SLA 94th Annual Conference in New York in June . Fully available from October 2003, the new service means that almost anything from the Library’s huge collections - whether born digital, in print or in microform - can be securely delivered to a desktop within two hours if needed, with born digital material available for instant delivery. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/36/iprws-rpt/ Tue, 29 Jul 2003 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/36/iprws-rpt/ The Intellectual Property Rights workshop was organised by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) on behalf of the X4L [1], 5⁄99 [2] and FAIR [3] Programmes and was a well attended and thought-provoking event. It was also timely, as many of our projects, in both higher and further education, begin to deal with the larger IPR issues which we are all facing. Copyright is becoming more complex and there are many unresolved issues about relationships and ownership, whether in the context of Learning and Teaching or of other institutional resources. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/36/romeo/ Tue, 29 Jul 2003 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/36/romeo/ The Open Archives Initiative’s Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) enables the ‘disclosure’ of metadata by Data Providers and the harvesting of that metadata by Service Providers. Although there is nothing to stop commercial providers from utilising this open-source protocol [1], it has its roots in the open access community and as such is used by many open archives. These include subject-based archives such as ArXiv [2], CogPrints [3], and the increasing number of Institutional Repositories, many of which have been established as a result of funding via the UK JISC FAIR (Focus on Access to Institutional Repositories) programme [4]. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/36/lyon/ Tue, 29 Jul 2003 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/36/lyon/ This article presents some new digital library development activities which are predicated on the concept that research and learning processes are cyclical in nature, and that subsequent outputs which contribute to knowledge, are based on the continuous use and reuse of data and information [1]. We can start by examining the creation of original data, (which may be, for example, numerical data generated by an experiment or a survey, or alternatively images captured as part of a clinical study). http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/35/delos-rpt/ Tue, 29 Apr 2003 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/35/delos-rpt/ Getting there was not easy on a budget ticket - my flight was cancelled, and I was rescheduled to fly to Warsaw on a flight seven hours later. So I spent an unanticipated night in Warsaw before travelling on to Torun by train , some 150 miles further north (outside temperature around -12 deg. C, but amazingly warm inside). Torun is a small city of about 200,000 people with a surviving mediaeval core. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/35/editorial/ Tue, 29 Apr 2003 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/35/editorial/ Welcome to the March/April issue of Ariadne. This issue of Ariadne focuses on the Portal concept. The term 'portalage' (the making of portals) crept (unforced) into a discussion of the portal concept held on the 25th April at the University of London Library (Gateways to Research and Lifelong Learning: Portals in Perspective). A good question for anyone to ask is: 'What features in a Portal?' since it is an area still lacking in consensus. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/35/miller/ Tue, 29 Apr 2003 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/35/miller/ There is, unsurprisingly, an increasing recognition that digital resources of all kinds are eminently suitable to repurposing and reuse. The Iconex Project [1], for example, was funded under JISC's 5/99 Programme to look at the creation, storage and dissemination of reusable learning objects. Service providers of the Arts & Humanities Data Service [2] concern themselves with collecting the digital outputs of scholarly activity in order to preserve them for posterity, but also with facilitating their ongoing use and reuse by learners, teachers and researchers across the community [3]. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/35/martin/ Tue, 29 Apr 2003 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/35/martin/ ePrints UK [1] is a two-year JISC-funded project under the Focus on Access to Institutional Resources (FAIR) Programme [2] which began in July 2002 and is due for completion in July 2004. The lead partner is UKOLN of the University of Bath. The aim of the project is to develop a national service provider repository of e-print records based at the University of Bath derived by harvesting metadata from institutional and subject-based e-prints archives using the Open Archive Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) [3]. 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/34/editorial/ Wed, 15 Jan 2003 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/34/editorial/ Welcome to the December/January issue of Ariadne. This issue has as its focus the practicalities of resource sharing - not only at a technical level, but also in terms of business models. In Sharing history of science and medicine gateway metadata using OAI-PMH, David Little outlines the resource sharing arrangements between the MedHist gateway and the Humbul hub, using the OAI Protocol for Metadata Harvesting, and some of the issues it has raised. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/34/powell/ Wed, 15 Jan 2003 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/34/powell/ An introduction to the IMS Digital Repositories Working GroupIMS [1] is a global consortium that develops open specifications to support the delivery of e-learning through Learning Management Systems (LMS). (Note: in UK higher and further education we tend to use the term Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) in preference to LMS). IMS activities cover a broad range of areas including accessibility, competency definitions, content packaging, digital repositories, integration with ‘enterprise’ systems, learner information, metadata, question & test and simple sequencing. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/34/little/ Wed, 15 Jan 2003 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/34/little/ The MedHist gateway [1] was launched in August 2002, providing access to a searchable and browsable catalogue of high quality, evaluated history of medicine Internet resources. MedHist has been funded and developed by the Wellcome Library for the History and Understanding of Medicine [2], but is hosted by the BIOME health and life sciences hub [3], and as such is part of the Resource Discovery Network (RDN). MedHist was developed principally to fill the gaps left in the coverage of the history of medicine by existing resource discovery services within and outside the RDN. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/34/geneva/ Wed, 15 Jan 2003 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/34/geneva/ CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research is the world’s largest particle physics centre. It is located just outside of Geneva on the French-Swiss border. CERN is also the birthplace of the World Wide Web, created by Tim Berners-Lee in 1990. About the ConferenceThe workshop was organized by LIBER, SPARC-Europe and CERN Library and sponsored by SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition), JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee), OSI (Open Society Institute), and ESF (European Science Foundation). http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/33/info-environment/ Wed, 09 Oct 2002 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/33/info-environment/ This document provides a brief introduction to the JISC Information Environment (JISC-IE) [1], with a particular focus on the technical steps that content providers need to take in order to make their systems interoperable within the JISC-IE technical architecture. The architecture specifies a set of standards and protocols that support the development and delivery of an integrated set of networked services that allow the end-user to discover, access, use and publish digital and physical resources as part of their learning and research activities. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/33/sherpa/ Wed, 09 Oct 2002 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/33/sherpa/   JISC announced its FAIR Programme (Focus on Access to Institutional Resources) in January of this year. The central objective of the Programme is to test ways of releasing institutionally-produced content onto the web. FAIR describes its scope as: “to support access to and sharing of institutional content within Higher Education (HE) and Further Education (FE) and to allow intelligence to be gathered about the technical, organisational and cultural challenges of these processes. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/33/oclc-scurl/ Wed, 09 Oct 2002 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/33/oclc-scurl/ The problem of "navigating a rich and complex information landscape" took on a new dimension as I traversed Edinburgh's High Street on a bright Thursday morning at the height of the Festival. Fielding a barrage of enthusiastic invitations to attend a bewildering range of performances, I headed across town to the University for the "New Directions in Metadata" conference [1], organised jointly by OCLC [2] and SCURL [3]. Michael Anderson (Pro-Vice Chancellor, University of Edinburgh) welcomed delegates to Edinburgh, and made an appeal for us to bear in mind that the true value of the services we build around metadata will be measured by how well they meet the requirements of the user. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/32/theses-dissertations/ Sun, 07 Jul 2002 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/32/theses-dissertations/ ‘ETDs’ is the acronym widely used in the US to stand for ‘Electronic Theses and Dissertations’. The father of the ETD movement, Professor Ed Fox of Virginia Polytechnic Institute (Virginia Tech), explains the acronym as containing an implicit Boolean ‘OR’: ‘ETs’ OR ‘EDs’ equals ‘ETDs’. This makes for a very convenient shorthand, whereby a digital object which is either an electronic thesis or an electronic dissertation can be referred to as ‘an ETD’. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/32/metalib/ Sun, 07 Jul 2002 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/32/metalib/ Since the advent of online databases there have been concerns about the different interfaces and software provided by publishers and suppliers. In recent years, the growth in the number of databases and full-text electronic journal services has made this aspect of electronic resource provision even more challenging, particularly for Higher Education institutions. Just as for the foreseeable future databases are likely to continue to be delivered through a variety of interfaces, it is equally likely that there will be increasing demands from users for simplified access. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/32/open-archives-forum/ Sun, 07 Jul 2002 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/32/open-archives-forum/ Pisa is small medieval Italian town, and, as is well-known, it features some extraordinary architecture, both religious and secular, some of which dates back to the Roman period. The Square of Miracles is in a class by itself, but there are several notable buildings as you move towards the river Arno. Including the Scuola Normale Superiore, where Enrico Fermi studied, a medieval building refaced by the artist and art historian Vasari much later. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/32/eprint-archives/ Sun, 07 Jul 2002 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/32/eprint-archives/ This article outlines the aims of the e-prints archive at the University of Glasgow and recounts our initial experiences in setting up an institutional e-prints archive using the eprints.org software. It follows on from the recent article by Stephen Pinfield, John MacColl and Mike Gardner in the last issue of Ariadne [1]. The Open Archives Initiative [2] and the arguments for e-prints services [3] need little introduction here and have been ably covered by previous articles in Ariadne and elsewhere. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/31/editorial/ Wed, 10 Apr 2002 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/31/editorial/ Welcome to the March/April issue of Ariadne. This issue of Ariadne is led by an article (‘Setting up an institutional e-prints archive’) on the practical implementation of an e-prints archive, by a number of authors with hands on experience of the task (Pinfield, Gardner and MacColl). The article also deals with the issues which have to be considered alongside the technical issues of implementation. These include: the impact on tried and tested means of scholarly communication; questions of quality control; intellectual property rights, and workload. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/31/eprint-archives/ Wed, 10 Apr 2002 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/31/eprint-archives/ This article outlines some of the main stages in setting up an institutional e-print archive. It is based on experiences at the universities of Edinburgh and Nottingham which have both recently developed pilot e-print servers(1). It is not the intention here to present arguments in favour of open access e-print archives – this has been done elsewhere(2). Rather, it is hoped to present give an account of some of the practical issues that arise in the early stages of establishing an archive in a higher education institution. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/31/aim25/ Wed, 10 Apr 2002 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/31/aim25/ AIM25 (Archives in London and the M25 area), a project funded by the Research Support Libraries Programme (RSLP) [1], and led by King's College London, provides a single point of networked access to collection descriptions of archives held in 49 higher education (HE) institutions and learned societies in the greater London area. The project has intended, where possible, to be comprehensive in its coverage of holdings by including deposited collections, in a wide range of subject areas, and also the administrative records of the participating institutions. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/31/information-environments/ Wed, 10 Apr 2002 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/31/information-environments/ The JISC Information EnvironmentThe Distributed National Electronic Resource (DNER) [1] is a JISC-funded, managed, heterogeneous collection of information resources and services (bibliographic, full-text, image, video, geo-spatial, datasets, etc.) of particular value to the further and higher education communities. The JISC Information Environment (JISC IE) [2] is the set of networked services that allows people to discover, access, use and publish resources within the DNER. The JISC IE technical architecture [3] specifies the standards and protocols that provide interoperability between this network of services. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/31/open-archives-forum/ Wed, 10 Apr 2002 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/31/open-archives-forum/ The Open Archives Forum: Mission and GoalsThe Open Archives Forum provides a European focus for the dissemination of information about European activities in Open Archives. A particular focus is on the Open Archives Initiative (OAI). The Open Archives Forum aims to promote the idea of globally distributed digital archives within Europe, to support the establishment of new digital archives and their related services, and to initiate European special interest groups. It is important to add particular European interests to already existing models such as the Open Archives Initiative. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/30/rdn-oai/ Fri, 25 Jan 2002 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/30/rdn-oai/ The RDN is a collaborative network of subject gateways, funded for use by UK Higher and Further Education by the JISC (though it is used much more widely). Each subject gateway, as part of its service, provides the end user with access to databases of descriptions of freely available, high quality, Web resources. As each resource described in the database is hand picked by subject specialists, following well developed guidelines, it is hoped that a resource discovered through the RDN will be of great value to an end-user. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/30/techwatch/ Fri, 25 Jan 2002 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/30/techwatch/ Content management? That’s what librarians do, right? But we’ve already got a library management system (LMS) – why should we consider a content management system (CMS)? The second initial is perhaps misleading – “manipulation” rather than “management” might better summarise the goals of a CMS. Content creation and content re-purposing are fundamental aspects which tend to lie outside the current LMS domain. Actually, from the point of view of workflow (and to lesser extent content re-purposing), the CMS and LMS have much in common. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/30/editorial/ Fri, 25 Jan 2002 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/30/editorial/ Welcome to the December/January issue of Ariadne. A focus of this issue of Ariadne is the Open Archives Initiative and the wider implications of the techniques and technology associated with it. A major impetus behind the take-up of the OAI idea is the wish to make research available more widely and more quickly than before, and also to counter the problems created by the nature of existing academic publishing. As David Pearson writes in our lead article on digitization strategy, ‘…. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/30/newsline/ Fri, 25 Jan 2002 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/30/newsline/ Multimedia Archive Preservation - a practical workshopOrganised by IASA, FIAT, PRESTO, ECPA … and more! 22-24 May 2002 in London, UK Overview: 80% of audio and video archive content is at risk, according to the results of EC project PRESTO. Unless preservation procedures are funded and implemented - quickly - unique heritage and commercially valuable material will be lost. This workshop will provide, in a concentrated three days, the combined experience of ten major European broadcast archives, and the new technology developed by PRESTO. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/30/oai-chan/ Fri, 25 Jan 2002 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/30/oai-chan/ Although the World Wide Web is less than a decade old, it already has had a profound impact on scientific publishing and scholarly communication. In particular, open standards and low-cost networking tools are opening many possibilities for reducing and even eliminating entirely the cost barriers to scientific publications. (1) One development that has great potential value for poorly-resourced countries is “open archiving”, or the deposition of scholarly research papers into networked servers accessible over the Internet. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/29/maccoll/ Tue, 02 Oct 2001 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/29/maccoll/ This report covers a selection of the papers at the above conference, from those which I chose and was able to attend in a three-strand conference held over three days (with two additional days for workshops, which I did not attend). It includes the three keynote papers, as well as the paper which won the Vannevar Bush award for best conference paper. The conference was held in Roanoke, Virginia, in the Roanoke Hotel and Conference Center, which is owned by Virginia Tech (located in Blacksburg, some 40 miles away). http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/29/editorial/ Tue, 02 Oct 2001 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/29/editorial/ As we suggested in issue 28, we have the first detailed information on the new post of Collection Description Focus, in the form of a short article by Pete Johnston and Bridget Robinson. Launched on 1 June 2001, the Focus will provide support both for UK projects actively involved in collection description work and for those investigating or planning such work. The Focus is located within UKOLN, which is based at the University of Bath. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/29/patel/ Tue, 02 Oct 2001 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/29/patel/ “Managing Digital Video Content” [1], a two-day workshop on current and emerging standards for managing digital video content took place on 15-16th August, 2001, in Atlanta, Georgia. The workshop was sponsored by ViDe, the video development initiative [2], the Southeastern Universities Research Association, SURA [3], Internet2 [4] and the Coalition for Networked Information, CNI [5]. Approximately 180 delegates attended, the majority from the States, peppered by one or two from Europe and Australia. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/29/pinfield/ Tue, 02 Oct 2001 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/29/pinfield/ Managing the development and delivery of electronic library services is one of the major current challenges for university library and information services. This article provides a brief overview of some of the key issues facing information professionals working in higher education institutions (HEIs). In doing so, it also picks up some of the real-world lessons which have emerged from the eLib (Electronic Libraries) programme now that it has come to a close. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/29/clark/ Tue, 02 Oct 2001 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/29/clark/ The vision that created the Distributed National Electronic Resource (DNER) grew out of the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC)s history of engagement with Higher and Further Education Institutions and significant research libraries in the UK. The DNER has an ambitious goal - to empower the HE/Post-16 community by providing quick, coherent and reliable access to a managed information environment that is geared to supporting learning and teaching activities. The JISC has established a great number of services that are helping to fulfil this vision of an integrated information environment. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/28/metadata/ Thu, 21 Jun 2001 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/28/metadata/ In the April 2001 issue of D-Lib Magazine, Peter Hirtle produced an editorial highlighting the potential for confusion between the standards being developed by the Open Archives Initiative (OAI) [1] and the draft Reference Model for an Open Archival Information System (OAIS) [2]. He noted the frustration that can ensue when words that have a clearly understood meaning in one domain begin to be used by others in a different way. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/28/join-up/ Thu, 21 Jun 2001 23:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/28/join-up/ This seminar brought together experts in the field of linking technology with participants in the four projects which constitute the JOIN-UP programme, for exploration and discussion of recent technical developments in reference linking. The JOIN-UP project cluster forms part of the DNER infrastructure programme supported by the JISC 5⁄99 initiative. Its focus is development of the infrastructure needed to support services that supply users with journal articles and similar resources. The programme addresses the linkage between references found in discovery databases (such as Abstracting and Indexing databases and Table of Contents databases) and the supply of services for the referenced item (typically, a journal article), in printed or electronic form. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/26/chris/ Wed, 10 Jan 2001 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/26/chris/ Philip Hunter asked for an assessment of the achievements and legacy of the eLib Programme 5 years on. It is a strange experience trying to summarise a huge enterprise, covering more than 5 years involving hundreds of people, and costing in excess of £20M, in a couple of thousand words. I immediately abandoned any thought of comprehensiveness, any formalised evaluation, or even any serious attempt at history. Instead this is a highly personal commentary on some of the highlights for me as Programme Director of the Electronic Libraries Programme (known as eLib) with a reflection on some of the less overtly successful things – again highlights where 20:20 hindsight showed we could have done better. http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/26/dner/ Wed, 10 Jan 2001 00:00:00 +0000 http://www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue/26/dner/ What is the relationship between the hybrid library and the DNER (the Distributed National Electronic Resource)? This paper discusses that question and suggests a number of ways in which DNER strategy and thinking can be informed by hybrid library developments. ‘Suggests’ is the word, since there is currently an investigation underway that is dealing with this question which is still to report. This is being coordinated by Stephen Pinfield, one of the authors of this article.